The girl with the purple-feathered devil horns looked at me with these dark-rimmed eyes and pinned her fingers around my wrist. The Monster Mash began to play overhead, and people in masks started to leave our table and collect themselves for the dance. She took a thick pen from her pocket, shifted in her chair towards me, then bit the cap off and held it between her teeth. Turning my hand over, she wrote the message in bold capital letters.

I could hear her whisper as she formed the words, almost like she was repeating lyrics to her favorite songs, trying to be telling, trying to sing quietly and looking like a thief. Her eyes were set on my palm and I could see her eyebrows furrow at the end of each symbol. They were very thick, thick like fur and at one point, I started to lean closer to get a better look at their angles.

When she finished, she let go of my wrist lightly and I took my hand back, waving it around to dry. Then I placed my other hand on top and avoided peeking for the remainder of the night. She gave me mean smiles, disguising her annoyance with her white teeth. She tried to keep her head low, but I’d overhear her say from time to time, to all the boys who wished to take her home, her name, and how it wasn’t a boy’s name.

It’s Robin.

Robin Hood?

Just Robin

Never met a Robin before. Nice.

I thought about the marks she left on me the night before. I could see those bones on my forearm and I could see her take a hard bite from my skin, snapping quickly and sucking in my flesh. It left marks – a porcelain tattoo – and I remember thinking about my science class, about entropy.

At the end of that lyric-filled night, I was in a taxi uncovering my palm and saw, “WITH ALL THE LUCK YOU’VE HAD, WHY ARE YOUR SONGS SO SAD?” I immediately closed my eyes, felt that heat grow on my cheeks and in my throat. I held my head pressed firmly against the seat during the cab ride home, sniffing deeply from minute to second as if I had a cold. The driver looked back at me, then darted his eyes towards the tissues he probably kept in the glove compartment.

It was going to be a long ride, and I could feel his uncomfortable legs shifting, so I asked him, in a whimpery voice, “How long have you been driving?”

In the rearview mirror, I saw him lift his brows, checking to see if I was talking to him or maybe on the phone even though the question was clearly directed at him, and eventually he said, “Almost my whole life.”

I nodded, though I realized he was only looking at the road, and said, “You like it?”

“I don’t mind it,” he looked at me clearly, eyes darting back to the road from second to second, and I could see his dark green eyes and how his eyelashes were incredibly long for a man. Then he asked, “Are you having a good night?”

“Did I have a good night?” I said this slowly, calculating the positives and negatives and I thought about it, thought about the girl writing the note on my palm and replied, “Didn’t mind it.”

He gave a quick smile in the corner of his mouth, as if he had been there, right there swimming in my head, and he said, “Sounds like it was a boring night or a bad one.” He seemed so sincere, not flirtatious at all, just simply listening and taking in my words with the tide. I told him about my evening. The jump from bar to bar, me tailing my friends like a misshapen shadow and wishing I had just stayed home in that calm isolation – because it was the solitude that cooled me and didn’t withdraw from my emotions. I recounted to him the millions of conversations I had with people I didn’t even care about.

And as I was about to tell him about the girl and the note on my palm, he slammed on his brakes and my head darted forward and smashed against the back of the passenger seat. I yelped a little and gripped my hand over my nose, which was warm.

“Shit…” he said this under his breath and started to mutter apologies.

I could feel a little blood dripping from my nose from the strike against the headrest so I cut him off and held back my cry, “What happened?”

“I don’t know. I think…there was something. Hang on a minute,” he put his car in park, leaving the keys in the ignition and the car rumbling. He shoved his door open in the middle of the road, looked around for cars, but it was too early for anyone to be out. The sun had even begun to show itself. He walked to the front of the car, squatted down, and I didn’t see him for nearly a minute. I sat back, hoping that he wouldn’t charge me for it. When he stood up, the sky had become pink and much lighter and I could see his hair hanging in his eyes, but I knew he was looking right at me, right through the windshield. His tail of his white-collared shirt was hanging out comfortably. He stood like that for a minute, his back curved towards the cement and his hands held out in front of him.

He turned to his right and came back to me, sat in his chair and began to reach for his seatbelt mechanically. But he stopped, saddened and had something in his hand. He leaned over to the passenger side, took out a box of tissues from the glove compartment and placed the small body in the center, “Just a bird,” he said, “I swore I saw something.”

So I looked at my palm again, wondering the same, and rubbed it away to make those letters smear.