Because in grade school

after Nighthawks, 1942, Edward Hopper

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some girl with pigtails as lethal as cutlass blades made fun of her shoes. Now, she shoves loneliness down her throat behind a cherry wood counter, surrounded by guys with hats who complain about five cent cigars. She never wanted to be another shadow in downtown Manhattan, doused in red like blood on a war knife. Maybe she woke startled at midnight, wanting a bologna sandwich. Maybe she saw her toddler levitate in his stroller that morning, and the suburbs could no longer shield her from the way her room smelled of smoke and wine. Maybe she ran, hobbling away with only one high heel on her left foot. Once, when she was younger, she saw her future latched to a table with tubes and wire, but she ignored it — that carcass she perceived with a third eye. Before, she discarded her shoes to breeze through vacant lots, and she wasn’t afraid of tattoos. She was pretty, with ginger hair fit for the pictures and legs as sinewy as rivers. She spent the next thirty years making sure to pluck the few stray hairs at the end of each eyebrow as soon as they grew. But memories crumble under recall, and the guys with hats don’t drift towards her with a mothish obsession. A streetlight flashes bright white outside. The color, like bone, falling in sheaves as thin as spears across the dark asphalt. Tomorrow, she thinks, she’ll stumble to the forest and live in the trees.