YD6-46(SHEc) Francine: stringing destiny in Manhattan, embodying Liberty

 

In this chapter of “You Are My Sunshine--Vitrine of consciousness,” Francine's enigmatic personality and the narrator's anxieties create a compelling dynamic as Aetheria orchestrates their experiences. The bustling New York, quiet moments, and symbolic landmarks form a rich backdrop for Aetheria's silent influence. As she guides the characters, the reader questions the nature of consciousness and its impact on human existence. The chapter's open ending suggests Aetheria's journey is ongoing, leaving the reader eager to discover her ultimate choice and its consequences.

An eerie quiet, typical of Sunday morning, spread beyond the neighboring backyards, prompts me to drop a glance at Francine next to me. Francine’s eyes, after last night’s exhaustion, kindled with a childlike awe. Unfazed by the gloomy skies, she slips from under the duvet. On a whim, she sighs. “I want to see the Statue of Liberty,”

In my earlier days, at Battery Park’s waterfront taffrail, the liberty island’s ocean breeze had embraced me. Immersing me with my toddler’s awe, drifting away from the white cliffs dawdling across the Mediterranean Sea. Sailing through an audience of sandy mountains — the Suez Canal. To be lost under the azure dome in the infinite blue — Indian Ocean. until the horizon etched — African coast, and landfall neared.

“Would you like some coffee?” I asked Francine. She nods ‘Yes.’ We leave the bed. I cross through the archway, into the galley kitchen to stand by the coffee percolator. Shiva’s hands open cabinet doors. I scoop ground coffee, pour in the paper filter, swirl with the jug to fetch water, cross the aisle, fill the cistern, flick the switch. I wash glass cups and saucers, to standby. Francine freshened up. I brush my teeth, shave, fetch steaming coffee. Turning to Francine seated against the headboard. I hand her the cup of coffee, obliging her hold, combing her frizzled hair. I edge back and sit on the foot of the bed. 

I fetch her empty cup, leaving Francine to slip into her rodeo girl’s boots. As I’m lingering, in the shadow of skepticism the night before. Francine follows as I’m edging through the galley kitchen, pausing the cups and saucer into the sink. Venture on, unlock the door to the driveway ramp. She steps past, allowing me to lock behind us. As I step on, fingertips brushing her palm, to clasp her hand to a neighborhood dance of the deserted street.

On a trivial path, we passed rows of checkered fenestration to mundane brick masonry apartment blocks, dwindling as we entered Forest Hills to houses in its midst. Targeting the subway we emerged from last evening, when I could have walked avenues in the momentum of crossing streets take our courses from Upper Manhattan. but the rodeo girl’s weariness, exhaustion to footing clay deep sidewalks, hence locating the nearest subway.

Under evening skies, the stepping-stones to home, with the upcoming squatted supermarket among the bland brotherly surrounding blocks, the chalk-whitewashed strip of storefront wrapping the corner along asphalt. I’m magnetized to rhymes with changing bland blocks, to lead Francine to the sidewalk across the asphalt. After a stretch of the cracks of checkered fenestration, a setback facade in our approach obliterates the evening sky. In our approach, gapping the sky’s silvery reflection. The base without a shadow exhausts itself, behind manicured greenery. Pacing along a strip lawn to an evergreen sentinel of spruces, when Francine sighs. “Why aren’t you holding my hand?”

Her words skin shriveling surprise, a student audacity crossing the threshold to womanhood. Walking abreast of Francine, my skin butter-soften. the strip of lawn open to looming shadows behind windows, and dare side step to hide behind the spruces. Confined to the sidewalk, in anger at Francine’s sting,  ‘How dare you?’ In a freaking glance, spurred out of a daughter’s comfort, through the day as she scanned her new world. Sensing her awaiting my reaction, before faltering, I blurted. “Je pensais… Je ne voulais pas m’imposer… — I thought... I didn’t want to impose myself...” But Francine sighed, “[French] No! I love it.”

I’m cornered by Francine’s unexpected request. Hard at digesting, Yael’s instinct stirs a lingering angst, echoing ‘The other woman!’ While Aetheria feasts on my anxiety, distant in her cosmic forest, a playful capering by her magic guide path destiny. 

