ten-minute timed writing exercise: Tracy

Tracy with long red hair, Tracy with a blonde pixie cut. Waiting on my front porch with a bottle wrapped in a brown paper bag. The phone ringing at work in the smoky room behind the bar, Tracy calling in sick. "What was wrong this time?" Someone would've said "I don't know, she threw her back out, fucking. Who cares." Tracy coming home crying, dripping from the rain with lank wet hair and wearing ruined suede, says she has to have another abortion. Tracy at the beach when we were all younger - when even I was as thin and white as a bone or a baby - both of us wearing black hoodies and glaring at the sand in the 90s. Tracy in my kitchen helping me pack boxes on my last day in her town, but really wanting to borrow money for beer. She would leave too, she said, if she could buy the gas. I gave her my last five dollars and told her to disappear. Maybe she went to her mother's...maybe she went to heaven. Maybe she went to get her hair done, or to bed, to let her hair down forever. Waiting on some saviour.