Joe

I look into the night sky and admire it. The desert stars are vivid and pierce the darkness. It feels like I'm driving on a lonely stretch of pavement suspended some where in the cosmos. As I look into the sky I see a moving star...

The desert night is contaminated with dust and worry. And some where happiness exudes the desert night. But here, close to the border, its a happiness induced by ephemeral things. Through the dust. Through the sounds of the night, a call pierces it all. Its the call of a lonely bird. A desperate bird. Like the call of this bird looking for the last living bird of its kind. The bird's name is Bethany.
She screams in the night: "Joe! Joe where are you?"
With Joe no where to be found, the bird wonders aimlessly through the streets. Continuing her aimless and desperate call for the last of her kind. One cold nights Bethany's emaciated body looks oddly lumpy, on account of layers of sweaters and shirts. Like a potato with thin little waif's legs. The walking potato-bird-woman has a third leg which is a thin cane, too short for her. So she hopelessly galumphs, disregarding centers of streets and cars and potholes and drunks and police men. She is focused only on Joe. She sees me and approaches me. She smiles and her teeth are all there. Mostly rotting, but all there. Her broken smile is far from charming: chapped lips surrounding browning teeth slowly disappearing into no where. I think she bats her eyelashes. All of her clothes are either dirty, or black, or both. On top of her head is a pristine Cuban looking fedora that is made from impeccably clean straw with a black ribbon around it. Surrounding her gray feet, regardless of the temperature, she wears brown sandals. The kind old coffee farmers wear in Southern Mexico.
"Hi," she says. "I look better don't I?"
She does (A while back she was beaten, almost to death. With two massive blueish-greenish-purplish circles around her eyes she yelled: "I'm proof that God lives! I'm alive because of God! God's angels of death came down on me but they didn't take me!." She pointed at the scabs on her neck: "he coulda cut my head off but he didn't!" I rode away on my bike. "God is real!").
"Hey, ha..ha..have you seen Joe?" she asks, with a ridiculous and uncomfortable smile. She has lipstick on.
"No Bethany, I haven't."
"D'you...d'you have like, a couple quarters or some pesos or something you can give me I have to pay rent and I missed a week and I'm behind on my rent and I don't know what I'm gonna do and I'm scared ok can you please help me?"
"I don't Bethany, I'm sorry."
Her eyes dart around the room and focus on a box of donuts. She looks up just past the brim of her immaculate fedora. Some how she looks like a child. A child wasting away in the body of a woman who could blow away with the wind. She actually licks her lips. Her eyes water and she says, "Can I, could I have one of those?"
I grab a donut and a napkin and hand it her.
"Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you."
She turns, donut in one hand, cane in the other and walks out and stop at the door way. She starts singing the Lord's Prayer and twirling around in circle looking up at the sky with her dry, red eyes. The tune is nothing. The rhythm is non existent. She take a bite out of the donut and walks away.
"Joe!"