Tronnor One-Shots

Beauty and the Beast

I need distraction like I need to breath. I need distraction; distraction to distract from the urge to wrap my dirty-nailed fingers around the slight waist of a ballpoint pen. My much too heavy desire is to press a stylus to the top of the grocery list of things I really need—like food, and a bed, and a home—and let me cross them off. To begin attaining those staples I require so badly, but I cannot. Only one bullet point, the very first mentioned, can currently sustain a weighty line across its letters.

To do such a thing—distract—I tend to watch people. Stationing myself on the sidewalks in the business hub of town, my sunken eyes catch onto the features of those more fortunate than I, to whatever magnitude, who stick their hands in their jingling pockets (and keep that money away from me, most of the time.) I make notes. Mental notes on what these people are, and what they are not from what I can see.

I do not know names. I do not know which streets they have walked in their lifetimes, who they find the energy to smile at, whether they like whipped cream on their pie, or whether they like pie at all. I have never met them, but I watch them scrutinizingly as they go about their daily life. Daily life, as I do not have much of, the sides of my thighs cold on the sidewalk and my fingers calloused from plucking strings.

Nobody knows who I am, but I can infer about who the woman at the playground is. She is a mother, a strong figure, with her body like a birch in summer: face glowing and legs dependant on her tippy toes to stand. Her white-bark skin pimpled with the autumn chill, the branches outstretching from her shoulders wait. Wait, for an airborne child to be brought back like a bird to a nest, into her resilient, natural, primal protection. "Higher, Mommy!" The toddler cheers as the swing is brought back into her forest of love, and I play Hush Little Baby on my guitar. I used to have a mother like that.

When that song has faded, and mother and child have uprooted in the happy breeze, they still do not know me. The sides of my thighs are tingling, and my fingers are inflamed from plucking strings. Little scraggly me, again, nobody cares to know, but I can infer about who the man on my left is.

A trodden man made of clay in heat, he is. Spinning that red carwash arrow has twisted his skin into knots and wrinkles; knots and wrinkles that, as the years became hotter, hardened and cracked the lines of his face into hills of bags and craters of frowns. The wind blows, the arrow is lifted from his raw hands of weathered earth and dispensed anticlimactically on the ground. He lags to pick it up, and I play a melancholy version of Hounddog on my guitar. I used to have a father like that.

In the next few hours, the man slouches in the direction that his arrow points, and occupies his misery elsewhere. I still occupy my misery here on this sidewalk, trying to not think about it, but with my thighs now numb, and my fingers now slit and bleeding. I lean to the side with what little mobility I have left to offer myself, and peer into my guitar case.

Several coins are lodged in the creases, but they have a measly total. Feasible for an ADD child's candy-shoppe budget, but not nearly enough for a grown man's dinner. I sigh, and the energy taken further wets the linings of my malnourished organs. My stomach speaks in tongues that resemble earthquake groans, but I just keep trying to know people. Keep trying to lure them to wanting to know me, or at least the pleas in my musicality.

That old lady, kicking pebbles along the sidewalk, obviously hates the pigeons. I strum Bird Song by Florence and the Machine for her, but it does not profit.

That dashing young businessman, j-walking hectically, is obviously stressed for a meeting. For him, I try Don't Worry, Be Happy—which is quite desperate for my heart, beating only in the minor keys—but not a cent he, nor any other pedestrian, graces me with.