velvet underground

Jade leans against the sticky bar and pulses her head to the loud music whose lyrics she can’t quite make out: it’s a lot of shouting and more shouting, an angry song that suits her just fine because she’s been angry for as long as she can remember, so she motions for the bartender and in her well-practiced grown-up sultry voice orders her second rye and coke of the night, and he nods and as walks away, he lets her catch a glimpse of herself in the mirror behind the bar, and she realizes she’s applied too much blush to her fifteen-year-old cheeks, then her eyes lock with those of a man with a five o’clock shadow, wearing a gray suit and tie, sitting a few bar stools down from her, fidgeting with his wedding band as he continues to appraise her, eyes relaxing, taking her in from top to bottom and bottom to top, feasting on the evidence of her youth, baby cheeks and all, and when the bartender returns to drop her drink in front of her, she slides a ten dollar bill towards him and wraps her fingers around the frosted tumbler, and steals a glance at the man in gray and notices that his wedding band is now missing, then he smiles a smile that exudes too much confidence, too much certainty, which turns her spine as ice cold as the drink she’s holding, so she lifts her heels one at a time from the sticky floor, and walks in the opposite direction, towards the booth with the red, velvet seats, the one with a cigarette burn smack in the middle, a hole smaller than the one she’d accidentally burned into her couch at home after she’d begged for its plastic cover to be removed, and of course no one in her family had believed that the burn had been an accident or maybe they had but they didn’t care, you always do these sorts of things, they’d said, which she didn’t think was true, although maybe she had forgotten to lock her bike the day it was stolen and, yes, maybe she had left the potatoes unattended when they boiled over on the stove causing a small fire in the kitchen, but those had also been accidents, and so when she dared herself to steal the fishnet stockings from the department store after school one day, she thought maybe she was a total screw up, but wearing them now made her feel so special and sophisticated, unlike how she feels at school, where her grade nine science teacher banned her from touching the microscope because he thought she’d break it, where the rich kids made fun of the foreign accent she’d worked hard to lose so she wouldn’t sound like her relatives, and the neighbour who always asked about the father she barely knew, because inside Velvet Underground, Jade can twirl Marlboro reds between her fingers and never worry about touching any lab equipment, she can choose to alter her accent or to not speak at all, especially not to men in gray suits with disappearing wedding bands, she can have a dead father instead of a deadbeat dad and here, she can forget about being Jacinta and become Jade.

Marilyn is a Luso-Canadian writer whose writing has appeared in Sky Island Journal, trampset, Longleaf Review, and elsewhere. Her work has also been nominated for Best of the Net. Marilyn holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Tampa's low-residency program.