Beyond me, my mind in tatters, I thaw to Francine’s tangible presence. With my hesitant hand, extending from my side, a Hydra head, reaching to brush her arm, stroke traced the curve of her wrist. My fingertips, dance, slip into her palm, curl together in a silent embrace. Yet, as we walk, Francine’s warmth of her spirit remains elusive. My fingertips attuned piano to her tendons, her knuckles, the voice of her apprehension. ‘There is someone else with you. She must be anxious and waiting on you — Isn’t it… Sorry for her — I need to hold you for myself.’

Francine and I descend the sidewalk hatchway to the subway, plunging into the subterranean labyrinth. Waiting at the rails carrying a silver light beam emanating from darkness, passing by our feet, vanishing into darkness at passaging time. Until the train emerges from darkness and obliterates the rails, with cinematographic windows onto the worlds to families' of souls venturing through the multiverse. 

The coach doors open, we step in. I turn away from Francine. track our way to Battery Park. join Francine as the coach floor tugged at our feet, bringing us to sit for the ride. Facing the transparent windows, flip to black mirrors reflecting our world. We flash in at stations, interplay the reflected souls personifying entry into the world on our journey. The leavers, at the closing doors, shed their physique in the glaze behind the glass life in consciousness. We step out of the coach, the world of our presence, letting the people ride on, their consciousness a reminder of our egress -- we emerge from the subway to discover Broadway on a Sunday morning deserted. 

As we stroll, guided by Francine’s notes, to think, ‘She gathered all the information back home, in France — prepared!’ I trace the familiar lines of towering tumultuous in various fenestrated facades, well worked into oblivion alongside the sidewalk doorsteps. My mind, drawn into the refurbishing of a gutted ground floor with a Pizza Hut Express up Broadway near Wall Street. With the electricity reinforcement, I discovered the city’s intriguing underground modernization accesses and channeled conduits and cable runs —.

I’m reliving a once off meeting in a tower’s upper floors, to descend the entrails. Trotting the fire-escape’s wide bullnose dogleg stairs, descending a dizzy spiral to eyesight leaps of the handrail’s sharp returns. Hooked with a grip diverging to switchback flights of stairs, unstoppable uniform blur, I lost track of the floors, until the stairs ended in the lobby of the 20s’ to face the pitch-black exit doors, the plate-glass portal reflecting my descent’s weird cavernous yellowed light. I spin around, gathering the machination of loosing a floor to the street, ascending the two half-flights of stairs to the lobby, clearing the street bathing in daylight. 

As the street turned away, the glass and stone fenestrated facades ran into a dead end. Francine and I stumble on a security gate open and hunched from the hinges by thickets’ hanging branches. To our dismay, a crazed asphalt sprawls a desolate dockyard to the waterfront. trusting Francine’s notes, we ought to be here, though suspicious. I scan the vast empty dockyard, return abreast the gate, a warding off warped security fence overwhelmed by a herd of overbearing thickets. I narrow my eyesight, figuring in the blurry distance a shiny easel, telling, ‘Someone ought to have brought it out?’ lured by the complex bright signboard to dark paint brush strokes spooks from the undergrowth, a negligible and weathered shack. Drawn nearer by a face wax behind a windowpane’s reflection, reach the shack curled and flaky sidings shadowing a cashier’s living bust.

While Francine stands by the signboard on an easel, I’m stepping up to the ticket booth, querying the bloated man’s wasteful regard. He mumbled, “…” shifting eyes aside, for me to pursue alongside Francine, to the board listing. “Liberty Island $15.00.” I fumble for my wallet, flip, flap to the purse behind my Seven-Star diary, extricating The three ten-dollar bills, which I slip through the window slot. His sausage-like fingers separating the banknotes. From the lay of a red ticket reel, tearing off two thumb-size tickets. on the heel of his hand alongside the cash, his fingers push them toward me. I pick them up from the window slot. Assured between my fingers of our journey on the ferry, the man with fingertips sucking the banknotes to drop in a metallic green cash box.

I catch up to Francine pacing off, to her hand trailing across the small of my back. In our strides rests her hand on my hip. I slip my thumb behind her thick leather belt. Heading toward a group of people across the dockyard and in the far corner of an ivory-cladding flank wall to an industrial shed. To my relief, crossing the desolated white demarcation, by the magnitude saved from the plausible serpentine lines of people. Falling behind a trail of a dozen people. Waiting, standing, chafing our hip bones. A vertebra squeezed under my belt. I’m enduring a mounting pain. Craning my neck over Francine’s shoulder, facing an ocean breeze. Impatient to relieve the pressure, bearing out a needle piercing my lower back, emerges from the blur of gray waters a dark wavering speck.

