Yaya’s Mournful New Year’s Eve.
NarratorEnough is enough. Yaya grabs the box of boyfriend leftovers and heads to the park. It’s close enough to midnight that New Year’s fireworks are streaking through the purplish black sky, exploding colorful plumes of dotted light in joyful bursts of symbolic renewal. The merriment is audible, screaming and shouting from multiple directions. A stumbling, drunk, overweight white man with a brown wool hat and comparably brown wooly beard even has enough courage to proposition Yaya for a midnight romp.
‘What do you say, my princess black mama?’ And the use of possessive is the least of his problems.
‘You pathetic piece of shit,’ she of course scoffs at the even more pathetic soul than she and pushes through into Fort Greene Park, technically closed to the public but not so for the emotionally deranged, who, in vulnerable moments of extreme duress, are suddenly possessed by righteously strange and sudden urges.
She follows the path, then cuts across the lawn, determined, despite long held fears that walking into a city park at this time of night is a perilous proposition, to find the right spot in order to enact this severance ritual. The rage-emotion, like a big fat ol’ tumor, has got to be cut out and destroyed, once and for all.
One committed foot after the other her distressed person eventually settles at the base of a tree. The illustrious grouping of large curved branches immediately calls to mind a profound alter through which big, lingering, emotional problems get sucked away into the great psychic dump in the sky. She throws the box to the ground, kicking its sides for good psychological measure. If only this was your head, she mutters, eventually kicking herself into a breathless, bent over state.
Once satisfied with the impromptu metaphorical beat down she removes the pack of matches, which just so happen to bear his restaurant’s logo, and strikes, fails, strikes again, fails, strikes again, this time by improvising a cup like shield with her hand, and eventually lights the match only to have it get blown out by a curt gust of unusually warm winter wind.
‘Global fuckin’ warming,’ she mutters, kicking the side of the box once again, this time imagining kicking him in his big fat disgusting gross beautiful voluptuous erotic lips so that they swell up and explode blood all over his moribund melancholic egomaniacal face.
She tries the whole match thing several more times, each time a failure. She resorts to an urgent appeal to Fate and Destiny. On her knees, pleading with the science of match lighting, pleading with the double crossing whimsy of nature, pleading against his past wrongs and her present irreconcilabilities, she just wants, nothing more and nothing less, than to burn this box of boyfriend leftovers and get rid of this shitty feeling so she can get back to her generally more than wonderful life of trying to get dumb rich and world famous.