The Glimpse

Ceci Tyler looked like an unmade bed. No—that doesn't nearly describe her. Speculation was that she was homeless and slept in a dumpster, or an old, torn sleeping bag in the woods or a park, or something.

She worked in the morgue—that's newspaper morgue—the library. It figures that she worked at a newspaper. I couldn't see a normal business tolerating her appearance. Newspapers, for the most part, are indifferent to their employee's sartorial finesse. It beats paying them well enough for them to maintain a clothing allowance. Yup, newspapers harbor a large number of the earth's slobs.

Ceci was brunette, in her twenties—maybe—and about five-feet-two. Her attire alternated between gray jeans—they may have been blue at one time—or a black woolen sheath that she passed off as a skirt, and which was much longer than she was, because she tended to trip over the hem. A sweater of faded gray-green—so bulky I thought it hid a Kevlar vest—completed the look, and it didn't change from season to season.

She looked pretty scrawny under those rags. But I couldn't be sure, and I certainly wasn't that curious.

Her hair she always wore up in a tight bun. No, it wasn't exactly a bun. It was more like a cudgel that bounced like a flaccid phallus from the crown of her head. Her face was sort of narrow. One might say her nose was elegantly long, if only it didn't veer to the left. Her eyes were distorted by heavy lenses framed within black horn-rimmed glasses.

God, she was a mess.

She took more than her fair share of crap. I remember when a bum passed out in front of the building, and someone flashed a message through the newsroom that it was Ceci's roommate, or boyfriend, or husband, or whatever.

She'd have to be deaf not to hear the snickers, especially among the women. Not that we guys were so kind. Like when Jack Caffey nodded as she walked by and said, "There goes Two-Bags."

"Huh?"

"Yeah, you'd wanna give her a bag to put over her head before you fucked her—just in case yours fell off."

Big guffaws all around. Ceci kept walking like she hadn't heard them. She must have, though.

"God, wouldn't you really rather just gnaw off your arm?" Caffey kept at it.

I didn't join in, but I didn't object either. None of my business.
The truth is, I didn't pay much attention to Ceci. She was just someone walking by in the background, someone I didn't speak to except to ask for a photo or a file.

I never gave her more than a moment's thought. Until that day—in the morgue. The day when everything changed.

I was trying to knock together an obit for an old politician who'd ingested one too many bad ice cubes and had plowed his Lincoln into a bridge abutment.

I went to the morgue for his clips, but Ceci was nowhere in sight. Of course, you could have lost the entire College of Cardinals in that place. It was a stuffy, dusty firetrap with rows upon rows of open-sided filing cases containing moldy manila envelopes stuffed with crumbling clippings. There was a rumor that the company had bought a computer system to catalog everything, but had left it to Ceci to figure out what to do with it. From the look of the place, it didn't seem she had made any progress.

Finally, she came around the corner of one row of shelves.

"Ceci, I need all our clips on Lennie Longfingers Lonergan."

Ceci never said much. Her shoulders sagged, and she blew a long wisp of air from the corner of her pout.

"They're up there." She gestured with a shrug of her left shoulder. I took that to mean Lonergan's clips were close to the top shelf of a filing case that almost reached the ceiling.

"Yeah," I replied. "Okay."

Ceci's brow furrowed and her pout got a lot poutier, but she turned and stumbled along the corridor between the files until she was out of sight. She was wearing her skirt. It was a wonder she hadn't fallen on her face yet.

She returned with a ladder set on creaky casters and pushed it against the shelves. Slowly she started to climb, every so often having to stop and tug her skirt from under her shoe. It was excruciating watching her ascent.

At last, she stood near the top step, but the box of clips was just out of her reach. She swayed on her toes and stretched her arms for the heavens. I was sure she was going to topple off the ladder, so I stepped around the counter to break her fall in case she took a brody.
Ceci settled back onto her heels for a moment, then made another mighty reach—and then it happened.

That god-awful sweater of hers rode up her stomach. At the same time, she must have been stepping on the hem of the skirt as it and sweater separated, just for an instant—no more than five seconds at the most.
But in those five seconds was revealed the most perfect, creamy pale tummy—skin so soft it beckoned me to reach for it, and a deep-shadowed belly button. Her stomach bulged just a bit—the way women's bellies bulge, or pooch, or whatever they call it, no matter their size or frame or weight. And the way the light caressed that little bulge, giving it such an ethereal glow and defining its slopes in subtle shadow. It wasn't just beautiful—it was angelic.