As Francine surveys her new surroundings, a man stalling behind us. His curiosity teased, eyes beaming to heat on my back, unveils his thoughts. ‘… who are those romantic embraces!’ While I stand cringing under a needle piercing pain, he moves up abreast. To his surprise, I caught a glance of him. Thirtyish, clad in summer clothes and hat, the man’s weird sharp eyes, he retrieves, laced with a hint of predatory interest. ‘You’re an old man — with such a young woman?’ While I’m eager to see across choppy waves, the still silhouette prow’s inadvertent growth. Behind us, more people trickled into the queue with their murmurs.

People’s heads turn with unruffled curiosity, as the ferry draws out of an apparent inertia, cuts through the choppy waves approaching. The vessel’s silhouette of soft blurs drifting closer and larger to sprawl onboard shadows, morphing figures to passengers gathered around the port taffrail. The ferry, in a soft change of course, and relentless crossing, approaches, short of the industrial shelter, the passengers’ gazes fixing on the dock. A man at the stern, opening a gate, emerges from the crowd and sets a foot on the edge of the deck. hands trawling, launching from behind a gangway across the narrowing gap to the wharf. 

The passengers’ slow Indian file across the gangway, demanding I  persist, bearing the standing squeeze of a needle’s thread through my spine. While ashore, debarking passengers disperse, blending with the tarmac and vanishing. Endless to a flicker of hope, as ahead of the queue, a ticket examiner steps offside. in Indian file to an accordion stretches in people’s strides along the shelter sidings. The queue unravels before Francine. I step out with some relief from my crushing spine pain. The gangboard nears under the line of people’s strides to the deck. Francine foots across the gap to dark waters, stepping off seeking a taffrail spot. her embracing hand, concede nimble fingers raise the hefty lens, regulating focus and light, as I step alongside to the wooden rail. I bend with both elbows prop, bending my torso overboard, stretching my spine to an exciting tingling relief.

To my toddler’s reviving awes, eyesight plummets along the hull, seizing the bow’s starboard, opening the cleft to the wash. We’re drifting from the wharf, breaching wild peckish surfs. I neglected my Canon Snappy in my left hip pocket, while Francine’s eager fingers on the lens, pointing and shooting the toyish Lady of Liberty. My mind lost in the land rising pinkish from the evanescent gray shades of sky, a blend with the Atlantic Ocean. The siren of France — Francine — met the Lady in her green stola, a stance in Fort Woods’s imposing pedestal, nearing to dwarf, circling, skirting the statue’s to the jetty onto docking.

After disembarking the wooden jetty, the tourists scattered to a trickle to stroll in a pocket of our own, the rampart walkway. As the statue towers, on the starfort bastion to the portal interstice. As we pass granite jambs, a lone figure overtakes us into the swallowing well of a hallway. Spurred by Francine’s determination, we follow the man. Francine, tall in my sight, led the way, my feet following behind, climbing the narrow staircase, echoing metallic footsteps to resonate spiraling up a chimney, the Lady lending a voice. We lost the stone pedestal, intrigued together with Francine, to glimpse at the lady’s grafted wrought iron entrails. without a Lady’s hearty warmth, skeletal beneath her flowing garment. Catching up with the trailing people ahead, slowing down to a pause. Proceed when, beyond Francine, dawns a pool of light on us. We turn up to stand in a cockloft. From the Lady’s crown, peek at her perception of herded skyscrapers at the distant waterfront. Francine turns away, into descent with a trickling metallic echo out into the open, the warmth of anticipation chilled, to walk across the planking, absorbing our steps to await. We board the ferry, drift toward the concrete jungle, approaching an audience crowded on the dockyard.

The sea breeze’s soft curlicue caresses around us, as Francine sighs, her inner Fire from flaring. “Je voudrais voir Chinatown -- I would like to see Chinatown.” she whispered. Circling the snaking queue, from a distant approach of the gap in the bushy hedging, tucked in the shadows of sky wild poking forest of towers. We emerge from the security fence clinging with thickets’ leafy swells. 

