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Thank you :D

You ever sit around all day don’t know what to do? So bored of yourself that you just look at anything until you feel the rot creep up on you trying to drag you down. Well if you’re reading this, you must have some time on your hands. The name is Don Kowalski by the way.
My uncle used to say ,Gotta get out boy’ he said, ,You’re in a dark spot some time and when you’re in it keep going. Take it all, breath it in. Keep going. Always keep going.’ – ironic since he killed himself in a hunting accident out somewhere in woodland. I suppose he didn’t want to miss his prey and kept going after it. Kept going.
It started to work. For a few days you fight, and you struggle as sailors in a dry ditch or on a dry glass and you keep going, push forward and nothing comes from it until you know nothing will come from it. Such was time for me at the outbreak of our lovely new friend Covid. My one-part-off-part girlfriend Alessandra was with her family in Florida and so I shared the sunriddled apartment only with booze and screens.
Time was the enemy although it hadn’t been so from on early. It didn’t have to be this way. In the beginning, I was thrilled staying put, living only at home, downing a bottle here a bottle there took me months to realize that getting drunk wasn’t much exciting when you could do it every day. Lifting was no fun at home without the showoff.
The thrill wasn’t there without the mirrors and the others and I would not give empty testament. So I was stuck, down deep in my black chair with my greying hair clinging greasy to my head and the stubble on my face growing thicker and thicker like hedges and forests of dry metallic wires drilling themselves deep in my naked skin.
I sat on the chair, blue light penetrated me and I watched into it like someone getting lost in the sun to see caleidoscopic patterns afterwards for minutes and some stare in the dark ponds in gardens and across them and I stared into the unknown abbeys of the internet until I found something that hooked me. Interest was reborn, the cherubim and thrones sang, and I was again digging for knowledge on the riddle.
It was the case of Nathan, not Lessing’s I mind you. You got to know I’m, and I know this sounds like the start of a bad pulpy novel, I’m a PI or what the cool cats call it now. Private Investigation, looking at lives for a fuck of money but better than to slither up buttholes at the ordinary stational sedentary life I once had and was led in. I was called up, by a Mrs. Anderson, whose voice sounded like a whisky drowned chimney.
Carry Ann Anderson had called about a friend who was now dead meat. The case was solved she said but somehow it was not, not for her. There was rot on the inside of fresh timber. A fair warning here – there won’t be no solution, cause certainly me didn’t solve it. I told her so, when she called again. I hadn’t been to LA and going there was a waste, I knew as much already. For her sake I called the department over there and talked to the detective. She wasn’t going to be happy with my findings.
Gluing a mask of false politeness to my voice I asked, “So what’s the matter hm?”
“They say it’s all real simple: kid snapped and did it. But something ain’t right. You see I knew her back from the day, from Sacramento. I can tell you, this boy was no of these Columbines or Sandy Hooks, he would never hurt them.”
“That’s what the parents of those kids said too,” I said, uncomfortable silence on the other end.
“Something’s just off about this. You saw the files already?”
“Mhm. Didn’t do much good.”
“Tell you this: the officers said the same. Said it’s all there orderly and not like some coverup or some shit they tell you like the conspiracy theories on TV you know? Like they had to dig for it you know? Not too difficult and not too easy but also not in between not your textbook stuff either. Not odd he said. But said that it all around made it odd. Made it seem odd, still, somehow. Seems like not the type to do it. You know he said type? He spat them words out on me,” she said.
There I was. I made some calls asked about the kid that chopped down his family, sat his flat up like a Christmas tree and coaled it down to the ground, all in a cozy night. One day to the other and a bunch of people gone.
I find a pal of his, named Erica Cremonte. She was willing to talk. Told me when it happened and went down and all the other stuff. Other guys didn’t talk or told me how shitty they feel about it all. I dug a bit deeper inside Erica since she was the only source of water in the land of dry lands, she told me a bit more, opened up like an old lady to the cashier or waiter or the poor sod at the bus. Told me about Nathan and his family and his brother and his girlfriend her few idle feel-good weeks in Africa and the funeral. And that it didn’t make sense to her either.
And the days go by and I start to forget about the whole thing since there’s no leads and none won’t talk and I give up. Call Mrs. Anderson and tell her there is nothing and she doesn’t understand the whys in my words but she knows them and we agree to part ways and wish each other a nice day and she’s gone.
Days and weeks and months go by and I forget. Then I am locked here in front of the monitor and it all comes back and something in me stirs and after hours I stare at the profile of one Margaret Suarez and see the condolences on her Facebook profile.
I write to her and days pass me by, drinking lifting reading and boredom, the old familiar gent from around the corner walks up again until there’s a response. Asks me how I found her, what I wanted. Calls me and tells me all about the disfigured creep that slashed her mother in the office. Digs deeper and finds all the glory all the madness in the last mail, sent from her mother’s account.
He left something for us and I will share it with you. Keep in mind it’s all ludicrous but it will help pass some hours. So, the following is the written word of Nathan Cohen, brought to paper after he killed his therapist while locked up in the cuckoo’s nest.
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Sometimes I look up at the sky, at night. I wonder, is the lightning of the stars hidden by the vast dark, or is the darkness a shield? A shield that keeps us safe and calm from countless eyes that stare at us?
Back then I didn’t care for the night. The air was on fire from the red morning sun, every time the same, from grad school to that day when those good Fast Times at Ridgemont High started. In the beginning it was only dark shades of purple and crimson until the firmament turned to face blood.
A line of mystic clouds was in the sky, creeping forward like a white river. The street came alive minute by minute, looming trashmen came to empty our waste in the stark dust flying around. It was better in the hills with the cooling breeze before the onset of dawn.
Back then life was soft and kind and sometimes the only touch of madness was a killed hedgehog on the street or two poisoned cats in the neighborhood. Now, the sky is blue and white and partly covered in striped clouds standing static on the package of my pills. My name is Nate Cohen. Or was. A sitting corpse though I might sit and breath and eat and drink but I don't laugh or sing or cry. The laid out actions of others, that brought me here, might seem untrue for they can’t be proven, but I assure you they are true.
All of them. I don't know what will happen after I hit the "send" button but you all need to know there is a shade of acid in the world you don't taste or smell, but it burns your face like brimstone like flame-gas scorching your eyes like the sun was just the backside of a black hole. You'll see.
I was born Nathaniel Cohen in 1991 in the glory land of sunshine, to Ira and Susan. We lived down in Sacramento, my father running flocks of cars from behind a stuffed desk, and my mother gave pottery classes every Tuesday and Thursday night, taught a few friends how to make halfskilled molds of clay. Dad was a bold man always chasing dreams of living without a mortgage, and Mum supported but was like a happy young girl and bathed in the sounds of Sunday lawnmowers and plastic pools, water from the hose filtered the rays of solar bronze.
I guess in their own ways both were not real, maybe that was what tied them together. We weren't rich but not poor.
Playful on weekends I built forts and donjons between California sycamores and gray pine and hunted and ran with classmates and friends and neighbor's kids that grew grizzled worker’s brown over their small shapes.
I was happy before and afterwards, but loss is like a sharp pin in the foot, long lost by a sewing woman, too lazy to pick up her needles. Until then, when I was under or over 11 and my progenitor decided he needed to be home faster or sooner or was just hungry, and crashed into 2 men and 1 woman and one dog. Insurance and my grandparents (now long dead) kept us from sinking in the shelters of the homeless ones, but my mother needed work or we faced to lose the house.
The first months she worked as waitress at Ear’s, a rundown bar I wasn’t allowed to enter and so sat for hours on the warm sidewalks, gleaming red in the drowning sunlight and grey and sad under the smile of Mother Selene. Some days Mrs. Anderson watched me and I watched her, sipping slowly but frequent on cheap Chadonay. This went until some better showed up, and the months turned to over a year until that happened. My mother had studied contemporary art spending hours devouring Roy Lichtenstein and the likes and to find paying employment had never been on her mind, until some time as now.
Finally, after two years my mother got an offer from a small magazine in Los Angeles and we moved to this strange new world. Surprisingly, moving at the age of 13 was no fun but new friends found me as I slowly settled, when something changed.
Robert Berkowitz came into our life and took us in. He was a bald man with blonde eyebrows and eyes like glowing azures, he was no stranger to money and art, which was the way he’d gotten involved with Mum. They hit it right at each other and after some months or weeks, might it was just some weeks, he took us to his house in Beverly Hills, not far from where Foothill Road hits Park Way.
Beverly Palm Plaza was soon my second living room. Later, in the foul age of 16, I used all chances to leave the house into the mass of the 30.000 inhabitants living there, crossing the invisible line south of the tracks, where Pacific Electric had once worked streetcars on the Red Line. Eons ago in another world.
I did everything to leave home, my newborn half-brother Seth a crying shitting mess, stomping out silent thoughts with such vigor, that I agreed to join my mother on her monthly expeditions to the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art, near the buzzing Wilshire Boulevard. It was well worth the laughter from the beauties in blonde and black, and the cute Valley Girl that lived across from me. Life was good.
Robert tried to be a father, but in the end we formed a bond. He was there for me when I wanted and offered counsel and paid for my life while I enrolled in college, even helped my shallow dream to join in true Hollywood. After college I enrolled in the UCLA TFT program and, with help from my stepfather, finally landed a job at a production company, Reality TV. I started out as trainee and clawed my way finally to second assistant of the executive director of scripted TV development at Geronimo Grande Productions.
It wasn’t what I had dreamt of but at last I sustained myself, though Robert insisted to help with the rent for my flat on Kelton Avenue, where I still lived after graduating. Life was good back then, without the staring stars that tried to break through the night, away, far far away, Racing with the Moon.
I was 28 when the shades and clouds came over me. I was out with friends, a steamed night in the cool warm air’s vibrations around us.
We found a small restaurant near my place. Pitfire Artisan Pizza on 2018 Westwood Boulevard had brilliant Pesto Chicken and a damn fine Field Mushroom. I was there with Jules and Erica, enjoying dinner outside to the left of the entrance, a silent small tree our only companion, until she walked by. Inside there was a meeting of some charity organization, The Cotton Club or something.
Hair like ironed black jasper and ascetic nude makeup, she strolled by in a white tank top and black yoga pants, the matt casually under her arm. I didn’t stop staring at her. I couldn’t. Some birds in some nearby trees seemed to whistle after her and she turned around, just for a second, as if to say come after me Birdy.
“You in love Naty?” asked Erica, the flower from the valley with the flaxen mob on her head, sitting across from me.
“No,” I stuttered “Just caught my eye. Nothing.”
“Sure,” grinned Jules between his teeth, “Mine too.” he said, folding his tattooed arms in front of his chest, tongue shoved in the corner of his mouth smiling like a bobcat dressed in jeans and shirt of the same fabric, The Boy in Blue.
“Why don’t ask for her number? She’s just down the corner.”
“Isn’t that kinda creepy?”
“Most women like a bit of creeps, ” Jules howled up at his own joke, his hat nearly falling from the back of his head as he raised it up and slapped his left knee.
“Oh, shut up predator,” I waved off, before I turned to Erica “You don’t think that’s awkward?”
“Not if a guy like you asked. I remember a friend of mine met her husband like that, now Peggy Sue Got Married,” she smiled and put her head to the side. Too perfect white Hollywooddream teeth.
I had seen the Girl turning left and jogged away from the Pitfire, still hearing Jules laughing, when I saw her near La Grange Ave. She cut another corner up right so I ran after her, praying to find her. Yet to the grace of my bad luck, she was gone. The street in front of me was not crowded but the vixen from my dreams was vanished. Hands empty and defeated I returned to the table.
“Vae victis,” announced Jules, as he saw my hollow eyes. I never had a poker face until now. With half your face in mashed up molten scartissue it’s difficult to show emotion and I wonder, so far from home will the sun ever show herself again, will it fill anyone out her, raise itself, Raising Arizona?
“Did she say no?” blonde Erica asked with true empathy.
“Seems I lost her,” I said, trying to hide my disappoint. Just a few seconds more decisiveness and my life might have changed.
“Well let’s go, search a new one,” Jules sprang up and clapped.
Let’s go. The words rang, as I tumbled out of the cab up to my flat, the Girl long forgotten for the next few months until another fateful day, when I went to my gym. Workout and work kept me focused for a time and it was mostly night when I came home.
I admit I was a glutton. I had to work out at least three times a week, gym rats they call them. Muscled sweat pouring gales of raw testosterone into the halls. The Equinox Gym was my favorite in Westwood and I had been a paying patron for years now and knew more faces there than in the streets around my neighborhood. I had just left after a session of pumping my brains out, when I saw her crossing me by.
“Hey,” I blurted out in reflex.
She tilted her hand. Black hair, a shimmer of brown in the dusky sunlight, dark eyes and a friendly smile took me right home. Right where I belonged.
“Hey yourself,” she said, raising one eyebrow.
“Do I know you?” she asked, without arrogance, her black-brown hair gently thrown over the left shoulder. Love leaking out of every pore I muttered a plain “Yes”. Before she had a chance to pass me by.
“Sorry. I meet a lot of people lately,” she smiled “Are you in one of my courses?”
“Courses?”
“Well, here,” she grinned. Small white teeth and a thick red snail that crouched behind them, giving them shelter and backup, all the same.
“Ah no. I think, you passed by a pizza palor couple of weeks ago?” I stuttered in embarrassment, trying to suppress redness swelling on my cheek.
“Yes, that’s on my way. So, you’re my new stalker?” She laughed.
“Well, don’t I feel honored,” I extended my hand “My name’s Nate, by the way.”
“Amy. Amy Gallagher,” she raised a slim white wrist in the shade of the California sundown.
This was the day I really met Amy Gallagher for the first time. I rue it every moment in the coffin of my sterile being with the stars laughing at me and the disc in the sky calling my name making me all Moonstruck.
We set a date for the Saturday to come. I thought it fitting to go for Italian and led her to Sammy’s down at Santa Monica Boulevard. It wasn’t too expensive (I didn’t want to come across as one of those guys) but stylish enough to show her I had some taste stored in me. She wore a stunning babyblue dress just touching the tips of her knees, and her black mane was straightened in a long tail crowning her right pale shoulder. When she saw me, she licked her lips as if to prepare me for her Vampire’s Kiss. Sammy was a first gen from Palermo, old now he longed for his home and always liked to impress with native extravaganza.
“Ciao ragazzi!” he said as I walked my stunning Kypris down the cheap red carpet between trashy fake Roman plastic pillars.
“Come stai?” Amy replied, took his arm and left me somber.
They chatted a bit in Italian, what they said I do not know, but I knew the small thing in my belly, the knot of discomfort in my stomach. Laughs and eyes on me. Cheers swallow the jokes.
“You’re full of surprises,” I tried to gain control of the tilting ship, unnecessarily clawing my black hair back.
“You got no idea,” she pressed her tongue between a marble row of perfect teeth, a small red viper watched out from the cave of her mouth.
