Evening on the Street
Yorgos Dalman

I borrowed a portable phone from a midget who was playing darts with an Asian man and tried to reach you. I’ve tried to reach you all evening.

The bartender was telling secrets to a faded little flower sitting on the counter.

The flower seemed young enough and yet still utterly unreachable. She just "happenned" to be there. She looked around, casually, like immature plants do, checking out the other customers — I couldn’t quite understand what she was up to. On one of her petals: a tangle of angry scars. On another petal: a tattoo of a red rose dripping blood from its calyx. The blood splashed onto the bar counter.

Rain hit the windows like a fast-paced monologue.

The bartender was daydreaming again. His smile grew more and more crooked. Flower petals began to escape his lips.

Flash of lighting ... The bartender opened his eyes. He dropped a beer glass. I heard it crash on the floor. For a brief moment we exchanged looks of doubt and loathing.

I left.

I tried to call you again, this time from a cell phone on the corner of two shopping streets. Someone walked by.

Confused, I shielded my eyes. A circle of red light opened around my body. I thought about your skin and stepped back into the darkness.

In an alley I saw a figure laying with its head in a puddle of frozen rainwater. The figure twitched. It belched. An armadillo slunk out of its trench coat.

I walked away. I didn’t want any trouble. The armadillo's eyes were bleeding.

I passed by the tall orange windows and the women pulled up their skirts. One of them had a bottle in her hands. It was filled with rainwater. Another one had glued patches of velvet onto her skin. She pulled a patch off, taking a square of flesh with it.

I turned away.

Somebody stomped on a sausage dog with a pair of cowboy boots. The moon was silent.

There was a piece of graffiti on the wall of a lingerie store. It was your name written in black and silver paint. I touched it with my fingers.

The wall collapsed at my feet.

Wind, rain ... dark cries from a nearby gutter. A hand reached out of the grate. It made a fist as the skin melted off of it ...

I looked across the streets, in trashcans, underneath car wrecks, behind rotting wooden boxes. I even looked inside myself, sticking out my tongue and yanking on it, turning my body inside-out ...

I passed a young couple. They were buried in each other's arms. They were eating each other's faces. I had never seen two people more in love.

Music drifted out of an open window. Sounds of laughter, whiskey-stained voices, electric gibberish, atonal marimba noises, thick drops of water ...

I stood in the middle of the road, trying to turn myself outside-in.

A fleet of glass flamingos passed overhead. For a moment the sky was enlightened. Then the birds crashed into a cloud. Seconds later it was raining broken, pink shards.

Late I bumped into the midget again. He had beat his opponent in darts. He won some money. But he couldn't remember how much.

The midget smiled. "Someday," he said, "someday all of this will be over. Someday it will all be fine." He shrugged. "You know."

I asked him if I could borrow his phone again. He shook his head and offered me a drink. There was a café down the block.

Much later, beyond the sunrise: still no response from you ...

Yorgos Dalman (1973) lives in The Netherlands, Europe. In the Fall of 2004 he published a collection of short stories called De vrouw in de kamer (trans. The Woman in the Room), which includes stick figure illustrations by D.Harlan Wilson. Dalman has translated many of Wilson's and Poppy Z. Brite's fiction for Dutch magazines. He has also translated his own short stories and poetry for American magazines like TDP, The Cafe Irreal, Samsara, Cthulhu Sex Magazine, The Edge, Descent, Black Petals, and Taj Mahal Review. A manic fan of singer Nick Cave, Dalman has adapted one of his own stories, "Natalja," for a short movie directed by Roel van 't Hoff. Currently he is working on new screenplays for the same director.