Contractions

An excerpt from Gary Lutz's Stories in the Worst Way:

My life had started to pill. I was fuzzing out little balls of myself that people would come up and twist off and flick into the already overpacked air.
At stoplights, I began to slope my neck sidewise so I could glint into whichever car was laned beside my own. The bloodshot, circumstantial desolation of the windowed faces - the splather of fingers against a cheek - was how I wanted things: wrung out.
I started wearing shopgirlish shirtwaists so that when I drove to the malls after work, I could be certain that if I lingered long enough at a display, restacking saucepans or arranging a strew of shoe boxes into a neat row, one old woman or another would eventually ask, "Miss, where would I find...," sealing off her question by salivating the name of some unfamiliar-sounding kitchen utensil or sewing-box instrument. Her gaspy mouth would be a burrow of caries and glazed tongue. I would do my best to crease my face into blank lines and busy my hands menially with the merchandise before me. "You don't work here?" the woman, unanswered, would continue. I would wait until I no longer felt her stare singeing my cheek, then watch her flutter off toward a real salesclerk.
People in malls had it coming to them - even the girls wristing one another along from store to store or willowing about in a subjunctive sulk. The girls all had their lives marqueed brightly on their faces. My eyes would dart straight to their skirted legs, the flesh that glowed above the cuffs of their socks. Their skin was a threat.