traffic patterns

"I need some traffic," said Shallah. She was walking out the door as she said it, for what turned out to be the last time; it made no sense at the moment, but she figured maybe it would grow on her after a while. Anyway there was no one in the house to hear it, when she left, just a musty noise like breathing that she had learned not to hear anymore. And the door when she closed it didn't make a final sound, no booms and crashes, just a scrape on the uneven lintel like it always did. She had to jerk it shut three times to make it latch, which she was afraid would spoil the mood but there was no mood to be in, just the same leaving feeling as it was every day, plus a little edge of guilt that she hadn't mown the lawn before she left. For one moment she almost went out to the shed to fetch the oil-smelling grass-eating beast, and give the grass one last trim, but she realized in time that of all the final gestures she could wish that would be smallest, and the most desperate. The lawnmower was a big reason why she was leaving, anyway.

So Shallah walked down the path to the gate, which she left open behind her because grandmother wouldn't have anyone to open it for her when she came home, from wherever she always went, and also because grandmother hated it when Shallah left the gate open. And she walked along the main road towards the highway, hoping to hitch a ride and thinking how embarrassing it would be if the first car along was her grandmother's big creeping Impala, with Archy hanging out the passenger side with his paws on the window and his tongue flying in the breeze, wondering why she didn't look happy to see him.

But the first car wasn't her grandmother's, and in the end she made it all the way through three cities before she even stopped to think about her starting point. Even then all she could remember off the top of her head was the lawnmower, squatting in a pool of its own rust, feeling abandoned. Before she could move beyond that memory, everything happened, and she got distracted.

The third city she came to was the first city she noticed. The first person she met there was a young man living in haze of smoke over a pool of chemicals, who would look at her fondly out of wide blind eyes and say impossible things into the air around her. Shallah learned to think of him fondly, in return, but the second his hand touched her she was whisked away by the traffic, to some other place where the women all dyed their hair and looked at her with a sort of friendly contempt. It was only later that she learned it was not a personal dislike they felt, but simply a dutiful scorn for the way she spoke, bred into them from birth. By the time she had found this out, however, she had taught herself not to care, and she was glad in retrospect she had not discovered the truth at a time when she might have been tempted to unlearn her accent in order to impress them. She enjoyed the way she spoke.

Her accent disappeared eventually, though, and she never noticed; it was worn away by the erosion caused by too much talk to too many strangers. Everyone she met, everyday, was a stranger, though many of them she had spoken to the day before, and the day before that. The first new thing she discovered in that city was an inability to predict anyone's behavior, even her own; now that she did at last look back, she found she could no longer picture the look on her grandmother's face, when she came back to an open gate and an empty house. That lack of memory came as quite a shock, and for some days Shallah tried to recover some knowledge she thought she might have lost somewhere, until she realized she couldn't remember the old woman's face at all. She might have been a ghost, or a mirage caused by her young man's pool of smoke; when Shallah thought of her past at all she could only see a blur, like passing cars. The women with colors in their hair worried about her then, though they would never have said so, for she threw herself into distraction at a feverish pace. But she was only looking for something to grow on her, to take the place of the solid, steady lawn mower, killing her with its inertia but at least telling her just by its presence who she was. Now she just had nothing, just an automatic ability to feel the traffic lights changing without even looking up, and so she clung to the changing city as though that very change, that blur of acceleration into the future, was a landmark to hold on to. Even on foot she walked between the raindrops, untouched through the traffic patterns, because the speed in her mind, heading away from that musty house in the background, outstripped everything on the roads, until at last her pent-up momentum carried her right up out of that place and into somewhere new.