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Show -251 storefronts, the streetlights here were old-fashioned incandescent lamps, dimmer and farther apart from one another, so that deep rivers of shadow ran between and around them. Way down at the end of the block, diminished by perspective, a figure leaned against a lamp-post. The yellow light fell on her dark hair. Everything was right: the hair, the melancholy posture (I remembered how Jenny used to lean against her locker in the hall in school, looking down at the floor with her disappointed child's smile). - I ran forward, shouting her name. I stopped in front of her. "Jenny," I said. She looked up. An old woman's face, dewlapped and wrinkled; the eyelids were painted an unnatural green, the lips were ghastly white. "Won't I do?" She had J. Cash's plastic teeth, whiter than white and big enough to bite a broomstick in half. She cackled. "Experience, boy, experience is what counts. Oh I'll do you good." Her head swung toward me on a limber, overlong, wrinkled neck. I turned and ran but that cackling laugh came after me and I heard the slap-slap of her old-woman slippers whacking the asphalt at my heels. "Experience, hee! hee! Experience, ha! ha!" "At last! At last!" I thought to myself, running away |