From my foggy mind, with the burden of hemorrhaging my bank account. While feet mired, in the uncertainty of a pending construction contract. Conjures a vague map charting a counter-wise course from midtown’s artery crossing the Brooklyn Bridge. North, Little Italy with restaurants in vibrant colors, while Chinatown is south, scattered red awnings amidst curled leaves and paper lanterns.

Stepping out the gateway, Francine’s eyesight immerses into the jumble of fenestrated and wrapping facades, tumultuous walls lining the forking streets. From Battery Park’s crotch to a wrought-iron fence, off the extended Broadway, we borrow the right street. Circling the micro-park statue. Walk up the paved stretch way out my purview of a commercial district, awakening traffic. duty bound by a beacon glowing in my mind, casting a shadow haunting me. As Francine, a graceful distraction while I’m not gaining traction with The Riese Organization’s contracts. 

As the wall of fenestrated facades cracks, pulled away from the street, airs a diverse array of cladded towers, boasting a unique architectural signature. Raising amid intersecting streets, grayish-blues fragments augmenting along our way. Hinting at the proximity of the East River. When across the way, in the depth of the side street, I spot flashes of vibrant red. At a closer look, outlining an increase of graceful, up-swept canopies. Suppressing a triumphant shout, ‘There’s Chinatown.’ I guide Francine into the narrow light stifling street, to discover our way through backstreets. 

Francine and I turn the corner to a street of culture appropriation, shadowing the townhouse’s architecture. A vibrant street of Chinese lanterns, swept up canopies, red lanterns adorn windows, and dragons doorways, kaleidoscopic bustling red and shimmering out of sight. We pass pits to basement entrances. Approach and pass around restaurant-goers. I can’t imagine among the file up to the porch door for lunch, and more people trailing along the sidewalk. Long past but niggling to mind, to my surprise, without slanted-eyes, besides an amorous couple — their figures intertwine — oblivious to Aetheria’s volition, weaving a tapestry of desire and distraction, convoluting the senses, with the lovers standing underneath the elevated windowpane shadowing the interior to figures bent-over meals stuffed and cluttered. Francine and I reach the curio Porte cochère, open to quilted murals of postcards holder slots on facing walls — echoing Lionel’s words. “Gavin’s room walls are plastered with postcards.” I came this far to select a few unique postcards, in stark contrast to the faded and bland habitual downtown and at the Twin Towers underground mall.

Gazing through the craggy kaleidoscopic dens, shadowing a half-dozen fenestrated cracked facades hinting at hardscrabble apartments. As we passed teemed small restaurants for the laundromats, curio shops, selling Jianzhis and jades. Until the grander storefronts, at the street’s end, flared, with a traffic call from both blind corners with a dizzying haze. Peering into the enfilade of windowpanes, shadowing faces — round, with slanted eyes butchering, oblivious to my thinking of their ‘slaughterhouses.’ Turning the corner, the sight of the stupendous stone arch surpassing the habitations. Taking Francine’s breath away, she exalts a sight, “The Brooklyn Bridge!” Carried along a whooshing trickling traffic, quiet and stretching her strides. Nurturing a prospect to mind, through the bisected street. along the shy terracotta brick walls, fenestration crack brick facades. For outsides, where cars are in seamless streams in the gapping arch. 

Drawn in her wake, I’m flabbergasted by the chain of storefronts. duck palms, chicken claws, or both, tied to a string, suspending headless in series naked, white pimpled bodies across the windowpanes — Although the family poultry farm, as teenagers. We were all at a task before school, Parents and siblings, in the outbuilding’s boys-room. We slaughtered six-week old roosters and unproductive laying hens. Plucked their feathers, ripped out the birds’ entrails, at the hock joint cut the shank off, desensitized by the rote task, stuffing the dressed chicken into plastic bags, for delivery while we’re attending school — to my disbelief, horripilated by the sight.

I catch up, reeling from the besieging dead animals, towards diving into Francine’s obsession, the screens of the suspender cables extending alongside the gapping stone arch. Across the East River’s waters, the convex deck streams traffic, evanescing beyond the dwarf arch on the blurry Brooklyn bank. Francine emerges with virile confidence, raises the camera lens above the stream of vehicles, capturing the rhythm of changing streams of traffic, as she returns from a brief foray across the street.

