MY WINDOW

tsarina

There’s something outside my window.  It’s been there for three days and I don’t think it’s leaving.

I’m not sure what it is.  I’ve been too afraid to look at it.  Have I told you that it’s been out there for three days?

Of course my job at the market is over now.  I think that they called the house.  I didn’t get up to answer the phone because I would have had to cross the window.  Someone knocked on my door too.  I didn’t open it, because I would have had to cross the window.

I might have mentioned that I don’t know what it is.  Because I don’t, no, not at all.  It might be a serial killer.  Or a sewer rat that looks like an old red-tail of an ex-convict.  I didn’t make that up, I stole it from somewhere.  I don’t even know what a red-tail is.  Or a sewer rat.

There might even be a tree outside my window.

I’m hungry.  I ate my collection of Easter candy, all fourteen years of it.  I’m beginning to feel sick.  I used my cellphone to try and call for a pizza.  But I realized that I had given them the wrong address.  I forgot that I had been evicted two years ago.  I also forgot that I was moved across the country.  That’s probably why they hung up on me--they thought I was playing a joke on them.  But they shouldn’t worry, the joke is always on me, that’s what I learned in school, before they asked me to stop coming.

I’m lucky that the bathroom is on this side of the window. I’m also lucky that it has running water, or I’d be dead.  I think.  

So I’m writing this message, because if it kills me, I want people to know that I was afraid, that I had had a premonition.  I think that it is going to kill me.  I don’t think that I want to be dead but I’ve never really known what it was that I wanted.  I want to eat something besides chocolate rabbits and eggs.

I have become well acquainted with the ceiling.  That’s a lie.  Even though I stare at the ceiling I haven’t seen it at all.  I’ve been somewhere else where the meadows catch fire without burning and nice people leave me alone.  If I don’t go there I become afraid.  An icy buzzing takes over my stomach, and my brain loosens in my skull and I am uncomfortable.  

Very soon I am going to be history.  Because if the thing outside my window doesn’t move, I am going to starve.  I’ve thought about taking the back door.  But I don’t think that it is my fate.