I like poems about parking meters. I really do. Whenever I read a poem about a parking meter I always laugh, because the poets make them out to be animals that need to be fed and conquered. They kind of remind me of daisies, almost. Or dandelions. Those plants that grow up in the middle of Industrial-Be-Damned Pittsburgh between the cracks in the sidewalk only to be stepped on by some fat lady in an ugly pink outfit with sequins.

Only no one steps on the parking meters. We feed them instead. Whenever we park our cars next to where the parking meters are, it shows that we own them. The parking meter is our responsibility. It is always hungry. We must give it some nibbles of our quarters and dimes. If the parking meter doesn't get any food and someone finds out about it, you get in trouble. Parking meters are to be protected, unlike dandelions.

Today I'm sitting in the middle of Industrial-Be-Damned Pittsburgh and there's a dandelion in front of me. What was once its head is now a smeared, dark yellow that stains the sidewalk. The fat lady in the sequins didn't even look down when her heel severed the stalk from its roots. When I saw that happening I wanted to say something, to jump up and yell at her to be more careful, but I didn't. Who can defend a dandelion? Everyone hates them. Even I'm not particularly fond of them.

Parking meters are another story. There's one in front of me, so it's also in front of the severed dandelion. I've been feeding it coins for about two hours now. A quarter every fifteen minutes. I don't know why I'm doing it. The parking meter is never full. Its stomach is always growling.

It's fifteen to three right now, so I fish in my pockets for some loose change. Finally, after sorting through wads of used Kleenex and several receipts (I really must change my pants when I get home), I find a quarter. I get off my bench and feed the meter, which ticks happily. When I get back to my bench, I notice that someone is sitting there.

A girl. I can see her nipple. Her shirt is torn from the collar to the navel and the loose flap reveals her upper chest. She hasn't started puberty yet. She wears a brown hobo jacket and pilot goggles on her head. Her hair is a dishwater blond color with streaks of silver, and her nose is Roman. Her miniskirt is a lime green color never seen on limes, and she's barefoot.

"Hello," I say to her, thickly. I haven't talked to anyone in hours. I feel like my throat is coated in phlegm, like the pipes in those drain cleaner commercials.

"Hi," she says to me shortly. Her eyes are different colors. I don't have the heart to tell her that her nipple is showing. Instead, I give the closest I can come to a smile in this dreary Industrial-Be-Damned city and ask her how she's doing today. She looks at me shortly and says, "I ate an apple today. This lady gave it to me. She was nice. She said that she had a daughter like me once. But she was wrong and I told her that. And then I walked and walked and now I'm over here. Now I'm... But not before." She looks down at her toes guiltily. Her toenails need trimming.

"You walked over here barefoot?" I ask.

"No," she replies, still looking at her feet.

Her feet are still bare. "But you aren't wearing any shoes," I insist.

She turns and looks the other way, scooting up onto the arm railing of the bench. With her back to me, she once again repeats, "No."

I glare at her backside and barely notice how her coat, which I had originally thought of as brown, is a blackish color on the back with words written on it that say "William's Autoshop," and proceed to state how it is located in Toronto.

I decide to continue in the conversation. I haven't talked to anyone in a while, and I feel like I know her from somewhere. I doubt it, though. I definitely would have remembered her. "Are you from Canada?"

"No."

"Ah," I say, at a loss for words. I hate it when this happens. You're in the middle of a conversation when suddenly you have utterly nothing to say to the other person. Talking, after all, is simply an exchange of information. I figure that I have none to share.

Instead, I look at the dandelion. It's still smashed and sickly spread over the cement. It looks nothing like the dandelion that was there twenty minutes ago, spreading its sunny color to the gray Industrial-Be-Damned city. Even the people here are gray, I notice as I watch a business woman stroll past me, barely missing the crushed flower by inches. She feels my eyes on the back of her neck and turns around midstride. She sees me, frowns, and turns around again, her pace quickening. I sigh. I always have that effect on people, women especially. They've never liked me. I am the scum of the city.

The dandelion is not doing that much. I look at the parking meter. It is still precisely ticking away the money that I have fed it. I wonder if it has a digestive system. Probably not. I check my watch and realize that I have at least five more minutes to go until feeding time, but I get up anyway and place another coin into the parking meter. The girl gets up and follows me.

