The Rousty and the Possum Belly Queen

The joint sat winking, treacherous, in a jagged line of the same. Their narcotic, double-crossing lights flashed across the midway, stretching it out in heartbreaking shadows like some perverted dance floor. The air was thick with cigarette smoke and cotton candy and first kiss aspirations. Fireworks popped in the sky, exposing teenagers wrapped around each other in the improvised alleys between tents. The ground squished loudly with each Reebok stomp, Converse jump that met it; the sound soaked comfortably in bells and whistles piercing the air, served over a binge of boom-box hoots and hollers.

The ring toss agent sat lethargically, the humidity coddling him, and eyed the crowd. He scratched at a fresh haircut, the uniformly shaved bristles reminding him that it was the start of the season. By October, he would be shaggy and entirely unpresentable once again. But by then, he would have a place to stay for the winter, and would not want the temptation anyway. He puffed at a Parliament, and shot a smile at a passing couple, their overweight, suburban kids too involved in their ice cream to be enticed.

Fifteen minutes, tops.

Continental Trailways brought all but the greenies in two nights before. They had pitched the lot then, and a winter of unemployment had kept him sleeping in his store, and eating scrounged Mulligan stew before the Thursday night spring. But the night had sprung with palpable excitement in the air. It was a comfortable position, starting the year in a big town – nobody flinched when they were handed a slum, or a key to the midway. They just learned their lesson and shrugged it off as part of the experience.

O’Toole trotted around just out of earshot, brandishing a big plush bear to strangers, grabbing their attention with a bright Hawaiian shirt and a slide whistle, telling boyfriends how easy it was to win. The midway was bustling with tight gaggles of high school kids, overworked moms and underpaid dads. With any skill, he would make back the nut before the night was done.

He was a wiry, arithmetic sucker-pop of a man in his late twenties, with tattooed sleeves rolled up to his elbows. A poker game had claimed two of the fingers on his right hand, and he did his best to show this off, gesturing enthusiastically with a big gold sovereign ring on his thumb. Black Wayfarers coated his eyes at all times, and he kept on just enough moustache to intimidate any sharpies that happened upon the game. His eyes caught a firecracker in the crowd that was not turning to smoke.

She was a half-spent piece of shit-eating trash, and had been for some time, but it was only just starting to catch up with her. Rust flecked from long curls, like parts of the Titanic resurfacing, long drapes of some rich fabric fell over her alabaster, freckled shoulders. Though not individually, their whole pointed downward toward a big t-shirt, clinging to one shoulder and falling from the other, hiding a handful of black-and-blue marks that was her damn business and nobody else’s. It was a darkish green, with some band’s name printed in big white letters across the front, tour dates littering the back. Shorts were cut just over two knobby knees, and pointed frayed denim toward black cowboy boots with stories to tell. Her face had a bad dream quality to it, like a façade and of doe eyes and lace stapled to the boogeyman’s skull. A wide-mouthed grin and a broken tooth told of too many marathon binges and drunken partners.

Sarah Yazin, the sword-swallowing beauty of the Cunningham Brothers’ Carnival and Freak Show caught the man’s glance, and smiled a big, unfortunate smile that showed off eighty-four yellowing teeth. His close-lipped smirk and nod responded, and he gave her a great big three-fingered wave. Across the crowd, she pointed to her wrist, no watch in sight, and strolled off. His vision was already blurred by a pair of high school girls who giggled and pointed toward him.

“Ladies,” his eyes, plastic and lens, were full of stardust, “I’ve got a feelin’ that the both-uh you’re gonna get lucky tonight,” he splashed a gold-toothed grin at the girls, melting their pocket books. “One dollar f’er two,” he pretended to hesitate, “three tries to get-tuh ring on whatever prize you want.”

One last glance away caught fiery red headed toward the sugar shack before the night’s show.

Two more here, then two on the road to anywhere.

His hair grew as thoughts of pioneering spirits cascaded over him, and he milked the girls out of a sawbuck, and the kids finished their ice cream.

He spat at an innocent alley, stepping out from the dive. The ground was cracked into a frown, and sputtered tiny bits of cold through his bee-stung boots. The night air was forgiving, and mild, like spilling tomato sauce on a red t-shirt. It had rained earlier in the day, and the weathermen spoke of possible storms in the coming morning, but the sky was sleeping heavily, leaning on the three-story facades that lined Main Street. It was that deep kind of black that only comes from unpaid power bills, stars meekly peeking here and there from spring clouds that threatened to pop on every brick corner and antenna spike. They shared stories and wept here and there about leaving the sea. Forgotten laundry quivered overhead, like gulls frozen mid-flight.

Fumbling for his breast pocket, he found a package of Luckies and a hotel bar’s matchbook. He snapped the last redhead from its holster, and scraped it against the little patch of rough in one movement, the slight friction like a piano falling in the silent town. Flames burst brightly and fell to a waltzing drunk, swaying back and forth in the man’s handheld cocoon. Scratch-drag-puff erupted from his mouth, the match already mid-tumble, life flashing before its eyes. Smoky haze drifted past his eyes, and all the beckoning streetlights turned to green-eyed monsters for a moment, wanting nothing more than a place to stay for the night.

Early morning hit the town like a plague that fed on good times and lit windows. Not a single sign smiled “Yes, we’re open” at strangers, and any stranger out at this time belonged somewhere else. Crooked lines painted the brick veneer of an urban condition, second-story apartments pushed back from the street per the wishes of some classically trained urban planner. Winding, suburban roads stitched the area just off of the comparatively booming block behind. Ahead was, arguably, where it all began – the train yard.

Change jumped and rattled in his pocket, the last of it, as he stumbled, contentedly drunk, toward the derelict bastion of industry. Tired freight cars with broken feet lounged in neat rows along the gravel lot, men wrapped up in cardboard comforters housed in only the most ritzy. Poison seeped through their bulging veins, haphazardly constructed interstates between tattoos and faded scars. A handful were still awake, smiling baked-bean smiles at each other and stomping and hooting at embellished stories around a barrel of fire.

This was their world.

Daylight rain had left its mark here, puddles forming in deep depressions scattered across the lot, the pioneer weeds between the rocks feasting. Most of the men here, census estimates only averaging them at a dozen, had spent the day tuck inside bars, or under awnings, or jumping from rooftops. Now, they were all wrapped up tightly in their bombers, dusters, and freighters, collars unfolded to keep the night breeze from dancing vampiric on their necks. Most of them lived out of these coats, and some had stitched in kitchens, dinettes, finished basements.

A roomy two-bedroom place lurched past, sucking on a roached cigarette and reeking of a personality disorder. The fire was comfortable, massaging his hands with warmth and turning them to shadow as he sidled up next to an ogre of a man in a brown trapper cap.

“Jagg, I dudn’t see y’there,” belched great beast, his whole trailer form pushing against the smaller man as he spun to face him. “Juh fine an-eh work f’urr meh?” A coughing laugh popped and sizzled on his lips, the guttural baseline backing it sounding like it came from the bottom of a well.

“No-think yet, Ed,” he shot an upward glance at the man, an eyebrow hanging loosely to forehead folds, and dug a hand into his back pocket. A scrap of yellow paper, folded into quarters, stuck between his fingers, and he handed it to the giant. His eyes surveyed the yard – nobody was paying them any attention. It was a world of half-hearted frowns and gleeful drunkenness. “They’ll be lookin’ f’er some hands t’set up the stands, clean out the shitters an’ all that.”

“Tha’ss great news!” exploded from the beast, garnering angry snores from their backdrop. He grinned back and forth, and the crowd lost interest.

“What’s great news, boys?” drifted across the fire in a faint Florida panhandle drawl. A youngish man with no defining signs of poverty smiled at the two. In the unsteady light, he was somehow pretty, his delicate, feminine features sizzling and shining like bacon fat as he blinked away ash from big blue eyes.

