She sat on my stoop every Sunday morning, scratching her rash speckled calves with dirt infested nails and destroying the bird nests in her faded green hair with her claws. Two bibles struggled against the cheeks of her hemp bag and poked their ragged corners out of moth bitten holes. The dimples in her cheeks reminded me of my aunt, and they bent in whenever she flashed her rotted roots at me. She stopped scratching when I climbed the steps and commenced as soon as I shut the door behind me. I could watch her draw blood from my apartment window. Every Sunday at nine, I brought her hot coffee in a Styrofoam cup on my way to work, and returned to find the cup’s quartered remnants, instead of her, on the stoop. Sometimes on Mondays, she woke me with the radio’s crackling songs just in time for work. Rock, always. If not for my involvement and the landlord’s hidden identity, Mrs. Craven might have had her cast off the stoop. The reports she dropped in landlord’s mailbox complained about Aerosmith at five, HIM at eight, and ‘the other blasphemies,’ of rock. I read them, circled her spelling mistakes, and tacked them on the cork board in my kitchen. The day the woman was finally taken away, by someone in a uniform or by her own need, I sent the drafts to Mrs. Craven. It wasn’t long before, perhaps from a similar need to the woman’s, I moved out of the city. I rented a room in a country inn, and spent five months there before I decided that I would spend the year. I often remembered the junkie and her tangled green hair, like a mermaid washed ashore. I never did move back to the city.

(Author)