Tack.

Wow. Talk about abrupt. I realise that a heap of the dialogue in this is a bit difficult to know whose is whose.
Ah well. It's basically irrelevent.


"Do you know where we are?"
A pause.
One of her long, unkempt eyebrows inching to the mould-ridden ceiling.
"I'm not here for the conversation, boy. Really."
"Just answer me. Do you know where we are?"
A twitch, her long fingers flying to the floorboards for a carton of Golden Gates she knew wouldn't be there.
"Hell, I don't know why you're still here."
"I mean, physically, we're in this room. In a two-inch mattress on hardwood floors."
He tapped the boards for emphasis. Or perhaps good luck.
"But where are we?"
"Shit, man. I don't know what to tell you. The greatest city in the world?"
She was starting to think about getting up and starting at this hangover...
"I guess. The greatest, you think? I've seen greater"
"I wouldn't know. Been here since I was a kid"
... But it was still kind of dark outside, and she never got up before 12.
"Really."
He was making her uncomfortable, she realised, with all his talk.
"You wasn't this weird at the dogs, kid."
"Well, you weren't this pretty at the dog races."
That did it.
She got up. Slowly.
As if he was holding a knife to her.
"You're afraid of me?"
"No. You're just weird, is all."
He smiled, got up, and followed her to her tiny kitchen.

He was there the whole day. Quiet like, watching her read the racing section in The Chronicle. She didn't look at him, unnerved that he was still there. Naked, and wholly comfortable, as if she was a ghost in his home, one he had learned to convince himself wasn't really there.

She hadn't noticed the pen and pad in his hand. But it had been there, and finally, at 5 in the evening, as she was dressing to start off for the races, when she turned to ask him if he planned to shadow her to the dogs that evening, he was gone.

And there was a scrawled note on her stove. It wasn't a note, for real, but she couldn't say for sure it was a poem, since it had no rhymes.
Up
The top, he had written the name she'd given him, and she really liked how that looked on the old paper, so she used one of her glittery earrings and tacked it to the underside of her tiny kitchen table, and watched him walk -still naked as a babe- all the way down Haight.