“Troy!” he yelled again, waking an old man from a stupor, and coaxing vague obscenities before quieting back into comatose doze. “I’de fig-gured y’t’uh stay back in Charlotte f’erruh ‘nudder month. How’d it tread-uh?”

“Hey Ed, Jack. It was good.” His eyes fogged over a bit, concentrating hard on something. “There’s a girl back there’ll have a place for me come winter,” he smirked widely, with a slight tilt in his head making him look like Sinatra.

Jack hid his disbelief behind a frown and a cough. “What happened t’the meat packin’ job in Providence? I thought that payed good money,” he stared blankly at the man, much closer to a boy.

“It did. The boss didn’t like Italians,” he winked.

“But I’ll bet-us daugh’urr did, huh?” the ogre shook as he laughed, slapping Jack on the shoulder with a meaty paw.

“Well, if I go missin’, you’ll know who to keep on the short list, yeah?” his smile grew, and turned to a breathy laugh that sounded like air limping from a ruined accordion. “If you two’re lookin’ to get in on this carnival gig, I’ll join you. But let’s keep it quiet, huh?” He spoke proudly, as if it was his plan.

The shorter man began to sour noticeably, his distaste toward the prospective coworker palpable. “Will do, Troy.” A dog barked somewhere close, begging for food from the commune. Licking at dry lips, the pretty young man took the noise as his exit, adjusting his suspenders as he left. Jack watched his awkward swagger – reliable sources told that the boy had been born with some funny defect that made his joints all crooked and flimsy-like. It always made the kid look like he was on the prowl – not too far off. He was unlike the rest, with their hardships and cold nights pinned to them like badges of honor; he spent his days seducing waitresses and truckers, his nights sleeping with them. He was the object of affection and envy for most…

“I’m goin’nuh get some shut eye,” barked the man, a disgusted frown fading from his mouth, eyes still glued to the buy as he sauntered back toward town to find an open door that had eluded the rest.

This was their world.

Midnight struck hard, arriving earlier than anyone had expected, bringing less suitcases of curious out-of-or-in-towners than anyone had hoped. Birds flew from the rafters as the sloppily patched tarps opened at the big tent’s mouth. To the trained eye, it was clear that someone had put considerable effort into painting the room, odd chunks of seating vacant, some holding haphazardly scribbled ‘reserved’ signs, others filled by lecherous looking old men and drunken young couples seduced by the taboo of 18+ only. The later show did not offer much more than the family-friendly earlier, but warmer filters on the spotlights and more tightly laced costumes at the ticket booth built up enough anticipation to bring a small crowd most of the time. Morals in the Chatsworth-area suburbs had held unfortunately high, and the turnout again made the show a waste.

Sarah looked herself up and down in the back of a ladel, a slow gas leak keeping heat inside the lesser marquee. Prematurely withering hands pulling stringy hair into a pineapple bun, away from her face. She knew full well that her crow’s feet were more pronounced than that should have been, but knew how to ignore them.

She could ignore all of it.

A three-legged stool grew from the ground as she leaned backward to sit, grabbing an ankle-high boot from the top of a leatherish trunk and tucking a foot inside. Behind, a curtain quietly threw itself open, the squat form of something horrible and deformed limped in, scratching at an odd patch of hair where a sideburn could reasonably sit. It climbed on top of a small crate that had long ago held fresh oranges and placed its pudgy hands outstretched on its lap, over trousers cut off just under the knee. It was quiet, not speaking until spoken to, gazing longingly at an amorphous rip in its shirtsleeve.

The woman turned slightly, not expecting the visitor. “Huh-lo Tim, how’re you?” Turning the rest of her form, an ode to thrift store tartishness, she faced the feral boy, his beady brown eyes tuck too-tightly into wrinkled sockets. They met hers, arguably green, but fading fast.

“Sh-ere, how’re-uh, Sh-ere? Goo-thangs,” he punctuated the unkempt words with a breathy hiccup like a typewriter meeting its right margin. His hands tensed on the sides of emaciated thighs as he spoke.

“Good, thank-yeh. Was there some-think yeh needed?”

“Sh-ere,” his puffy lips were surrounded by a sea of rippled fat deposits. The feral boy was much closer to the grave than the cradle. “Sh-ere, thu-sus gonna beh m’las-season whiv-vuh companeh.” He hiccupped again, phlegm jumping from between his teeth. “I’m-un-nuh be a jah-nutter come Aug-uh-sht.” His face contorted to a sickly sort of broken smile, his teeth either cracked to sharp edges or ground in mushy little woodchips.

“Oh. I’ll miss-yeh, Tim,” she lied, having woken up more than once to the retarded midget standing half-naked over her. “Have-yeh tol’ e’reyone else?”

“No, Sh-ere. Sh-ere, they don’ like meh. Nuh-nuv them’ll ev-” The curtain slipped open again, held there by a black cane, its white tip pointing accusingly at the horrible man. Gliding on winged feet, a tall man with a convincing hairpiece and devilish good looks entered, most of his form obscured by a gaudy tuxedo.

“Tim, quit botherin’ her.” His neck was held together with a black bowtie, hanging more to one side than the other, and partially tuck under a candy-apple red collar. “Five minutes, ginger,” a top hat was stuck comfortably under his arm, its felt top held trace freckles of fraying, but not enough to notice from the crowd. “He botherin’ you?”

Buckling the top of her boot, she turned back toward the makeshift vanity and reached for a pair of freshman homecoming costume earrings. “He’s just leaving.”

“Sur-reh, Misser Moore.” Making a death-defying leap from the crate, the feral boy kept his head down and stepped under the man’s outstretched arm, the tent’s gasping hole still fluttering open.

“Yeh-know he’s leavin’ at the end of the season?” she turned her head back, one false eyelash in place, the other sticking to her index finger.

“He’s leavin’ tonight.” His arm made a big show of rolling up its sleeve, and he checked the time on a convincing fake, weedy tattoos licking at its silver band. “He got caught dealin’ again.” The top hat leapt onto his head, tilted slightly forward. “C’mon. It’s time.”

“Gimmie a han’ with this,” Jack struggled to drag one end of a tarp from a semi-trailer. Pylons and pipes inside began to spill out of the side as it stumbled to the ground, nowhere near its x-marks-the-spot in the middle part of a soggy field. Midday was splashed across the whole lot, sweat pooling on top of bulging guts and under caps that doubled as wallets and tripled as pockets. Cigarette smoke rolled languidly across the air in dry clouds, turning it into a disinterested hurricane of drunken day laborers.

Through the troubled seas, the giant lifted the trailing end of the pockmarked canvas, a cumbersome smile streaked across his pancake batter face. Jack nodded a thank-you to the man, a drop of sweat jumping from his briar patch chin and signing the white of his ribbed t-shirt. One of the sleeves was ripping at the shoulder, a gaping mouth yawning where the two pieces of fabric had caught separate trains. As he stepped, it jumped back and forth, licked at the edges of a black ink remnant of Government Issue.

“Stop,” squawked a Chinese man with oval-shaped glasses and a binder of hand-drawn plans. He stomped toward the duo in a tussled white polo tuck into a mess of Levi Strauss denim. Panting, ugly billows of smoke poured from his face, a long, feminine Max hanging from his penciled-in lips. “You read?” he barked to the smaller of the two, holding up a list of instructions.

“What?” escaped Jack, something lost in translation.

“Can you read?” the man yelled, slowing the words to a crawl, their sharp edges and shrill notes more pronounced.

Catching a page of more pictures than words, he tried his luck. “Yeah,” he shot back, hiking up his trousers with one hand, holding out the other. The Chinese man filled it with a worn manual, held together with staples, and waved an arm across the duo.

“Fine some-beddy else, and put up tents here.” He walked away without acknowledgment, an electronic megaphone on its way to his lips – his tongue darting out to push the cigarette to his mouth’s corner.

