At last, after a long silence, women took to the streets. It wasn’t a solitary woman drifting out of an office, looking expectantly— stepping onto the asphalt. It was every woman in one-long-three-minute-moment-of-time standing up (from a dishwasher, from weed picking, from her desk, from behind a stove, from packing school lunches, from a jail cell), knowing what had to happen next. They weren’t on automatic pilot, nor were they joyous or celebratory. They just stopped what they were doing and took to the street.
She left her building, a route as familiar as the rise and fall of the sun, leaving her laptop-book bag-lunch box, and walked towards the road. As she left out the back door, the janitor glanced up at the clock, “you’re out of here mighty early today,” he commented. She remained silent, eyes forward, not even a sigh, pushed open the door and went out. Head erect, she moved through a parking lot, past a slick garbage dumpster and Milt’s truck. She sensed other women beside her, and clearly women in the distance. They were silent, not the normal laughing or calling out as when a fire drill happens just at the right drowsy part of the day and everyone hopes it will last until five pm. Not zombie movements, though–more of a considered action, a decided calling—an expected pulling. The time had come, and this was the time.
The roads and streets and highways became millions of women. Tall black women in bright reds, Mexican women wearing Converse tennis shoes, young punk women in snags and snarls, bent women tossing walkers by the groomed juniper bushes along the highway entrances. The woman next to her smelled like a chamomile plant, she was breathing hard. A sizeable brown woman directly ahead wore stretchy pants, exposing an abundant lovely buttock, the up and down of her rounded hips a lull. She looked ahead to see the merging—-she was both in the stream and outside the stream.
Then came the pulsing just below her feet, a hum of sorts, sing-song and welcoming. The earth below the road contained whispering vibrations that climbed up legs, through the inside, spiraling up and up, passing through wide mother hips, round and soft stomachs, breasts of all sizes, through untouched necks and sad heads. And then, witness—an exiting out through head-crowns with such force! She-heads, encircled by an intergalactic explosion of stars—-the ultimate final protection, as promised. She began to cry.
