E.T.: A Tribute

And there were two young bros with smooth swooped hair and florescent sneakers walking in the parking lot and one of them pointed at this lady and said to the other, “Look, Elizabeth Taylor’s been resurrected,” and the second bro cackled and his shoulders bounced in laughter. The woman’s chestnut eyes, eyes she mostly hated and tried to conceal, darted at the bros. And in fact it turned out that the resemblance was not a coincidence at all and that the lady had been a lifelong devotee of Elizabeth Taylor and had only days before been shattered by the news of her idol’s death and only moments before been released from yet another soul-demolishing, rotten day of work at the County Clerk’s, so when she saw and heard the bros cackling and pointing she snapped and couldn’t restrain herself from running across the parking lot in slumped equine arthritic strides. The boys were laughing, their arms shriveling inward in half-assed self-protective glee at the lady’s running and the absurd bouncing of her treated spider-black hairdo. The lady had only her keys in her hand as she ran and she did not notice her empty cart begin rolling backward into the parking lot’s thoroughfare or, when a wheel stopped on a pebble, spin abruptly into a screeching BMW sedan, bringing the cart and the vehicle to a synchronous halt; the lady all the time galloped toward the boys with the sharpest key on her chain now sticking out obscenely from a cage of fingers until she finally reached them and began sobbing and screaming and jabbing, and the bros chortled at each other until she got one of them in the eye, and when he went down she mounted his chest and very deliberately got him in the other eye, and when the other bro grasped her by the shoulder she sprung up and punctured his cheek and then got him in the eye too but through the lid and he began clutching his spouting face with one arm and swinging around the other apparently hoping to strike the lady but clearly he couldn’t see her because he swung and swung and shortly tottered off and tumbled over. Finally the onlookers restrained the lady and later one senescent man lay his arm across both her shoulders as she sat on the curb and whispered,—splattered with bro blood, swaying, sobbing, waiting for the police and the ambulance to arrive—whispered “Oh, Lizzie, Lizzie,” through a mask of dripping cosmetics.