Green Girl Read Online Free PDF

her to take a break, where she will escape to the employee toilet and lock herself in a stall of porcelain white, feeling the silence of her own breath.
     
    To last throughout her shift she escapes outside of her body and lets it do all the work. She asks woman after woman, all strutting by like robins in their winter wear, if they would like to sample Desire. Desire? Desire? She is on repeat. The silver is starting to wear off, sparkly silver on her hands, the glitter buried deep in her palm. Angry women swinging their angry purses. Holding the hands of British children, freakishly precocious like tiny adults.
     
    Sometimes she is struck by the sense that she is someone else’s character, that she is saying someone else’s lines.
     
    At the end of her day her throat is dry from her constant spiel. Her feet and her calves ache from standing. Her cheeks ache from pretend smiling. The very top of her second finger on her right hand, the uppermost joint, aches from pressing up and down, up and down.
     
    Point. Squirt. Hand. Point. Squirt. Hand.
     
    (My Ruth. I write on her bored.)
     
    The piped-in sounds of pop music. Manufactured, packaged, digestable. A song by the starlet whose perfume she’s shilling. Cooing sultry come-ons, breathless promises. On a track, repeating over and over again. The landscape of shopper’s ringtones. Music that’s not music. The buzzing and the coo. Ruth has swallowed all of these noises. She doesn’t even notice them anymore.
     
    The horrible head sometimes walks by and snaps his thick sausages in her face. Look alive. He doesn’t even say her name. She is nameless. She is an unknown. He had begun to walk by her station just to see whether she was awake, to the delight of the terrible girls. You should be offering Desire to everyone who walks through that door. He points at the door, and then points at the globe carelessly cupped in her hand. The world that exists inside her sweaty numbing palm.
     
    You’re a salesgirl. You’re supposed to be selling. Are we clear? Ruth smiles blankly. In a fog. Not there. Not really there. Watch her, he points at Noncy, who throws up her hands at him. Ruth imagines her pulling him aside. Those temps, they’re not too bright you see. They’re only temporary.
     
    Poor Ruth, parroting away like an automaton. Ruth feels tremulous handing out the sticks of scented paper, uncertain, passive. Desire, would you care to? Desire?
     
    She is now supposed to squeak out, Have you ever experienced Desire? The horrible head recently came up with this. But she only does it when he is around, watching her.
     
    Have you ever experienced Desire?
     
    During dead stretches of time she fantasizes about the past the forbidden.
     
    I can see us, fighting like wet cats, clawing at each other, on the street unable to help ourselves, in front of your car, you unable to drive away, in bed at the latest hour, the birds beginning their appeal, knowing the next day to be already ruined. We would suck on each other’s mouths as if to drag the life from each other.
     
    The green girl necessarily pines for the past, because the present is too uncomfortable to be present in and the future, unimaginable. The need to long, to desire that which she cannot have, that which has eluded her, because she deceives herself that it was this person, this chance, where she would have found happiness. It would have been this boy, this ordinary boy with his ordinary cruelty, who would have unlocked the key to herself, a self mysterious even to her. The One and there is only ever One so if you missed out, sad for you.
     
    I can see you, red chapped elbows propped up against my pillow, cigarette between lips like a bemused farmhand with his blade of grass.
     
    Have you ever experienced Desire?
     
    She felt ridiculous saying this, like she should be selling herself on late-night TV.
     
     

Their job was to sell, sell, sell. There was no official script, officially. All in the delivery.