Character Study
Sunset.
She ashed her cigarette as the setting sun lit her in silhouette, bright red glow fading to inky nothing across scant radians of her skin. Like the arc of a taut bow, her back slouched, hunched. Eyes staring at something so far and so close.
Her elbows found the tops of her knees, pressed together.
She had dragged in a breath, and now she let it out. Half-consumed smoke spiraled in the air, lips pursed, eyes half drawn shut.
Brown hair, maybe-imagined red in stripes going too far up to be sun fade, too organic to be dye or tint. Leggings, boot cut, pockets peeking out from beneath an overlarge sweat that drapes and moves like there’s no cloth beneath it.
Tears roll down her face, unbidden, unnoticed, at first.
She sighs like she found a stain on the couch, smears her face dry with her palms, dabs at her eyes, snatches a breath out of the air and shoves it right back, and she hits her cigarette.
Time passes, she smokes.
A single iota away from visible, gears turn in her head. From time to time she mutters something, just a syllable or two, to nobody, not even herself. A nod, an eye roll.
Like the purr of a cat-sized bee, her phone hums, light winking through the material of the pocket of the leggings.
A motion so practiced as to put soldiers to shame plucks her phone out, pivots it between fingers and one of them taps the screen, to wake it, right before the phone slips in to place in her hand like a magazine in a rifle.
Time passes, she smokes.
Another utterly rote motion undoes it all and the phone is back in her pocket.
Time passes, she smokes.
More tears.
She sighs, throws the cigarette with two fingers at her feet and with the same motion that she stamps out the ember, she is standing, she is striding.
She drives off.
