Ghost-Foot Woman

A Mid-Morning Stroll in Harm County, Peoples Shithole Republic of Maryland, 10:22 A.M. 7/9/19

I was walking about the suburban rabbit warren, square in the sights of the oncoming urban blight, taking my mid-morning walk as I consider the writing day among my relatives—the hale, the frail and the stale.

I turned onto a little-used asphalt side street among the neatly manicured lawns of the brick row-home community built in 1948 to house returning victors of The Great Crusade and their blooming families.  

This street was only a hundred yards long, with no houses facing the asphalt, both sides lined with two end house sides and their back yards and an alley mouth. The left side is overgrown with weeds as high as the weeping maple trees, making of themselves a green tunnel. I nearly stepped—one-eyed and all—into a hole in the hollow asphalt where a traffic cone had been placed yesterday. On the right hand side of the street, pulled over almost into the parking lane, was a white sedan, with the driver’s side door propped open and a fair white ankle, beneath a knee brace, supported by a crutch sat as if an SOS carved into some desert island beach.

Obviously, this foolish woman had made the same sharp turn onto the rarely used side street just as I had, unconcerned with the rare oncoming car and got that red cone folded up under her car. I walked to the door as the fair young thing—young for me, you understand—looking to be in early middle years and armed with a “save me, Daddy” smile and a superior posterior, apparent even from where she was seated in the Japanese interior. She smiled up into my offset cyclopean eye and said, “Somebody must have left that cone folded up in the street because I didn’t see it. Could you please use my crutch to get it out? I can’t get prone with my knee and my arm’s not long enough.”

Saying this, she handed me the medical support device and I handed it back. “But, how can you get it out?” she chirped.

“With the bone-claw, Baby,” I answered, while showing off my only strong part, being the arthritic hand attached to the Popeye forearm.

Going around the car and lowering my fat ass with a reverse pushup below the rear passenger side door in the gutter, I saw that this woman had hit that standing cone doing about 20 and folded that sucker up into a pinned rubber spring.

I tried dragging it out, but the 80 yard drag had frayed the cone and driven part of the heavy rubber base plate into a hollow of the undercarriage. I squeezed the cone and the base between my thumb and fingers and dragged it squeaking free.

Throwing the cone on the curb, I stood and walked around the car to see an oncoming ebon warrior. This well-muscled welterweight might have been me in my youth, except his skin was a smoky, nut brown and he was dressed all in black, from his sneakers to his do-rag and he was double-timing it diagonally down the street towards her open door and fair ghost form in her dainty, slipper-like sandals.

Her eyes were on me, her mouth asking me if I needed the crutch as she stood behind the open door.

His eyes started up from her pale, creamy form to me with surprise etched across his inverting smile.

I simply looked at him from a relaxed posture.

He stopped in his tracks and then straightened his course to pass on the other side of the street.

She never noticed him but rose from her seat, and asked, “You can drag it out with the crutch.”

“It’s done, was hung up in the undercarriage. You hit it standing to fold it like that. So calm down, relax, and take your time getting to where you’re going.”

She looked at my hand and said, “You did it with that.”

“It’s on the curb.”

She put her arms around my neck, kissed me and pressed her perky nipples into my hard gut and said, “Thank youuuuu!” as I thought about palming that nice ass but scanned for the warrior instead, who was climbing through the weeds behind an abandoned car on the opposite side of the street, under the hanging maple leaves, I suppose as a demonstration that he meant no disrespect. I turned and watched him as he bushwhacked through the five-foot wide jungle and she caught my look and spied him.

I patted her on the shoulder and said, “Now, get going without the hurry—relax.”

She sulkily said, “Yes, sir,” as I checked her fingers for a wedding band and found none.

Then, as I began shutting her into the driver’s seat, she stopped the door with her hand and looked sidelong up at me and, as she nodded her head to the ebon warrior now breaking free of the weeds and branches as he glanced furtively over his shoulder at me, said in a sweet little hiss, “Who skulks through weeds?!?”

I shrugged my shoulders and grinned, “Relax and stay alert,” and waved as I walked off, hoping I get to see her under better circumstances as she complied and pulled away.

Then, walking past actual rabbits darting from lawn to bush, I found myself wondering, whether the young man was a rival Good Samaritan or an opportunistic predator?

I have no way of knowing. He might have been as young as 17 and as old as 21. Many youth lack the social skills to clear up a simple misunderstanding. Where he probably grew up, young guys get shot for making time with some silverback’s girl. The important thing was, she had no idea he was there once she felt safe, expressing in her darling distress the seduction of the suburbs, the assumption of goodwill—the false security of America’s duplicitous Promised Land.