“I thing I saw Troy smohe-kin’ out fron-nuh th-uh truggs. I’ll guf-fine ‘um,” Ed was an over stimulated puppy, jumping at the opportunity. He lumbered away without waiting for consent, braces groaning to constrain his powerful girth as he stumbled around a thinish older man with curly hair that stank like a brewery and stared confusedly at his boots. Both jumped as a set of collapsible bleachers fell from a trailer. A man’s leg was crushed.

The Chinese man began yelling about incompetence and the day yawned on in a bed of fistfights and far off traffic.

Ed yawned, a great humming bellow climbing from the depths of a sinking ship, its tar-covered and dope-smattered labyrinths amplifying the sound as it found its way out in a popping gasoline bubble. Two days of work brought a cold glass to his lips, ice chips slapping at the bacon fat of his messy blonde moustache. Leaning violently on a ham-hock elbow, sleeve rolled just covering it; he smiled an honest, unfortunate smile across strangers lining the rest of the bar. The bartender laughed, a hearty laugh like Christmas dinner, and changed the channel on the muted television, a boom box on top of the fridge spewing out guitar and saxophone. An ox in his late forties, he rubbed at the inside of a glass with a meaty hoof, broad shoulders threatening to rip at a t-shirt with a band’s name stretched across it.

Jack drifted between two tables of arguing married couples, wiping water off of his hands, dying the hips of his trousers blackish. His face was a beaten red, scrubbed clean in the sink, sideburns and brow still leaking and clumped heavily together. He planted himself next to the beast, cracking a peanut in his hand. It was not uncomfortable in the dive, but still filled with an arguing committee of experts voicing their opinions, stitching together a quilt that covered quieter voices.

“Y’thing we’ll ged-duh weegund?” Ed dropped a peanut shell on the ground, the chewed bits of nut cementing his teeth, popping from his lips as he spoke.

“I think so,” he looked at the rip in the big man’s collar. “Word’s they kep’in mos’ of the han’s fer the show in Chatsworth. Don’ know how many came with.” He nodded to the bartender. “Kid I talked t’uh didn’t seem t’uh know anywhone.”

“Goohd news, huh?” he mitted the smaller man’s shoulder, pushing hard on it as an impoverished sign of gratitude. As if punctuating the statement, the bar’s big wooden door swung open, a tall man with a palpable ego strode in, his pointed black boots snapping like gunshots over the room’s noise. All eyes were on him, as he loved. The door stopped before closing, a small hand catching, snaking around it and pushing it open, a redheaded woman squeezing through.

They were both damp, but it was red-on-white with her, the wetness matting her big curly locks down, giving her the air of some dramatic classic starlet having just taken a grapefruit to the face. A greenish t-shirt with nothing on it and its tag sticking out at the neck hid under a white jacket, fell atop denim jeans. Her boots clicked loudly too, but they were a snare beat for the room’s jazz to stray from. They found themselves a table in the front, far from the bathrooms and sat down. She pulled a pair of black sunglasses from the collar of her shirt and placed it on the table next to a set of car keys as he made a big production of starting a conversation.

A local girl, probably the bartender’s daughter, as she was not pretty enough to get a waitressing job, stomped over to their table with a notepad in one hand, an empty plate for carrying drinks tuck under the other. Gum clicked as she asked their orders, the man speaking for both of them. She left, and the redhead leaned onto her elbow, exploring the crowd like a vulture that had just gorged itself on a family of suburbanites in a broken down station wagon.

Jack almost recognized a poorly Xeroxed doppelganger of the woman, but took his time finding its relevance. A newsman broke through the television’s sitcom, closed-caption struggling to keep up with his account of a spreading wildfire somewhere that had no effect on the bar. Still hazy, he pulled beauty from the déjà vu as Edward caught his gazing and elbowed him in the chest. “Lucky guy, huh?” he motioned toward the tall man, reaching in his coat for a pack of matches as the woman balanced a Pall Mall on her lips.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

“Shit, Ed,” he was hit with lightning. “That’s one-uh the freaks from th’uh show.” He padded down his pockets for the yellow flyer, and opened it, her head life-size next to itself. “I’ll bet she could geddus in wh’iff somebody that’s got pull ‘round there.”

“Go tag tuh-err, Jagg.” The ogre sucked down the last swig of his drink and grinned, slapping encouragement onto Jack’s back in a big red handprint. As he did, the ringleader noticed the time on his convincing fake, and jumped from the table to forage for a payphone. Opportunity was apparent. “Tell-er ‘bout me an’ Troy, too. Huh?” Jack took a drink from the freshly planted glass on the bar and ran a cracked hand through his peppercorn and cinnamon hair. Uncrossing his legs, he landed on the floor and navigated toward the woman, her eye line catching him in a corner, but her cigarette gaining more concentration.

Hand grabbing at the table like a life ring, its mismatched legs made it stumble jarring the woman from her smoky daydream. She blinked surprisedly up at the man, he being taller than her, even sitting on the tall stool. Her hair covered one eye, and smoke sat lazily in front of the other. War and homelessness piled extra years on the man, and she guessed him not far from retirement, about to offer her a stolen prescription pad filled with downers and uppers.

He had trouble reading the script. “You work for the carnival,” he asserted, the immediacy of the statement sounding like an amnesiac killer recalling evidence from the electric chair. Brow furrowing, he shook off the statement, a smile apologizing itself from the bottom of his mouth.

“I do,” she smiled, looking down at the yellow square folded and pinched between his knuckles. “Sarah Yazin, a plezzure,” an Irish accent licked at the words.

Patting down the front of his pants, he found a pack of Luckies with a matchbook tuck inside. “I’m Jack Leavitt,” he stuffed one of the cigarettes between his lips, sparking the match. “Me an’ my friend,” he motioned toward the giant, who was staring, wearing a goofy grin. “An’ another friend, act-shoo-ully, were lookin’ to get some work at the show. I thought y’might know who t’talk tuh.” His face lit for a moment, the Lucky Strike lighting up as he took a drag.

“Yeah,” she hung onto the word. “Yeah, I cehn help yeh.” The ringleader cut his phone call short, noticing the sorry bastard at his table.

“Y’thing I’m y’er damn prop-tee?” she frowned, hands gripping the steering wheel, knuckles white and red. He sank into the passenger’s side, nursing a bruised sense of self bubbling under a bruised jaw. “Th’guy was jus’ lookin’ f’er wherk. Hell, he was lookin’ f’er you.” Stone facades wept unceremoniously on either side, their pathetic parade largely ignored. They were crawling toward a bus station in its twilight years, the ringleader having found room and board for the most profitable members of the traveling show. Shuddering and shaking, a tall conversion van carried the two toward black stretched to infinity as their brick canyon walls crumbled, the road suddenly a marker stripe on dark construction paper.

He hung the phone on its noose, his unused time jingling and jangling its way out of the metal box. Leaning against it, he sneered at the homeless weasel as he puffed languidly at a cigarette pacifier, matching his redhead. The ringleader sat at a slow simmer, the bum fumbling and tripping over every word, a feigned attempt at good-ole-boyhood. She led him with eyelashes and giggles, the bitch.

Eyes far apart, the two glued themselves to the limbo outside. He saw himself as the king’s son, and was a bastard for thinking he could do no wrong. She was a manipulative whore without shame. A hitchhiker stepped into the van’s headlights with a cardboard sign that spelled out something Spanish. Too quick to be sure, it looked like something had burned his face a long time ago, ropelike streaks pinching his eyes closed, squeezing his forehead into his scalp. He frowned out the window, filling the walking man’s stare. She sped up, his tired gaze entirely fixed on her.

But he passed without consequence – probably never ending up anywhere Spanish. The ringleader fished a napkin from a pocket, dabbing at a weeping split in his lip.

