Anaconda Woman.

We saw her bundled up in a cape of brown and black in the corner of the street. The lines of the sidewalk were unforgiving, holding onto her with crooked intentions. We didn’t know what to say. And if we did know what to say, we didn’t know how to say it. She was a fountain of flaws and drabs. I noticed her fur jacket in reluctance, somehow giving her this solemn and classy edge that now, plastered in a heap on top of her, just couldn’t save her from her losses.
“What’s wrong?” we asked her. Her muffled tears could only make their way to the drainage line beside her- it had never been finished. I’d heard people complaining about this before. But somehow, it was providing her with a portal for her tears, so I guess there really wasn’t much to complain about.
I continued to contemplate putting my arm around her, but something inside of me resisted. I believe it must have been the way the black jacket cascaded clouds of arsenic-filled smoke around her.
Then she screamed with all the ardor and fervency inside of her belly, the very bottom- where germs and viruses hide.
“Oh, you! You can never understand- the plight that I live with- my imprisonment here! I could tell you- but no. No-no! You must never understand!”
I’d seen a flick of her pupils in her cries as she flailed her hands around her head like a misplaced halo and called attention to the little pearl rings on her fingers.
I waited in the wake of her outburst; waited for the black waves around her to recede into a constant, soft rhythm.
Then I told her, “Miss, I beg your pardon. But you are seated quite uncomfortably on the floor. All you have to do is get up.” I had said it gently, but for some reason, it might have sounded like I was an officer dressed up in blue and white, demanding her to follow a system and coercing her to follow my corrupt direction.
She shook her head with even more violence. “No, no, no. But you can’t. But you can’t.” It was as if a lopsided, drunk giraffe with 5 necks took over her body and stood up, pulling his heads in all different directions that she finally made it up to her feet. She was barefoot. I hadn’t known that. I tried to reach for her hand to help her but she refused.
As she walked to the end of the street, I saw a white glow coming off of her body. It was so white that the moon couldn’t find the right way to sit on her skin. She was completely bare. Yet, every time that she cried, the black and brown crawled back around her like a ignominious, slithering anaconda- snapping at the passers-by all the way home.