Joanie

Joanie was a girl who rested in the sound of a referee's whistle. She collected Barbies her brother stole to use as model-tall girlfriends for their robust G.I. Joes. Their hair got tangled in the wrists of lonely soldiers. Hers got caught in the carpet on the floor she'd place her head on as she waited for rescue of a kind she couldn't describe. She lived in a tornado, ever-whirling, in the eye. The eye is where it seemed most calm, but one self-gratifying stretch in any direction would shred the skin from her young arms. She read to retrieve herself. The words were tiny doctors of the heart. The kittens she'd accumulated through tears of manipulation, her audience, her adorers, and their purrs, gifts of flowers and candy tossed to her feet where she balanced on an invisible stage. In the eye, she willed the wind stop so she could reach across the wall's barrier, but it held her in and all others out. She was happy cats could climb the spinning dome of her home and land like gymnasts on the 'x' of the monster's circular center to be her comrads. But they climbed and lept, just as easily, out, as her legs went numb in their Indian-style posture and she observed cats' ripe cores lifted and heaved by graceful, fuzz-covered limbs up and out of the cage of spinning debri in escape. They'll come back, she'd say aloud with neck tilted up toward the circle of evading light at the top of the junk-blistered tunnel. Joanie always spoke out loud, by way of conditioning. No one could hear a small girl of such youth mumble remarks from inside the heart of a vacuum.