après moi le deluge
something short. Overly inspired by Edith Piaf. Enjoy.
No one knew where she came from, but they only knew that she appeared under the overhand of the bus stop of fifth. Her eyes were dark and sunken, and laugh lines crossed with worry lines over her face: each line a street to the map of her life. She had short hair, something out of the twenties, under the same felt cap she wore every day. She bellowed out impressive songs in french, punctuated with beautiful long notes and stunning sweeps of voice and emotion. Even those who couldn’t understand her would stop and watch.
She also always had a small child, no older than eight years old. She was a dark-haired, wide-eyed girl, who clung to her mother’s hand like it was her lifeline. Her eyes would dark around at all the people, her hand squeezing tighter and tighter around her mother’s. Occasionally strangers would drop coins into the small hat that the child clutched.
The woman was in no way beautiful; her jaw was too strong and her nose was large and crooked. Her teeth were stained yellow from smoking. She earned the uncreative title of “the French Singer” from passerbys. No one knew if she understood English.
There was a group of punks who loved to terrorize her. They would surround her and her daughter, no way to escape, and take the small amount of change she had earned. They would shout insults at her and throw stones at her, and she would sing through it. They would chase her off some days, by taking smashed glasses and waving them towards he daughter. She would scoop her up and run away, and they would laugh.
“There she goes again, that french woman.”
“I think she’s doing drugs.”
“She might just been not right in the head.”
“I still think she’s on something.”
But still, she sang. Though no one could understand her, she sung of her hardships, of love and hatred and being lost and being found. She sung of life and death and happiness and sadness. Her notes were long and unbroken, her tales long and bittersweet, of all the truths of life.
Hardly anyone noticed the day she didn’t show up.
“Where is that french woman?”
“Maybe she got hurt...”
“I don’t know, but I worry for that child...”
“She always brightened up the neighborhood. I love french.”
Two years after she started singing on the corner, they found her body. It was slumped against some stairs in an alleyway only a few blocks away. Her little girl was crying.