She liked the way the word felt in her mouth, the way the c, crisp and aspirated, sprang from the glottis and landed lightly as a hiss on the teeth; the way the nasal m restrained the sound, held it, until it popped on the p and the tongue slid through the l to stand indefinitely on the alveolar ridge of the mouth, like an ice skater’s final pose before the applause, before the release.
Cosmopolite, she repeated, and felt the word turn in her mouth, tongue savoring its sweet bite. It was at once open skies and stretching earth, boundless, unfettered, where a Boeing 777 or the Eurorail was her corridor between bedrooms. It was movement, purpose, and aspiration. Respiration. It was glamour and futuristic worlds, a shiny metropolis with long black streets and sharp, other-worldly lights, so unlike the grubby streets of a wintery Chicago burb with its muck-encrusted sidewalks and aching, neglected houses, where streetlamps burst and were never replaced, leaving patches of darkness over bridges and on street corners, places she knew to hurry through while her breath stuck in her chest and ghosts prowled in the shadows. She felt them, sometimes, even now. Icy tendrils at her ankles, hot breath on her neck. If she ignored them, let them linger, they pressed their advantage, continuing a snake’s pathway up her thighs, a collar constricting her throat and stealing her breath.
But no. Not that, not now. Her home was now the wide globe, the pinpricks of New York, Toronto, and London, where she charmed her way into dinner invitations, and of Athens, Berlin, and Tokyo, where she beguiled her way into beds. She knew the bistros of Paris and the cafés of Buenos Aires; she told stories about yesterday’s friends in Cairo to today’s friends in Sydney. Tomorrow, she would make new friends and craft new stories, stitching them into the fabric of her heart, now a patchwork quilt that kept her warm for those nights when there were no dinners and no beds.
So tonight, tonight, she breathed Iberian air and walked down the streets of Seville, brushing the lint of her multiple past selves from her sleeves, reinventing her steps, recreating the mask, fitting her mouth with a new tongue, becoming cosmopolite.
Holly Teresa Baker is a Midwestern writer currently living and writing in Romania on a Fulbright research grant. She earned her PhD in English with a focus on fiction from the University of South Dakota and is currently teaching creative writing at the University of Bucharest. Her work has appeared in Crab Orchard, Painted Bride Quarterly, Eclectica, LIT, and others. She is currently working on a novel.
–Art by Menerva Tau