We talked of hard work, of idle time, of family the usual first-date-topics broken up by a hand of awkward pauses in between, like flashes in the storm.
“My family’s not from around here.”
“Neither’s mine.”
“So whose Italian? Mom or Dad? I bet your Dad.”
“None of them,” she grinned “I picked it up couple years ago.”
Movies, theater, literature, antipasti, strange people, more hobbies, main dish, skipping desert and I rolled from over her in my half of the bed (thank god I had cleaned up before I left).
Time flew like night owls and bats and the days were filled with wet noises. I visited some of her Yoga classes, though it didn’t suit me. She visited me on my work. I showed her around the crappy little rooms we sat in and all awed at her body and face.
The nights were like Sunday afternoons with her and all ungood became stored noise in the corner, so became my dead father and her dead family and my aspirations in Hollywood and her degree from John Hopkins and my love for seafood and her fishnet dress and here working Never on Tuesday. Three months and there was the big day.
“So you’re the famous Amy!” mother opened her arms to greet her, eager to impress. Hard embarrassment as Robert did the same, while Seth waved at her and whispered a shy “Hi”, acting so often like young male teens, caught in the web of a child’s mind and a growing body.
Mother had insisted to cook and so we all chowed away on something resembling orange Lasagna, chowing away with the Time to Kill until it was all over. Robert tried to save grace by filling up after each bite and putting on some of his favorite tunes. Wine spilled on the tablecloth like the face of Christ.
“Nothing better than the master,” he prophesized while laying on a small fortune in the body of an old vinyl version of “Sweet Home Chicago”, his second most favorite behind “Fire Birds”.
“You like to make deals yourself Nate told me,” Amy teased with a smile, Wild at Heart but calm and in control.
“Oh, we got an expert over here!” he teased back.
“I knew some devils myself,” she curled her pink lips, deviously looking from my chest to my eyes.
“I bet you still do,” Robert winked and tucked away as my mother gave him a noticeable kick under the table with a smile on her face.
“So, you’re a Yoga-instructor?” asked the former waitress, sucking out the air of the room.
“Amy is actually a doctor,” I deflected as she took my forearm softly, clinging for support.
“A doctor? That sounds nearly like what Zandalee did! Remember Zandalee? She was the girl down the street who had that accident a few years ago?” asked Robert, ignored by the rest.
“Why not work in a hospital or a clinic?” asked my mother.
“You must know, Western medicine is very limiting. There are many ways to keep oneself healthy, but you got to be open minded and have the stomach for it,” she laughed.
“You mean like this Eastern stuff?”
“Well there’s many older tricks to keep oneself in good shape,” she said before switching the topic “Nate says you two are art enthusiasts?”
“I don’t want to brag but I know my way around,” said Mum.
“Well me certainly not,” said Seth annoyed, a bored sigh escaped his lips, barely noticeable the runt of the egomaniac litter.
“Who made that wristband?” Amy inquired “It looks really cool!”, prompting a hidden prideful smile from my little brother who had put a small plastic pearl on a leather band knotted around his wrist.
“I did,” Seth said, as he stared awkwardly at the table.
“Don’t be shy baby,” said my mother “he’s usually not like that.”
“Just not interested in girls yet.”
“Are you famous?” asked the child, his cheeks bright red.
“No, I’m afraid I’m not,” said my love, giggling like an imbecile on her Honeymoon in Vegas.
“You sure? Aren’t you from the poor family?” asked the child again.
“Why do you ask?”
“I saw you on TV. You’re in that show about it.”
“Seth what are you talking? Stop that nonsense!” insisted my mother.
“It’s not nonsense,” said the child
“Enough now!” said mother.
“Ready for some games?” asked Robert as we dropped Seth’s fantasy.
“As ready as Amos & Andrew,” answered my Mum.
We spent the rest of the eve with talk and drink and spilled chips and even attempted to gamble on a bit of Ma-Jong before everyone sighed in boredom and we drove back to Amy’s place at Red Rock West with the Deadfall of the evening behind us. Usually, I had no trouble sleeping somewhere else and I had been to her little house at the fringes of the city’s civilization more often than not and when I woke at 03:00 a.m. the room smelled like gasoline. The TV was dead. We had watched something didn’t we? I thought “Guarding Tess” or “It Could Happen to You” was just starting when we dropped in. The things I knew were all so useless, I thought, what did it all do me good to know A Century of Cinema?
The bed was empty except for my own sweaty body, the smell like tiny razors in my nose, and when I called out, the only response was nothing from the hallway. I made my way outside on the corridor when I heard the whispers. At first I thought they came from the dirty bathroom but the closer I came towards the stairway the clearer it was.
Some voice was talking in the kitchen. Hiding my presence, I gazed through the open door and saw my girlfriend stare up at the moon, her voice barely a sound in it’s dead light. I didn’t hear what she said but for a while it seemed like there was someone else with us, someone who saw me and pointed a finger, led to her turning around, her eyes open and wide locking on my face. I jumped back at the swift surprise, as she called my name.
“Nate?” she asked me with a hunted voice, as if ready to give me the Kiss of Death.
“Y-Yeah. Everything all right Babe?”
“Sure. What you doing down here?”
“You were talking.”
“Did I wake you up?” she opened her arms to hug and we embraced another. Something wasn’t right.
“What you doing here? It’s after 4 in the morning and you here in the kitchen.” I left the words hanging in the air.
“You never noticed? I sleepwalk, always have. You really never woke up to this before? Did it since I was a baby when we were Leaving Las Vegas.”
I had no idea what she said. She told me it had happened to her since she was a child and that she had strange dreams of the moon and would wake up in the kitchen or the living room, mouth dry which meant she talked for long times, though to whom or what, she never said. Said it happened when she fell with the head right on the top of The Rock. We went back to bed but something was off. There was a noise. Or was there? I tried to turn around, roll over, Amy’s soft snoring next to me. Still a noise. Or not? Yes, yes definitely a noise. Or not?
A crackling sound, I jumped up. Slowly I crept outside the bed. Maybe just a bird had hit a window, had happened before. I crouched into the hallway, it came from the door. There was someone outside. Someone whistling. Slowly I made my way towards it, careful not to make the outsider aware of my presence.
I heard him breath or something that seemed like breathing. Half-breathing. Through the peephole I saw the void outside. There was nothing, just darkness and that whistling noise, soft and barley hearable.
It changed. Like light but not light, maybe orange or red. Did someone make a fire? Who would make fire in a building? It was like a bright red ring surrounding the black void. Then it blinked and I fainted.
Weeks came about and went by and work took me up as our next big project came, on my side always dutiful two new interns who often filled the whole office with the smell of fries they brought with them. We were in one of the smaller conference rooms, clean metal filled with flecks from cheap food, taking short breaks in between the longing working hours.
Sometimes I would use the breaks to talk some things through with my boss, always eager to show him how dedicated and thankful I was. His office had his name on the door but every time I couldn’t suppress the image of Very Important Pennis: Uncut on it. My tow fellow working drones were out to grab some snacks and I enjoyed the insularity of the room and took deep breaths, breathing through, Con Air from its powerful oxygen.
In my hand, a cup of coffee laying my eyes on the window, down on the people who passed another on the concrete between the pavements, when at the corner a man stood still. He was not ordinary. He just stood there. Had he stood here before? I don’t know but he stood and watched and then waved. Did he wave his hand at me? I came closer and tried to see what he was doing.
He raised his arm up in 45 degrees, and a single finger pointed at me like a spear as I gasped. Was this man mad? Was he seriously looking at me? There was something odd with him, I knew. There was something with his grimace, his Face/Off like he didn’t belong here.
Not on the street, but right here right that he was wrong in the City of Angles with his staring and unblinking Snake Eyes. As if he licked the thoughts in my head he violently shook his face up and down, loosening his slicked back brown hair and he smiled like a kid until for a moment his skin shook looked like a loosened mask. Then he hopped from one leg to the other, passers just ignored him, one to the other one to the other one to the other and bang he had fallen flat on the street crushing his head on the ground.
He lifted himself, blood tripling down on his brown suit and his white shirt and he did the same again. With full force he cracked his face on the hot concrete, again and again, sputtering teeth in all directions, still everyone ignored him and laughed at the sunfilled day.
As sudden as before he stood up, waved at me and ran away around the corner. In disbelief I kept standing and saw him look around the corner, staring at me until he produced an 8mm camera he pointed downwards. Then he started to spit around, all over the place as if that would have some effect like melting the stone or Bringing Out the Dead (which of course it didn’t).
Then he was gone in no time, Gone in 60 Seconds. Unbelievable what I had seen. When the interns returned, I pointed the spot out but the blood wasn’t there and the street so dirty clean like ever, and they thought I joked at them and turned their pimpled faces into smiles. Maybe it had just been bizarre performance, stranger things happened.
I told Amy of it and she agreed that it was nothing but an act or maybe really just a party clown or maybe someone who wanted to perform for his kids like The Family Man that he might be. I snugged up to her and pulled her close. I was happy and lucky and had to suppress that crunching emotion of bliss for a single time in my life only to accept the beauty in it with my shortloved heart.
I didn’t think about the man until a month later, it was weekend and Amy had her courses to give so I decided to grab my brother for a time at the beach. The hot sand around us we were lain out in the sun, talked about girls our mother and that his encroaching puberty started to cause tidal waves in the house. He was a good child and I tried to be as much a brother as I was. We were out in the water and then dried in the sun, palyed volleyball and disturbed elder people with it, when the sun tingled away.
Time had flown and I was glad I took the day to spend it with him. On our route home I filled up the car at the next gas station. There I met the Man again. Seth had taken time to make a visit to the toilet as I waited in the car. I was on my phone and scrolled through reviews for the coming movie night. I made a selection, “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” it was and “Christmas Carol: The Movie” and “Windtalkers” but a newer Adaptation, I looked up and saw the Man in the front of the car. His blue eyes examined my face, brown suit brown hair, and he hopped back in one jump and picked something up.
It was a little beagle and he pulled the puppy tight to his chest and scratched him gently behind the ears, whispering something into them that sounded like Sonny, but I’m not sure. He looked again at my eyes and he smiled. I didn’t know how to react, so I smiled back at him and showed him my thumb up and prayed he may go away. He did not.
He dropped the puppy to the ground and kicked it and jumped on it.
I heard the yelp and whimpering from outside but was too shocked to do something. He jumped up and down time after time my mouth opened in terror as I saw the blood on his black shoes. Through all this he had this relaxed smile and looked at me.
The howls of the puppy stopped and he picked up the furry meat, the head a mess of bone shards and brain, one eyeball broken out, dangled down form the rest of the defiled carcass. The Man pulled the puppy tight to his chest and lifted his thumb, cradling his face in the red stew. He let it fell down to the ground again and kicked it again and again until it was bloods-and-bones-stew.
I opened the car door when Seth shouted, “Where are you going?” I turned around to see he poked his head in the rustic car and as I nudged to the front, I saw the Man was gone.
Headfirst I sprang out the car and nosedived on the street, my face nearly touched the asphalt. He was gone and so was the blood. Seth shouted out but I was inside the shop already and begged the young cashier for aid, asked her if she hadn’t seen the Man outside. Headlight eyes looked at me in fear as I tried to grab her shoulders over the counter. Dirt blew up all around me as I touched the dusty bins and shelves. After a babbling tirade I looked at the hand that clenched my arm. Seth looked bewildered at me, his eyes asked if I gone maniac.
I had scared him but it brought me back to reality, for a short time. We sat silent in the car until angry hoops of late afternoon commuters called for banishment. I turned around and parked on the lot, then called police. They weren’t skeptical like in the films, especially when I told them that I had seen the man before. An understanding face took notes and went inside to consult with the cashier. I called Mum.
“What you guys up to? What’s going on?”
“Mum,” I said. “There was this guy.”
“Did something happen with Seth? What did he do?”
“Nothing,” I said and watched from the frame of my sight how my brother curled up in the passenger seat. “It was just odd.”
“What’s the matter with you? You scared me to death,” she said. I couldn’t scare her with this. Had I really imagined it all? I called Amy but she didn’t answer.
There was nothing on the video, they said. Just me in the car staring bewildered then stumbling out like drunk. They gave me various explanations from dehydration to stress and left me and my brother there on the road.
I opened the door and fell on the couch. I told him about my encounters with the man and tried to find reasons for the strange behavior until he asked if I couldn’t file against a stalker. Was this Man stalking me? From one second to the other things made sense and didn’t seem as bad, or bad in a different way. I pulled over a stoic mask on my mad face and cheered him up as I felt his angst. I called Mum and told her everything was fine, just a misunderstanding, and she accepted my explanation with weary ease.
I ditched my list and let Seth choose a film and slumped on the couch with dry eyelids covering my headache.
I woke up from a noise at the door, Seth crouched on my shoulder in sleep. I was scared and turned around to see my Amy standing in front of me, trying to plug in her dead phone. We embraced and sat down in the bedroom far off from troubling my brother with my disturbing tale. Amy didn’t doubt me but seemed more skeptic crafting mighty fine tales of pranksters and jokers wandering around town scaring people to practice their grotesqueries.
After a half slice of pizza and a cold shower we sat down with Seth on the couch, he somewhat checking out my girlfriend’s body under the green summer dress, a piece of cloth befitting a city not in tune with itself but always in fake summer. We lied in bed afterwards, she behind me, pressed against my back. I drifted away with a headache and the blazing last sunrays shone behind my eyelids again, a flash of a smile of the Man and his rat teeth and his chopstick-dress and he all set on fire, just standing and smiling. I woke and stared in darkness, the moon smirking at my anguish. Night bathed the room and I heard the deep snoring sound of Amy, still behind me.
The pillow was hot and cooked my ear and brought back memories of a headache as to command to turn over my headrest to the cooling side of the equator, to hopefully fall fast back asleep but as I lifted up there in the split of the halfclosed door to the dark of the halls behind I saw the blazing eyes. Red glowing in the dark for a lifetime and a second, staring and blinking and a soft tickle of laughter. I crouched myself at Amy’s side and shook her softly, she mumbling as her eyes opened awake.
I told her there was a thing at the door in the apartment. Sober from sleep her grogginess fell in an instant, and stiff like a white candle, she was up in the bed next to me. Her hands turned on the light and I moved a finger to the mouth and slowly crawled out from the bed, scared and slow steps I leaped forward looking behind me to see her face. She got up after me and held a hand on my back, a sign of watchful reassurance.
The rest of my home was dark and silent but for the breathing of Seth on the couch who woke as I switched on the lightbulbs tingling above his hair. Questioning eyes, he asked what was going on, Amy sat down with him as I went through all rooms again.
Then in the bedroom I looked under the bed and there was nothing. Back in the darkness of the hallway, Amy whispered to me of talking to someone a therapist or a psychiatrist, as I just stared at the shadow of a Man that was next to me, his face inches away from mine.

