The City Has Sex

Vivian strolled through the Pike Place Public Market, thrilled for no particular reason. A small-boned, dark-haired girl of almost average height (though not quite), she was dressed in thick snow boots, warm woolen tights, and a hooded parka just long enough that it covered up the short dress and thick sweater beneath. Black mittens covered her hands, and a colorful home-knit scarf wrapped warmly across the lower half of her face, obscuring it.

When Vivian walked, she swayed, not in a manner which suggested sexuality so much as an eager disposition towards precocious adventure. It was really something in-between a sway and a skip, sometimes breaking stride to turn in a little circle in front of a fruit stand or in the middle of an intersection, able to contain her elation no longer. Sometimes she forgot the sway altogether and took off running at impromptu moments, smiling wildly.

Surely, the more cynical or faultfinding members of the audience are, by this point in the description of our heroine, rolling their eyes. Their complaint, most likely, is that this Vivian sounds as if she is someone out of a children’s storybook and not a real person. Which was precisely the problem, actually--it was true. Yet here she stood, as though through some kind of semi-cruel joke, where Elliott Avenue meets Alaskan Way, with reddened cheeks, a heart pumping blood and real as any stranger. Everywhere she went, people were either charmed by or skeptical of her.

It was the perfect sort of winter day, though, and most of the strangers she passed seemed to be the former. And rightfully so; who could resist a young woman so happy! Vivian was twenty-three. She had round cheeks and circular, amber-colored eyes with a shiny appearance as if encased in a thin layer of glass. She had pale skin, and a strange little nose. It had been a smidge forsaken by straightness, veering more to one side to a small degree. Her nostrils, should one take the time to study such things, were not quite matching in shape, but the whole feature was saved from coarseness by the fact that it was slightly upturned.


Vivian loved the Market! She and Seattle had been involved in a playful and passionate love affair for years now. The city sometimes betrayed the girl by growing too familiar or windy or full of stomachache-inducing people, and the girl sometimes forsook the city by growing restless and tired of it and running off elsewhere for a few months without much warning. But both of them always relented, eventually, and wound up laughing hard in one another’s arms, the smell of tides and raw seafood and carnations swelling all around them as they shook. Neither was a particularly steady or predictable lover, neither prone to being terribly emotional or possessive when it came to the one they adored, yet it always came back to the fact that their adventures together were inevitable, for they were far too alike to have it any other way.

The girl bought a muffin and a cup of hot herbal tea from an outside stand next to the fish market, turning away as the cylinder of sweet-smelling steam warmed her hands. Vivian didn’t like to see the lifeless fish being tossed from man to man amongst the ice like big silver chew-toys. She herself didn’t eat such things, though she made good use of the produce stands. When she had finished her muffin, still clasping the little paper cup of warmth close to her body, she headed towards the pier.


She loved the pier as well, and today it was particularly inviting, the first lights of the holiday season having appeared on the outsides of the restaurants. Her partner was a worldly and grandiose hipster, encircled by planes and secretly ruled by marine mammals, watched over flawlessly by enormous steel giraffes, and today she was feeling especially pleased. She opened up Milan Kundera’s Life is Elsewhere and began to read. She had just gotten to the part in which the family’s servant girl loses her fiancé and the boy, the young poet, is entranced by her tears, having discovered the unmistakable beauty of sorrow. Vivian then noticed a few small droplets, as if from some distant lawn sprinkler, appearing on the pages. She decided to ignore them, and read a few more lines.

But the droplets grew larger and quicker, so the girl put her library book back into her bag and again began to walk. She couldn’t have made more than a score of paces before a flurry of perfect, tiny snowflakes encircled her every angle. Vivian, delighted, began to run, subdued laughter ringing out from beneath her scarf. Oh, the air smells just like peppermint! she thought, twirling in a rapturous little circle on the sidewalk somewhere between the train tracks and the beloved aquarium. How could anything, anywhere possibly be more perfect?

And as she ran, the snowflakes increased in both frequency and size, until she stopped short just before the sculpture park, and the city was a world of fresh new swirling white. The colorful hard-candy wall in the distance adorned with the falling peppermint shavings now was almost too much to bear. She readjusted her scarf so that it covered the majority of her cheeks, which were tingling now, and her unmistakable little nose, which was beginning to give way to sniffles, courtesy of the cold air. And yet Vivian suddenly felt as if she were surrounded by an invisible force field of warmth, and she stood chilly but not cold as her darling changed before her from his gray coat to his white.

It was the most beautiful thing that she had ever seen, she decided.

Ps- This chapter is named after a Bright Eyes song. Its on an album of theirs called Letting Off The Happiness, so if you've never listened to that, you should, because its really good.