Once upon a time, Lisa and Adrienne worked for the same alternative newsweekly. Now, both spend their respective lives mining their creative souls and leading hermit-like lives. And so an idea was hatched. Every week, one would send the other a sketch—either in illustration or word form—and the other would make a companion to the sketch. The result would be posted on both their blogs every week, just for grins. Even if the result isn't award-worthy, the exercise makes both minds more nimble. Hopefully.
I was in line with her at passport control after a ten hour flight. Which is not when you want to run into the most irritated woman in the world.
She was wearing high heeled boots and fishnet tights, both black. Ditto her short skirt and tight top, which both acted like cotton/poly sausage casings. Animal prints were involved. Her dark hair was a mass of snarly cockscrews; her face looked like a dried apple face, the kind we made in second grade one October.
If she weren’t screaming at the passport clerk so loudly, she would have been small enough to fold into my carry-on. But I don’t need another screaming thing in my life. I’m full up.
She screamed about the line. She screamed about the forms. She screamed about the lack of pencils with which to fill in the forms. She screamed about no one responding to her screaming.
“Lady,” I wanted to say. “You know these guys have guns, right?”
But no one responded. Openly, anyway. We looked away, exhausted after hours in a metal tube being hurtled through the sky. And we collected our documents and went home.
Text ©Adrienne Martini; illustration ©Lisa Horstman. Until the end of time. Or something.