- a story inspired by J.G. Ballard.
He stood in front of the trailer park watching it bellow a smoky sigh of relief, as the fire finally diminished.He could only manage to get a single tear to trickle from his eye, though he wished to cry a thousand. Then again even shedding one tear had probably been too much.Men do not cry. Men do not wallow. So, he wiped the tear away, pulled out a camel, and flicked its tip adding to the pile of ash. He found himself unconsciously skimming the rubbish for her body. He didn’t know why, I guess because he had never seen an actual dead body. The only time he had come close was when he was six and his grandfather died. They had an open casket at the wake but when it was his turn to go up and say goodbye, or whatever it is that you’re supposed to do in those situations, he closed his eyes. He stood there for a few minutes pretending to pay his respects, his eyelids clenched so tightly together not a single ray of light could make its way through. Sometimes he’d look back and couldn’t help but think what a little bastard he had been. The guy was dead; he owed it to him to see him one last time. Maybe he just wanted to remember his grandfather for what he was like when he was alive, and not as some dolled up body displayed in a box; or maybe he was just scared.
His eyes darted in every direction, looking for that singed body: eyes melted out of the sockets, hair strands crisp and broken from her head, those burn marks scattered over her bruises. Oh God, her body, her eyes, her hair… those bruises. He couldn’t help but wonder how this could have happened to him. Him: a forty three year old male with a wife, kids, a job. He had a Lexus for Christ’s sake! How could he have fallen in love with a prostitute? He had never been a “one night stand” man, sure, but this was different; she was just a cheap whore.
It was peculiar to him that she burnt down the object that made him fall in love her in the first place. He had first requested her services during a business trip to the city, and every time he came back he couldn’t resist calling her up. It was always the same hotel, same all-knowing glances from the doormen’s eyes, same pinstripe wallpaper, the same duck soap. But the first time they had sex in her mobile home changed everything. Suddenly she was showing him something he had never seen: herself. She was its metal jagged roof, its broken windowpane, the bees nest in the corner of the ripped screen door, the 1970s molding carpet. It was there in the mobile home that he spent hours, probing through her uterus sewage walls complied with unidentifiable smells and scraps with his hard-on. Once as he was reaching his climax, paint chips fell from the ceiling, sprinkling his naked body with artificial snow. It in this moment of ecstasy that the realization of his love for her finally set in. For although she was overused and trashy, she was one of a kind like the mobile home.
She had no limits, no boundaries, no necessities beyond surviving, and he liked it; he liked it a lot. She was not involved in the same heart scheming game of money he had mastered in his day-to-day commonplace reality. He remembered that five-dollar, garage sale snow globe that she kept on the nightstand beside the bed. Her fascination with it he could never understand. What had once been city of Las Vegas inside of it, now had become a bumblefuck ghost town, eroding slowly as the days passed from unprovoked snow. The miniature dice inside were suddenly missing their dots; the city lights, white-faced and faded, containing only a few traces of long gone yellow. He remembered that he had offered to purchase her a brand new snow globe once, but she simply glared at him in retaliation and said, "No amount of money could buy a snow globe greater than this."
Then she shook it as he smoked a cigarette and watched her intently; her eyes trailing each flake of tiny morsel of snow falling onto the crumbling rooftops. Somebody else’s trash, it was her personal treasure… and she was his.
I guess she had known he’d never leave his wife for her, and I guess he knew he never would either. He knew it now too, so he wiped away his nostalgia and began to walk away from the burnt down mobile home…like a man would do. As he walked a glimpse of her crooked mailbox caught the corner of his eye, and he noticed it was wide open.
He leaned down, looking onto the metal platform covered in empty darkness, and saw it: the five-dollar garage sale snow globe. Underneath it there was a folded piece of notebook paper with a burnt corner. He opened it and began reading:
Dear snow inside the snow globe,
I’m writing to you because I think you can understand me. You, like me, are falling down inside of a world your not supposed to be in. You are so pure, so untouched. But I guess no one sees that. They just see the trashy city of Las Vegas that hides how truly beautiful you really are. But I see you. And I’m sorry snow, I really am, because I know what that feels like be looked at for what you are, and not who you are. I wish I could be inside of there with you, and you could fall on me and make another piece of trash look beautiful too. But I can’t. I have to go. I don’t know what’ll happen I just know I can’t stay. It’s all just… too much.
Maybe where I’m going I’ll find my own snow.
Maybe.
Love,
Lily
He crunched the paper into a ball and grasped the snow globe into the palm of his hands. He shook it vigorously, a mad man brewing a blizzard, as tears trickled unconsciously from his eyelids. He stood, in front of the burnt down mobile home and waited for the snow storm to end, watching intently.
As the last microscopic flake of snow slowly fell onto the base of Las Vegas,
he closed his eyes.
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