Having enough, he stalked toward the table, fists clenched into cannonballs. The crowd seemed to part, music building to a climax, his boots booming over every inebriational joke. The bum’s hand brushed against hers as the ringleader’s caught her cheek, sending the cigarette diving from her lips, eyes opening to shock before wincing shut in vaguely familiar pain. Her stool’s balance faltered, one leg not as strong a contender as the others, and she started to fall toward the far-away floor.

The hobo grasped at bits of arm, cushioning her fall almost, but leaving her to tear in half, halfway on the ground. He shot a confused yelp toward the movement, suddenly sobered.

A black-and-blue blemish bloomed around her left eye as the flickering lights of one-town-over glittered as a speck on the licorice horizon. She kept trying to rub at itchy splits in the skin, but each time she did, the bruise pulsed in disagreement. Still, neither said a word, the radio whistling nothing but quiet static, barely audible over the hum of the engine and the whisper of tires along wet asphalt. Rolling past, they both noticed a lonely filling station, its Quapaw attendant thumbing through a magazine, ignorant to the passing tragedy.

Ed jumped from his stool, sending it clanging loudly into the bar, then the ground. The bartender took notice, moving in-step with the intoxicated giant. The ringleader reloaded, catching Jack in the ear, as he was still bent into catching the woman. The world seemed to float in unfocused motion for that moment – fleshy piles of veteran and varicose meat sliding against leather seats and metal stools, crash filling the smoky air. Patrons formed a shredded circle around the skirmish, taking all bets.

The giant grabbed at his friend, hatching him in a struggling hold with spastic flail getting lost to elbows and shirt. In tandem, the bartender landed a fist on the ringleader’s jaw, hooking the scruff of his neck. He bulldozed a path toward the door, the giant and his chained-up chum in tow. Someone irrelevant helped the redhead to her feet and brought her to the bathroom.

Hands scraped and skinned, knee swollen from a skid across pavement, he frowned out the window and picked absently at his lip. Fists still clenched on the wheel, she scrunched either side of her face, she frowned out the window, feeling the difference in size and shape of her cheeks.

Inebriated, Jack spun through the night bouncing in the height of pinball fashion between soldiers and streetwalkers. The waltz caught him lurching off of curbs and catching on sewer drains like some down-and-out mark. Matching time, the ogre kept close to his cohort, his shirt torn open to the navel, just as out on the roof. Doors closed on the duo, them jackknifing between dives and flophouses. Not even the night agreed with their antics, getting darker by the blink, finally drawing them like moths to the twenty-four-hour fluorescence of a linoleum diner. An ambulance’s siren whined far away, nothing close making any argument.

Jack pondered the Hopper painting splayed as a panoramic window in front of him, and considered hard the change weighing down his pocket. Inside, a redheaded woman perched herself all woven-and-stitched-together on a stool and sipped good drip coffee. Dropping past its twins, a quarter lodged itself between his calloused fingers, and he squeezed it. Reflection caught in the darkened window of a barbershop, he ran a hand through his hair and patted at the creased marks in his collar. The beast held up a lamppost a few steps away, his face contorted to an uneasy belch – he took a moment to adjust his suspenders and push ragged cuffs back up to his ham-hock elbows.

The door jingled and jangled as Jack fell through it. Enveloped in his crossword, a man painted deep olive ignored the two. In a corner by the jukebox, a couple sat on the same side of a booth, whispering drunkenly to each other and taking turns nibbling French toast.

From the back came a tightly-knit waitress with fame in her eyes and silicone in her chest. A smoldering Kent stayed floating at the edge of her painted lips, a nicotine cloud wrapping her features in a 35mm haze. Blondish hair, more accurately brunette at the roots, was reined harshly into a bun sticking like a rabbit’s tail from her head. Deep, unfortunate pockmarks from teenage ugliness dotted her forehead. Contact lenses shielded the world from her sapphire eyes; she squinted slowly before and after each blink, eyelashes unleashing upon everyone a slow, dramatic gaze. Skin like putrid alabaster or foggy moonlight tuck itself into a white blouse, blue skirt, grey apron. She opened her mouth, pinching a grin toward one side more than the other. “Evening, boys,” escaped her with a crescendo of strings and a slow pan across the city.

She was all the beauty that money could buy.

They looked like pigs, a layer of dirt and barroom bravado coated the two in messy strokes, and she hated them for it. Both had been here before, had been greeted by the same smoky stage show, the same stale script. Neither had ever taken the chance to decipher the word printed on her nametag. Barking a hello, the big one polluted one of the stools, a few down from the redheaded woman. He perched himself stupidly on both elbows leaning hard on the counter as the other man squeezed onto the next seat.

Click-clacking floor brought her sauntering toward the duo, pen dropping from behind her ear, pad floating from her apron’s pocket. She stopped between the two, a linoleum countertop chasm separating her stage from their audience. Feet in blue flats spread shoulders’ width she stopped, saying nothing.

She did not need to.

“Coffee,” slurred the smaller man. The big one echoed. Knees locked and unlocked mechanically as she turned, stepping like a ballet performance to the urn, snatching two porcelain mugs from a shelf, hanging each from a finger. Warm sounds trickled from the machine, she not letting a drop spill between the two. Reversing each movement, the patched-together beauty laid the two mugs in front of the men and smiled methodically, mist seeping between her teeth.

The redhead’s glance strayed from her brownish doppelganger, meeting the two men. She did not swallow swords, and long train rides gave her headaches. A greyed, once-white, jacket partially hid the loosely-fitting sadness of green scrubs. Eighteen hours at the veterans’ clinic brought her here, wanting to be bothered, not wanting to ask. Refilling the redhead’s mug, the waitress thought that she caught some ill-fitting moment between the two – he gained a weirdish frown like he was contemplating a mask on the woman, she let her jaw drop hesitatingly, just slightly exposing a few top teeth as she glimpsed the tattoo painting his arm. Both hid, he tucking into his reflection, she moving fast enough to disappear into a tangerine mane.

Frowning more slowly, the giant slipped into his Folgers crystals, disappointed at the mistaken identity. Sizzle and crack seemed to bring the redhead back to life, an egg frying somewhere hidden. The door sang again, a regrettable looking man with hair all over his face shambled in, clear Wayfarers stuck uncomfortably above his moustache. He found a seat and the waitress swam toward it, pen and pad already meeting in her hands.

“Vietnam?” broke the redhead, escorting an accusatory point toward the bum, his eyes still hazily locked on themselves. Blink and snort brought him back, and a slurred turn reconnected their eyes.

Mouth opening slowly, he coughed, settling on a nod. Another cough, throat losing all lubrication, focused nothing on him. The fit drew a small grin on the girl, he letting coffee drip from the corner of his mouth as he half-choked on a big gulp. The olive man did not stray from his crossword, and the couple in the corner kept tongues intertwined. Waitress and Sasquatch both surveyed the disruption with a vague lack of interest, then reengaged in small conversation. A hiccup of déjà vu rushed over the redhead, she nearly recognizing the man from-

Bruise and needlepoint met her as she strayed from the trail of caffeine leaking from his face. She almost saw soreness painted across his body, hidden just under the filthy button-up and ripping slacks. The doctors were damn bears to these junkies, sometimes.

“My brother,” she adopted a distance, face an emotive sort of foggy, “he was in the marines in seventy-one.” The waitress carried a mess of over-easy and grease to the crossworder. “He went missing, though.” Melodrama flowed, the redhead’s heart bleeding crimson sympathy. A peculiar type of silence overtook the diner as the jukebox paused to pick a new record.

Scratch. Static. Song.

“Sorry t’urr that,” mumbled Jack, his voice no longer cracking sharp notes and sparks. He strayed from the girl’s heartbreaking green eyes and was truly sorry to hear it. A long ago relative had to have been Irish, the heritage peppering her face in pockmarked freckles. Her hair, wrenched backward, fell as a longish, wavy tail, wiry stragglers curling at her brow.

