Sheila Brighton

Sheila Brighton says her husband Howie works all the time at the Medical Plaza, attending to the sick and misplaced.  The shortage is difficult and so she tells me that her loneliness is a small price to pay for the benefits.

She blushes.

No, not for herself.  The greater benefits.  The ones we all enjoy! Security and prosperity.  Green foods, red meat, wide concrete roads to move us during the Open Holiday Season, twin iron ribbons to move us during the time of labor and commerce.  Still, she says to me in her whispered voice, it is undeniably wonderful to watch the flutter and tempest of working people from the warm oval window of the University Tea Room over on Dead Leader Avenue.  The waiters are so soft and kind.  They glide like un-human wraiths, table to table, a silent dance of solid customer service, wicker-wrapped stone teapots balance upon their strange foreign heads.

Sheila Brighton sips the exotic teas.  She watches through the oval window.  She can see her car.  She can see the driver perched on the hood, warming himself like a cat.  His eyes are still and serene, focussed upon something impossibly far away.
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NOTE: I had some of these drawings tacked to the wall of my studio.  A date I had over was looking at them and she said, “Oh my god – you hate women!”

I should note that the date was married to a doctor named Howie.

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