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To: pleine peau

From: Anne Pierce <apierce@earthlink.net>



it's just that it was easier to write all this than to think about what else to do right now.
call me
Once, while i was working in Alexandria, a guy with long knife scars across his face and neck came up to me. This happened during my lunch break. Like the most dangerous people usually do, he seemed to come up suddenly out of nowhere, materializing out of the air, really, and then he came way too close to me right off. A familiar threatening intimate closeness. He had a soft voice, but menacing in a controlled soft way, just like the voice of a man who had pulled out a gun, then talked gently to me about not moving or trying to run while he held up an attendant in a laundromat i'd been in just a few months before. I was sitting at a picnic table that i couldn't climb out of easily, and was trying my best to stay cool about it. I couldn't decide (now that we were all alone by the canal) what he wanted, did he want sex, should i just try to go, but then within a few minutes i realized he'd been following a conversation i'd had with my boss about writing, which had been going on earlier while she was with me. She'd already gone back to work by the time he showed up -- he'd been listening to us for a while, hiding sort of down under a ridge. He told me about his poetry writing (in prison is my guess), how much i would like it, and said he'd meet me tomorrow, same time and place, with some poems he wanted to show me, i would be there, wouldn't i? I gave him half of my sandwich, which he really wanted...but wouldn't tell me he wanted it, and i remember he actually stopped looking at me so brazenly or intimately or closely, and he even completely avoided my eyes when i asked: "do you want this sandwich?" It turned out to be my trade for getting away.
p l e i n e p e a u