You ever sit around all day don’t know what to do? So bored of yourself that you just look at anything until you feel the rot creep up on you trying to drag you down. Well if you’re reading this, you must have some time on your hands. The name is Don Kowalski by the way.
Time was the enemy although it hadn’t been so from on early. It didn’t have to be this way. In the beginning, I was thrilled staying put, living only at home, downing a bottle here a bottle there took me months to realize that getting drunk wasn’t much exciting when you could do it every day. Lifting was no fun at home without the showoff.
The thrill wasn’t there without the mirrors and the others and I would not give empty testament. So I was stuck, down deep in my black chair with my greying hair clinging greasy to my head and the stubble on my face growing thicker and thicker like hedges and forests of dry metallic wires drilling themselves deep in my naked skin.
I sat on the chair, blue light penetrated me and I watched into it like someone getting lost in the sun to see caleidoscopic patterns afterwards for minutes and some stare in the dark ponds in gardens and across them and I stared into the unknown abbeys of the internet until I found something that hooked me. Interest was reborn, the cherubim and thrones sang, and I was again digging for knowledge on the riddle.
It was the case of Nathan, not Lessing’s I mind you. You got to know I’m, and I know this sounds like the start of a bad pulpy novel, I’m a PI or what the cool cats call it now. Private Investigation, looking at lives for a fuck of money but better than to slither up buttholes at the ordinary stational sedentary life I once had and was led in. I was called up, by a Mrs. Anderson, whose voice sounded like a whisky drowned chimney.
Carry Ann Anderson had called about a friend who was now dead meat. The case was solved she said but somehow it was not, not for her. There was rot on the inside of fresh timber. A fair warning here – there won’t be no solution, cause certainly me didn’t solve it. I told her so, when she called again. I hadn’t been to LA and going there was a waste, I knew as much already. For her sake I called the department over there and talked to the detective. She wasn’t going to be happy with my findings.
Gluing a mask of false politeness to my voice I asked, “So what’s the matter hm?”
“They say it’s all real simple: kid snapped and did it. But something ain’t right. You see I knew her back from the day, from Sacramento. I can tell you, this boy was no of these Columbines or Sandy Hooks, he would never hurt them.”
“That’s what the parents of those kids said too,” I said, uncomfortable silence on the other end.
“Something’s just off about this. You saw the files already?”
“Mhm. Didn’t do much good.”
“Tell you this: the officers said the same. Said it’s all there orderly and not like some coverup or some shit they tell you like the conspiracy theories on TV you know? Like they had to dig for it you know? Not too difficult and not too easy but also not in between not your textbook stuff either. Not odd he said. But said that it all around made it odd. Made it seem odd, still, somehow. Seems like not the type to do it. You know he said type? He spat them words out on me,” she said.
There I was. I made some calls asked about the kid that chopped down his family, sat his flat up like a Christmas tree and coaled it down to the ground, all in a cozy night. One day to the other and a bunch of people gone.
I find a pal of his, named Erica Cremonte. She was willing to talk. Told me when it happened and went down and all the other stuff. Other guys didn’t talk or told me how shitty they feel about it all. I dug a bit deeper inside Erica since she was the only source of water in the land of dry lands, she told me a bit more, opened up like an old lady to the cashier or waiter or the poor sod at the bus. Told me about Nathan and his family and his brother and his girlfriend her few idle feel-good weeks in Africa and the funeral. And that it didn’t make sense to her either.
And the days go by and I start to forget about the whole thing since there’s no leads and none won’t talk and I give up. Call Mrs. Anderson and tell her there is nothing and she doesn’t understand the whys in my words but she knows them and we agree to part ways and wish each other a nice day and she’s gone.
Days and weeks and months go by and I forget. Then I am locked here in front of the monitor and it all comes back and something in me stirs and after hours I stare at the profile of one Margaret Suarez and see the condolences on her Facebook profile.
I write to her and days pass me by, drinking lifting reading and boredom, the old familiar gent from around the corner walks up again until there’s a response. Asks me how I found her, what I wanted. Calls me and tells me all about the disfigured creep that slashed her mother in the office. Digs deeper and finds all the glory all the madness in the last mail, sent from her mother’s account.
He left something for us and I will share it with you. Keep in mind it’s all ludicrous but it will help pass some hours. So, the following is the written word of Nathan Cohen, brought to paper after he killed his therapist while locked up in the cuckoo’s nest.
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Sometimes I look up at the sky, at night. I wonder, is the lightning of the stars hidden by the vast dark, or is the darkness a shield? A shield that keeps us safe and calm from countless eyes that stare at us?
Back then I didn’t care for the night. The air was on fire from the red morning sun, every time the same, from grad school to that day when those good Fast Times at Ridgemont High started. In the beginning it was only dark shades of purple and crimson until the firmament turned to face blood.
A line of mystic clouds was in the sky, creeping forward like a white river. The street came alive minute by minute, looming trashmen came to empty our waste in the stark dust flying around. It was better in the hills with the cooling breeze before the onset of dawn.
Back then life was soft and kind and sometimes the only touch of madness was a killed hedgehog on the street or two poisoned cats in the neighborhood. Now, the sky is blue and white and partly covered in striped clouds standing static on the package of my pills. My name is Nate Cohen. Or was. A sitting corpse though I might sit and breath and eat and drink but I don't laugh or sing or cry. The laid out actions of others, that brought me here, might seem untrue for they can’t be proven, but I assure you they are true.
All of them. I don't know what will happen after I hit the "send" button but you all need to know there is a shade of acid in the world you don't taste or smell, but it burns your face like brimstone like flame-gas scorching your eyes like the sun was just the backside of a black hole. You'll see.
I was born Nathaniel Cohen in 1991 in the glory land of sunshine, to Ira and Susan. We lived down in Sacramento, my father running flocks of cars from behind a stuffed desk, and my mother gave pottery classes every Tuesday and Thursday night, taught a few friends how to make halfskilled molds of clay. Dad was a bold man always chasing dreams of living without a mortgage, and Mum supported but was like a happy young girl and bathed in the sounds of Sunday lawnmowers and plastic pools, water from the hose filtered the rays of solar bronze.
I guess in their own ways both were not real, maybe that was what tied them together. We weren't rich but not poor.
Playful on weekends I built forts and donjons between California sycamores and gray pine and hunted and ran with classmates and friends and neighbor's kids that grew grizzled worker’s brown over their small shapes.
I was happy before and afterwards, but loss is like a sharp pin in the foot, long lost by a sewing woman, too lazy to pick up her needles. Until then, when I was under or over 11 and my progenitor decided he needed to be home faster or sooner or was just hungry, and crashed into 2 men and 1 woman and one dog. Insurance and my grandparents (now long dead) kept us from sinking in the shelters of the homeless ones, but my mother needed work or we faced to lose the house.
The first months she worked as waitress at Ear’s, a rundown bar I wasn’t allowed to enter and so sat for hours on the warm sidewalks, gleaming red in the drowning sunlight and grey and sad under the smile of Mother Selene. Some days Mrs. Anderson watched me and I watched her, sipping slowly but frequent on cheap Chadonay. This went until some better showed up, and the months turned to over a year until that happened. My mother had studied contemporary art spending hours devouring Roy Lichtenstein and the likes and to find paying employment had never been on her mind, until some time as now.
Finally, after two years my mother got an offer from a small magazine in Los Angeles and we moved to this strange new world. Surprisingly, moving at the age of 13 was no fun but new friends found me as I slowly settled, when something changed.
Robert Berkowitz came into our life and took us in. He was a bald man with blonde eyebrows and eyes like glowing azures, he was no stranger to money and art, which was the way he’d gotten involved with Mum. They hit it right at each other and after some months or weeks, might it was just some weeks, he took us to his house in Beverly Hills, not far from where Foothill Road hits Park Way.
Beverly Palm Plaza was soon my second living room. Later, in the foul age of 16, I used all chances to leave the house into the mass of the 30.000 inhabitants living there, crossing the invisible line south of the tracks, where Pacific Electric had once worked streetcars on the Red Line. Eons ago in another world.
Robert tried to be a father, but in the end we formed a bond. He was there for me when I wanted and offered counsel and paid for my life while I enrolled in college, even helped my shallow dream to join in true Hollywood. After college I enrolled in the UCLA TFT program and, with help from my stepfather, finally landed a job at a production company, Reality TV. I started out as trainee and clawed my way finally to second assistant of the executive director of scripted TV development at Geronimo Grande Productions.
It wasn’t what I had dreamt of but at last I sustained myself, though Robert insisted to help with the rent for my flat on Kelton Avenue, where I still lived after graduating. Life was good back then, without the staring stars that tried to break through the night, away, far far away, Racing with the Moon.
I was 28 when the shades and clouds came over me. I was out with friends, a steamed night in the cool warm air’s vibrations around us.
We found a small restaurant near my place. Pitfire Artisan Pizza on 2018 Westwood Boulevard had brilliant Pesto Chicken and a damn fine Field Mushroom. I was there with Jules and Erica, enjoying dinner outside to the left of the entrance, a silent small tree our only companion, until she walked by. Inside there was a meeting of some charity organization, The Cotton Club or something.
Hair like ironed black jasper and ascetic nude makeup, she strolled by in a white tank top and black yoga pants, the matt casually under her arm. I didn’t stop staring at her. I couldn’t. Some birds in some nearby trees seemed to whistle after her and she turned around, just for a second, as if to say come after me Birdy.
“You in love Naty?” asked Erica, the flower from the valley with the flaxen mob on her head, sitting across from me.
“No,” I stuttered “Just caught my eye. Nothing.”
“Sure,” grinned Jules between his teeth, “Mine too.” he said, folding his tattooed arms in front of his chest, tongue shoved in the corner of his mouth smiling like a bobcat dressed in jeans and shirt of the same fabric, The Boy in Blue.
“Why don’t ask for her number? She’s just down the corner.”
“Isn’t that kinda creepy?”
“Most women like a bit of creeps, ” Jules howled up at his own joke, his hat nearly falling from the back of his head as he raised it up and slapped his left knee.
“Oh, shut up predator,” I waved off, before I turned to Erica “You don’t think that’s awkward?”
“Not if a guy like you asked. I remember a friend of mine met her husband like that, now Peggy Sue Got Married,” she smiled and put her head to the side. Too perfect white Hollywooddream teeth.
I had seen the Girl turning left and jogged away from the Pitfire, still hearing Jules laughing, when I saw her near La Grange Ave. She cut another corner up right so I ran after her, praying to find her. Yet to the grace of my bad luck, she was gone. The street in front of me was not crowded but the vixen from my dreams was vanished. Hands empty and defeated I returned to the table.
“Vae victis,” announced Jules, as he saw my hollow eyes. I never had a poker face until now. With half your face in mashed up molten scartissue it’s difficult to show emotion and I wonder, so far from home will the sun ever show herself again, will it fill anyone out her, raise itself, Raising Arizona?
“Did she say no?” blonde Erica asked with true empathy.
“Seems I lost her,” I said, trying to hide my disappoint. Just a few seconds more decisiveness and my life might have changed.
“Well let’s go, search a new one,” Jules sprang up and clapped.
Let’s go. The words rang, as I tumbled out of the cab up to my flat, the Girl long forgotten for the next few months until another fateful day, when I went to my gym. Workout and work kept me focused for a time and it was mostly night when I came home.
I admit I was a glutton. I had to work out at least three times a week, gym rats they call them. Muscled sweat pouring gales of raw testosterone into the halls. The Equinox Gym was my favorite in Westwood and I had been a paying patron for years now and knew more faces there than in the streets around my neighborhood. I had just left after a session of pumping my brains out, when I saw her crossing me by.
“Hey,” I blurted out in reflex.
She tilted her hand. Black hair, a shimmer of brown in the dusky sunlight, dark eyes and a friendly smile took me right home. Right where I belonged.
“Hey yourself,” she said, raising one eyebrow.
“Do I know you?” she asked, without arrogance, her black-brown hair gently thrown over the left shoulder. Love leaking out of every pore I muttered a plain “Yes”. Before she had a chance to pass me by.
“Sorry. I meet a lot of people lately,” she smiled “Are you in one of my courses?”
“Courses?”
“Well, here,” she grinned. Small white teeth and a thick red snail that crouched behind them, giving them shelter and backup, all the same.
“Ah no. I think, you passed by a pizza palor couple of weeks ago?” I stuttered in embarrassment, trying to suppress redness swelling on my cheek.
“Yes, that’s on my way. So, you’re my new stalker?” She laughed.
“Well, don’t I feel honored,” I extended my hand “My name’s Nate, by the way.”
“Amy. Amy Gallagher,” she raised a slim white wrist in the shade of the California sundown.
This was the day I really met Amy Gallagher for the first time. I rue it every moment in the coffin of my sterile being with the stars laughing at me and the disc in the sky calling my name making me all Moonstruck.
We set a date for the Saturday to come. I thought it fitting to go for Italian and led her to Sammy’s down at Santa Monica Boulevard. It wasn’t too expensive (I didn’t want to come across as one of those guys) but stylish enough to show her I had some taste stored in me. She wore a stunning babyblue dress just touching the tips of her knees, and her black mane was straightened in a long tail crowning her right pale shoulder. When she saw me, she licked her lips as if to prepare me for her Vampire’s Kiss. Sammy was a first gen from Palermo, old now he longed for his home and always liked to impress with native extravaganza.
“Ciao ragazzi!” he said as I walked my stunning Kypris down the cheap red carpet between trashy fake Roman plastic pillars.
“Come stai?” Amy replied, took his arm and left me somber.
They chatted a bit in Italian, what they said I do not know, but I knew the small thing in my belly, the knot of discomfort in my stomach. Laughs and eyes on me. Cheers swallow the jokes.
“You’re full of surprises,” I tried to gain control of the tilting ship, unnecessarily clawing my black hair back.
“You got no idea,” she pressed her tongue between a marble row of perfect teeth, a small red viper watched out from the cave of her mouth.
We talked of hard work, of idle time, of family the usual first-date-topics broken up by a hand of awkward pauses in between, like flashes in the storm.
“My family’s not from around here.”
“Neither’s mine.”
“So whose Italian? Mom or Dad? I bet your Dad.”
“None of them,” she grinned “I picked it up couple years ago.”
Movies, theater, literature, antipasti, strange people, more hobbies, main dish, skipping desert and I rolled from over her in my half of the bed (thank god I had cleaned up before I left).