“They say there are still gooks out there fighting – like they just never let the war end.” Sunlight seemed to creep shyly from somewhere deep within her, like she had suffered some horrible tragedy and spent every moment trying to tilt the world back toward goodness.


Maybe that was why she stayed at a diner all night, looking to be bothered.

Maybe it wasn’t.

The place was a derelict jailhouse, guards’ ghosts chewing toothpicks at the edges, double-decker of cells stacked up against an outdoor set of hallways, one window, one door per. Buckethanded, the redhead jabbed fruitless at an ice machine tuck next to a janitor’s closet, sunken into the walls to hide from rain and sunshine. Stab had given to ache, and she was too full of steam to fit into the ringleader’s embarrassingly humble abode. The machine stuttered and coughed disagreeance, and she cursed at it, resigning. Lurching instead into the night, she strolled past the motel’s pool, gate chained shut, not yet reopened for the season. Nothing crept around showing that it had ever been filled.

Oil dripped from the sky, leaking down over the sleepy excuse for metropolitan peppering eye-level with starry window lights. A hand caught her jacket’s sagging pocket, fishing out a package of Pall Malls. Remembrance faltered as she patted down her clothes in search of fire, the white sucker-pop sticking flaccidly from her lips, unlit. Light peeked sheepishly from the attendant’s office, so she waltzed therewardly, cigarette tuck back between her fingers, nestled between chipping polish.

A chirping sort of broken buzz escaped the door, tugging the attendant upward, head meeting her before his eyes rose from a magazine. “D’you’ve a m’ehtch?” she blurted, presenting the cigarette before he made any indication of customer service.

“Umm…” he yawned, patting down denim pockets. His face was natural, with the dirt and stubble that comes with making every day attempts at Renaissance Man handiness. Eyes sat safely behind wire framed lenses, dullish brown hair like fall’s leaves in spring fell with a tamed curl onto his forehead. A body strongly cut by hard work and sporadic nutrition hid inside a white t-shirt, grey pullover on top, both pointing loosely toward well-worn 501’s. “Yeah,” he looked around, “one second.” Bouncing from his chair, roll landed filthy white sneakers on the floor, pulling him to some back room kind of place, disappearing.

The redhead leaned her elbows on his desk, glancing uninterestedly at uninteresting things. Nothing flinched, the only sound drawers opening and closing behind a door left ajar. She recognized a youngish twin of the man in a picture; he was holding a hooked fish, a fatherlike creature with a frozen grin leaned sunburned next to him.

A Zippo tuck between his fingers, the man pushed back through the door. “Got it,” he presented, flipping its top around a hinge fingers sliding against the serration of its lock atop. Pall Mall returning to her lips, she leaned inward toward the uneasy flame, locking eyes on its tumultuous dance. With her caught in cathartic unfocus in the nursing first drag, he let himself study the raccoon markings around her eyes, blush-tinted swell in her cheek. Camelot rioted within for a moment, wanting to right her wrongs.

Then she looked back up at him.

Then the door buzzed, a slight woman pushing at it with a suitcase that looked to be upholstered with an oriental rug. Without difficulty, she could have climbed into it and hardly affected its weight. A crooked, coffee-stained smile peeked from her lips as she cleared the threshold. Wide eyes in dull grey-blue bulged behind bottle-top glasses, glowed somehow under knotted blonde bangs like shook up ginger ale. Sticking strangledly from the luggage, a grey sleeve waved as she slumped, dropping it to the ground.

Suddenly feeling tumorous, the redhead smiled a least-you-could-do kind of thank you toward the attendant and sidestepped the woman, leaving a nicotine trail in her wake. The door buzzed again, she catching breeze of his asking, “How can I he-“

Idling softly, the blonde woman’s car sat just outside the office, front tire leaning unsteadily on the curb’s cracked lip. It was a bluish sedan that fit the start of the ending decade. Breathing another cloud of smoke, she peered in through the cracked-open window; another suitcase in a similar pattern sat in its back seat, escorted by a handful of Dixie cups, a sandwich wrapper, and a can of Coca Cola that had spilled out onto the floor mats. The passenger seat was a mess of paper; notebooks and loose sheets were scattered across the dashboard, spilled over the gearshift, and tuck between the seats. The sight gave Sarah a peculiar sickish feeling in the pit of her stomach, and she stepped away from the car with a retching frown stretched across her face.

The vacancy light flickered and died.

There was still no ice.

The second-biggest problem was that she still had not met anybody exactly her own age. Night was enjoying its last fleeting moments, the pink-and-blue nursery colors of dawn threatening to cover the whole sky all at once, now crawling from a hazy horizon to the east. It never bothered to get all that dark in the city, anyway. Streetlights and nightclubs and gunshot pyrotechnics wrapped the nighttime sky in a cellophane paper of musty orange. Even so, that very first chapter of morning had a habit of swallowing up the colors of the shoreline and spilling them out along the accusatory tips of the skyscrapers’ fingertips, letting them drip down to the avenues and boulevards below.

It was wasted on the girl. She, tuck into a dripping alley, stared vacantly toward a vending machine tuck glimmering between a bus stop’s benches. An old man with more beard than face was leaned up against it, broken-down posture and clamped eyelids indicating an extended stay. He had a cardboard sign nestled in his lap, but she could not quite make it out. Knowing it would not help, she pushed a pair of tortoiseshell Wayfarers up the bridge of her impish, upturned nose.

She sat at the helm of an arguably white two-door that could legally drink, it being entirely unremarkable but for a corroded scar along the seam of its driver’s side door. Her hand was draped across it, hanging limply out the window, and she traced its jagged flakes with two fingers – a bandage on one, and a smoldering Lucky balancing above the other. Her wrist was pressed against the car door, unable to tell any stories, and got lost at her elbow in a folded and pushed-up green sleeve. It pointed to a hood that matted down a tangerine crop of ratty styluses, a zipper that hid the logo of an east-coast record store she had never entered, a ribbed seam that fell onto dark denim legs that ended in apocalypse-worn orange sneakers.

From a center console cup holder, a cell phone started to tweet, bouncing sound through the fiberglass cabin and out through the driver’s side window. She jumped, but made no motion to silence the beast, its chirping melting into vague background noise alongside thumping newspaper deliveries and howling stray dogs. The girl’s hand found the ignition, wrapping around it with a palm dressed in bandages. Engine sparking, the car hummed to life and she adjusted her posture.

The phone stopped ringing.

Just past the shotgun side, a door moved, then pivoted about its hinges, screaming in protest. In the doorway stood a youngish man with reedy blonde hair sweeping more to one side than the other. It swirled and got weirdly matted in the sweat painting his forehead, aimed downward along with a tight frown toward a light tee shirt zipped under a grey pullover. Either sleeve’s end was punctuated with balled fists. He eyed the dormant car, and pounced, closing the distance between in two panicked strides. Steam jumped from his pores as he crushed the foam in the passenger’s seat, slamming the door.

“Whea’s Eddie?” jumped from her lips in a raspy, childlike kind of voice, a muffled kind of across-the-pond accent licking indistinctly at the words. She shot at the passenger with a prickly glance.

“No,” he exhaled, pounding on the dashboard and pointing forward. The boy, arguably still in his teens, wore a pained look across his sunken-in kind of face, and did not make eye contact with the driver. She ground the gears, shifting into first, and the coupe coughed to life, the noise of an elevated train just above drowning the car suddenly losing and regaining traction on drying, slightly chilled pavement. The passenger gulped down big, ragged breaths and snaked a hand through the grease coating his scalp, tugging a pack of Newport Kings and a plastic lighter from his pocket. They left the alleyway sheath with a bounce off the edge of a chain-link fence, and an over correction off the bricks of a desirable for-sale first-floor retail space.

