The Reincarnation of Shirley MacLaine (Ritz #1)

(for Velocity)

The Vegas lights edged the landing strip of foreign invaders, the undulating forgotten origin that forged desert sand into monuments of clear silica pillars. She had arrived from the post of all “posts”, the mismatched oasis whose creativity was so spontaneous it, by necessity, combusted.

The heat contrasted oddly with the cool neon that sought to eliminate all vestiges of absence. And yet absence was all pervading.

She had come to this town to taste the legendary fashion that was rumored to explode metastatic into rains of rein stones. She toyed with fashion like autumn trees fired their leaves to stand naked with audacity. She toyed with fashion like a collection of 1960’s Playboys revealed in the corner of a used bookstore.

It amused her to assume magazine personas of eras whose meteorites had lost their trails through the night sky. Not that one could see the past through the glare of the ever present signage.

Even as the lush and beautiful woman she had become she still clung to the little girl dress-up fantasies, their meaning mutated from frustrated want to coy in-joke. She would paint her body in mode after mode only to reveal, surprise of all surprises, there was a real person at the core and the joke is on you.

It amused her to assume magazine personas, the bright primary colors that enticed travelers to lighten their wallets on their way to three shows nightly.

It amused her to assume magazine personas from a time that appeared to have a cultural clarity, a simplistic view of a world that no longer existed.

It amused her to assume magazine personas for this present season, this present phase of her life.

She knew in the end history would find her, she would move from deserts to lands with deep slow flowing rivers. Move from magazine to literature.

Perhaps Paris. Perhaps Milano. Perhaps somewhere with a memory.