Time flew like night owls and bats and the days were filled with wet noises. I visited some of her Yoga classes, though it didn’t suit me. She visited me on my work. I showed her around the crappy little rooms we sat in and all awed at her body and face.
The nights were like Sunday afternoons with her and all ungood became stored noise in the corner, so became my dead father and her dead family and my aspirations in Hollywood and her degree from John Hopkins and my love for seafood and her fishnet dress and here working Never on Tuesday. Three months and there was the big day.
“So you’re the famous Amy!” mother opened her arms to greet her, eager to impress. Hard embarrassment as Robert did the same, while Seth waved at her and whispered a shy “Hi”, acting so often like young male teens, caught in the web of a child’s mind and a growing body.
Mother had insisted to cook and so we all chowed away on something resembling orange Lasagna, chowing away with the Time to Kill until it was all over. Robert tried to save grace by filling up after each bite and putting on some of his favorite tunes. Wine spilled on the tablecloth like the face of Christ.
“Nothing better than the master,” he prophesized while laying on a small fortune in the body of an old vinyl version of “Sweet Home Chicago”, his second most favorite behind “Fire Birds”.
“You like to make deals yourself Nate told me,” Amy teased with a smile, Wild at Heart but calm and in control.
“Oh, we got an expert over here!” he teased back.
“I knew some devils myself,” she curled her pink lips, deviously looking from my chest to my eyes.
“I bet you still do,” Robert winked and tucked away as my mother gave him a noticeable kick under the table with a smile on her face.
“So, you’re a Yoga-instructor?” asked the former waitress, sucking out the air of the room.
“Amy is actually a doctor,” I deflected as she took my forearm softly, clinging for support.
“A doctor? That sounds nearly like what Zandalee did! Remember Zandalee? She was the girl down the street who had that accident a few years ago?” asked Robert, ignored by the rest.
“Why not work in a hospital or a clinic?” asked my mother.
“You must know, Western medicine is very limiting. There are many ways to keep oneself healthy, but you got to be open minded and have the stomach for it,” she laughed.
“You mean like this Eastern stuff?”
“Well there’s many older tricks to keep oneself in good shape,” she said before switching the topic “Nate says you two are art enthusiasts?”
“I don’t want to brag but I know my way around,” said Mum.
“Well me certainly not,” said Seth annoyed, a bored sigh escaped his lips, barely noticeable the runt of the egomaniac litter.
“Who made that wristband?” Amy inquired “It looks really cool!”, prompting a hidden prideful smile from my little brother who had put a small plastic pearl on a leather band knotted around his wrist.
“I did,” Seth said, as he stared awkwardly at the table.
“Don’t be shy baby,” said my mother “he’s usually not like that.”
“Just not interested in girls yet.”
“Are you famous?” asked the child, his cheeks bright red.
“No, I’m afraid I’m not,” said my love, giggling like an imbecile on her Honeymoon in Vegas.
“You sure? Aren’t you from the poor family?” asked the child again.
“Why do you ask?”
“I saw you on TV. You’re in that show about it.”
“Seth what are you talking? Stop that nonsense!” insisted my mother.
“It’s not nonsense,” said the child
“Enough now!” said mother.
“Ready for some games?” asked Robert as we dropped Seth’s fantasy.
“As ready as Amos & Andrew,” answered my Mum.
We spent the rest of the eve with talk and drink and spilled chips and even attempted to gamble on a bit of Ma-Jong before everyone sighed in boredom and we drove back to Amy’s place at Red Rock West with the Deadfall of the evening behind us. Usually, I had no trouble sleeping somewhere else and I had been to her little house at the fringes of the city’s civilization more often than not and when I woke at 03:00 a.m. the room smelled like gasoline. The TV was dead. We had watched something didn’t we? I thought “Guarding Tess” or “It Could Happen to You” was just starting when we dropped in. The things I knew were all so useless, I thought, what did it all do me good to know A Century of Cinema?
The bed was empty except for my own sweaty body, the smell like tiny razors in my nose, and when I called out, the only response was nothing from the hallway. I made my way outside on the corridor when I heard the whispers. At first I thought they came from the dirty bathroom but the closer I came towards the stairway the clearer it was.
Some voice was talking in the kitchen. Hiding my presence, I gazed through the open door and saw my girlfriend stare up at the moon, her voice barely a sound in it’s dead light. I didn’t hear what she said but for a while it seemed like there was someone else with us, someone who saw me and pointed a finger, led to her turning around, her eyes open and wide locking on my face. I jumped back at the swift surprise, as she called my name.
“Nate?” she asked me with a hunted voice, as if ready to give me the Kiss of Death.
“Y-Yeah. Everything all right Babe?”
“Sure. What you doing down here?”
“You were talking.”
“Did I wake you up?” she opened her arms to hug and we embraced another. Something wasn’t right.
“What you doing here? It’s after 4 in the morning and you here in the kitchen.” I left the words hanging in the air.
“You never noticed? I sleepwalk, always have. You really never woke up to this before? Did it since I was a baby when we were Leaving Las Vegas.”
I had no idea what she said. She told me it had happened to her since she was a child and that she had strange dreams of the moon and would wake up in the kitchen or the living room, mouth dry which meant she talked for long times, though to whom or what, she never said. Said it happened when she fell with the head right on the top of The Rock. We went back to bed but something was off. There was a noise. Or was there? I tried to turn around, roll over, Amy’s soft snoring next to me. Still a noise. Or not? Yes, yes definitely a noise. Or not?
A crackling sound, I jumped up. Slowly I crept outside the bed. Maybe just a bird had hit a window, had happened before. I crouched into the hallway, it came from the door. There was someone outside. Someone whistling. Slowly I made my way towards it, careful not to make the outsider aware of my presence.
I heard him breath or something that seemed like breathing. Half-breathing. Through the peephole I saw the void outside. There was nothing, just darkness and that whistling noise, soft and barley hearable.
It changed. Like light but not light, maybe orange or red. Did someone make a fire? Who would make fire in a building? It was like a bright red ring surrounding the black void. Then it blinked and I fainted.
Weeks came about and went by and work took me up as our next big project came, on my side always dutiful two new interns who often filled the whole office with the smell of fries they brought with them. We were in one of the smaller conference rooms, clean metal filled with flecks from cheap food, taking short breaks in between the longing working hours.
Sometimes I would use the breaks to talk some things through with my boss, always eager to show him how dedicated and thankful I was. His office had his name on the door but every time I couldn’t suppress the image of Very Important Pennis: Uncut on it. My tow fellow working drones were out to grab some snacks and I enjoyed the insularity of the room and took deep breaths, breathing through, Con Air from its powerful oxygen.
In my hand, a cup of coffee laying my eyes on the window, down on the people who passed another on the concrete between the pavements, when at the corner a man stood still. He was not ordinary. He just stood there. Had he stood here before? I don’t know but he stood and watched and then waved. Did he wave his hand at me? I came closer and tried to see what he was doing.
He raised his arm up in 45 degrees, and a single finger pointed at me like a spear as I gasped. Was this man mad? Was he seriously looking at me? There was something odd with him, I knew. There was something with his grimace, his Face/Off like he didn’t belong here.
Not on the street, but right here right that he was wrong in the City of Angles with his staring and unblinking Snake Eyes. As if he licked the thoughts in my head he violently shook his face up and down, loosening his slicked back brown hair and he smiled like a kid until for a moment his skin shook looked like a loosened mask. Then he hopped from one leg to the other, passers just ignored him, one to the other one to the other one to the other and bang he had fallen flat on the street crushing his head on the ground.
He lifted himself, blood tripling down on his brown suit and his white shirt and he did the same again. With full force he cracked his face on the hot concrete, again and again, sputtering teeth in all directions, still everyone ignored him and laughed at the sunfilled day.
As sudden as before he stood up, waved at me and ran away around the corner. In disbelief I kept standing and saw him look around the corner, staring at me until he produced an 8mm camera he pointed downwards. Then he started to spit around, all over the place as if that would have some effect like melting the stone or Bringing Out the Dead (which of course it didn’t).
Then he was gone in no time, Gone in 60 Seconds. Unbelievable what I had seen. When the interns returned, I pointed the spot out but the blood wasn’t there and the street so dirty clean like ever, and they thought I joked at them and turned their pimpled faces into smiles. Maybe it had just been bizarre performance, stranger things happened.
I told Amy of it and she agreed that it was nothing but an act or maybe really just a party clown or maybe someone who wanted to perform for his kids like The Family Man that he might be. I snugged up to her and pulled her close. I was happy and lucky and had to suppress that crunching emotion of bliss for a single time in my life only to accept the beauty in it with my shortloved heart.
I didn’t think about the man until a month later, it was weekend and Amy had her courses to give so I decided to grab my brother for a time at the beach. The hot sand around us we were lain out in the sun, talked about girls our mother and that his encroaching puberty started to cause tidal waves in the house. He was a good child and I tried to be as much a brother as I was. We were out in the water and then dried in the sun, palyed volleyball and disturbed elder people with it, when the sun tingled away.
Time had flown and I was glad I took the day to spend it with him. On our route home I filled up the car at the next gas station. There I met the Man again. Seth had taken time to make a visit to the toilet as I waited in the car. I was on my phone and scrolled through reviews for the coming movie night. I made a selection, “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” it was and “Christmas Carol: The Movie” and “Windtalkers” but a newer Adaptation, I looked up and saw the Man in the front of the car. His blue eyes examined my face, brown suit brown hair, and he hopped back in one jump and picked something up.
It was a little beagle and he pulled the puppy tight to his chest and scratched him gently behind the ears, whispering something into them that sounded like Sonny, but I’m not sure. He looked again at my eyes and he smiled. I didn’t know how to react, so I smiled back at him and showed him my thumb up and prayed he may go away. He did not.
He dropped the puppy to the ground and kicked it and jumped on it.
I heard the yelp and whimpering from outside but was too shocked to do something. He jumped up and down time after time my mouth opened in terror as I saw the blood on his black shoes. Through all this he had this relaxed smile and looked at me.
The howls of the puppy stopped and he picked up the furry meat, the head a mess of bone shards and brain, one eyeball broken out, dangled down form the rest of the defiled carcass. The Man pulled the puppy tight to his chest and lifted his thumb, cradling his face in the red stew. He let it fell down to the ground again and kicked it again and again until it was bloods-and-bones-stew.
I opened the car door when Seth shouted, “Where are you going?” I turned around to see he poked his head in the rustic car and as I nudged to the front, I saw the Man was gone.
Headfirst I sprang out the car and nosedived on the street, my face nearly touched the asphalt. He was gone and so was the blood. Seth shouted out but I was inside the shop already and begged the young cashier for aid, asked her if she hadn’t seen the Man outside. Headlight eyes looked at me in fear as I tried to grab her shoulders over the counter. Dirt blew up all around me as I touched the dusty bins and shelves. After a babbling tirade I looked at the hand that clenched my arm. Seth looked bewildered at me, his eyes asked if I gone maniac.
I had scared him but it brought me back to reality, for a short time. We sat silent in the car until angry hoops of late afternoon commuters called for banishment. I turned around and parked on the lot, then called police. They weren’t skeptical like in the films, especially when I told them that I had seen the man before. An understanding face took notes and went inside to consult with the cashier. I called Mum.
“What you guys up to? What’s going on?”
“Mum,” I said. “There was this guy.”
“Did something happen with Seth? What did he do?”
“Nothing,” I said and watched from the frame of my sight how my brother curled up in the passenger seat. “It was just odd.”
“What’s the matter with you? You scared me to death,” she said. I couldn’t scare her with this. Had I really imagined it all? I called Amy but she didn’t answer.
There was nothing on the video, they said. Just me in the car staring bewildered then stumbling out like drunk. They gave me various explanations from dehydration to stress and left me and my brother there on the road.
I opened the door and fell on the couch. I told him about my encounters with the man and tried to find reasons for the strange behavior until he asked if I couldn’t file against a stalker. Was this Man stalking me? From one second to the other things made sense and didn’t seem as bad, or bad in a different way. I pulled over a stoic mask on my mad face and cheered him up as I felt his angst. I called Mum and told her everything was fine, just a misunderstanding, and she accepted my explanation with weary ease.
I ditched my list and let Seth choose a film and slumped on the couch with dry eyelids covering my headache.
I woke up from a noise at the door, Seth crouched on my shoulder in sleep. I was scared and turned around to see my Amy standing in front of me, trying to plug in her dead phone. We embraced and sat down in the bedroom far off from troubling my brother with my disturbing tale. Amy didn’t doubt me but seemed more skeptic crafting mighty fine tales of pranksters and jokers wandering around town scaring people to practice their grotesqueries.
We lied in bed afterwards, she behind me, pressed against my back. I drifted away with a headache and the blazing last sunrays shone behind my eyelids again, a flash of a smile of the Man and his rat teeth and his chopstick-dress and he all set on fire, just standing and smiling. I woke and stared in darkness, the moon smirking at my anguish. Night bathed the room and I heard the deep snoring sound of Amy, still behind me.
The pillow was hot and cooked my ear and brought back memories of a headache as to command to turn over my headrest to the cooling side of the equator, to hopefully fall fast back asleep but as I lifted up there in the split of the halfclosed door to the dark of the halls behind I saw the blazing eyes. Red glowing in the dark for a lifetime and a second, staring and blinking and a soft tickle of laughter. I crouched myself at Amy’s side and shook her softly, she mumbling as her eyes opened awake.
I told her there was a thing at the door in the apartment. Sober from sleep her grogginess fell in an instant, and stiff like a white candle, she was up in the bed next to me. Her hands turned on the light and I moved a finger to the mouth and slowly crawled out from the bed, scared and slow steps I leaped forward looking behind me to see her face. She got up after me and held a hand on my back, a sign of watchful reassurance.
The rest of my home was dark and silent but for the breathing of Seth on the couch who woke as I switched on the lightbulbs tingling above his hair. Questioning eyes, he asked what was going on, Amy sat down with him as I went through all rooms again.
Then in the bedroom I looked under the bed and there was nothing. Back in the darkness of the hallway, Amy whispered to me of talking to someone a therapist or a psychiatrist, as I just stared at the shadow of a Man that was next to me, his face inches away from mine.
Part 2

