Stopping by Frederick’s on a Foggy Evening

She wants her every breath to matter, life piquant as a good first line, the sound of the sea in every room. Her hair smelling of mangoes and pomegranate, her sex of Api Etoile apples and Ballerina roses. Medici-red. She wants the Maitland-Smith four-poster fringed with Noguchi lamps and the men in her life, those seemingly-organic shapes, insubstantial and wispy as clouds, ephemeral as love. She dreams of cornices and minarets, the Pulaski dresser’s surface littered with Moroccan fig candles, vintage embalming equipment, Papillon daffodils in Sapporo bottles. The burgundy velvet walls dripping in Bettie Page prints, Massaccio‘s "Madonna Enthroned," a Siouxsie and the Banshees resplendent in all their fuck-you bravado. She wants her love life as deliciously ambiguous as Bierce, as grayly surreal as Enrico, and glisteningly decadent as Cocteau. A vintage ’50s pink nylon baby doll nightie to trace the shimmering intaglio of her desire, cradled by a cerulean chiffon peignoir, soft as the inside of her wrist. Most of all, her womb to stop seeming like the single cracked Versace Medusa flute on the serpentine mahogany roll top. Empty, useless, scarred with the tiniest of hairline fissures. Its flesh-pink glaze dimmed by dust.






Click here to listen to Toni Scales reading "Stopping by Frederick’s on a Foggy Evening"

Toni Scales is an ex-funeral director assistant and recovering goth chick living in Corpus Christi, Texas. One of her life’s greatest accomplishments is that, in high school, she wrote to Bela Lugosi, Jr., and he sent her a warm response in return. She attends Texas A&M University as an English major; before this, she studied mortuary science at San Antonio College and was the recipient of the 2004 Key Memories Scholarship. Her work has appeared in Lily, Wicked Alice, blossombones, and The Pedestal Magazine. You can reach her by email at bloodrose@aol.com.