Philadelphia 76ers Offer Iverson: "Summer Interior"

We will continue to view the NBA season through the eyes of Edward Hopper. Feel free to add your thoughts on the 2010 Sixers in our comments section.

The threadbare sheets feel like cobwebs in her hands. As she lets them evaporate from her fingers, she counts the threads that remain on her skin, like stray hairs on an old man's scalp; they wiggle like legs plucked from a grandaddy spider in the breeze blowing in from the open window. Elton remembers how summer days in Durham when she used to trap grandaddy long legs in glass jars and pluck off their legs, using metal tweezers because she didn't want to dirty her hands.

Sitting on the hardwood floor, her own legs cramping and burning, Elton feels as if her own muscles are being squeezed by giant pair of tweezers. She is the twitching limb of a dismembered body, having lived out the American dream to its most bloated possibilities under the bright lights of southern California, all of her lies and deceit having brought her here to a seedy motel in Philadelphia, the birthplace of Declarations, of separations, and reinvention.

Elton would like to pull herself up from the floor, clean herself of experience, and put on a new dress, but her spot on the floor is as low as any valley, a stranger named Igoudala is in the shower, and the threads of that new dress are already as worn as the bed sheet.

Knock. Knock.

"Who's there?" she doesn't recognize her own voice, shattered like last night's shot glasses.

"Open the door, Elton. It's time to go home." The voice is more familiar than her own.

"Allen, is that you?" she asks the question as if she fears either of the two answers it might render.

"Is that the maid? Tell her to come back in an hour." Igoudala is out of the shower, a towel around his waste, droplets of water running down his shoulders clean as tomorrow's sun rays. Elton sits on the floor, frozen between Igoudala in the open doorway of the bathroom and Allen on the other side of the room's shut door. She goes back to rubbing the bed's cobwebs between her fingers and thumb, shaking her head slowly from side to side, like a weather vane in a stagnant breeze.