"Cigarette and Powder Burns" : A Drama in Four Acts

Six months later...

He had been a canker on the side of her mouth. Feeding on her and making her wince every time he made himself known. She had almost gone crazy when November finally let up, and had gone back to Seattle to lay out a new life for almost a few weeks. But the tourist had burnt through the rest of his east-coast sensibility and crossed the line again.

Fara stood a block away from Exile Records, a straight shot out, where the blocks met at an uneven corner. The winter air bit deeply into her cheeks, cutting red lines across her forehead. It made the flame from a match dance a stupid kind of jerking tango that kept pulling it away from the beat-up and humidly damp end of a Lucky Strike. It caught, and she dropped the match without waving it out, took a step without breathing, blinked regret from her eyes without shedding a tear. Her foot crunched against the cement’s unabated toupee of snow. Long, black Doc Martens laced her legs, and kept her warm and dry, disassociated from the city. A dark wash of skinny 501s tuck themselves under the thick leather. The girl was wrapped up in a lightish grey trench with a belted waist and a high collar that she had turned up when she left the train station. On its breast, she wore a little red pin that read “Seattle Children’s Home” in green letters.

Even from a few blocks away, the place was a wreck. Two gargantuan windows had been replaced with cracked and graffiti’d wood. A third had a plastic sheet taped over it, and it flapped pathetically in the wind. Even above, one of the windows to Ed’s apartment, her home, had been cracked – a rock thrown through. She wondered, for a moment, who had covered the façade so quickly. No lights were on, but she could assume the barren and derelict state of the store.

Her hands were dug deeply into black gloves, and she felt the fuzzy itch of wool as she pulled at the door handle, its metallic chime mocking her entrance. A sign had fallen from the wall. She picked it up:

“After twenty years in San Paro, Exile Records will be closing its doors.
We thank the community for all of its support.
God bless you and yours this holiday season.
Happy New Year!
-Management”

Its origin, too, was a mystery - the number was not even right. She flicked on the light switch by habit; nobody had told the power company yet. The shelves had been picked clean, vultures from the city scrounging any stray bit of vinyl and cardboard they could find. The sight made her feel very sick, and she kept her eyes kind of closed as she duck through to the back stairs.

There were gaping holes in the drywall that oozed in insulation and seeped wood splinters. Pushing on her glasses, the girl started up the stairs. Two steps had completely caved in, and she worried about the stability of the rest.

The door did not even have a handle anymore - it was just cracked edges and frayed lines. Inside was hardly better. The green lamp that she had gotten from a garage sale was shattered along the floor, glass littering the carpet. The coffee table they had rescued from a garbage collector was split in two. Shiny black ravens of gunshot wounds painted the exterior wall. All the pretty little dull-blue flowers printed on the couch seemed to be in mourning, it bleeding cotton fatally from a thick vein.

“In here.” It was Alice’s voice – bored and analytical of the situation. She had called Fara less than a day ago, woken her from a delightfully sound sleep with news that Ed had been attacked and shot. “There is coffee in the pot,” the woman appeared in the doorway to Ed’s bedroom, her skeleton figure hardly filling a third of its width. She had come by to bring groceries to the man, a task she inherited from the brat’s skipping town. At entering, she had found the ogre collapsed over a broken coffee table, eyes fluttering, sweat and blood leaking through his shirt. “Still isn’t saying anything other than See-Fur.” The blonde shrugged and peered into the room at something. “Probably means more to you than me, hmm?”

Basically, it's just a smash up he told me. It was all just supposed to be a monetary movement, to let the G's get their business outfront. Man, what a fuck-up he turned out to be - Sometimes... The cold winter day lashed through the wool jacket and bandanna, invisible fingers tearing through fabric to lay their icy grip on the man who wore it more like a badge than a garment. It was dark, but the snow on the streets reflected the lights above like an inverted Aurora Borealis, causing queer reflections to dance methodically and menacingly on the walls where the rats called citizens moved about trying to shield themselves from those same fingers he welcomed.

He had been given a job (finally) that didn't involve baby-sitting some runt and making sure they knew the 'ins-and-outs' of being a 'criminal'. It had begun to disgust him, having to act like some post-maternal nurse maid running milk bottles between the crying mouths of little bastards and bitches. He had enough, and wanted to put an M-80 in the ward so he could listen to them all wail when the explosion hurt their little ears. It was going to be a symphony to him though, a sweet sound of awakening that those children needed.