I'm not looking to buy online, but I can't seem to find a place that sells good quality Poker Chips in the Calgary area. Anyone know of a store that has a selection, or does anyone have any decent ones on hand that they are looking to unload?

You ever sit around all day don’t know what to do? So bored of yourself that you just look at anything until you feel the rot creep up on you trying to drag you down. Well if you’re reading this, you must have some time on your hands. The name is Don Kowalski by the way.
My uncle used to say ,Gotta get out boy’ he said, ,You’re in a dark spot some time and when you’re in it keep going. Take it all, breath it in. Keep going. Always keep going.’ – ironic since he killed himself in a hunting accident out somewhere in woodland. I suppose he didn’t want to miss his prey and kept going after it. Kept going.
It started to work. For a few days you fight, and you struggle as sailors in a dry ditch or on a dry glass and you keep going, push forward and nothing comes from it until you know nothing will come from it. Such was time for me at the outbreak of our lovely new friend Covid. My one-part-off-part girlfriend Alessandra was with her family in Florida and so I shared the sunriddled apartment only with booze and screens.
Time was the enemy although it hadn’t been so from on early. It didn’t have to be this way. In the beginning, I was thrilled staying put, living only at home, downing a bottle here a bottle there took me months to realize that getting drunk wasn’t much exciting when you could do it every day. Lifting was no fun at home without the showoff.
The thrill wasn’t there without the mirrors and the others and I would not give empty testament. So I was stuck, down deep in my black chair with my greying hair clinging greasy to my head and the stubble on my face growing thicker and thicker like hedges and forests of dry metallic wires drilling themselves deep in my naked skin.
I sat on the chair, blue light penetrated me and I watched into it like someone getting lost in the sun to see caleidoscopic patterns afterwards for minutes and some stare in the dark ponds in gardens and across them and I stared into the unknown abbeys of the internet until I found something that hooked me. Interest was reborn, the cherubim and thrones sang, and I was again digging for knowledge on the riddle.
It was the case of Nathan, not Lessing’s I mind you. You got to know I’m, and I know this sounds like the start of a bad pulpy novel, I’m a PI or what the cool cats call it now. Private Investigation, looking at lives for a fuck of money but better than to slither up buttholes at the ordinary stational sedentary life I once had and was led in. I was called up, by a Mrs. Anderson, whose voice sounded like a whisky drowned chimney.
Carry Ann Anderson had called about a friend who was now dead meat. The case was solved she said but somehow it was not, not for her. There was rot on the inside of fresh timber. A fair warning here – there won’t be no solution, cause certainly me didn’t solve it. I told her so, when she called again. I hadn’t been to LA and going there was a waste, I knew as much already. For her sake I called the department over there and talked to the detective. She wasn’t going to be happy with my findings.
Gluing a mask of false politeness to my voice I asked, “So what’s the matter hm?”
“They say it’s all real simple: kid snapped and did it. But something ain’t right. You see I knew her back from the day, from Sacramento. I can tell you, this boy was no of these Columbines or Sandy Hooks, he would never hurt them.”
“That’s what the parents of those kids said too,” I said, uncomfortable silence on the other end.
“Something’s just off about this. You saw the files already?”
“Mhm. Didn’t do much good.”
“Tell you this: the officers said the same. Said it’s all there orderly and not like some coverup or some shit they tell you like the conspiracy theories on TV you know? Like they had to dig for it you know? Not too difficult and not too easy but also not in between not your textbook stuff either. Not odd he said. But said that it all around made it odd. Made it seem odd, still, somehow. Seems like not the type to do it. You know he said type? He spat them words out on me,” she said.
There I was. I made some calls asked about the kid that chopped down his family, sat his flat up like a Christmas tree and coaled it down to the ground, all in a cozy night. One day to the other and a bunch of people gone.
I find a pal of his, named Erica Cremonte. She was willing to talk. Told me when it happened and went down and all the other stuff. Other guys didn’t talk or told me how shitty they feel about it all. I dug a bit deeper inside Erica since she was the only source of water in the land of dry lands, she told me a bit more, opened up like an old lady to the cashier or waiter or the poor sod at the bus. Told me about Nathan and his family and his brother and his girlfriend her few idle feel-good weeks in Africa and the funeral. And that it didn’t make sense to her either.
And the days go by and I start to forget about the whole thing since there’s no leads and none won’t talk and I give up. Call Mrs. Anderson and tell her there is nothing and she doesn’t understand the whys in my words but she knows them and we agree to part ways and wish each other a nice day and she’s gone.
Days and weeks and months go by and I forget. Then I am locked here in front of the monitor and it all comes back and something in me stirs and after hours I stare at the profile of one Margaret Suarez and see the condolences on her Facebook profile.
I write to her and days pass me by, drinking lifting reading and boredom, the old familiar gent from around the corner walks up again until there’s a response. Asks me how I found her, what I wanted. Calls me and tells me all about the disfigured creep that slashed her mother in the office. Digs deeper and finds all the glory all the madness in the last mail, sent from her mother’s account.
He left something for us and I will share it with you. Keep in mind it’s all ludicrous but it will help pass some hours. So, the following is the written word of Nathan Cohen, brought to paper after he killed his therapist while locked up in the cuckoo’s nest.
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Sometimes I look up at the sky, at night. I wonder, is the lightning of the stars hidden by the vast dark, or is the darkness a shield? A shield that keeps us safe and calm from countless eyes that stare at us?
Back then I didn’t care for the night. The air was on fire from the red morning sun, every time the same, from grad school to that day when those good Fast Times at Ridgemont High started. In the beginning it was only dark shades of purple and crimson until the firmament turned to face blood.
A line of mystic clouds was in the sky, creeping forward like a white river. The street came alive minute by minute, looming trashmen came to empty our waste in the stark dust flying around. It was better in the hills with the cooling breeze before the onset of dawn.
Back then life was soft and kind and sometimes the only touch of madness was a killed hedgehog on the street or two poisoned cats in the neighborhood. Now, the sky is blue and white and partly covered in striped clouds standing static on the package of my pills. My name is Nate Cohen. Or was. A sitting corpse though I might sit and breath and eat and drink but I don't laugh or sing or cry. The laid out actions of others, that brought me here, might seem untrue for they can’t be proven, but I assure you they are true.
All of them. I don't know what will happen after I hit the "send" button but you all need to know there is a shade of acid in the world you don't taste or smell, but it burns your face like brimstone like flame-gas scorching your eyes like the sun was just the backside of a black hole. You'll see.
I was born Nathaniel Cohen in 1991 in the glory land of sunshine, to Ira and Susan. We lived down in Sacramento, my father running flocks of cars from behind a stuffed desk, and my mother gave pottery classes every Tuesday and Thursday night, taught a few friends how to make halfskilled molds of clay. Dad was a bold man always chasing dreams of living without a mortgage, and Mum supported but was like a happy young girl and bathed in the sounds of Sunday lawnmowers and plastic pools, water from the hose filtered the rays of solar bronze.
I guess in their own ways both were not real, maybe that was what tied them together. We weren't rich but not poor.
Playful on weekends I built forts and donjons between California sycamores and gray pine and hunted and ran with classmates and friends and neighbor's kids that grew grizzled worker’s brown over their small shapes.
I was happy before and afterwards, but loss is like a sharp pin in the foot, long lost by a sewing woman, too lazy to pick up her needles. Until then, when I was under or over 11 and my progenitor decided he needed to be home faster or sooner or was just hungry, and crashed into 2 men and 1 woman and one dog. Insurance and my grandparents (now long dead) kept us from sinking in the shelters of the homeless ones, but my mother needed work or we faced to lose the house.
The first months she worked as waitress at Ear’s, a rundown bar I wasn’t allowed to enter and so sat for hours on the warm sidewalks, gleaming red in the drowning sunlight and grey and sad under the smile of Mother Selene. Some days Mrs. Anderson watched me and I watched her, sipping slowly but frequent on cheap Chadonay. This went until some better showed up, and the months turned to over a year until that happened. My mother had studied contemporary art spending hours devouring Roy Lichtenstein and the likes and to find paying employment had never been on her mind, until some time as now.
Finally, after two years my mother got an offer from a small magazine in Los Angeles and we moved to this strange new world. Surprisingly, moving at the age of 13 was no fun but new friends found me as I slowly settled, when something changed.
Robert Berkowitz came into our life and took us in. He was a bald man with blonde eyebrows and eyes like glowing azures, he was no stranger to money and art, which was the way he’d gotten involved with Mum. They hit it right at each other and after some months or weeks, might it was just some weeks, he took us to his house in Beverly Hills, not far from where Foothill Road hits Park Way.
Beverly Palm Plaza was soon my second living room. Later, in the foul age of 16, I used all chances to leave the house into the mass of the 30.000 inhabitants living there, crossing the invisible line south of the tracks, where Pacific Electric had once worked streetcars on the Red Line. Eons ago in another world.
I did everything to leave home, my newborn half-brother Seth a crying shitting mess, stomping out silent thoughts with such vigor, that I agreed to join my mother on her monthly expeditions to the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art, near the buzzing Wilshire Boulevard. It was well worth the laughter from the beauties in blonde and black, and the cute Valley Girl that lived across from me. Life was good.
Robert tried to be a father, but in the end we formed a bond. He was there for me when I wanted and offered counsel and paid for my life while I enrolled in college, even helped my shallow dream to join in true Hollywood. After college I enrolled in the UCLA TFT program and, with help from my stepfather, finally landed a job at a production company, Reality TV. I started out as trainee and clawed my way finally to second assistant of the executive director of scripted TV development at Geronimo Grande Productions.
It wasn’t what I had dreamt of but at last I sustained myself, though Robert insisted to help with the rent for my flat on Kelton Avenue, where I still lived after graduating. Life was good back then, without the staring stars that tried to break through the night, away, far far away, Racing with the Moon.
I was 28 when the shades and clouds came over me. I was out with friends, a steamed night in the cool warm air’s vibrations around us.
We found a small restaurant near my place. Pitfire Artisan Pizza on 2018 Westwood Boulevard had brilliant Pesto Chicken and a damn fine Field Mushroom. I was there with Jules and Erica, enjoying dinner outside to the left of the entrance, a silent small tree our only companion, until she walked by. Inside there was a meeting of some charity organization, The Cotton Club or something.
Hair like ironed black jasper and ascetic nude makeup, she strolled by in a white tank top and black yoga pants, the matt casually under her arm. I didn’t stop staring at her. I couldn’t. Some birds in some nearby trees seemed to whistle after her and she turned around, just for a second, as if to say come after me Birdy.
“You in love Naty?” asked Erica, the flower from the valley with the flaxen mob on her head, sitting across from me.
“No,” I stuttered “Just caught my eye. Nothing.”
“Sure,” grinned Jules between his teeth, “Mine too.” he said, folding his tattooed arms in front of his chest, tongue shoved in the corner of his mouth smiling like a bobcat dressed in jeans and shirt of the same fabric, The Boy in Blue.
“Why don’t ask for her number? She’s just down the corner.”
“Isn’t that kinda creepy?”
“Most women like a bit of creeps, ” Jules howled up at his own joke, his hat nearly falling from the back of his head as he raised it up and slapped his left knee.
“Oh, shut up predator,” I waved off, before I turned to Erica “You don’t think that’s awkward?”
“Not if a guy like you asked. I remember a friend of mine met her husband like that, now Peggy Sue Got Married,” she smiled and put her head to the side. Too perfect white Hollywooddream teeth.
I had seen the Girl turning left and jogged away from the Pitfire, still hearing Jules laughing, when I saw her near La Grange Ave. She cut another corner up right so I ran after her, praying to find her. Yet to the grace of my bad luck, she was gone. The street in front of me was not crowded but the vixen from my dreams was vanished. Hands empty and defeated I returned to the table.
“Vae victis,” announced Jules, as he saw my hollow eyes. I never had a poker face until now. With half your face in mashed up molten scartissue it’s difficult to show emotion and I wonder, so far from home will the sun ever show herself again, will it fill anyone out her, raise itself, Raising Arizona?
“Did she say no?” blonde Erica asked with true empathy.
“Seems I lost her,” I said, trying to hide my disappoint. Just a few seconds more decisiveness and my life might have changed.
“Well let’s go, search a new one,” Jules sprang up and clapped.
Let’s go. The words rang, as I tumbled out of the cab up to my flat, the Girl long forgotten for the next few months until another fateful day, when I went to my gym. Workout and work kept me focused for a time and it was mostly night when I came home.
I admit I was a glutton. I had to work out at least three times a week, gym rats they call them. Muscled sweat pouring gales of raw testosterone into the halls. The Equinox Gym was my favorite in Westwood and I had been a paying patron for years now and knew more faces there than in the streets around my neighborhood. I had just left after a session of pumping my brains out, when I saw her crossing me by.
“Hey,” I blurted out in reflex.
She tilted her hand. Black hair, a shimmer of brown in the dusky sunlight, dark eyes and a friendly smile took me right home. Right where I belonged.
“Hey yourself,” she said, raising one eyebrow.
“Do I know you?” she asked, without arrogance, her black-brown hair gently thrown over the left shoulder. Love leaking out of every pore I muttered a plain “Yes”. Before she had a chance to pass me by.
“Sorry. I meet a lot of people lately,” she smiled “Are you in one of my courses?”
“Courses?”
“Well, here,” she grinned. Small white teeth and a thick red snail that crouched behind them, giving them shelter and backup, all the same.
“Ah no. I think, you passed by a pizza palor couple of weeks ago?” I stuttered in embarrassment, trying to suppress redness swelling on my cheek.
“Yes, that’s on my way. So, you’re my new stalker?” She laughed.
“Well, don’t I feel honored,” I extended my hand “My name’s Nate, by the way.”
“Amy. Amy Gallagher,” she raised a slim white wrist in the shade of the California sundown.
This was the day I really met Amy Gallagher for the first time. I rue it every moment in the coffin of my sterile being with the stars laughing at me and the disc in the sky calling my name making me all Moonstruck.
We set a date for the Saturday to come. I thought it fitting to go for Italian and led her to Sammy’s down at Santa Monica Boulevard. It wasn’t too expensive (I didn’t want to come across as one of those guys) but stylish enough to show her I had some taste stored in me. She wore a stunning babyblue dress just touching the tips of her knees, and her black mane was straightened in a long tail crowning her right pale shoulder. When she saw me, she licked her lips as if to prepare me for her Vampire’s Kiss. Sammy was a first gen from Palermo, old now he longed for his home and always liked to impress with native extravaganza.
“Ciao ragazzi!” he said as I walked my stunning Kypris down the cheap red carpet between trashy fake Roman plastic pillars.
“Come stai?” Amy replied, took his arm and left me somber.
They chatted a bit in Italian, what they said I do not know, but I knew the small thing in my belly, the knot of discomfort in my stomach. Laughs and eyes on me. Cheers swallow the jokes.
“You’re full of surprises,” I tried to gain control of the tilting ship, unnecessarily clawing my black hair back.
