"Porcelain Poppy Fields", opening excerpt

She lived in the apartment upstairs, and sometimes we would ride the elevator together and talk about the economy going to hell or the noise that the neighbor’s dog made last night or the weather when we really couldn’t think of anything. Her hair was cut short around her chin and I liked that about her. Lots of girls can’t pull it off but I think she had the right bone structure or skin color or something because it looked good on her. I only saw her sometimes but it was nice when I did—she seemed clean and pleasant and wore nice clothes that weren’t too stylish but not frumpy, either. Girls who wear too many fancy clothes with the purses and those shoes with the heels and their mascara are always hiding something, if you ask me. They seem so shiny and glowy with their long, long endless legs and then you meet them and you realize they hate their dad or their first boyfriend hit them once, hard, in the backyard and told them not to tell and they didn’t or they’ve got some mom who’s always telling them they’re fat. But Cat wasn’t like those girls so I thought she probably was different, better somehow. I imagined that really she didn’t walk so much as floated because she didn’t have all the heavy things weighing her down like the rest of us since she lived in the apartment upstairs and wore clean, tasteful clothes and sounded smart when I talked to her in the elevator for the minute or so it took to get from the lobby to the seventh floor.

“Good-bye Charlie, see you next time,” she would chirp in this funny way she had of talking, like she didn’t want to let the words go so she held onto the end for just a little too long and her voice went up and down in a sing-songy sort of way. I would turn and wave and feel like a dope when I did while the elevator doors closed shut.

I always would lay awake at night after running into Cat and think about her in that apartment, square above mine. I decided she probably had lots of art on her walls but not in that pretentious, slick way like some people I’d known. No, she would’ve picked out something real interesting, something that had meaning to it. I mean you could just tell that about Cat. And besides the art I imagined that she had nice rugs that she put in all the rooms—probably real Eastern-looking, Tibetan or Indian or something, that she would sometimes just lay on and stare at the ceiling from. I could just picture her short hair spread out around her head like some little brown beautiful Japanese fan, and there was probably nice soft moonlight coming through the window and lighting the whole floor, too. Milky white.