san diego: part 2

Alice forgot her rabbit.

Alice is 64 but spry for her age. She shows me by bench pressing the building with lit cigar and prayer. You'd barely know her with the handle bar moustache, that gets her into trouble at the lesbian saloon. She tells me she's incognito, on the lam, from a band of evil queens.

"See anyone with a pitchfork or burning hand fan on your way in?", Alice asks.

Started a business with a Swatch watch as down payment. A fitness studio. Here, she tells time by clocking the stock market. Alice gives receipts as smiles, doesn't want hugs or human touch. But, she collects human hair. On the TRX or in the toilet, guests pay her for her predictions on anything from love to climate change.

Alice is mean but the sea isn't to blame. She takes up macrame and tarot to bide the time when she's not growing her muscles the size of Cadillacs, reading the Anne's, Sexton and Rice, and pinning photos of Provincial chateaus and husband material to her vision board.

"Do you write while driving?" I answer her the roads are too dusty to see anything and even then, it's a danger.

Only five more one-legged crab walks until I'm done for the day, she promises, but my nipples already hurt.

"And what about now?", she asks to a phantom in the room. Alice's vague game is well-formed at the edges, on par with sanskrit Scrabble. I don't know the lyrics, so my fingers have to be guided.

"That's all folks!" She harps at the class for one. Now, she will lunch, venture to the boardwalk costumed in fur hat, muff and machete, seeking local rabbit among beach rats.

Before she leaves, while I am also leaving, I stare as she conjures her own image in the mirror glass by gazing as if she's baring witness to future revolutions, a vision of laser specificity, on what day and where the second hand will be. Alice knows things. She has her glass. Even if she no longer falls through, she can summon more than you or I.

Cannot seem to look away, however much my boiling skin and catnip chest itch in this place. Note to self: must stop buying Gorilla Tape shoes.

Tomorrow, I will write Alice a thank you note to leave at the fitness studio door.