From the East River, Francine catches up with me, steps inland to meet the busy corner. Signs on easels daubed with paint splashes, insinuating ‘We’re Open.’ in stark contrast to crude slaughtered birds hanging to  windows across the street in Chinatown. We cross the inviting frontier artery’s corners, flowing into a side street bursting with a vibrant tapestry of speckled green, white, and red. The colors adorn storefronts and awnings, flagging Little Italy’s inviting restaurants. While a white limousine, sleek black car at opposing ends through the vista, disgorge figures, they cut through the flurry of families dressed in their Sunday best vanishing in restaurants. 

Francine and I cross the side street, our eyes rolling away. Little Italy fades, but across the asphalt ghosting a traffic whooshing, a lone figure walks on the fringes of Chinatown shining etched red specs amid the sky’s silver-gray fenestrated facades. I’m baffled by the encroaching influence of China, with Manhattan Bank’s guards by dragon statues. Then, we walked into the shadow of an invasive red upswept eave roof to a Bell Telephone booth before and the fall of glamor. Our path diminished to brick walls of cracked fenestrated facades, to a quiet and deserted concrete sidewalk.

An artist had woven a spider web of discarded vehicle parts, raising a kaleidoscopic vulgar noise tapestry, jarring a fenced-off bare plot amidst dull, bland walls of fenestrated brick facades. We walk lost in city streets when people trickle from the fenestrated facades, and around street corners, converge to stream. We join the crowd’s draw. I enter a spatial orientation, after the “Barnes and Noble” splashed across the fascia street-corner wrap atop the open window book display. My mind completed with a puzzle piece, as eager readers circled the red planted sign, “On Sale.” Reminiscing years earlier the size of a street planter’s crate — my eyes scan, plunge a hand, picking book spines. Until the face of the book, a John le Carré novel. I stepped inside, paid, carried it home, and lost myself in his writing style.

I spare a squint as Francine brushes across book spines, and we spin off from the crate’s circling people. continuing along a gradual emptying sidewalks. our path across Avenues’ mounting numbers. In the distance, the sidewalk teems with figures, approaching, encroaching on tourists rolling eyeballs, gawking at spectacles around Times Square and its dazzling neon lights

Oblivious -- it wasn’t as if a war had torn through the streets, leaving destruction and rubble. That Wall Street’s Black Monday crash of 1987, to stumble on Broadway and 7th Avenue’s corner boarded-up  -- After I waltzed through to task, finishing and handing over the restaurant to the franchisee, Houlihan restaurant. The Greek contracted, hired by The Riese Organization to outfit the corner space, fled to Greece. 

Aetheria, an intuitive weaver of destinies, leads me away from the boarded up corner of 42nd Street. A stark reminder of the drumbeats to manage the work went dead. A wasted pretty spacious dining hall, an elaborate bar, and kitchen, sit soulless in the gloom. But echoing, ‘Four-million-dollars investment?’ in my mind. As we head downtown, and cross Golda Meir’s bust, on the square bearing her name, I find Yael’s tracks. Offering Francine the door to the Jewish fast-serve restaurant. Francine seizes herself, with skepticism, enters sighting orthodox Jews, coiffed with a yarmulke. Francine lags me, she advances in the likes of a business day busy queue. 

After ordering falafels from the overhead menu, Francine’s intimidated by the unfamiliar Jewishness, with an inadvertent side paces. As the Kippa-coiffed middle-aged owner, marked his ownership at the start of an assembly line. Facing the two-tiers worktop service counter. He counts each customer’s order, handing paper serviettes of an order ticket to the chefs. 

Francine’s gaze detaches, wanders. The queue inches forward. I lock sight onto the chef, plumpish and thirtyish beside me. While a chef, at the head of the front counter, scrutinizes the next ticket. swirls toward the gleaming stainless-steel backdrop. A swift knife blade slices a taboon bread’s top to discard with a side brush. My curiosity, piqued by a chef at the far end, suggesting behind the woman to a cash register the handing of his culinary creation to a waiting customer. I stick with a taboon, amid customers’ orders, the hands of the chef, a Shiva’s wield tongs, plucking the various bright-colored chopped salads, from the row of bowls feeding the agape taboon bread. 