The chime rang as it always did when someone entered, and it was the fuse to him; it was that hiss that foretold of impending peril that only he could hear. The symphony was about to begin he thought to himself, this time it was all his conducting that would pay for some food, coffee, and gas. He tapped on the glass of a display case, like a conductor tapping his baton - three quick taps was enough to bring Ed out front. Sephr had always admired the sheer size of the man, thinking 'T'hell'd I do if I got'n'ta a rukus w'im?'. He hopped that all that thinking would pay off.

Ed nodded silently, knowing how Sephr preferred not to talk but silently and quickly said "Coffee's in th'back." as he pointed toward the door that held an "employees only" sign on it. Sephr Motioned in return, causing Ed to turn his back and make his way through the door. Sephr wondered if Ed would walk, run, or even ever make it though that door again - but it really wasn't his concern and he quickly dismissed the thought. As he followed Ed into the back, he silently placed receivers he pulled from his pocket on what he thought was the right spot.

Ed started to pour the coffee.
"None f'me t'day."
Ed put the coffee down.
"N'y'gun too."

An inquisitive look crossed Ed's face as he looked back seeing Sephr hold a device which began to beep when the lid of it was flipped open. "Y'got th'eas' way... Or th'ard way." Ed charged, his full weight barreling down on the much thinner, sleeker red-headed mutt. "Th'ard way it is" Sephr managed to blurt, before his breath was taken away as Ed's shoulder rammed into his gut. The crescendo had begun.

The moon was burgundy mallow at the edge of the sky, it already melting into the horizon. She was in bad need of a haircut, ruddy orange locks plastered to the swell of her cheeks by sticky, dirty, city snow. The el train shuddered and whined, dipping into a subway tunnel. Its lights flickered, painting the girl as a harsh silhouette against the yellowed windows. She stood, a thin wrist exposed, gloved hand clamped tightly around a steel pipe, grey sleeve wilting, bunched midway toward her elbow.

“Ask the Landlord,” Alice had suggested, her voice never hinting at interest or emotion. “Takes up in Creston, hmm?”

Over a tinny, muffled speaker oozed the words Creston Heights. Rust was creeping along the doors, and she had to push hard at their housing to get them open. They flaked and ripped at her touch, and a stray bit of corroded metal caught on her glove. It snagged the wool, and sliced jaggedly into her finger. Instinctively, she pulled her hand back, wincing, frowning at the thin line of blood.

She stepped from the car, moving over the threshold onto the station’s wooden planks. It was under construction, evidently, and ghostlike tarps of white-clear plastic hung from scaffold rails, and stuck to mostly tiled walls. She stomped up the cement staircase and was slapped with a vision of the parts you throw away. A tornado of newspaper shards enveloped and released her into the chugging row of tagged and tarnished factories. Some old Lincoln nearby stuttered and coughed to life, its tailpipe shuddering disapprovingly.

Cutting down past Ninth and Hennepin, the redhead ducked into an alleyway between a double-handful of apartments or the like. She stitched between two tinder-box tenement buildings, feeling the stare of insomniac addicts sucking at cigarettes on their balconies above. Someone spat, and it landed near to her feet.

It was hardly more than a woodshed, where the landlord sat in wait. In a clearing or a footprint of something gone, it stood vaguely crooked, leaning onto a wrought-iron fence. He was a slimy bullfrog of a man. Thin, brackish hair fell wiry out from an off-white knit cap. The plastic hood of a murky blue raincoat drooped lazily over that, and sneezed a shadow around the fatty edges of his face. Eyes were invisible behind black horn-rimmed glasses. A thin pencil moustache perched itself above his lip, and he weirdly lapped at it with his tongue when she marched into his lair. Tinny wind-chime sounds escorted her through a decaying rot of door.

“Miss Yazin. Miss Yazin. Miss Yazin.” He had a heavy, gravy-thick voice that swam in a frothy kind of stew of spits and bubbling noises. The bullfrog king made a movement to get up from his folding-chair throne. Jacket unbunched, and showed a plaid tie looped over a Mickey Mouse tee-shirt. “What’s the buzz?” he stuck out a pudgy stub of a hand, and she grasped it, feeling the roughness of his gloves against her cut finger.