“It wasn’t any good,” seeped through his teeth flanking nicotine mist. “It was all ready to go though, but Noble wanted it dosed, first.” The boy’s head shook, strands of hair scratching at his eyes. “Poor Eddie ended up takin’ it, and he was on the floor like that,” he raised his hand, but forgot to snap, instead pounding it on the door and giving an accusatory stare out the window.

“Poor Eddie,” she echoed.

“The whole damn thing blew up, and somebody got the Bulls on the line before Noble could grab anybody but Eddie. His muscle started toward the leftovers, so I split.” His eyes were bulging, and cherry-red lines cut through them at weird intervals. Her phone buzzed a voicemail reminder. “If Eddie comes out of it, though,” he took a long mouthful of tar, “if Eddie comes out of it, he’ll let slip that you were here, too.”

“Poor Eddie.”

“Bulls’re gonna be on us soon – we’ve gotta get outta town and let this simmer.” The kid’s movements slowed momentarily, but then his hands ended up in the air, “Noble took the goddamn brick on top of it – probably unload the garbage on some junkies come the weekend. What we nee-“

“I’ll find th’Soap, get him werkin’ on this. In the meanwhile, keep poor Eddie un-deh your hat – might have t’pin it to him at worst.” Police sirens echoed fainly along the steel-and-glass chasm. “Noble’s not goin’ t’sic th’Bulls on us right away – he’ll keep-em in his pocket. Don’t worry too much ‘en that.”

The sky was turning a more violent mixture of lilac and saffron, it being unusually proud this morning. She checked the time on a plastic Casio, the tape deck’s clock incorrect. Ahead, a streetlight turned from forest to fire, and her foot landed on the brake, car staring down an uninterested sedan headed opposite. The girl looked to be caught in a slight daze, eyes landing heavily on the housing project horizon. He allowed himself a long stare, a moment of curiosity.

Her sleeves were still tuck partway up her arms, bunched just before knobby elbows. The feet of a purple bruise licked at the edge of the closer, but it did not hold his attention. Clasped around the gearshift, her hand afforded him a voyeuristic view of four scabbed and scarred tears across her wrist, stitched just around the base of her palm and reaching roughly to the contorted bone protruding at either side. Another two, showing a different age, were drawn more jaggedly at the trunk of her forearm. A war waged within his better and worse judgment, and he forced himself to look away, instead taking the last stubby draw from his cigarette and tossing it through the shotgun window.

The light turned green.

She had felt his eyes hungrily taking in her life’s story, and pulled the gearshift getting hit with a salty wave of self-conscious anger. The girl bit at her lip and the car shuddered as it moved. Morning people that oozed influence from their lapels started peppering the streets, walking briskly and doing their best to ignore their cohorts. At the next stop, both caught wind of a couple of leather-jacketed men speaking Spanish to one another, and grinning like they had both told great jokes that the other had not yet caught. A map of the closely surrounding area began to paint itself in the girl’s mind, rather than an obligatory point westward.

They bounced over a pothole still sodden with last night’s rain, and the car began to pick up speed, more than necessary or safe on the cramped single-lane routes of the city’s seedy borough. She crooked her head downward, and furrowed her brow just enough to keep from looking angry, glancing between the stretched-out blur of road ahead, and her passenger.

“C’mon, slow down. What’re you doing?” he coughed, lips narrowing into a sutured line and eyes yawning open. He did not know the girl, not well enough to trust her and her suicidal track marks, anyway. “Hey, you even listenin’?” She was probably some tweaked-out junkie, herself. He hedged a bet that she had cut the brick badly, and all but killed poor Eddie. “Stop the car!”

She batted his hand from the gearshift and snarled a peculiar, mechanical kind of noise like steam blowing the weld off of a pressure gauge. Odds were good that the jerk had cut the brick with fabric softener to make a buck on his own, and thrown poor Eddie to the wolves. Odds were good that he was going to do the same to her.

At a diner a few blocks away, the cook knew her face pretty well. She grit her teeth like she was trying to crush them, and choked back a prayer. Just ahead, a streetlight went golden, then crimson. They were pushing forty-five, the signs begging twenty fewer.

She stomped the gas and pulled the wheel, hard, the small car sliding shotgun-first into the intersection, its driver’s side lifting lightly from the ground. They both let out their own variety of yelps, but were quickly overpowered by an incredible noise bouncing through the cabin. The space shrunk in an awfully foreign way, passenger’s side door meeting with the grille of an illegally parked van. His side crumpled inward as hers bowed out, glass confetti showering the inside of the car. Both were thrown rightward: he colliding hard with bits of everything, and getting pinned awkwardly into a crunching C-shape, she being met with powerful whiplash, both thighs splitting as they crashed into the car’s suddenly defunct steering column. Another jolt sent them forward, the car’s front wheels, and morsels of its low-hanging underside catching on the curb, springing to a sudden stop that threw plastic dashboard at their respective foreheads. A second too late, the steering wheel cracked open, a white punching-bag hurling the girl’s head backward into her seat, a lens of her glasses cracking over a tightly-clamped eye.

Blood seeped between her teeth, gnashed tooth-marks cut into her tongue. A blink opened her eyes to stinging whiteness and hazy grey specters. Only a moment had passed, the dashboard’s clock reading the same incorrect time. Dirty water flooded the world, and seeped into her ears and eyes. It kept everything moving, and laced spiderweb cracks along the edges of her consciousness. A vague buzzing or whine muted her surroundings. To her left, a blurred head with a blonde mass of mop bristles lolled, slowly, sideward. Its forehead was indiscernible, but vaguely dark red all over.

Her arm moved itself along the door’s handle, sleeve catching and ripping on a long finger of glass. She heard herself scream, but felt a bruised looseness in her shoulder more than the ruddy gash freshly torn obliquely across her elbow. Tendons disagreeing, flexing, screaming, she pushed at the door, it all but disappearing as an acidic breeze of monochrome city smells saturated the cabin. It lurched, slightly, back, sticking on the street corner’s nametag.

All the same, she rolled from the seat, a pungent variety of smells hitting her as her hands landed and rolled on the littered cement. It felt like glass patchwork and reflected the sunlight off glistening gasoline gulf-streams. Something more reflective than fabric jumped from the cushion of her seat, landing eye-level at the floormat height of her face. She reached for the mysterious, monolithic gem, it mirroring formlessly the floor of her somehow dripping hand. The device buzzed as she grabbed it, and it fell from her shaking hand, landing on a corner, its lifeblood back end cracking from its holster and bouncing spastically into the cavelike expanse beneath the car. Back arched, arm scrapingly outstretched across the rocky street, she crawled her fingers outward, unable to lay a pad on the maverick piece.

She pulled back, slicing open her ring finger on an unhappy shard of glass. It stung almost immediately, cauterized by the mixture of gasoline and mysteries soaking the cavern’s floor. Her feet found stability, body heaving hard against the car, arms pushing downward onto its roof. The passenger only made sorrowful, sloppy movements, any noises lost to the square wave still filling her ears.

Snarling, the trunk sat unevenly, lock having released at the first impact. It looked unnatural, hanging open, more to one side than the other.

“Poor Eddie,” she thought, or rather, felt herself mumble.

A sickish feeling bubbled in the bottom of her throat, but she swallowed it back for a time. Feet somehow brought her to the car’s rear, and she bent her fingers under the trunk’s top, pulling at it. Only, after a few inches it disagreed, refusing to budge. Around, a scene was being made, six, or half a dozen people dotting the first edges of a removed circle. They frowned and choked on sips of coffee, snapping pictures with their telephones. She frowned, too, looking condemningly at the trunk. Gulping back another carbonated pang, she stepped back, then forward, heel colliding with it. Again. Again. Something loud and despondent snapped, and the metal yawned open, revealing a carpeted cubby, empty but for a heavy flashlight and a plastic grocery bag wrapped and taped into a loosely bricklike shape.