With our gradual approaching the end of the counter. By the hunchback woman, served customers turn away at the head of the queue. vanishing among people scattered through the weathered dining hall, the floor-through extending into the daylight of the back avenue. While our Taboon bread somewhere along the production line, as the Kippa-coiffed chef scoops sizzling and dripping oil from a meshed basket into the taboon bread. 

One chef grabs a white sock puppet serviette, feeding in his hand the spilling taboon. He steps around the other-half-owner — the woman's shoulders hunched over the cash register. Francine jumps at the call of our combined menu name. The cashier spares us a confirmation glance. She rings up the ten-dollar bill, returns to my palm a few dimes, which slip into my trouser pockets. With Francine coming around my shoulder. She picks up her falafel from the dispatch table and rolls back on her step. She strolls toward the daylight of our earlier entry, past meager sprawled families through the dining, and pushes the doors out into the street.

We picnic on our walk, savoring our falafel. passing a trash bin, we discard the serviette wrappers, Broadway our guide across streets counting down. Aetheria’s subtle hand echoes with memories of Erin, girlfriend, but anxiety of The Riese Organization cast shadows — to a phantasmagoric orientation spin — Erin in her Fiat circling the villagey artist, for a parking spot of Soho, the artists and nightlife, Francine is walking on another woman’s territory. 

Francine and I close in on the sidewalk’s guardrail hatchway. Not until Francine reads the bright subway disks, to a distant thought. She picks in her hip pocket, nimble fingers unfold a sliver of paper, scrutinize, fold the note slap to her joint fingers onto slipping down her back thigh pocket. Without qualm, unbeknown tied the string with her Strasbourg University professor, Pesche, I ignored his studio in the vicinity, strolling toward a subway station glowing ball perched on a post.

On an aleatory path in Manhattan to her rendezvous on her note from France, step down the stairs underground, back to the city’s hard, unyielding core. Zigzagging the tunnel, we emerge onto the deserted platform. While waiting, mice scurry across sleepers, fearless beneath the silver thread of light carried along the tracks vanish into the darkness. Wonder which path leads into the future. Until a draft rises, the driver a fleeting shadow, the train rumbles in from the past, obliterating the tracks to our presence. As carriage windows flicker, the scenes of families on their own journeys. A cinematic tapestry of lives intertwining, the doors part. We step across the threshold, the lurching carriage floor underneath our feet, to sit. The windows plunge into darkness, reflecting us in the bright interior to spare a glance at tourists among travelers.

As we ride with the interior reflection, the windows flashing stations to a trickle of people passing through open doors. As loudspeakers announce, “Sixty-third Drive — Rego Park.” I jump to my feet, extend my hand to Francine. she takes hold of my fingers, anticipating the platform rushing in view. Pulling to a stop, the doors to split, sliding aside, we step off joining a few travelers. around nooks, to prolong a light washed grid of white-tiled walls, ascending the stairwell open to daylight before emerging blinking Queens Boulevard before the week’s turgid traffic. 

We turn the corner onto the brick-lined street to apartment cracked-window facades. Walking and in a breath, I say, “We’re entering Forest Hill!” Francine slips her arm around my waist. I reciprocate, placing my hand on her hip, but find discomfort by our hip bones awkward bumps. In discomfort with our awkward stroll home, as Francine doesn’t heed, I match my pace to hers. Approaching the Fascia wrapped with the whitewashed storefronts, Francine sighs,  “Is that the only supermarket?” causes to step down the curb, losing Francine’s tempo, bumping hips bone. Awkward crossing the deserted junction, to the opposite sidewalk. Focusing on the mechanics of maintaining her pace, regaining her walking rhythm, err her tempo here and there. We approach the dwarfed line of evergreen trees, pass the shrubby entrance to the looming checkered apartment windows to the brick block, leaving the strip of lawns, my fingers slip to an arm comfort to her jeans’ back pocket, out to remind me, the ticket with her notes from France tucked within. 

As across the street and upcoming intersection, home punctuated by the single-story, pitch roofed townhouses, a young man approaches in my line of sight jaywalking. He steps to the corner curb, too, nearing along the sidewalk with a blizzard in his eyes — invisible to him. shuns a look, to lean his course grazing me and passes by with a draft brush on my shoulder. Then a couple of men’s moving bust behind the corner villa’s hedge. Turn from the dogleg side street to walk up along the sidewalk. They approach, seeing through us, with objectionable piercing eyes, their course continuing into our wake, to diverge, passing by Francine disappearing.