“Th’tourist. He came after Ed.” She stared loosely at herself in his eyes. “What comes next?”

“Wild one going against daddy’s will, mmm?” He licked at the roof of his mouth. “Makin’ a play f’urr the big tme? Sheep breakin’ from th’flock, mmm? Shepard losin’ control, mmm?” His tongue shot out across his top lip. “No way to leave furr-ever,” an accusatory finger stuck out toward her pin. “Always here, never gone. No, no no.”

She dug deep into a big pocket at her waist, pulling a kind of bricklike shape wrapped in a few grocery bags. “Where?” the girl threw it partway toward him.

“Boy’s weak, says the wind.” The Landlord’s face was glued to the floor, as if waiting for the brick to unfold itself. “Not not not going nowhere yet.” Breath heavy, he pulled an inhaler from a pocket. His mouth opened to baked-bean teeth and leaking, chewed pockmarks. She felt slightly queasy. “Gone to d’uh Lighthouse with a girl. Leavin’ for Singapore come tomorrow.”

The redhead furrowed her brow and turned back toward the door. Above, a sacred heart picture looked somewhere else and judged her passive-aggressively.

She hailed a taxi.

Tides of cold weather swelled against the mist that rose from manhole-covers and drainage-grates. The mist occasionally gave shape as an entity, only to be beaten back by the harsh wind that blew through the streets and alley-ways; however, it reminded passer-bys of the forgotten memories it held in its' shapeless existence, even memories that were currently and quickly fading like the sun setting behind the towering buildings.

Jeska, the kid sister was carrying her foolish brother back to his apartment. She thought it much more of a hovel than even a shanty, but she wasn't (For once) worried about his living conditions. The bleach-blonde and black haired woman had much more concern for her brothers condition of life, and it's tenuous state.

The day-tenant and trustee of Ele and Exile Records had beaten Sephr within and inch of his life, but somehow Ed was laying face down in a burnt and broken store as the other man miraculously walked out much resembling that of a tenderized steak that has yet to be cooked. He only managed to text his sister with where he was before he passed out face down in the snow in some dirty alleyway, an alleyway that resembled a cheap cemetery more than a location for employees to smoke their cigarettes.

It was one thing to hear of him in trouble, but to see him brought to this state filled her mind with anger and her eyes with tears which froze as they touched upon her woolen jacket when they ventured down her face and made the leap from her chin. He was barely conscious with an arm slung over her shoulder, a giant messenger bag that seeped freely and wheezed with each step; but this didn't stop her from giving him an ear-full every chance she got.

When they finally reached the hovel, she quickly went to look for anything he could have to bandage his wounds. While she was trying to sort through candy-wrappers and empty Styrofoam cups for something suitable, he rifled through his pockets for his cigarettes, dumping his gun into the pile of trash next to him seemingly un-noticed. Just as he lit his smoke, another soldier bent on death burst in the door. Her defined eyes focused on the heap of trash next to where the gun had fallen, the man who had become a useless heap of rotten meat thanks to the large man who lay in an equally critical condition.

Another gun was held in delicate hands that had an angry vengeance, fed by a heart pumping with pain for what had seen this situation as treason. The heap of a man saw it as just business, even though he couldn't see through blood stained eyes he knew full well the intent. The beautiful sister saw this as a childs' game with dire consequences and could only fall to the ground and curl up as tears flowed from her eyes.

An eternity passed as three sides waited for each to make a move, the gun shaking, the cigarette burning its' final ember away and a heaving chest wanting this bad dream to end. As Jeska buried her face to steady what steel she had left in her spine she heard a shot, and upon looking up witnessed no mist from the gun of the other woman. She screamed when she saw the mist coming from her brothers gun, Sephr had taken all he had and used it as he saw fit. Ele walked over and helped Jeska to her feet, only a few lines ever were spoken in that hovel that night.

"Care fer'a coffee?"

"It wa'ne'r pers'nal, y'know..."

"I know. Now I know..."




(Sometime, somewhere, farewells turn back into hellos)