A kaleidoscope of color circled her like a brilliant halo. Damn, this is different.
Suddenly she found herself back at Rocco's apartment. Her head spun like a violent hurricane.
She tried to breath deeply, like the therapist she'd gone to once, and only once, had suggested and then she lit up another Loral and smoked it until she felt herself calming down a bit, and then she pressed the intercom button for Rocco: 802; Apartment 802.
She cleared her throat, causing reverberations in the small entryway and her ears started to ring at the same pitch as the doorbell.
She heard the sound of footsteps the other side of the door... her ears pounded in rough rhythm with the tread.
As she heard the sound of the deadbolts sliding free, she had a heartstopping moment of uncertainty, and she thought, Run--and as she turned to do just that, the door swung open abruptly.
At first, she thought there was nobody there, as the blinding light from the myriad windows dazzled her completely.
(Where the hell are we? Oh, yes. "She" (still nameless) is at Rocco The Gigolo's place. I thought it might be a fun job to be a gigolo but it's probably hard work).
Rocco had redone the place and it was entirely white, stark white: walls, carpets, furniture, his clothes, even the damn poodle that watched them had gone from black to white and, aside from her own clothes, the only color in the room was the green of her cash as she laid it out for Rocco.
In sharp contrast to the dazzling whiteness, she noticed the open mouths of the paint cans--crisp, barky earth-tones, leafy forest greens and muted reds and oranges, placed randomly around the floor of his expansive loft--everything just as it had been the first night he had shown her the artist's way--and she smiled a wicked little smile.
"I half expected Saint Peter to be sitting here, posing for his portrait amidst all this heavenly white," she tossed out at him, taking another look around. "Why'd ya whitewash the poodle?"
There was a mental uneasiness in the way Rocco was nervously fumbling for the right words to explain a "whitewashed" poodle, his thoughts seemed to have taken him prisoner and it showed from his disdainful countenance.
They looked at each other awkwardly, unable to find anything to talk about because this was after all nothing more than a business deal: her paying him some money and they both knew that but the dog, the white-washed dog didn't (or maybe it did) and it slipped out of Rocco's apartment and made its way down the stairs and onto the street, a NYC street.
"Goddammit" Rocco said, and as he bolted through the door in pursuit of his poodle, his foot slipped and spilled a can of red paint all over the nice white floor.
The stencil squad rushed into the foyer.
(Hi, bigmike! Welcome to A2K and to this particular thread which drifts along. It's really great to see contributions from folks with less than say 30 posts up to someone like Osso with over 12000.
If you were to take the time to read back a long, long way you might note that our stories were set in rural America for the most part. We've tried to put this one in an urban setting: NYC
There is no need to rush the story along, unless you want to do so.
Thanks for participating). -johnboy
Rocco stood there gaping in disbelief as he watched the red paint spreading across the white floor of his foyer, reminding him all too clearly of the blood stain on his last lover's white bedsheets after he shot her.
Outside, the rain pounded the granite walkway.
(welcome, kellyvinal)
God, it was raining hard and James stood under the canopy of 945 Park Ave where he had been the doorman for some forty years but he thought back, sort of a flashback, to Korea, 1953.
Then, too, the rain and blood had mingled and the stench of war had sickened him - he had been barely 19 when he'd been sent off to Korea.
James thought about Korea sometimes, particularly on nights like these when it was raining hard, really hard, but James had put most of that in his past and now his 60-year old eyes saw two things happening: this white poodle escaping from the building and this huge black limo pulling in next to him under the canopy.