Francine and I pause at the curb, then step down, our hip bones rolling around each other. The deserted street invites a shortcut, and we angle across, jaywalk the crux of the deserted junction. I split my focus on my kitchen’s portrait window along the featuring wrought-iron staircase etched on the fenestrated facade to my landlady’s balcony. We reach the sidewalk, the driveway ramp rolls over. Our arms releasing their hold. I edge forward with keys jingling at hand. 

Underneath the balcony, after turning the key, I step back, offering Francine to head indoors. Behind her, I press the door close, latch and lock, to a hip swing around the corner of the protruding cabinet. While at the end of the galley kitchen, Francine vanished from the gapping archway. I catch up with Francine in the dim corner of the converted garage, as she crawls on the bed. I restrain myself from nearing her longing heart’s eyes shifting from the bright edge of the bed, abreast the window afternoon tapestry of daylight lay in the courtyard. She rolls backward on her hips, straightens her spin to a lotus posture between pillows. 

As her delicate eyesight rests on the duvet, I settle at the foot of the bed. The stillness of the room amplifies my inner restlessness, and seeking a familiar comfort, I ask, “Would you like some coffee?” from her dream emerges a whispery sigh, “yes.” 

I jump to my feet, eager to fill the space with action. I enter the kitchen, my Shiva’s hands, instinctive, amid cabinet doors, slaps. grabbing paper filters, ground coffee brick, scooping, pouring, and swirling behind. The jug fills with a whoosh of water. I uncoil from the sink to a long-spout into the cistern, and the flick of the switch On. I settle at the foot of the bed. While abreast, the percolator’s sigh starts the drip. Francine’s eyes brighten, voicing her thoughts. “I left Strasbourg.” The percolator gargles to a silence. I turn up facing the percolator, flick the switch to Off, and grab the jug from the heating pad. I pour two cups. After my INS-and-outs through the archway, and Francine’s words nurtured her insinuation, ‘I left my boyfriend.’ while handing her a crystal cup of coffee on a saucer, I ask, “[French] What sign is he born under?”

Francine opens the sluice to her soul, revealing. “He’s a Gemini — forty-five.” As we chat, a vision tele-shadows a neon plasmatic windowpane — a threshold into the immaterial realm of Francine’s consciousness — as a man figures behind a stretch bar bathed in a soft medieval light. The bartender serves drinks and chats with customers, while a young woman waits, featuring offside perches on a high stool at the far end, awaiting the bar’s closing. 

The scene morphs into a glitch to daylight, my mind stretching a Hydra’s head hovering quaint, a villagey cobblestone gleam from lantern’s light pools ghosting roaming horse-drawn carts. Intersecting an asphaltic street lined with glass and concrete commercial facades, skirting the extended city. Circling with an eagle’s eye, seeking beyond nameplates, settles on a quaint gothic French-German inn. saddled terracotta tiled-roof eave, dropping shadow to the fenestrated-cracked brick-timber facade. gliding closer into the street, opening the inn’s cracked fenestrated facade, above the ground-floor sigh of an open air window. a young woman with an eloquent turn from bidding farewell over the city’s rooftops, her shadow vanishes from amidst the wide inner-open sashes to the somber interior. 

In the room’s hollow, the Hydra’s eye of my mind catching glimpses of the vibrant young woman. From the dim corner, her shadow flits across the reaching daylight of the room, through doorways, to her figure descending the staircase. A glitch, and a phantom’s closing of the door to the night, muffling the downstairs revelry of a beer hall crowded, bidding her farewell. Glitches to daylight in continuance, the Hydra of my gaze crossing the rear room to the wide-open window. Scanning the aetherial path of the young woman’s volition, into the vortex of her flight. 

After standing at the window, I draw my gaze back from the azure sky to the old city shared terracotta shade gables, chimney stacks, to pitch roofs. My eyesight plummets over the windowsill to the shallow brook below, evanescing under the ancient stone arch bridge. Glitches to the embouchure to the Atlantic Ocean, startled by Francine’s jumps to the floor. She walks from the headboard, circling me at the foot of the bed, vanishes behind the door beneath the upstairs landing to the room. Returning to a pause facing me, Her troubled expression, ‘And you. . . Upset digestion?’ she turns away, lost in her thoughts, ‘...falafel from the Jewish place?’