ELIZABETH P. GLIXMAN writes poetry, nonfiction, and short stories. Her work can be seen in issue #5 of Snow Monkey, Tough Times, Skyline Literary Magazine and online in the archives of In Posse Review, Pig Iron Malt, 3 A.M. Magazine, and Muse Apprentice Guild.

                                                                    danielle, the bell at easter


The music had been going on for months. This hip hop boom wordless bass sound slamming into my apartment’s air space, a 747 on a downward slide, never landed. It hit me with a wallop that lived in my night and day mind. I was transforming into a raging wild crone on amphetamines. I was changing into a bad-mouthed trashed out woman with a fat ass and a lying mouth. There was no escape from the music.

People wanted into my neighbor’s party. The bell ringers in all colors, especially cocoa brown, placed fingertips on the buzzer and pushed, impatience rising in their twenty year old pants. They pressed the bell with a desire to blow something up. It was their birthright to fuck a lily-white fat woman with a child. They were cool man. They all knew they were cool, you know what I am saying. The music played on.  

Danielle, the fat white girl with Irish smiling eyes, rolling verdant hips, and a half-sister younger than her four-year-old daughter, walked like a cement mixer through her three room apartment as if she were hiking the cliffs of Dover. She thought she was a black diva lying her way into this crowd. This crowd adored the "f" word. They cradled it with their nasty mouths adjusting head bandanas to smooth the kink. They loved the "f" word, said it when they made blood pour from a brother’s face.

Hey bro, the fat girl is a ho. She ain’t. Fists flew, fluid dripped. Lying Danielle - madonna and her child - watched, happy to see the fight that validated. They hugged and fat Danielle was lost in adoration watching the male bonding man ritual.

My ceiling is awash with the word fuck. In every flavor I hear it. Danielle says it like a girl eating strawberry ice cream at a church picnic.

There is a little half-white, half-Latino child dancing in the apartment with this madonna woman. She is a seedling holding the "f" word in her innocent tongue, swishing it around, waiting for it to seep out like when she presses the bell to get in to see her mother and ask for her forgotten lunch for daycare, as the bus for St. Bridget's waits at the curb with a whole lot of children, who also hear bells ringing at night. They are being mothered by white women who lie like people in the probation line at the courthouse and never mop their lazy excuse for a man off their slippery floors.

Who said music is grand? Too much of anything can make you sick.

Fuckin' sick and the flow seeps chocolate syrup and vanilla ice cream with chocolate chips on its shoulder and Oreo cookies all over its loud motherfucking Happy Easter, sorry mam we disturbed you face.

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© 2003 Elizabeth P. Glixman