Crazy Ava Monologue

Crazy Ava is directly inside the open door with the EMTs at her side, fussing over her again. Except this time something is different. Lying on the sofa with her mouth half open and the paramedics kneeling over her, a fossil of an eastern bloc peasant, the type that you smell rye bread, sauerkraut and old brick dust on, her sour expression has vanished. And sure enough, she is wearing that Parasztok headscarf again.
Except this time her eyes are wide open as if, the last thing she laid those rheumy eyes on imprinted itself on her psyche, terrorizing her. Clearly, her breath still smells like dog shit, by how paramedics lean away from her and curl their noses; or, maybe it’s her carpets. All those years of pet stains from Houdini, that
That black guy? Remember John Lee Hooker? The one that used to live here and got in all those fights until they tossed his sorry butt out?”
“What the hell could she possibly have been thinking hanging around with him?”
The emergency medical technicians take her blood pressure and shine lights in her eyes, calling her name. She doesn’t respond, appearing dazed and lying there motionless on the couch, her hand no longer trembling with that recognizable palsy. Those thick ubiquitous lenses of her eyes appear distant, a moment in time frozen on them. Almost as if whatever she encountered has bound the image to its surface and into the reaches of her brain.
A dozen or so of the veteran dragons, creaky with age and thirsty for everyone else's saucy tales, ardently watch. Ever the predatory cats, they gaze at the EMTs through the doorway as they hover over Ava and hoist her from the couch to a gurney.
The aging dragons pin their eyes on the pigeon as technicians roll Ava out of the door and past us towards the van. Passing those geriatric bags crouched for the kill. Those fossils lick their lips, watch and wait, hoping to wrap a jaw around the old bird's head. Their flapping jaws have a long history of wrapping around other people’s