Grabbed, and tuck into a jacket pocket, this disappeared. The girl took a few stumbling steps away still leaning hard on the car. Her face met a sudden surge of feeling, and a bruise pulsed around the tortoiseshell plastic pushed deeply, bent downward, onto her cheek. She pulled the glasses from her face, and tuck them into her jacket as well. Eyes went fuzzier, and floating specks danced around the edges of her vision. She landed both arms on the car’s top, then glanced away from it, emptying her stomach onto the cement.

The acidic taste in her mouth brought her back to focus, and she tripped along the back of the illegally parked van, only one onlooker making any effort to stop her. “Cahwl an ambulench,” she barked unsteadily as he instructed her to lay down. She kept walking, white tiled walls of the mildly familiar diner misty, but within sight. It sat at the feet of an apartment complex in the middle of renovations, and scaffolding was stapled above the building, a towering yellow crane sticking up like a spire from the alleyway next to it.

This was the city’s edge, and lacked the semblance of cleanliness apparent in its bustling commercial center, and high-end residences. The world had not been taped and glued together correctly here, after it was found to wrap around a sphere, rather than end in a diving board.

Streets turned to alleyways, and trains raced along gutter work bulging from scattered cement aqueducts. Illegible graffiti tagged every door’s handle, buildings and streets bought, sold, earned, lost, without money or acknowledgement ever changing hands. Hers met with the mint-colored doorframe, and she collapsed her way inside.

A veteran waitress, cigarette hanging limply from a plump lip widened her eyes at the girl, the door’s bell having pulled her attention from a romance novel. One customer, the only, sat uninterested with the visitor, he not allowing anything break his stare from a pile of scrambled eggs. He was tired looking, with a resigned sort of face that made it seem as if that breakfast was the first good thing to happen to him since his first kiss. A brownish-red jacket with patches on the shoulders covered his top, hanging limply across a certain broadness that is reserved for people who sit and contemplate themselves over scrambled eggs.

“Oh my god, are you alr-“

“Washroom,” she interrupted, already pointed toward it. As she shuffled forward, she made a movement to pull her hood from her hairline.

“Sure, hun. Are you okay? You look-“ she stopped, words catching in her throat as she choked down the bloodied gashes along the girl’s arms. Her silence was met with the imposing clunk of the bathroom’s door. Over the kitchen’s counter, a tumor of a man appeared, his hair, long and greyed, plastered to his brow and ears.

“What’s that,” he barked, rubbing at his forehead with a damp rag.

“Girl just came in here lookin’ like death, thought I heard a car crash a second ago. I’m going to call for an ambulance.”

He nodded, the waitress walking briskly toward the telephone, dialing an arguably only-for-emergencies number. Abandoning a mound of hash browns, the cook peeked past the front door, catching glimpse of a growing group an intersection away.

From the washroom came a muffled pukelike noise. The girl had made a mess of the sink, washing pieces of ground out of her arm. She lost the remnants of her stomach after some heavy breathing, pulling a piece of glass from her cheek. The water ran for a few moments, and she almost got lost in it, vision starting to turn black. But, splashing some of it on her face, she came to. Tornadoes raged inside of her, hands shaking as she let the water wash over her flayed palms. The door creaked, starting to move as the cook pushed it open. His eyes bulged at the sight of the small girl, her knobby frame hunched brokenly over the sink, various colors leaking out of her.

“Lissun,” she croaked, clearing her throat, twisting enough to meet him with a mostly useless eye. “Lissun, I’ll clean this up ahn…ahn make y’er trouble worth it. But I’ve to get – make sure my frien’s okay.” She tried to disallow him a chance to disagree, but his soggy, big frame blocked the doorway, calling her bluff.

He knew who she was, had landed a couple of lecherous glances on her youngish frame in the past. Also knew that she had come in with unsavory friends, before. Knew that those friends would know that she came here after a car crash. Those friends would pin a disappearing college girl at his feet. “You’ll need a few bucks,” he reached into his pocket, pulling a thick block of leather from it, and extracting a handful of dollars from that. He slipped them into her hood, hands still dying the sinkwater messy pink. “You need a phone, or anything?”

Thought landed briefly at the powerless phone tuck thankfully into her pocket, and she shook at no toward the man. He nodded, and moved from the door’s frame, holding it open for her. “You should leave,” he emitted, with the vigor and authority of a man without vigor or authority. She frowned, tears staining the corners of her eyes, and bounced from the room, leaving the man with a sink poised to overflow. She met the fire door with the bulk of her power, and fell through it as a largely ignored alarm sounded. The waitress peered toward it, on hold with an emergency dispatcher, the customer chewing, stare having moved out the window toward the edge of a small crowd watching something interesting.

Different graffiti waved to her from the side of a dumpster, and she sidled up against it for a handful of moments, adjusting to the alleyway’s top-down sunlight. She pulled her sleeves down, and her hood up, turning all but invisible. Around aborted visions of construction, she found the next street, and eyed a subway station.

The girl fell asleep on the green line, headed west.

She woke with a shot. Long, wet curls of red coated her eyes, and it was still dark. But the blinds were drawn, and sunlight crept meekly in through their seams. The room was a forgettable blur of beige floral paper and water-damaged carpet. At some point, she thought, she must have collapsed herself into bed alongside the ringleader. It was small and lumpy, she remembered then, and when she tried to push herself away from him, the mattress creased awkwardly and threatened to drop her to the floor. Hair pulled lazily away, she let her eyes adjust to the midday darkness. A clock flashed midnight and noon, and sprayed neon red along the bedsheets and bathroom door. Nothing else moved.

Leaning from the bedframe, toes rolled on the carpet and she felt it scratch at the soles of her feet. Broken looking fingers twisted the plastic tab hanging next to the window, and they moved in a segmented line. Gutters and alleyways of light flooded the room, painting themselves like sideways-pointed jail bars across the walls. A big, stuck-to-the-wall mirror, echoing the bars, showed her that she had slept in the evening’s tee shirt and jeans. A gross kind of sleep-induced sweat discolored the shirt, darkened the roots of her hair, flushed her cheeks.

She arched her back and looked somewhere else in the mirror for a moment, but then she smiled and remembered that she had a few cracked teeth and her cheek was a bruise of yellow and purple, and more than that, she was a carnival freak. And she did not want to smile, or see the mirror anymore, so she climbed into her shoes and found a pair of Wayfarers and escaped outside.

And outside it was hot. It was that heavy, sticky kind of bad hot that means that you better find an umbrella because the sky is going to get mad and turn torrential come night. Already, unhappy clouds painted far west, but the sun was unobstructed overhead, hanging somewhere that felt probably like ten o’clock.

The Ginger Ale blonde was sitting at the pool, covered in a blue tee and jeans rolled to her ankles. She had a can of Coke on the end-table next to her and it had sweat a ring of water around its bottom rim, staining the cover of a darkish paperback with a long title in gold. A composition journal was balanced on her knees, and she was scribbling into it quickly. Sarah started to frown, noticing a mess of papers sticking haphazardly from the book, tuck into the journal. Until-

“Morning, Sarah,” a man snorted, reading eleven-thirty off of a gaudy gold watch. He was the human wrecking ball, a bulbous lump of a man, leaned and spilled over the pool’s railing, puffing at a stubby cigar stump. His hand left the railing and gave a small wave to the redhead, and his fat, red-haired arms swayed as they peeked from the sleeves of a tan polo shirt. He had gotten all of his mother’s blood, she being Irish, and a prostitute in New York – his father, an Italian of second or third generation, had not been around much. The bear was entirely covered in unkempt tufts of curly auburn hair: it was almost gone from his head, but spilled from his collar, and coated his legs, sticking from denim shorts. A few days earlier, he had decided to get rid of his bushy beard, and she thought his face looked naked and weirdly too young without it.

