Windows are not windows. They are portals and picture frames, barriers and bridges. Windows are like scissors, how they intersect our manmade, unbreathable opposites. They hold things in and keep things out: the temperature inside, the temperature outside – cut ; the submarine’s oxygen, the ocean water’s salt – cut; safety and mystery – cut ; silence and cicadas – cut. So, when I looked outside and I saw her there, dancing, I knew we must have existed on opposite planes, and just this once, I wanted so badly to even them out, to slip through the glass, to merge sense and nonsense and join her in the middle of the dark empty road.
The stretch of time between turning off the light and ‘falling’ asleep is a waiting room. I don’t fall asleep, I wait to sleep, but that’s okay. I enjoy that waiting room and its stack of magazines because my daydreams are fantastic and my real dreams are so bleak. The whole neighborhood has crawled into the hole of night, except for me, awake and waiting. Winter frosts along the windowsill, no one moves or blinks for miles. From a distance I hear fireworks. Or gunshots. Those are the only two options in America. Squinting past the mist of the sharp and frosted window, I hope to see smoke, fire, color, somewhere far off and away but not too far away. Smoke, fire, color. But nothing was there, until the woman appeared
A slender dancing woman with a heavy, angular jaw and bones of pure gelatin. Her hair was black and soaked in tar. Had she just crawled from the vents? The gutter? The engine of a car? In the quiet center of all my questions sat a knowing truth. She was born just now, moments ago, from the crack of my windowsill. All that sludge, that tar, that gasoline is what happens during childbirth. It’s natural, I’m not afraid of it anymore. She spins, she leaps, her fingers twitch and tangle like insects in a web. She’s a spider, and a scorpion, and a knife, and a window.
Shivering and smiling, I rise from the bed, kneel close to the window and watch her dance. So many people would cry. So many people would scream. But all I want is to join her. I want to spin with her, slip with her, jolt to the rhythm of those blind fireworks ricocheting in the background, creeping closer. I need to dance inside of her dark mystery, her dangerous embrace. I wrap my body in my bed sheet, speckled with cotton cherries. I slide on my slippers and peek into my parents room. They’re both snoring with their mouths wide open, curtains closed.
The bangs and the booms grow louder. Suddenly, the only thing separating me and the dancing woman drenched in tar is my trembling hand on the latch of my window. I think of everything I’ve been taught. Everything that’s been shoved down my throat, since grade school, about strangers and dangers and dancers. About inside and out. About the order of things. About one or the other. About cruel opposites. How filthy and stained our history is. How fireworks are always gunshots, and if you hear the crashes, lock the door. I’ve never crawled through a window. I’ve never felt the line, the ridge, the boundary of everything brush between my legs, like tidal waves. I’ve never been where I’m not supposed to be. I’ve never danced with a foreign visitor, rolled in the coal, swallowed the tar, bit the concrete and stood within the glorious inbetween.
I slink out. A single street light illuminates the dark road. I approach the woman. She’s a spider, she’s a knife, and I’m standing there in my slippers with a pimple patch on my nose. So many people would cry. So many people would run. Her tangled hair swings and slaps. The woman never looks at me, but she extends her hand, dripping in raindrops of gasoline, wrinkled and pruned and unfamiliar. I take her hand. Together now, we dance on to the next street, and the one after that, until someone else joins, and someone else after that. The streetlight will flicker out, the sun will rise, and when that happens, we will crawl through the vents, flatten our multiple dimensions and slip back through the windowsill we came from, where the glass meets the pane.