“You got no idea,” she pressed her tongue between a marble row of perfect teeth, a small red viper watched out from the cave of her mouth.
We talked of hard work, of idle time, of family the usual first-date-topics broken up by a hand of awkward pauses in between, like flashes in the storm.
“My family’s not from around here.”
“Neither’s mine.”
“So whose Italian? Mom or Dad? I bet your Dad.”
“None of them,” she grinned “I picked it up couple years ago.”
Movies, theater, literature, antipasti, strange people, more hobbies, main dish, skipping desert and I rolled from over her in my half of the bed (thank god I had cleaned up before I left).
Time flew like night owls and bats and the days were filled with wet noises. I visited some of her Yoga classes, though it didn’t suit me. She visited me on my work. I showed her around the crappy little rooms we sat in and all awed at her body and face.
The nights were like Sunday afternoons with her and all ungood became stored noise in the corner, so became my dead father and her dead family and my aspirations in Hollywood and her degree from John Hopkins and my love for seafood and her fishnet dress and here working Never on Tuesday. Three months and there was the big day.
“So you’re the famous Amy!” mother opened her arms to greet her, eager to impress. Hard embarrassment as Robert did the same, while Seth waved at her and whispered a shy “Hi”, acting so often like young male teens, caught in the web of a child’s mind and a growing body.
Mother had insisted to cook and so we all chowed away on something resembling orange Lasagna, chowing away with the Time to Kill until it was all over. Robert tried to save grace by filling up after each bite and putting on some of his favorite tunes. Wine spilled on the tablecloth like the face of Christ.
“Nothing better than the master,” he prophesized while laying on a small fortune in the body of an old vinyl version of “Sweet Home Chicago”, his second most favorite behind “Fire Birds”.
“You like to make deals yourself Nate told me,” Amy teased with a smile, Wild at Heart but calm and in control.
“Oh, we got an expert over here!” he teased back.
“I knew some devils myself,” she curled her pink lips, deviously looking from my chest to my eyes.
“I bet you still do,” Robert winked and tucked away as my mother gave him a noticeable kick under the table with a smile on her face.
“So, you’re a Yoga-instructor?” asked the former waitress, sucking out the air of the room.
“Amy is actually a doctor,” I deflected as she took my forearm softly, clinging for support.
“A doctor? That sounds nearly like what Zandalee did! Remember Zandalee? She was the girl down the street who had that accident a few years ago?” asked Robert, ignored by the rest.
“Why not work in a hospital or a clinic?” asked my mother.
“You must know, Western medicine is very limiting. There are many ways to keep oneself healthy, but you got to be open minded and have the stomach for it,” she laughed.
“You mean like this Eastern stuff?”
“Well there’s many older tricks to keep oneself in good shape,” she said before switching the topic “Nate says you two are art enthusiasts?”
“I don’t want to brag but I know my way around,” said Mum.
“Well me certainly not,” said Seth annoyed, a bored sigh escaped his lips, barely noticeable the runt of the egomaniac litter.
“Who made that wristband?” Amy inquired “It looks really cool!”, prompting a hidden prideful smile from my little brother who had put a small plastic pearl on a leather band knotted around his wrist.
“I did,” Seth said, as he stared awkwardly at the table.
“Don’t be shy baby,” said my mother “he’s usually not like that.”
“Just not interested in girls yet.”
“Are you famous?” asked the child, his cheeks bright red.
“No, I’m afraid I’m not,” said my love, giggling like an imbecile on her Honeymoon in Vegas.
“You sure? Aren’t you from the poor family?” asked the child again.
“Why do you ask?”
“I saw you on TV. You’re in that show about it.”
“Seth what are you talking? Stop that nonsense!” insisted my mother.
“It’s not nonsense,” said the child
“Enough now!” said mother.
“Ready for some games?” asked Robert as we dropped Seth’s fantasy.
“As ready as Amos & Andrew,” answered my Mum.
We spent the rest of the eve with talk and drink and spilled chips and even attempted to gamble on a bit of Ma-Jong before everyone sighed in boredom and we drove back to Amy’s place at Red Rock West with the Deadfall of the evening behind us. Usually, I had no trouble sleeping somewhere else and I had been to her little house at the fringes of the city’s civilization more often than not and when I woke at 03:00 a.m. the room smelled like gasoline. The TV was dead. We had watched something didn’t we? I thought “Guarding Tess” or “It Could Happen to You” was just starting when we dropped in. The things I knew were all so useless, I thought, what did it all do me good to know A Century of Cinema?
The bed was empty except for my own sweaty body, the smell like tiny razors in my nose, and when I called out, the only response was nothing from the hallway. I made my way outside on the corridor when I heard the whispers. At first I thought they came from the dirty bathroom but the closer I came towards the stairway the clearer it was.
Some voice was talking in the kitchen. Hiding my presence, I gazed through the open door and saw my girlfriend stare up at the moon, her voice barely a sound in it’s dead light. I didn’t hear what she said but for a while it seemed like there was someone else with us, someone who saw me and pointed a finger, led to her turning around, her eyes open and wide locking on my face. I jumped back at the swift surprise, as she called my name.
“Nate?” she asked me with a hunted voice, as if ready to give me the Kiss of Death.
“Y-Yeah. Everything all right Babe?”
“Sure. What you doing down here?”
“You were talking.”
“Did I wake you up?” she opened her arms to hug and we embraced another. Something wasn’t right.
“What you doing here? It’s after 4 in the morning and you here in the kitchen.” I left the words hanging in the air.
“You never noticed? I sleepwalk, always have. You really never woke up to this before? Did it since I was a baby when we were Leaving Las Vegas.”
I had no idea what she said. She told me it had happened to her since she was a child and that she had strange dreams of the moon and would wake up in the kitchen or the living room, mouth dry which meant she talked for long times, though to whom or what, she never said. Said it happened when she fell with the head right on the top of The Rock. We went back to bed but something was off. There was a noise. Or was there? I tried to turn around, roll over, Amy’s soft snoring next to me. Still a noise. Or not? Yes, yes definitely a noise. Or not?
A crackling sound, I jumped up. Slowly I crept outside the bed. Maybe just a bird had hit a window, had happened before. I crouched into the hallway, it came from the door. There was someone outside. Someone whistling. Slowly I made my way towards it, careful not to make the outsider aware of my presence.
I heard him breath or something that seemed like breathing. Half-breathing. Through the peephole I saw the void outside. There was nothing, just darkness and that whistling noise, soft and barley hearable.
It changed. Like light but not light, maybe orange or red. Did someone make a fire? Who would make fire in a building? It was like a bright red ring surrounding the black void. Then it blinked and I fainted.
Weeks came about and went by and work took me up as our next big project came, on my side always dutiful two new interns who often filled the whole office with the smell of fries they brought with them. We were in one of the smaller conference rooms, clean metal filled with flecks from cheap food, taking short breaks in between the longing working hours.
Sometimes I would use the breaks to talk some things through with my boss, always eager to show him how dedicated and thankful I was. His office had his name on the door but every time I couldn’t suppress the image of Very Important Pennis: Uncut on it. My tow fellow working drones were out to grab some snacks and I enjoyed the insularity of the room and took deep breaths, breathing through, Con Air from its powerful oxygen.
In my hand, a cup of coffee laying my eyes on the window, down on the people who passed another on the concrete between the pavements, when at the corner a man stood still. He was not ordinary. He just stood there. Had he stood here before? I don’t know but he stood and watched and then waved. Did he wave his hand at me? I came closer and tried to see what he was doing.
He raised his arm up in 45 degrees, and a single finger pointed at me like a spear as I gasped. Was this man mad? Was he seriously looking at me? There was something odd with him, I knew. There was something with his grimace, his Face/Off like he didn’t belong here.
Not on the street, but right here right that he was wrong in the City of Angles with his staring and unblinking Snake Eyes. As if he licked the thoughts in my head he violently shook his face up and down, loosening his slicked back brown hair and he smiled like a kid until for a moment his skin shook looked like a loosened mask. Then he hopped from one leg to the other, passers just ignored him, one to the other one to the other one to the other and bang he had fallen flat on the street crushing his head on the ground.
He lifted himself, blood tripling down on his brown suit and his white shirt and he did the same again. With full force he cracked his face on the hot concrete, again and again, sputtering teeth in all directions, still everyone ignored him and laughed at the sunfilled day.
As sudden as before he stood up, waved at me and ran away around the corner. In disbelief I kept standing and saw him look around the corner, staring at me until he produced an 8mm camera he pointed downwards. Then he started to spit around, all over the place as if that would have some effect like melting the stone or Bringing Out the Dead (which of course it didn’t).
Then he was gone in no time, Gone in 60 Seconds. Unbelievable what I had seen. When the interns returned, I pointed the spot out but the blood wasn’t there and the street so dirty clean like ever, and they thought I joked at them and turned their pimpled faces into smiles. Maybe it had just been bizarre performance, stranger things happened.
I told Amy of it and she agreed that it was nothing but an act or maybe really just a party clown or maybe someone who wanted to perform for his kids like The Family Man that he might be. I snugged up to her and pulled her close. I was happy and lucky and had to suppress that crunching emotion of bliss for a single time in my life only to accept the beauty in it with my shortloved heart.
I didn’t think about the man until a month later, it was weekend and Amy had her courses to give so I decided to grab my brother for a time at the beach. The hot sand around us we were lain out in the sun, talked about girls our mother and that his encroaching puberty started to cause tidal waves in the house. He was a good child and I tried to be as much a brother as I was. We were out in the water and then dried in the sun, palyed volleyball and disturbed elder people with it, when the sun tingled away.
Time had flown and I was glad I took the day to spend it with him. On our route home I filled up the car at the next gas station. There I met the Man again. Seth had taken time to make a visit to the toilet as I waited in the car. I was on my phone and scrolled through reviews for the coming movie night. I made a selection, “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” it was and “Christmas Carol: The Movie” and “Windtalkers” but a newer Adaptation, I looked up and saw the Man in the front of the car. His blue eyes examined my face, brown suit brown hair, and he hopped back in one jump and picked something up.
It was a little beagle and he pulled the puppy tight to his chest and scratched him gently behind the ears, whispering something into them that sounded like Sonny, but I’m not sure. He looked again at my eyes and he smiled. I didn’t know how to react, so I smiled back at him and showed him my thumb up and prayed he may go away. He did not.
He dropped the puppy to the ground and kicked it and jumped on it.
I heard the yelp and whimpering from outside but was too shocked to do something. He jumped up and down time after time my mouth opened in terror as I saw the blood on his black shoes. Through all this he had this relaxed smile and looked at me.
The howls of the puppy stopped and he picked up the furry meat, the head a mess of bone shards and brain, one eyeball broken out, dangled down form the rest of the defiled carcass. The Man pulled the puppy tight to his chest and lifted his thumb, cradling his face in the red stew. He let it fell down to the ground again and kicked it again and again until it was bloods-and-bones-stew.
I opened the car door when Seth shouted, “Where are you going?” I turned around to see he poked his head in the rustic car and as I nudged to the front, I saw the Man was gone.
Headfirst I sprang out the car and nosedived on the street, my face nearly touched the asphalt. He was gone and so was the blood. Seth shouted out but I was inside the shop already and begged the young cashier for aid, asked her if she hadn’t seen the Man outside. Headlight eyes looked at me in fear as I tried to grab her shoulders over the counter. Dirt blew up all around me as I touched the dusty bins and shelves. After a babbling tirade I looked at the hand that clenched my arm. Seth looked bewildered at me, his eyes asked if I gone maniac.
I had scared him but it brought me back to reality, for a short time. We sat silent in the car until angry hoops of late afternoon commuters called for banishment. I turned around and parked on the lot, then called police. They weren’t skeptical like in the films, especially when I told them that I had seen the man before. An understanding face took notes and went inside to consult with the cashier. I called Mum.
“What you guys up to? What’s going on?”
“Mum,” I said. “There was this guy.”
“Did something happen with Seth? What did he do?”
“Nothing,” I said and watched from the frame of my sight how my brother curled up in the passenger seat. “It was just odd.”
“What’s the matter with you? You scared me to death,” she said. I couldn’t scare her with this. Had I really imagined it all? I called Amy but she didn’t answer.
There was nothing on the video, they said. Just me in the car staring bewildered then stumbling out like drunk. They gave me various explanations from dehydration to stress and left me and my brother there on the road.
I opened the door and fell on the couch. I told him about my encounters with the man and tried to find reasons for the strange behavior until he asked if I couldn’t file against a stalker. Was this Man stalking me? From one second to the other things made sense and didn’t seem as bad, or bad in a different way. I pulled over a stoic mask on my mad face and cheered him up as I felt his angst. I called Mum and told her everything was fine, just a misunderstanding, and she accepted my explanation with weary ease.
I ditched my list and let Seth choose a film and slumped on the couch with dry eyelids covering my headache.
I woke up from a noise at the door, Seth crouched on my shoulder in sleep. I was scared and turned around to see my Amy standing in front of me, trying to plug in her dead phone. We embraced and sat down in the bedroom far off from troubling my brother with my disturbing tale. Amy didn’t doubt me but seemed more skeptic crafting mighty fine tales of pranksters and jokers wandering around town scaring people to practice their grotesqueries.
After a half slice of pizza and a cold shower we sat down with Seth on the couch, he somewhat checking out my girlfriend’s body under the green summer dress, a piece of cloth befitting a city not in tune with itself but always in fake summer. We lied in bed afterwards, she behind me, pressed against my back. I drifted away with a headache and the blazing last sunrays shone behind my eyelids again, a flash of a smile of the Man and his rat teeth and his chopstick-dress and he all set on fire, just standing and smiling. I woke and stared in darkness, the moon smirking at my anguish. Night bathed the room and I heard the deep snoring sound of Amy, still behind me.
The pillow was hot and cooked my ear and brought back memories of a headache as to command to turn over my headrest to the cooling side of the equator, to hopefully fall fast back asleep but as I lifted up there in the split of the halfclosed door to the dark of the halls behind I saw the blazing eyes. Red glowing in the dark for a lifetime and a second, staring and blinking and a soft tickle of laughter. I crouched myself at Amy’s side and shook her softly, she mumbling as her eyes opened awake.
I told her there was a thing at the door in the apartment. Sober from sleep her grogginess fell in an instant, and stiff like a white candle, she was up in the bed next to me. Her hands turned on the light and I moved a finger to the mouth and slowly crawled out from the bed, scared and slow steps I leaped forward looking behind me to see her face. She got up after me and held a hand on my back, a sign of watchful reassurance.
The rest of my home was dark and silent but for the breathing of Seth on the couch who woke as I switched on the lightbulbs tingling above his hair. Questioning eyes, he asked what was going on, Amy sat down with him as I went through all rooms again.
Then in the bedroom I looked under the bed and there was nothing. Back in the darkness of the hallway, Amy whispered to me of talking to someone a therapist or a psychiatrist, as I just stared at the shadow of a Man that was next to me, his face inches away from mine.

