Emily felt like there was an ogre inside her. The ogre was buck-toothed, with uneven eyes and wielded a giant mallet of anxiety in the caverns of her secret soul. It was daytime and the powder blue cotton sheet on top of her felt like a lead x-ray blanket. Her head thudded. She was prone to migraines when she was a child, but this doozy was pure Cabernet Sauvignon. She didn't even know how to spell Sauvignon, much less endure an excessive hangover because of it. The ogre took a rest and lit some heartburn in her physical self to remind Emily that her bladder felt like a whoopee cushion filled with jelly.
It was spring and she could smell green through her screen window. The window brought weekend city noises too; people going to get the paper and drink coffee, car doors slamming, other people kissing good morning. She sighed and rolled over, feeling chilly under the thin sheet. She rubbed her feet together like spoons and lifted them up enough so the sheet edge drifted, then she quick tucked them down to cocoon the sheet under her feet.
Snug as a bug in a rug. Emily half smiled and crunched down into her pillows trying to find the "cold" spot.
Emily keeps little things. She has an antique cologne bottle on her windowsill with the neck the size of a punch hole. This is the smallest bottle she has and is impressed that it is the size of the snuff bottles in museums, but held instead wannabe pheromones in the 1920's. Other jars and bottles of various color and age line the sill and they are all filled with things she combs from the beach; rocks, bits of broken pottery, frayed nylon nets and seaglass. The smallest bits of seaglass are put in the small cologne bottle, because they are the only things that will fit. Emily has a wish that her eventual husband will set a bit of seaglass on a platinum ring instead of a diamond solitaire, but she knows that it won't ever happen. Emily dates guys that pick flowers in public rose gardens.
The morning light shines through the bottles and leaves a kaleidoscope of color bubbles on her wrinkled sheets.
The bladder is too much and she shuffles to the bathroom over oak floors. She pees and gives the toilet lever a push, then opens up the cold water on the pedestal sink. It flows and she scoops it up in her hands, hanging her face above the painted iron bowl. She splashes the water on her face until she feels fresh. Beads of water drip off her smooth skin, one bead catching on the mole on her lip. She licks it off and smoothes her hair back before she shuffles back to bed. She is thinking of the robin eggs and remembers time doesn't matter.
When Emily was a little girl, she found a fallen nest of robin eggs near her front steps. The blue speckled orbs intrigued her five year old self. She thought they were leftover Easter Eggs. She cracked the first one for chocolate and found a dripping mess down her arm. She was ashamed and took the other three dead eggs to her room and put them under the butts of her stuffed animals. When the eggs began to stink her mother confiscated them and bragged to her socialite friends that her daughter had tried to "save" the robin babies.
Emily would play "shark" in the downtown pubs. She would circle and wait until some riff-raff would buy her a drink. She would never fornicate with that particular bloke. Instead, she would shmooze to his friends and they would buy her drink after drink. As a gesture, she would sport a round and they would all flambooozle over the gesture. She had it sown until her old loves intervened.
Her old loves popped up all over and she didn't know what to do. They sabotaged her effort and without friends to divert, she was lost. Emily wished she had friends, but most of the straight girls she hung around grew jealous with her errant apathy. Emily didn't mind so much, but she really did want a girl friend to snuggle with on the couch.
Girls abhorred Emily. Her soft lips and big breasts made most women cringe. When they went to a bar with her, men would drool and flock around her pressing chests, ignoring them. F-that.
Emily would lead those same guys on and make
them sleep on the couch. Guys made a joke about giving her a ride home. It became that none of them did. Emily was alone.
Instead, alone with the remnants of bitter drunken guys, Emily swoons with her imagination and predicts love like it might occur on a long lost beach; swollen robin egg blue sky with yellow sun and sand beach. A beach where you close your eyes and see the red insides of your lids and smell the salt caking on you and the wind brushes the tiny hairs on your arms. If you have been there, you know what Emily wants.