wild midget-midget russian doll ponies

The girl asks for directions, and maybe she is not so hot, but I put my conversation on hold and stand in the cold outside the subway station a little longer to find her destination on my phone. She has glasses and piercings in her face. Respectable piercings, little studs on her lip and in her nose. She hides bright blue eyes behind the thick-rimmed specs, and her voice is high-pitched and not from here.

"Best way to get across town is by cab," I say.

"I don't have enough money," she says.

She is going to some club I've never heard of. I go over the subway directions for her: Uptown here, then this train there, then walk south to there, right by such-and-such park.

"Know how to tell if you're going north or south on the grid?" We talk, she nods and she is on her way.

My friend is unimpressed. "She wasn't much to look at," he says.

"I'd hit it," I say.

"Then why didn't you go with her, man? You're going the same way," he says.

"Because it's one stop till she changes trains, I'm def not going to that club, even if she invited me, and I wanted to finish our conversation. I can't believe you got a hotel, man. Why didn't you stay with me?" We finish our conversation. I walk down the steps to the train and the girl is sitting at the bottom, pulling everything out of her purse and setting it where people are trying to walk. She unpacks a leather journal.

"Need me to swipe you in?"

"Oh, thank you so much," she says. She has a big head, but nice lips and red stockings under her skirt. As soon as she is through the turnstile, she finds her metro card.

"Oh, I'm so stupid. I'm sorry."

"No, problem," I say. "So where are you from?" Because she is totally lost and confused. She is from Virginia and she tells me about some island where tiny ponies run wild and swim. "Tiny ponies" makes me think smaller than already-small ponies, like if a midget gave birth to a midget-midget, like Russian nesting dolls. These ponies must be three feet tall. She says she slept there, on the island, camping with wild matryoshka ponies.

She looks tiny and wild, too, a smaller version of some bigger-but-still-small version of her that must exist somewhere else. She says she opened a museum for the military, and that came out of her mouth from nowhere, but I believe her even though I never would have thought. She says she lives in the borough that is the least like a borough, the one most other people in the city do not even think about or count unless they are forced to. She is living with some friend blah and something about her mom blah or the other person's mom blah or something blah. I do not know.

We are at her stop and I cut her off in the middle of a word to say, "This is your stop," and, "Good luck," and she says, "Thanks," and, "Bye," and we smile and she leaves and we never got each other's name but that is okay.


~O~