The foggy room entered my body with a tolerant giddiness that effused me. My soul became present. Smoke curled by wafts into plexuses of unrequited pollution. I figured the athletes were performing badly as a boisterous contempt filled the main room. It was zero to seven and ten o’clock. The Giants had it. I inched my vein-jogging fingers to the hem of my starch-tan skirt, which made my heart rate and the decibel of everyone else increase. I loosened my joints to my sides and instinctively backed toward a door that camouflaged with the designer walls. I camouflaged with the brown as well as a man exited from the door, unleashing a stench so heaping and shared it made me crawl from my nose to my skin. He burped Patron, adding to the gathering I wasn’t role-playing in. I had myself in mind to be secretive instead of simply lonesome and excluding. My hair was down and sickle under my throat. It was dark against the corner and shiny against the wood, reflecting my countenance well. And it was untouched because I envisioned myself to remain intimate. Solitaire and exclusive like the eyes of peeking boys who deliberately attended such parties and carefully made it so everyone understood their effortless appeal and attraction. Appeal was supposed to be effortless, and attraction seemingly effete where it was effective at most. Like such tête-à-têtes with my father when the least spent less time doing everything in all and mannerism out of that was irregular in me. Diffidence was learning and so was low confidence. So I kept at common cosigning and he went on, explaining everything in all but two words. However, when I disagreed with simple opinions, he’d retaliate with a further, intricately persuasive point that didn’t change my mindset until silence shaped into a nescience of reciprocation. He wasn’t as cloudy as his whimsical pipe made him in mind. His wide-rimmed glasses and large knitted pull over a collared button-down with the tuck-in flaps over corduroy slacks and alligator Sunday shoes when he couldn’t find his moccasins defined just his conservatory. As did his lumberjack workplace, the husky grunt of an outline he was. And my influenced reserve was just as his appearance. He was too brilliant for my company and I wondered the type of love he shared with my mother when she lived. He laughed at abasing quips and brief banters. His own humor was uneven and complicated but I understood. I was never a retaining type of person but I understood. Graduating at the top of advanced-placed high scholars, there was always retentive vocabulary, an unknown fact, or a modern method of finding solutions unfolding and branching. And since I never actually learned to apply them, it was irrelevant in all. But I would always learn, especially from him, holding an adult maturity so that I knew life’s fable enough. Just the basic significances.

The music was about the only convivial feature beside the nostalgic nicotine. A tall boy led a small woman by the fingers to the bathroom. His hat was low so he didn’t acknowledge me and probably wouldn’t have even without the girl clasped to his shoulders for both of their drinks and eyes were fizzing. Surprisingly, however, she smiled at me, mirthlessly. I accepted it as hope, which I defended unnecessary. If I were a man, I would have been the hopeless so I, nonetheless, was the shame in the mute blarney I represented. But if I were a man I wouldn’t have been so awaiting, no matter how hopeless.

My soul bolted into place as an underground track only I had ever heard of crept into the rambunction of clanking plastic cups against imbibing golf balls and still-loud disagreement with the breaking and cracking of selected MVPs. It wasn’t until the Super Bowl record was in the catch of Burress when a shaven, near-sighted young man appeared, approaching from a place I allegedly wasn’t paying attention to. I was allegedly not looking toward the deluge of the people for definition. However, the rancid bathroom wasn’t fit to be the night’s review but neither was a general concentration. The study method I absorbed was to make the intake as hypnotizing as the trash television I was so into. Any other life from mine staged a more exciting course and I was always ready to learn if religious philosophy was slipped into it.

His gold watch spotted my eyes and I did his purple and brown sweatshirt. It was neatly and symmetrically woven like the dexterousness of my grandmother. There was a white logo stitched just above the left breast but it was smudged with a dark substance, all the more darkly above the communal light. He should have probably chosen a white, or gray, polo for his own right. He compulsively bantered, devouring my ability to reveal anything beneath my t-shirt and one-foot skirt. I was once disappointed to learn, and reminded, that I wasn’t the role of the taken, him being the intake, but the initiator, for the skirt and t-shirt was a flirtatious approach enough. But I kept my personal position to be effectually, fecklessly conveying. In the mean time, I plastered my humid palm to the wall, afraid his celebrity-designed sneakers would scuff on my frail, open toes. I wondered when he was planning on assuming common, intimate contact. A clammy handshake, an innocent grope. Maybe the partygoer mastermind was what hindered the courteous introduction. They all seemed to presume that the standard meeting was unacceptable so they all operated away from it, unevenly staging reputable behavior toward each other as to not stir forward conflict. But I wouldn’t have liked a hug anyway. Reputable it was until it was taken to the bedroom.

After a short while, the apartment boomed with jocularity at the break and underlined with bass-vibrating choruses. It all made me feel powerfully overwhelmed with outer-body experiences I regularly sustained in spurts and kept private. But the anticipation of returning to my core suppression began to fade to mere potential and I resolved to frolic in it. Silent observation at the party’s wall was as effective as the reaching yelling at the game’s play anyway. So I unbalanced my shoulders and restrained rubbing the nape of my neck in the critical retrospection I seemed to demonstrate. The way that didn’t offend my father but said what I wasn’t sure I should have. The diffidence.

The guy, whose name I couldn’t mentally hold on to, spoke with prophetic gesticulations, which was how I understood he was talking about current events. I responded with an occasional “Yeah” and something in the context of “It’s all Darwinism. The madness is uncontrollable by now.” His topics didn’t matter because his point was presented. I remember the gist of it, questioning the motives of human beings and wondering if life would forever be parallel. He turned sluggish after a random momentary pause, swagging his hands like my father did when unraveling a satirical story, cigarette tails dancing in the air with diction as amorphous. I was always wistfully intoxicated by the whole aura, my soul colossally weak and purple by the whole ordeal. But he was gone but there he was. I realized that it was, in fact, a swagger into the bathroom when I instinctively grabbed my neck, reflexively rejecting his modest yet humiliating invitation. I was disappointed as I had never been in my father. It was a new feeling of disagreement. Just as it usually was, however, he noticed but proceeded with the eager task of getting me to attach to his part. Nodding in acceptance, carefully assuring, lightly suggesting I do what I please but the contortions in his insisting slowly wrung my silence out. A nescience of surrender; his period was effective. I felt the appealing huskiness of his nature, the attracting heat of his face, anyway, and my rapture admitted to his simple prey. I was his girl, above all.

***

Sarah Estime

Since the sky is but a factor of her outreach, Sarah Estime tries to stay grounded and persistent at finishing excruciatingly long novels to broaden her ridiculous circumlocution. It seems to be working so she decreases in pessimism by comparison.