My Town
by Roberta Allen
I live in a town where a man found a mouse and threw it in the pile of leaf litter burning in his backyard. The flaming creature dashed into the house, setting it on fire. The house burned down, I was told by my hairdresser whose car once crashed into a black bear on the road. My driving teacher said that when a woman drove into a ditch, her two kids in back continued licking ice creams. I watch petunias grow in pots on my porch.
Sometimes I dance on Friday night at a club with other middle-aged people who smoke a lot of pot, including a loud Swedish woman with a head twice the size of mine, who owns a printing shop that does shoddy work and a psychiatrist who treats transsexuals and once wore a blue filmy dress with long loose sleeves that made her look angelic when she spread her arms until she said to me, "Whatsa matter Roberta, you don't like me?"
One night I sat outside the club in a pagoda with those same people, staring up at the wooden structure, wondering why I was there while they passed around joint after joint. Their laughter made me feel even more excluded until I realized that as soon as I get my license I can leave in my car whenever I want to. In fact, I don't have to come here at all, which is something I don't seem to grasp in my solitary state which seems too solitary until I am not solitary and then regret leaving the petunias and my porch.