The Quiet Behind Her
The roller girl at the end of the world straps her roller skates on her feet, slides through suburban neighborhoods. They are empty and quiet, like her neighborhood is empty and quiet. She goes past bare-window houses like the wind.
The roller girl isn’t looking particularly, isn’t seeing, isn’t observing. She is going fast, fast, faster. Her lungs burn, her thighs ache. There are windshield-broken cars and torn curtains and spoke-bent bicycles, and the roller girl thinks this is it, this is all that is left, thinks I am all that is left, thinks there is nothing, there is nothing, there is nothing left.
Before, the roller girl used to skate at the local rink. She grapevined and twisted, she sang along with the old songs, ABBA and BeeGees and Donna Summer, she spun and spun under the sparkle ball in the center of the rink. She drank grape sodas and wore wristbands, she colored her lips scarlet and puckered them with a pop in the jam-door back bathroom mirror.
She wrote boys’ names on her forearm in blue marker, she crossed them out later with black. She watched their names bleed away in the shower. They never wanted to do the couples skate, they never wanted her to wear blue eyeshadow and tease her hair till it was big.
The roller girl, now, tries to remember those names.
The roller girl wishes for a blue marker.
There are loose feathers and scattered gravel and black plastic bags, slick and full and round. The roller girl glides past them all. The roller girl sings Lookin’ for some hot stuff, baby, this evening, and her voice disappears into the quiet behind her.
The roller girl isn’t looking particularly, isn’t seeing, isn’t observing. She is going fast, fast, faster. Her lungs burn, her thighs ache. There are windshield-broken cars and torn curtains and spoke-bent bicycles, and the roller girl thinks this is it, this is all that is left, thinks I am all that is left, thinks there is nothing, there is nothing, there is nothing left.
Before, the roller girl used to skate at the local rink. She grapevined and twisted, she sang along with the old songs, ABBA and BeeGees and Donna Summer, she spun and spun under the sparkle ball in the center of the rink. She drank grape sodas and wore wristbands, she colored her lips scarlet and puckered them with a pop in the jam-door back bathroom mirror.
She wrote boys’ names on her forearm in blue marker, she crossed them out later with black. She watched their names bleed away in the shower. They never wanted to do the couples skate, they never wanted her to wear blue eyeshadow and tease her hair till it was big.
The roller girl, now, tries to remember those names.
The roller girl wishes for a blue marker.
There are loose feathers and scattered gravel and black plastic bags, slick and full and round. The roller girl glides past them all. The roller girl sings Lookin’ for some hot stuff, baby, this evening, and her voice disappears into the quiet behind her.
Cathy Ulrich's sixth-grade class had a skate party at the local roller rink. She probably fell down a lot. Her work has been published in various journals, including Flashback Fiction, 100 Word Story and Adroit. She can be found on twitter @loki_writes.