“Hey,” she shouted back, moving to close the distance between the two. The blonde looked up briefly at the scene, but squinted at the glaring sun and turned away.

He let go a halting kind of cough that left a pause a moment after. “Have you eaten yet?” he spoke like anyone from anywhere, a hearty, warm kind of voice missing any origin.

“No – jus’ goddup,” she leaned herself onto the rail, opposite him. He thought she was really fucking perfect, in that she was nothing like his mother, but also kind of was just like her. Someday, he knew, they would move to somewhere that was not a city and they would be very happy. “What-sat?” she interrupted, gesturing toward his pants.

A racing form stuck from his pocket, looking worn and crinkled and sun-scorched. He patted at it, pulling it from its holster and studying it. “Oh. Haven’t worn these in a while. This was from Culver last fall,” he smiled, daydream slipping from the future to the past. “Tim and me made a bundle that day.” She looked away, glancing sadly at the blonde woman again, and he noticed her disinterest. “Let’s go – my treat. Bet’chu there’s a good place somewhere in town.”

Town was only a short walk, the church van in use somewhere. They settled upon a familiar kind of place – a diner that was mostly dirty windows. It was a vinyl stamp at the corner of two nothing streets, filling a quota to which every town ascribed. The waitresses had changed shifts, this morning’s a small brunette with a jealous kind of smile and a tongue that kept cracking her gum. She looked angry, looked like she was stuck like that.

They placed themselves in a booth near the door.

Okay, so Exile Records, which was like the best place in town for music, sat at the foot of Fifth Street, right off of Madison in Union Square. It sold a lot of old vinyl, and some newer kind of stuff, usually that was on cds, but sometimes those were records, too. And all day, music would pump out of this bad stereo set up towards the back, and it would play a library of top-forty songs from the past sixty or seventy years. And it was all on shuffle, so sometimes it would not sound right at all when one would end and the next would start.

So anyway, Ed lived above Exile Records, and his hearing was not really the best, so it did not bother him that the Jacksons would bounce through the plumbing, and Crüe would tear through the carpet, and Ella would shake the doorframe all day. Without all of the other sounds layered on top of it, he liked the deep th-thump, th-thump of the bass lines seeping through the floor. But that was where Ed lived, and that was where the girl lived, because she did not have a place of her own, and had lived with Ed since she was five and he had kind of like raised her after everything happened with her parents. Maybe.

She was there at the kitchen table, which was just a card table with four mismatched chairs around it because neither of them had a good enough job to invest in decent furniture. She was there, and she had a Lucky Strike perched, smoldering at the corner of her mouth and a super bad sickish feeling bubbling in her throat.

And a grey kind of drizzle had smattered itself across the city, and it licked at the apartment’s windows. It seeped in around them, too, because the seal had kind of cracked and gone bad around most of them a long time ago. She watched sweaty droplets bead themselves around the window’s frame and struggled against something old creeping through the ducts.

The brick sat, plastic-bagged, quietly announcing itself from its soap-box kitchen table.

Ed filled up a Mickey Mouse glass with water from the sink, and put it down in front of her. He was a giant, with pockmarked, limp skin hanging from his cheeks and pitiful wisps of blonde hair streaked across his scalp. A grunting noise thumped out through his baked-bean teeth, and he sat down across from her, watching her watch the rain. For a long time, they sat there, neither saying a word until she took a sip from the water.

“What now?” she gulped heavily at the water, feeling the weird, fuzzy texture of the printed cartoon mouse on her palm.

The ogre shook his head, deeply-set lines frowning through his cheeks. “Wh’ull wait f’er Noble. Mah-bee get Eddie bag too.” He had caught most of the details when she had burst through the door with welled up eyes like a little girl whose dog had gone missing.

“Noble’s th-fuc-“

“Can’t ger-rup in arms jus’ yet, Fara,” he placed his meaty pawn on the table, leaning inward rather imposingly. “Whud’dubowt th’udder guy?”

“He was in th’car. I mean, he’ll…he’ll probably be fine. I needed a-“

He nodded.

“This’us so fucked, Ed. Even if Eddie doesn’t say nothing, Noble’ll know damn-fucking well I ’s there with’um.” She felt the sickish feeling get worse, and took another big swig of the lukewarm water. “I’ve got’tuh get to work.”

Okay, work was Espresso Royale. It was a café at the edge of a pile of condemned section eight housing that was probably going to be reopened as condominiums for bohemian twenty-somethings, maybe. Jazz or artist-of-the-month sponsored folk music streamed quietly through a system in the ceiling all day, and made it kind of cool and sophisticated feeling in there.

So, between seven and nine in the morning, a bunch of self-important suits would rush in and yell something Italian and not tip and rush out. A similar crowd would show up again at like four in the afternoon, but they would be a lot less hurried, and try to make small talk, and joke about the names of drinks. That part was really awful.

But the rest of the day was almost barren, though. There would be this handful of regulars: college-aged kids that would order big, cold drinks and some fatty kind of pastry and sit out front with books and cigarettes and make pop-savvy jokes for hours on end; an elderly couple that would each just order coffee with cream, and split a piece of pie a little after lunchtime; and one lonely-looking guy with really nice suits that would rotate every three or four days who had been writing a novel, or something, since she had started work there more than a year ago. He would order one drink, usually a black coffee and put a dollar in the tip jar, when he got there around ten, most of the time, and then drink it slowly and write. And then at like one-ish, he would get an iced tea and a bagel and sit there writing or reading the newspaper for another hour or so, and that was all the contact that they ever had.

The only other people who were ever there were the ugly-as-hell Polish lady that ended up owning the place after her husband had been in a car crash and barely even spoke any English, and her half-Polish-half-other-stuff son, who was almost thirty and spent the whole day smoking and baking pastries in the kitchen. There was also Aldo, the delivery guy for coffee supplier.

Aldo was probably only a couple of years older than the girl, but it was really hard to tell, because he was always wearing this perfect-toothed grin that had cut lines into his face before his driver’s license was issued. He had darkish brown hair that he combed forward over his forehead, and it curled when it dried, so it never really got into his eyes, even though it was probably long-enough. Eyes were a hazel-green, but, then, also looked kind of bluish when it was cloudy out, or he had on the right color shirt. And they were always a little bit squinting because he was smiling. His shirts were all these papery kind of collared ones that were wrinkled fiercely, and he would roll their sleeves up, and sometimes wear a loose tie even though he was really just a delivery boy. And sometimes, he would complain that not enough stores carried his size, because he was a pretty average height, but skinny from running charity 5Ks all the time, and putting enough calories of effort into everything he did that he could really eat their pastries all day and not gain a pound, probably.

She kind of loved him, but sometimes thought that there were probably decomposing prostitutes in his bedroom closet, because he was just so damn good all the time. Maybe.

But whatever, because Aldo did not even come that day, because he came on Thursdays, and it was only Wednesday. So she spent the bulk of her work-hours in a hazy, scabbed-over malaise. She spent them pouring coffee listlessly groggy. Spent them steaming milk mechanically. Looking through the windows.

They closed at ten, so she usually was done cleaning off the tables and wiping out the machines around ten-thirty, or later, sometimes. Most nights, when was back home, which was like eleven, usually, she would browse through the records at Exile for a while. Ed was friends with the owner, who was this middle-aged guy with super bad acne scars and long hair, and he had gotten a key for just this purpose. She would spend some time looking at the covers, rifling through the dollar bin, recognizing and not recognizing names. And she would pick one that was maybe better than the rest, and bring it upstairs. Spinning it in her fingers, she would pick either side, and put it on the record player in her room, which was just a little table-top thing with bass-less speakers and a needle that stuck sometimes. Most nights, she would put it on, and keep the volume pretty quiet-like, and just let it play through until it stuck, or she fell asleep.