Soon I'll be holding you instead of this machine gun

Here's something I started without any idea where it will go. This all I have of it at the moment:

You are a gypsy man. You wax the edges of your handlebar mustache every morning, curling them upwards. You dance yourself to sleep at night around a fire, wearing bells that jangle against your knobbly ankles, jangle up down up down, as if trying to keep the moon awake, so that her eyes will never close and she will never drop out of sight, so that the sun will not dawn nor a new day begin. You dance yourself to sleep, trying to keep the night awake forever. 

You are a gypsy man. Music runs in your veins, your heart pumps out blood to a beat. When you pass the gypsy women, with big gold hoops in their ears and missing teeth, they waggle their hips at you, the ragged edges of their skirts lifting and jerking. You waggle your hips back, and continue walking barefoot down the path. There is dirt beneath your toenails, but so is there the earth your people have lived on for as many years as your grandmother's grandmother can count. 

You have two goats, Valeria and Jaakov. You milk Valeria every mid-afternoon, and hang her milk in a cloth over a cracked blue bucket to curdle for cheese. You fondle Jaakov's twisted horns, feeling the grain beneath your thumb, and look into his eyes knowingly, to which he jerks back and tries to butt you. Such is life. You are a gypsy man, you are Ukrainian, your name is Andrij. 

After you milk the goats, you decide to head to town, a little ramshackle main street with shops on either side that serves all your purposes for getting food, and supplies. There is a grocery store, barely lit with dusty cans of beans on the shelves and barely refrigerated chunks of meat and bundles of greens. There is a garden behind your little house, with carrots that you pull from the earth and crunch on with dirt still clinging to the tips, and with spinach and kale and leeks. For meat, your goats will do, but Valeria and Jaakov are not for eating. Valeria gives you milk and children, and Jaakov by now would be much to hard and stringy to eat—he is very old, your trusty goat who you chose from a litter of kids many years ago. Valeria has recently had children though, and that is where your nutrition will come from. 

As well as a grocery store, there is a small clothing store with fancy machine made clothing, and fabric in the back. You stop by and pick up some purple muslin for your sister so she can make herself a skirt, stringing coins and beads along the waist, to chime and sing for her when she dances. There is a little run down restaurant for the few tourists who wander through, that has pierogies and borscht and not much else. Next tot he restaurant are a bunch of little businesses that are always opening and closing the next month, continually switching between grand opening sales and going out of business sales. The gypsies don't often pay these stores much attention. Then, there is the last store.

Title Quote: Izabella, Jimi Hendrix

Purple haze all in my eyes Don't know if it's day or night

There was a girl. She must have been around 17 or 18, and she had skin the color of coffee with rich cream mixed in. She had a small nose, which must have been like a button when she was little, but had now grown to a point, giving her whole face a defined manner. Her lips were darker brown than her skin, and she wore no makeup. Her face seemed without a mask. Her eyebrows were pronounced, yet they were soft at the edges, and her eyes were the color of a black cat's at night, sparkling with a secret. The girl's face was made even more vibrant by the scene of her hair behind her. It was wiry, and tightly curled, hanging at different lengths along her shoulders and back. Each ringlet was a different color, one the color of honey when light streams through it, one the color of a dusty antique oakwood cabinet, and one the color of rich amber beer when held up to a window. Her hair was only just held back by a colorful sash, full of lapis lazuli blue, eggplant purple, and a dull ochre, woven with binding silk threads. The sash was wide as a headband at the front, and crinkled thin where it was tied at the back, trailing down to the girl's hips. At the very bottoms dangled little worn brass bells, about three a piece for each end. They must have tinkled like a dream does, if only people would stop to listen.

  The girl was wearing a baby blue cotton shirt, worn at the edges, the sleeves coming down halfway between her shoulder and her elbow, and banded at the bottom, with the tops blooming out slightly. The neckline had been, presumably by her, cut into a ragged V, and there was a symbol, or writing on her shirt, in black, though the way she was twisted there was no hope of deciphering what it said. The bottom of her shirt dipped low in in the front and the back, and the sides were shortened to her hips. The bottoms fell over her skirt, which was a beautiful gypsy piece, hidden with patterned patches, stolen from mandalas and persian curtains. It was a tiered skirt, but it was not the kind where the tier evenly circles around the whole length, it was more each pice for their own, and the effect was of more shingles than anything else. Where the patterns flapped up, you would catch a glimpse of fuchsia silk from a sari, and bits of it trailed and fluttered with he rest of the skirt in ringlets. The hem came to about her calves, but just then, the girl ran over a subway grate, past crowds of people, and because of the breeze, the skirt hovered around her knees, exposing, long, thin legs made for jumping on trampolines and dancing the tango. 

Now, her features had been molded to form a look of defiance, and determination, even though her obligation that she was determined to fulfill was a hard one. Her hair had been blown back momentarily from the breeze, exposing the eye of a peacock feather dangling from each ear, swirling in emerald and the darkest of blues. And now I saw, too, that the girl was clutching a shoulder bag, made of woven hemp the color of beaten straw that was held to her waist. The tip of a book nosed out. Then, the girl continued on her dash past the subway grate, and disappeared in the tumult of people, off to haunt someone else's vision.

Title Quote: Jimi Hendrix, Purple Haze