Lou Ellen

Lou Ellen is sad. But not the sad you'd expect from her type.

 

The color of her hair, what's left of it, has been reduced to something like smoke. Skin dangles from the ledge of her bones. Cats knot the corners and heights of her house, where the floorboards seem marinated in the bloaty chemical reek of mothballs. She's all spinster cliché, and bland, vacant, Meals-On-Wheels aloneness.

 

But she's come to terms with all that.

 

Why she's sad...did you see that show? The way the ambulance screamed like an airplane in the ears, and how the medical tools were all tangled up. The driver had the radio loud and he tripped when he dismounted his perch.

 

They couldn't save the boy. His mother wailed.

 

But that wasn't it either.

 

After, in the turn of the credits, she saw a name that was the name of someone she once loved. A "c" stood in place of a "k" but otherwise it was identical.

 

She stopped loving this K the way the K stopped loving her, in a rainstorm of thrown things, a house upturned, then abandoned.

 

After, there was another house, one on the highway she drove down, not far out from the city, but far enough to feel far.

 

The house was lit from the inside.

 

Everything was painted a dark, violent maroon. There was a woman with her back turned and it was almost as if Lou Ellen could see through the sickly blond hair that hung down her spine, through the tight skin and skull, to where an expression was perched on her face that said nothing will be alright but nothing will be wrong.