XThis was my response to a "picture challenge" proposed this morning at my Facebook writers' group. The challenge being simply to write a piece inspired by the picture posted here:
Billi-Jo Tells a Joke
She finally decided on just the plain bra and white cotton panties. She wasn’t sure yet about the black heels. With the shoes, would it be too obvious that she was wearing an outfit identical to the one worn by Nooki Knightly in “Donkeys, Deirdre and Little Doggies”?
Billi-Jo pondered these things as she reached up to open shutters on the one window in her little room. The room she had been asked to leave. She could almost feel the dark eyes of Nooki, the star; Nooki the desired; Nooki the money pit, drilling through the ample flesh of her back from the poster on the wall above her single bed, setting the fine hairs on the back of her neck on fire. XXX. Well, she would be leaving the room, alright. But it wouldn’t be by the door. No.
She wasn’t at all sure that the shoes would stay on her feet, anyway. She could sort of picture them in her mind, sailing in slo-mo just behind her, as her big body—the one that never had sold—rolled and billowed like a plump, pink cloud against the backdrop of a broad, blue sky. She imagined the scene as shot from an angle where the building couldn’t be seen. There were always windows in these scenes, but Billi-Jo didn’t want that. She did not want to imagine the faces of strangers, their arms folded across their chests, their mouths like the black slashes of straight razors, watching her leaving the scene from their dark, disapproving windows.
Or should she say that the shoes would be sailing above her—like a pair of black carrion birds—crows—or whatchamacallit?—turkey buzzards. They had those back home in West Virginia. Almost heaven. Ha! As if. Ugly things, those buzzards. Sitting by the roadside, sticking their ugly, red heads right up inside of the road kill. The stink that lingered inside your car, for miles and miles afterwards.
Billi-Jo decided that she would definitely wear the shoes. The idea of being escorted to the Dance by a pair of big black buzzards appealed to her. It was a thing that would never occur to a shallow bitch like Nooki Knightly. All Nooki ever thought about was money. And Nooki.
Well, we would just see who made the bigger splash in the tabloids tonight! Splash! Ha! Stop it, Billi-Jo, she chuckled to herself. Just stop it! Yer killin’ me!
X