Published in Come Let Us Sing Anyway (Peepal Tree Press, 2017). Not enough room for it here, but I also liked Ross's stream-of-consciousness rant "Why You Shouldn’t Take Yourself So Seriously" (the passing thoughts of a woman as she spends too long in a noodle bar toilet to avoid a pompous date), collected in Margaret Busby's New Daughters of Africa (Myriad Editions, 2019).

The Mullerian Eminence

The Müllerian ducts end in an epithelial [membranous tissue] elevation, [called] the Müllerian eminence… in the male [foetus] the Müllerian ducts atrophy, but traces … are represented by the testes… In the female [foetus] the Müllerian ducts… undergo further development. The portions which lie in the genital core fuse to form the uterus and vagina… The hymen represents the remains of the Müllerian eminence.
In adult women, the Müllerian eminence has no function.
— Anatomy of the Human Body, Henry Gray, 1918
Charu Deol lived in the large cold city for five months and four days before he found the hymen, wedged between a wall and a filing cabinet in the small law office where he cleaned on Thursday nights. The building was an old government-protected church, but the local people only worshipped on the weekend, so the rector rented out the empty rooms. If Charu Deol had been a half-inch to the right, he might have missed the hymen, but the dying sunshine coming through the stained-glass window in streams of red, blue and green illuminated the corner where it lay.
Charu Deol thought it strange that a building could be protected. There were people playing music on the trains for money and two nights ago he’d seen a man wailing for cold in the street. He thought the government of such a fine, big city might make sure people were protected first.
Still, he’d known several buildings that acted like people, including his father’s summer house, with its white walls and sweating ceiling and its tendency to dance and creak when his parents argued. They’d argued a great deal, mostly because his mother worked there as a maid and complained that the walls were conspiring with his father’s wife. Charu Deol was also aware of a certain nihilism in the character of the room where he now lived – the eaves and floor crumbling at an ever-increasing and truculent rate. When he ate the reheated kebab with curry sauce his landlady left him in the evenings before work, he could hear the room complaining loudly.
The hymen didn’t look anything like the small and fleshy curtain he might have imagined, not that he had ever thought about such a thing. At first, it didn’t occur to Charu Deol that he’d found a sample of that much-prized remnant of gestational development, the existence – or lack thereof – which had caused so much pain and misery for millennia. He hardly knew what a hymen was, having only ever laid down with one woman in his life: the supple fifty-something maid who worked for his mother.
Away from his father’s summer house, his mother had her own maid, because what else did you work for, after all? The maid had offered warm and sausagey arms, the sweet breath of a much younger woman, and a kind of delighted amusement at his nakedness. After he’d expelled himself inside her – something that took longer than he’d foreseen, distracted as he was by the impending return of his mother – she’d not let him up, but gripped his buttocks in her hands, pressing her entire pelvis into him and pistoning her hips with great purpose and breathlessness.
He was left quite sore and with the discouraging suspicion that she’d used him as one might a firm cushion, the curved end of a table, the water jetting out of a spigot, or any other thing that facilitated frottage. Afterwards, she treated him exactly as before: as if he was a vase she had to clean under and never quite found a place for.
He used the side of his broom to pull the soft, tiny crescent-shaped thing toward him, then, bent double, he touched the hymen with his forefinger.
First, he realised it was a hymen. Next, that the hymen had lived inside a twenty-seven-year-old woman, for twenty-seven years. When she was twenty-four, her boyfriend returned home, bad tempered from a quarrel with his boss. When she asked him what was wrong one too many times, the boyfriend – who prior to that moment had washed dishes and protected her from the rain and gone with her to see band concerts and helped her home when she was drunk and collapsed laughing with her on the sofa – grabbed her arm and squeezed it as tight as he could, causing a sharp pain in her shoulder and her heart. When she said, ‘You’re hurting me’, like the women in movies and books, he squeezed all the tighter and looked happy doing of it, and the little flesh crescent inside her slid through her labia and down the leg of her jeans and onto their kitchen floor. The boyfriend swept it up the next day. The bin bag burst in the apartment rubbish dispenser; the hymen got stuck to the edge of someone’s yellow skirts and, helter-skelter, this little pink crescent was pulled along the cold and windy city streets.
Now it was gently pulsating in Charu Deol’s horrified hand.
The knowledge inside the hymen did not manifest in good and tidy order, like a narrative on a TV screen. It was more, thought Charu Deol, like being a djinn or a soul snake, slipping inside the twenty-seven-year-old woman’s skin and looking out through her eyes. He had the discomforting feeling that her body was a bad fit, and stifling, like a hot-water bottle around his thinner, browner self, baggy at the elbows and around the nose. He knew the woman was still with her boyfriend, and that she thought about what she’d do if he ever squeezed her arm again. Charu Deol knew they pretended that the arm squeeze and the not-stopping was a nothing, or a small thing, instead of the cruel thing it was, and that the hair on her arm where the boyfriend gripped her was like a singed patch of grass that never grew again.
Charu Deol sat down on the floor of the law-office church and saw that his hands were shaking. The hymen felt like thin silk between his fingers. What was he to do with it? To discard it was like throwing out a prayer book or a sacred chalice. Before he knew what he was doing, he took a new dusting cloth from his cart, carefully wrapped it around the hymen and placed it in his pocket.

When he got home, he stole a small, plastic bag from his landlady’s kitchen – the kind she packed with naan and Worcestershire sauce and tied up with a plastic-covered piece of wire for work. She would be angry when she discovered his theft, so he left a pound coin on the floor, to the left of the refrigerator, as if he’d dropped it.
She’d put the coin in her pocket without asking if it belonged to him.
Alone in his room, he unwrapped the tiny, silken, throbbing thing and rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger. He was assaulted with the woman’s story again: the squeeze, the disbelief, the lurking, tiny fear. This was why, when the boyfriend slapped the backs of friends or laughed too loud, a small part of the twenty-seven-year-old woman winced and moved away.
Charu Deol placed the hymen inside the plastic bag and sealed it, setting it on the nightstand where he could see it.
He was a witness, and that was important.
He couldn’t sleep, conscious of the lumpy mattress, the large cupboard that took up most of his box room, the smell of the thin blue blankets his landlady stole from the old people’s home where she worked. ‘No one wants them,’ she said, ‘no one has any use for them.’ He didn’t know why she stole them; all she did was stack them in the cupboard.
He thought of his father, a man who had never held him or as far as he knew, been proud of him at all.
He got up and slipped the plastic bag in between the ninth and tenth blue blanket. Before he did so, he examined it one more time. In the dim light, the hymen looked like a beautiful eye: brown and dark and soft and wet, its worn edges like eyelashes, an expression he couldn’t fathom at its centre.

