Saturday, October 3, 2009

An Incident at the Ice Rink

Subbed to Mudlucious on 10/10/09

***

A Pink Evening at the Ice Rink
by Robert Aquino Dollesin

The woman skating ahead of me slipped and struck her head on the ice. I scraped to a stop and dropped down beside her. A pool of pink blood was beginning to blossom on the ice around her head. She was unconscious. Her face contorting, her limbs twitching. Before long other skaters crowded around. Some older guy who claimed to be a doctor took charge, started to bark out instructions. He told some of those who'd gathered around what to do -- what to get. He swung his arms to clear the crowd away so he’d have room to work.

But I couldn’t move.

My gaze was fixed on the sweat running off the woman’s face. Her open mouth. Her closed, but flickering eyelids. The snapping joints of her arms and legs.

The man who'd taken charge shouted at me. “Grab her feet, dammit! Keep them steady.”

When I didn’t move, the gray-haired man slammed a fist on the ice and said, “Do it!”

I blinked. Everything was dreamlike, hazy.

I got myself positioned between the woman’s feet and held her ankles through her pink woolen socks to keep the heels of her skates from pounding the ice. My hands slid down to the tops of her white shoes, keeping them in the crotch between my thumbs and forefingers, keeping the razor sharp blades tight against the ice.

Everything was happening quickly. Panic. Distorted voices hollering back and forth. People skating past. Shadows falling over me. The nervous voice of a woman over the speakers, trying to calm everyone down.

I held fast to the downed woman's feet, determined to do everything I could to help.

I felt her feet shake in my grip. I held tighter, pushed down harder. The blades slipped, sliding, bringing me with her knees up and close to her bottom. The knees drew apart.

In the hysteria of the moment I held my breath, then furtively peered up under the woman's pink skirt and sneaked a glimpse at her panties. Like her skirt. Like her socks. Her panties were pink. They were sheen, her pale skin and dark pubic hair were visible beneath them. Everything exposed except for the triple knitted square that concealed her most private part.

“She’s not going to make it,:” someone shouted. “God damn it. She’s not going to make it.”

The doctor started pounding his fists on the woman’s chest. People screamed frantically. She went limp in my grip. The doctor sighed.

"She's gone," he said. "You can let go now."

But I couldn't unwrap my fingers from her shoes, no more than I could pull my leer away from the pink panties underneath her skirt.

Even the doctor peeled my fingers one by one from the woman's shoes, I kept thinking -- Pink. Pale pink. Wide bit of thin pink fabric separating the pink waistband from the elastic leg holes that dug into the dead woman's pink thighs.


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