Illusions

Pia’s dictum prohibits white girls. She is careful to avoid all parking lots and ATMs, fish-eye lenses ever unblinking. She prefers to keep an empty stomach, having once been nearly apprehended before slipping inside a detached carport over on Trumbull Avenue. Tears dripped from her cheeks as she vomited an entire Tombstone pizza into the packed dirt of the garage’s floor while the night danced with tactical shafts of light. Calculating, she now carries a single energy bar stuffed deep inside her sweatpants’ pocket. Her waist is trim, the taut flesh of her left hip warm against the pistol’s cool steel. She keeps her black shirt untucked, shoe laces double knotted.

Pia also honors the rule of threes. Nothing, of course, will happen along any well-lit street or thoroughfare, and all activity must take place outside a three-mile radius of her Pilsen apartment complex. Moreover, principle dictates no project be tasked before three in the morning or ever, once initiated, take longer than three minutes to conclude.

Tonight, Pia stands watch from under the awning of a foreclosed paint store. She breathes deeply and feels in her chest the slow calculus of stars wheeling toward a dawn still several hours away. And as she watches, a young man shouldering a JanSport backpack turns and heads up the sidewalk. Pia is very still, but her eyes track from the man back to the corner as she makes certain they are alone. Assured, she steps off the curb and moves with silent purpose across the pavement. The man scrolls through his feed with a single finger; he’s quietly lipping lyrics, an occasional plosive or fricative all Pia can make out from thirty feet behind.

Pia quickens her pace and draws the .38. Shoving the muzzle into the man’s lower back, she reaches up and pulls the earbuds out.

“Ease up, partner,” Pia says. She feels the latissimus muscles tense beneath the man’s shirt.

“Shit,” the man says.

“Pretty much,” Pia says.

“Wait—you’re a girl.”

One. Pia breathes in. “And?”

The man does not respond.

“That’s what I thought. Now lose the bag.”

The man slouches out of the shoulder straps and places the backpack between his legs.

“You can have it,” says the man.

Two. “Is that so?” Pia says. “Who’s got the piece, guy? Don’t tell me what I can do again.”

“Why me?” the man asks.

“Excuse me?” Pia says, reaching around to take the man’s iPhone.

“What did I do?”

“I don’t know, man. You’re just here.” Pia presses the pistol deeper, forcing the man to step forward. Pia squats, sets the phone and EarPods on the sidewalk, and unzips the backpack.

“Just take the whole thing and go,” the man says.

Three. Pia’s free hand stops rummaging. Her jaw sets. A small voice still raps from the headphones. She stands.

“Oh, Jesus,” says the man. He runs three steps.

*

The sun crests Lake Michigan as Pia climbs into bed. Chicago awakens. Somewhere off in the gray distance, patrol cars and ambulances shatter the morning. Pia closes her eyes, resolved in her decision to have left his possessions behind. Tumbling toward sleep, she mouses a balm of gunpowder, brocading her dreams.

Gina Marie Bernard is a heavily tattooed transgender woman, retired roller derby vixen, and full-time dorky English teacher. She lives in Bemidji, Minnesota. She has work appearing in Ghost City Review, Gingerbread House, Meow Meow Pow Pow, and Monkeybicycle. She has work forthcoming in STORGY, x-r-a-y lit mag, Anti-Heroine Chic,The Syndrome, and Whale Road Review. Her daughters, Maddie and Parker, share her heart. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and the Pushcart Prize. She is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Arkansas, Monticello.

A Song for Gina Marie