"Can I do that?" she asks me. I turn to look at her. She catches me in her gaze. Once, when I was a little kid, I fell asleep in my backyard overnight. Around three in the morning, I woke up feeling little prickles all over my body. I had fallen asleep next to an ants nest. I was covered with the little insects. I screamed and jumped up and down, pulling off my shirt with such haste that it showered the ants down like hail. I kept on screaming and yelling until my mother came running out. I must have been a sight, standing the middle of the yard in my underwear, brushing and scratching at my skin.

My mother picked up the hose in the backyard and sprayed me with it, drenching me completely. We went back inside so she could comb my hair and get all the dead ants out when suddenly I realized that I hadn't been bitten. Not once. I looked out at my yard and realized that I had just killed hundreds of tiny creatures who hadn't done a thing to hurt me. I was just in the path to their home. My soul felt barren.

As the girl looks at me, I feel that way again. Like everything is on the surface. Like everything about me can be read like a book. Then she averts her gaze and I feel normal again. Shaken (not stirred), I dig in my pocket and give her a quarter. It's my last quarter too, by the feel of it. She takes it and tries to place it in the slot, but it won't fit. She tries again and again, but it won't work. Finally she gives me back the coin and frowns severely at it, like a teacher would do to a student who had just been caught cheating on a test.

I walk back to the bench and sit down, turning the quarter over and over again in my hand. Something about it doesn't feel right, so I look at it.

"What the hell..." I mutter, staring at the quarter. Instead of George Washington, there's a badly embossed daisy in the side. The petals on top are larger than the petals on the bottom. The other side of the coin is the same, except that the surface of the metal has a gold tint to it. I turn and stare at her, noticing things that eluded me before.

Her hair is no longer blond and silver. Now it is cotton candy pink with blue braids placed at random spots. She is now wearing a red-and-white-checked dress under her jacket. Her entire chest is covered. Her nose is no longer Roman, but a short round nub with a silver nose-ring. An octopus is making lazy circles around her head, emitting jets of CK One perfume instead of ink. I feel dizzy.

"Are you all right?" she asks me. Somehow, I can see the color in her words. I can't understand it. She is speaking in colors.

I grab my head. "My brain hurts."

She looks at me, one finger lightly placed in the cleft of her chin. "I can make you feel better."

I look bleakly at her beneath the cracks of my fingers. I notice that her eyes are different colors. That feeling passes through me again, as though I am impersonating a newspaper and everyone can read me and know who I am. I am, once again, caught in her gaze. One eye is green. The other is blue with tiny silver flecks that swim like fish. I begin to feel lightheaded.

The octopus goes in front of her eyes, temporarily obscuring my view. The moment is enough to pull back and avoid her gaze. "Who are you?" I ask her, but she has gotten up and is looking at the dandelion between the cracks.

"Who are you?" I repeat. She ignores me. Instead, her fingers brush the dandelion lightly and something grows up there again in its place. It isn't a flower exactly, but it looks like a child's picture of a flower. The stem is a bright green, and the center of the flower is yellow. However, the yellow of the flower almost...

When I was a little boy I loved to color. I'd spend hours coloring quietly in the dining room, which my mother was thankful for since I exuberantly exhibited my energy at all other times. Whenever I colored in a picture, I would always go past the lines and color onto the white part of the paper. Always. The flower looks as though someone had colored it in and then trailed off the border and into the air. Like coloring.

The girl looks rather pleased with herself. "All fixed!" she announces and skips back to where I'm sitting. She looks at me expectantly. I can only breathe.

"Well?" she asks.

"Well what?"

"Do you like the flower? I think it's pretty pretty pretty pretty. Do you know her?"

I struggle to catch up. "Know who?"

"Death, silly willy head. I once ate six tomatoes."

"Do I know death?"

"Four of them were yucky and all slimy and stuff. I don't like tomatoes. But the sixth one was good. It was an orange. Have you ever had oranges? I once knew a word that rhymed with orange, but now I forget it again. So, do you?"

The octopus around her head starts to vanish with a final puff of perfume. Now there are little pandas swimming in circles. One panda is bright pink. Another is humming something that sounds like a cross between Elvis and a Native American funeral song.

"Who are you?" I ask her again.

"I'm..." she starts, then looks annoyed. "No! You should answer me first. My brother was big on talking nice and in rows. You should be, too, four, six, eight, nine little monkeys doing something... um... I forget. Um."

"Then what is your question?"

She thinks for a moment, then asks, "Do you like mangos?"

