The Shine Journal

The Way of All Flesh

by

Greggory Moore

She's too young, I'm sure, too young.  I doubt she's twenty.  But she's cute, and so part of me doesn't care.  She has kind of an awkward face:  a little buck-toothed, pale and burnished skin, a pointy nose, some light freckles.  She's got her hair dyed that artificial red-black I love, today with a blue calico bandanna encircling her tiny head and her ears just peeping through.  She's got a great body in that thin, unfinished way.  Her eyes are strong ovals with drawn, apiculate corners, streaks of glittery turquoise eyeliner on the lids. Her smile is bright, ebullient in a mousy way.  She seems so nice.

I struggle up from my chair.  She's at the end of the counter as I pass by, and she looks at me with a genuine grin.  I step into the restroom and go to the sink.  Looking straight ahead I encounter a wrinkled face, heavy with sagging folds and dotted unnaturally with liver spots.  I look down at my hands, following with my gaze the convex, bluish trains of veins over the hills of gnarled knuckles on those two decrepit, quaking landscapes.  I rest them on my bulbous gut and look back to the mirror, considering what she beheld as I lumbered past her, what she might have thought.  "Jesus Christ," I whisper.  "Does it never end?"  

For a moment I'd forgotten.

Motivation:Not sure what to do with this question.  For my journalism work I tend to have specific motivations; for my art writing is just what I do.

Bio:Lifelong SoCal resident living in my second historic landmark in downtown Long Beach; copy editor and writer for The District Weekly; columnist for LBPost.com; likes children (well, some of them, anyway).

Image by: Kristin Smith