Blair Erotica

Skinny Girl

It was nearly midnight when Keith finally gave up on the poem he was trying to write. He reached a serious level of saturation and more work was not making it any better. Different but not any better. Fatigue could flatten his writing into the same Hallmark drivel he hated; anything he did now would only have to be rewritten later.

He lit a cigarette and pushed the papers and books he had been using to the back of his desk. He realized that his room didn’t like him. The bed, the desk, the dresser, his ancient wooden hat rack, the rickety table that held the electric hot plate, the small refrigerator, none of these provided any warmth. They were unyielding objects that formed inflexible surfaces that could support him or bruise him, nothing more. What else should they be?

These thoughts convinced him that he needed some sort of distraction, something that he could throw himself into in excess while the weary synapses of his underbrain tried and retried every permutation of language and thought, reduced them to a few conscious artistic choices. He needed something consuming to focus on, but he thrashed about for a solution, realizing that his question was like a child's game — was it a person, place or thing? Sometimes activities or new places could provide the level of interest, of complete absorption, but that seemed wrong now. He leaned toward thinking it was a person.

In his entire universe he could think of only a handful of people who could command his attention, and he was glad that Tasha, the girl he had been sleeping with lately, was gone because she was not among them. He ran through their names wondering if there was one capable of understanding his current sensibility for exactly what it was. Maybe.

He thought of The Skinny Girl. That was what people called her. She didn’t give her name. She was indeed a skinny girl. A tall skinny girl with a sensuous mouth that she covered with purple lipstick. It was odd. It was sexy. He had fantasized about her lips. They were delicious. He thought of her because she spoke her mind and seemed to live outside the conventions that bound most people. She was provocative. At least he was provoked. That was a good start. Of course, if he simply turned up at her door, she might just send him packing and then what?

Well, life was for making mistakes, after all; for plumbing the depths of your individual foolishness. If you couldn't make an ass of yourself, fuck things up once in a while then what good was it? How did you know you were alive?

He pulled on a tee shirt, leaving the shirt to hang out over his jeans. He pulled his boots out from under the bed, finding they contained a semi clean pair of socks. Dressed, he grabbed his book and a pack of cigarettes and went out.

Although he was aware that it was late he had no real idea of the time. But night was a good time for walking and he realized that she didn't live very far away. He began walking.

In a few minutes he arrived at her apartment building. It had the formidable look of cheap apartment buildings everywhere. For some reason that pleased him, and he whispered:

The tall, skinny girl, her body sexy but spare, lived in a dark building, that sat squat and square.

The building housed six apartments — three downstairs and three upstairs. It had no main front door, no buzzer to control access, and the front gate had no lock so he went through and then up the dark, concrete stairs that smelled of dampness and urine, to the end apartment. There were few lights in apartments; the sound of a television came from one apartment and a water sprinkler hissed in an unseen yard somewhere, but otherwise the building could have been empty. At the top of the stairs he emerged into the dim glow of a low-wattage landing light.