I shrug. I have never been that partial to fruit. She digs into her pocket and pulls out an orange. "Here you go."

"An orange?" I ask aloud, slowly becoming certain that I have to leave soon. The girl makes me nervous. If she can make pandas, she can do other things. However, if I leave now it will be rude. My mother taught me never to be rude.

She doesn't answer my question, but that's okay since it was rhetorical. I sink my fingers underneath the skin of the orange and peel off a chunk. However, inside it looks empty. Hollow, as my father would say, as a politician's head. I turn it over and out falls a woman's ring. It rests in the cup of my hand like a teardrop.

The girl laughs and claps her hands. "Oh! Oh! You got a prize!" She smiles and takes the ring from me and twists it onto her finger. It looks good there and I feel proud of myself for the first time in a long time. It's an odd feeling, like a cousin that you haven't seen since your fifth grade recital, but when they visit your house they still feel at home.

I am about to say something when suddenly I see a flash of pink from the corner of my eyes. I turn and look and there is the fat woman who had stepped on the dandelion before. My eyes narrow without me noticing but I can't move. They say the time it takes for an average person to react is three-fourths of a second, but I feel paralyzed by the knowledge of what I _know_ is going to happen.

Without stirring, I drill my eyes into her flabby neck as I watch helplessly as she draws nearer to the flower that the girl had... I must say it... made. As her heel comes down on the yellow center, I cringe free of my paralysis as the sound of breaking celery fills my ears. This time I feel I have the courage to say something.

"Hey! Stop it!" I shout, but as the lady looks at me, I feel more and more childish under her shallow gaze. Finally, she looks down at her shoes and the remains of the flower, looks up at me again, then shrugs. I hate it when people shrug. Its a put-off gesture, as if nothing is your responsibility anymore. It suggests that something does stink, but you sure ain't the one who's gonna clean it up. I summon up all my reserves and manage to glare at her. She shrugs again and flashes her pink sequins at me.

I sigh and sit down, feeling defeated, and look over at the girl. She is frowning, staring at the fat woman who is waddling slowly past us. As I hold my hands in my lap like the pansy I am, the girl walks up in front of the woman and stops.

"Yes?" she asks, looking more and more pig-like as I watch. The girl twists her arms and looks the woman in the eyes. She says, "I think you should not step on flowers."

The woman rolls her eyes, as if to ask "This again?" and puts a condescending look on her face. "I wasn't watching where I was going. It's just a flower." Her voice is high-pitched, too, like a pigs. I bet she took speech classes when she was younger.

The girl, however, doesn't seem to hear the last part. "I think you should see where flowers are, if you can't. See them. I think you should see lots of flowers. Lots and lots and lots."

I'm feeling panicked, like a deer in headlights. Her eyes are... I look away from the girl, trying to suppress a shiver. To distract myself, I look at the fat woman. Her mouth is open, and a long sting of saliva is dripping onto her ugly pink dress. Her eyes have a glazed-over look. One of her chubby hands points towards the brick building behind me. "Do you see them?" she rasps, and I can't tell if she's talking to me or to herself, but it doesn't seem to matter because I don't think she could hear me if I answered. "Do you see the pretty blossoms? All over..." And with that she starts walking up the street, swaying as if she's drunk. I feel dirty.

The girl watches the woman for a moment, then her attention wavers and she turns to the parking meter. She places her hand on it.

"I'm sorry. I shouldn't have...done. That. What I did." she says, looking down at the crushed flower. I want to get up and comfort her. I want to hug her and tell her that everything's all right, because she seems so inconceivably _sad_ and tormented. I want to make her feel better. I want to do something good.

However, I sit there and look at her, not doing anything. I hate myself for not getting up, but at the same time that paralysis comes over me again. I think that I'm afraid of looking into her eyes. I'm not really sure, though.

The girl takes her hand off of the parking meter and twists her ring. "Bye," she says and wanders off. I try to watch her but it's like when you're stuck in traffic on a really hot day and you see the heat flow up from the cars and she's gone. I check my watch. It's fifteen after. I fish around in my other pocket and find a coin that I overlooked, and I walk up towards the machine.

The slot seems bigger than usual. I place the coin in and turn the handle, not prepared for when I actually hear its stomach rumble. Not prepared for when it burps and licks its lips. As I watch it smile at me, winking where no eyes should be, I begin to back away.

And when it mumbles a "thank you", I am gone.