Writers Island prompt: #7 for 2011: Epiphany

[ezekielsdaughter]

 writersisland.wordpress.com/2011/02/12/prompt-7-for-2011-epiphany/

As may be obvious, I didn't use the photo prompt although I did use the word as a title.

Epiphany

For a moment, Amani pauses at the window of the office tower.

She sees them far below.
For the first time, she realizes that they will always be there.

The pair are real enough that people on the sidewalk detour around them.
At this distance, she can’t hear a word but she recognizes the pantomime.
The fumbles of a couple--becoming.
Any moment now, the woman will disappear as she rushes from the scene to her dorm room. Ten minutes and she will report in excited half sentences to her roommates the first time that any man flirted with her seriously.
Amani has no idea how this memory of hers came unmoored and ended up here on a city street and solid enough that passersby smile and speed dial their own honey for dinner arrangements. They see nothing, but the smell of potential sex in that square of sidewalk drives the hands to the pocket and the phone to the ear. The words spill from their lips. “Baby, are you free tonight?”

This is Amani’s second sighting of herself.
The first was a fortnight earlier.

She had guided her SUV down a side street. Feeling like a pirate, she had watched the darkness cling to her vehicle like loamy bayou waters. The small shotgun had risen up on her right, an island, gold with incandescent light. She recognized the figures through the broad glass windows: the hairdresser with her hot combs--she was long dead now--and the little girl, with her head bent over a book: “Lorna Doone”. It was a tawdry nineteenth century romance, but firmly on the college prep list. The twelve year Amani was getting her hair pressed for Sunday school. It was the summer of 1968. People said that change was finally coming but every seventh day was still God’s Day.

Amani had wanted to raise a hand in warning; she wanted to salute the two of them. No need, they would always be there.

Turning, Amani headed for her desk.
In the window, her mirror image crinkled like foil and bowed.