Charu Deol took long walks. That was what big city people did. He went to a small and well-manicured park during the hours he should have been sleeping. He bent his head near the small park pond and dipped his long cracked toes in the water until someone stared and he realised he was up to his ankles at the cold, dank lip. He watched a man teach his two girls cricket with a tennis racket. He watched an orange-helmeted man run down the path, holding his son’s scooter, laughing and calling, ‘Use your brakes!’ He thought about city people soaking in baths and whether they noticed the scum floating to the surface like bad tea, and about the landlady asking him if he’d like her bath water after she got out and how he’d stammered, ‘No thank you.’
‘That’s the way you do it here,’ she said, and her face reminded him of his mother’s when his father’s wife went out to get sweet biscuits at the end of a meal.
A woman walked past with a shrill voice and a plaid shirt and a friend eating grapes, while he dried his cold feet on the grass. When they were gone, he saw the small, iridescent thing by his big toe and wanted to ignore it, or to decide it was a lost earring. He closed his eyes. But he could not leave it there, forsaking his new knowledge, as if he had no responsibility.
Charu Deol lay on the grass, curled around the hymen, and played nudge-chase with it, like a cat with half-dead prey, snatching at the air above it, using his thin sleeve to push it around under the soft edges of the setting sun. The shrill-voiced woman’s hymen was not as soft or simple as the brown eye that lay between the ninth and tenth blue blankets in his room. This one was round, with seven holes in its centre, reminding him of the way thin, raw bread-dough broke when you dragged it across a hot stove; but he’d never seen dough encrusted with stars. This hymen glittered so ferociously against the wet grass, he thought it might leave him and soar into the sky where it belonged.
He touched it, expecting it to burn him.
The woman with the shrill voice had been raped twice before her tenth birthday, each time by her father, who smelled expensive then, and still did now. It was not the pain the woman remembered, but the shuddering of her father’s body and the way he closed his eyes, as if he could see the burning face of God. She had never had an orgasm because she couldn’t bear that same shuddering inside of her; if it broke free, it might kill all the flowers that ever were. Charu Deol knew all this and also that the shrill-voiced woman sometimes wondered: Why no more than twice? Was it because her father had stopped loving her?
Charu Deol shivered on the grass. After a while, he picked up the silver-star hymen and put it into the plastic bag in his coat pocket because part of him had known another would come. He watched the geese until a park attendant nudged him with a broom.
‘What’s up, chappie,’ he said. He was an older man, with the dark chin of an uncle.
‘What do you do when evil comes?’ asked Charu Deol.
The attendant took out a pack of mentholated cigarettes. He sat down next to Charu Deol and smoked two cigarettes and watched the geese. ‘I don’t know,’ said the park attendant. ‘But I think you have to be rational and careful about these things.’
Charu Deol took the plastic bag out of his coat pocket and showed it to him.
‘I think you’re very emotional,’ said the park attendant, and bared his teeth. He didn’t seem to see the bag. ‘Chin up, laddie,’ he said.

Charu Deol sat on his lumpy bed that night and examined the bagged and beautiful hymens. Surely, he thought, they belonged to virgins. But neither of these violated women were pure. Was this a strange sickness of city women that no one had thought to tell him? Certainly, he hadn’t known city women before, with so many ideas and so many of them about him. More than once, he’d found himself feeling sorry for them, even the ones who looked at him strangely on the 453 bus and moved their purses to the left when they saw him.

His Tuesday job was for a company that made industrial bleach. He liked it best there. Despite the smell of ammonia, his cart shone – and the teeth of his lady boss shone, and she looked into his face, not through the back of his head, and laughed loudly when he told her about the cracks in every one of his landlady’s china cups.
‘Is your country very beautiful, Charu?’
He thought it very familiar of her to address him so. He could see she was made of the same stuff as his mother’s maid, very different from the finer skin of his father. She lifted the hair off her neck, which was something he thought she should only do near a man she knew well. Nevertheless, he nodded politely and when the boss lady left he went to the large unisex toilet and scrubbed yellow and brown stains out of the bowls, his rubber gloves rolled all the way up his wrists and forearms.
When he backed out of the stall and turned around, there were three hymens on the floor. One of them was like a piece of thunder, singing a dark song and rolling back and forth – the hymen of a woman in her fifties who got something called a good backhander when she talked too much, and a pinch on the waist when her opinions sounded more clever than her husband’s. The second reminded him of a teardrop. When he lifted it to his face, it filled him with memories of a woman whose husband once ironed the inside of her left thigh like a shirt. The third one slipped him into the skin of a woman who had a happy life except she remembered walking home from school and the stranger who crept up behind her, put his hand up her skirt and clutched her vulva.
Charu Deol was so startled by the sudden feeling of invasion that he dropped her hymen in the soap dish and had to fish it out again. Two more hung from the rolling towels, like wind chimes, twins: one raped, one not, but he knew the untouched sister stayed with the violated twin because she wished it had been her instead. He clutched the sink; he couldn’t see his reflection because there was a spray of crystalline hymens across the mirror, each smaller than the last. He bent closer and realised it was only one after all, exploded across the glass like a sneeze. The woman it belonged to had clouted her best friend’s fiancée when he’d tried to hold her down. He hit her so hard in return he made her deaf in one ear. She had never told her best friend, but she didn’t go to her house anymore and that had caused problems between them. The blood from her ear had tinged the hymen spray a shy blush-pink.
Charu Deol set about gathering them all.

He thought them safe, slipped between the blue blankets, and so they were for a few days, but he had forgotten his landlady’s monthly clean-out, and returned that Friday to find her shining his floors with a coconut husk and changing the sheets on his bed, her fat, brown back unexpectedly familiar. The blue blankets were stacked on the floor, one plastic bag peeping out from a crevice. He was so frightened she might have thrown them away, or hurt them, that before he knew it he was speaking in his father’s baritone, demanding she respected his privacy, please and thank you, and if she couldn’t, she could find someone else to pay her every Sunday for this shithole. It was a city word and he felt powerful saying it to her.
The landlady stared at him, as if he was a new and rare object.
‘Please yourself,’ she said, and shuffled away from the half-polished room. ‘Do someone a favour,’ he heard her muttering as he scooped up the plastic bags, ‘look what you get.’

He bought himself a long coat from a charity shop. The coat had many pockets and after his Sunday job, he sat on his bed and sewed more into the lining. His Sunday job was at a university, where he cleaned staff offices and found thirty-eight hymens. Some were like bright cherry-red fingernails; one s-shaped, glimmering wrought iron; he tapped it and heard a ting-ting sound like his mother’s bracelet on her kitchen pots. One reminded him of a cat’s paw; another smelled like fresh sea urchin. It surprised him to find that eleven of the hymens were from women abused by scholarly, well-respected men.
As the numbers increased, anxiety took him: the risk of forgetting even one precious story. To forget would be sacrilege. He stole two reams of recycled typing paper from his Sunday job and wrote the stories of the women down and read them at night, trying to commit them to memory. On Wednesday, he was fired from his Wednesday job, for refusing to take off his suspiciously bulging coat for the security guard. On Thursday, the landlady left a note from his Sunday job, to say he must not come back – their cameras had recorded his paper theft.
At his Tuesday job, the boss who was overly familiar left her hymen on the edge of her computer desk.
It was so pretty he mistook it for a small, white daisy. When he touched it, his head reeled with alcohol: cranberry vodka and alcopops. Last Friday she’d gone around the back of the pub with two men who seemed quite nice; she was sexually aroused but also frightened and when one of them said something lewd and dark, she wanted to run back into the pub, but the second one had a hand on her hip and she decided she might as well bite her lip because making a fuss might. Might. Might just.
Hurt.
She found Charu Deol weeping for her, his cheek hard against her computer screen and fired him for the way he looked at her, his face broken open. She said if he told anybody about unfair dismissal, she would say he tried to rape her.
‘Don’t look at me,’ she said. ‘You don’t know.’

Charu Deol’s head is light and empty as he walks through the early morning sunshine. The coat full of hymens rubs his ankles; the satchel on his back is stuffed with scribbled paper. He is concerned about himself. He has taken to muttering in public places, to stopping men on the road to tell them about women. He needs help. He cannot witness these stories alone. If he could just explain, if he could just ask them, politely, not to hurt anyone; if he could just talk to enough of them, it might stem the tide. Most thrust him away, mistaking him for drunk.
‘It’s not true,’ say the few who listen when he tells them that it’s one in every three women he sees. ‘It’s complicated,’ say the men. ‘What can I do?’ they say.
He doesn’t know.

His skin hurt. He feared it was transparent, exposing his internal organs. This was not a job for one man, not for a man who needed to pay rent, although he found himself less concerned with such banalities. He avoided speaking to women at all, worried he might hurt or offend them. He was practically servile with his landlady since his last harsh words, cleaning not just his own room, but the entire house, including her roof and digging her backyard until she yelled at him. He was relieved that she was among the unscathed, and marvelled at women on the streets for their luck or stoicism.
One tall lady left a trail of hymen strands behind her like golden cobwebs, a story so long and fractured and dark that he bent over in the busy street and cried out his mother’s name. He wondered if he would ever see his mother again; if he could bear to take the risk, now that he was witness. He watched the golden cobweb woman laughing with a friend, swinging her bag, her heels clicking. How was she standing upright? How did they restrain themselves from screaming through the world, cleaving heads asunder, raking eyeballs? How did the universe not break into small pieces?
He became convinced that the hymens in his coat were rotting. Despite their beauty they were pieces of flesh, after all. At other times, he imagined them glass; feared he would trip and fall and shatter them, piercing his veins and tendons. Still, he walked every day and gathered more. They littered his room, piled under the bed and towards the ceiling.
He bought a lock for his door.

On Monday, or perhaps it was Thursday, he took himself to the church that was a law office. The gravestones ached with the weight of early Spring daffodils. The rector found him bent over one of the graves, inserting his fingers into the damp earth, hands going from coat pocket to soil. When he said, ‘Son, can I help you?’ Charu Deol asked if this was blessed earth, and would it protect blessed things. He clutched the area around his heart, then the area around his neck, and whined like a dog when the rector tried to soothe him.
‘Can you not see them?’ Charu Deol said.
‘What, my son?’ asked the rector.
Charu Deol grasped the man’s lapels and dragged himself upright. He was weeping, and frightening a holy man, but the hymens were thick on the ground like blossom, and the task was suddenly, ferociously beyond him. He dropped the rector and ran through the graveyard, past clinking, bleeding, surging, mumbling pieces of women.
The hymens were a sea in his landlady’s front yard. He crushed them underfoot, howling and spitting and weeping, feeling them splinter, break, snap, squelch under his heels like pieces of liver. He tried his key, once, twice, again, wrenched it to the left, and pushed inside. The place was quiet, the usually dull and lugubrious walls mercifully blank, his bed cool against his face.
The landlady knocked and entered. ‘Lawks lad,’ she said, ‘I’m worried about you. It can’t be all that bad, now.’ She sat on the edge of the bed and looked at him.
He remembered a son she’d once mentioned; he’d never taken the time to listen.
‘Tell me of your son,’ he said.
She did, saying that she knew young men. All they needed was a firm hand and a loving heart. The two of them, they’d got off to a bad start, but now she saw he was in need of help. Would he like a cup of tea? He was too handsome a lad to get on so. Charu Deol sniffed, tried to smile, inched forward, put his head on the soft knee. She patted him awkwardly, and he felt a mother’s touch in the fingers, and a fatigued kind of hope. He crawled further up her knee, put his face into her hipbone. She smelled familiar. His teeth felt sharp, his fingers sweaty. He could hear flesh outside, beating on the door, crawling up the windowpanes.
He didn’t see the hymen inching down her thigh, like a rubied snail, like torn underwear.

Love Silk Food

Mrs Neecy Brown’s husband is falling in love. She can tell, because the love is stuck to the walls of house, making the wallpaper sticky, and it has seeped into the calendar in her kitchen, so bad she can’t see what the date is, and the love keeps ruining the food – whatever she does or however hard she concentrates, everything turns to mush. The dumplings lack squelch and bite – they come out doughy and stupid, like grey belches, in her carefully salted water. Her famed liver and green banana is mush too; everything has become too-soft and falling apart, like food made for babies. Silk food, her mother used to call it.
Mrs Neecy Brown’s husband is falling in love. Not with her, no.
She gets away from the love by visiting Wood Green Shopping City on a Saturday afternoon. She sits in the foyer on a bench for nearly two hours, between Evans and Shoe Mart. She doesn’t like the shoes there; the heels make too much noise, and why are the clothes that Evans makes for heavy ladies always sleeveless? No decorum, she thinks, all that flesh out-of-doors. She likes that word: decorum. It sounds like a lady’s word, which suits her just fine.
There are three days left to Christmas and the ceiling of the shopping mall is a forest of cheap gold tinsel and dusty red cartridge paper. People walk past in fake fur hoods and boots. A woman stands by the escalator, her hand slipped into the front of her coat; she seems calm but also she looks like she’s holding her heart, below the fat tartan-print scarf around her neck. Then Mrs Neecy Brown sees that the woman by the escalator is her, standing outside her own skin, looking at herself, something her Jamaican granny taught her to do when the world don’t feel right. People are staring, so she slips back inside her body and heads home, past a man dragging a flat-faced mop across the mall floor, like he’s taking it for a walk.
She trudges through Saturday crowds that are smelly and noisy. The young people have fat bottom lips and won’t pick up their feet; she has a moment of pride, thinking of her girls. Normal teenagers they’d been, with their moods, but one word from her or one face-twist from Mr Brown, and there was a stop to that! She had all six daughters between 1961 and 1970: a cube, a seven-sided polygon, a rectangle that came out just bigger than the size of her fist and the twin triangles, oh! The two of them so prickly that she locked up shop on Mr Brown for nearly seven months. He was so careful when he finally got back in that their last daughter was a perfectly satisfactory and smooth-sided sphere.
All grown now, scattered across North London, descending on the house every Sunday and also other days in the week, looking for babysitting; pardner-throwing; domino games; approval; advice about underwear and aerated water; argument; looking for Mamma’s rub-belly hand during that time of the month; to curse men and girlfriends; to leave pets even though she’d never liked animals in the house; to talk in striated, incorrect patois and to hug-up with their daddy. Then Melba, the sphere, who had grown even rounder in adulthood, came to live upstairs with her baby’s father and their two children. The three-year-old sucked the sofa so much he swallowed the pink off the right-hand cushions. The eight-month-old had inherited his father’s mosquito face, long limbs and delicate stomach, which meant everyone had to wade through baby sick. Then Lara, Melba’s best friend from middle school, arrived in a bomber jacket with a newly-pierced and bleeding lip so long ago that Mrs Neecy Brown didn’t even remember when, but regarded her with fond absent-mindedness, not unlike a Christmas decoration you’ve had so long you don’t know where it came from. And the noise. Oh dear, oh Lord.
In between all of this, her husband’s bouts of lovesickness.
He’d proved no good at marriage: the repetition, the crying babies, the same good mornings, the perfectly decent night-dresses she bought – Lord woman, you couldn’t try a little harder? – but there was nothing wrong with her pretty Marks and Spencer cotton shifts, lace at the décolletage, and little cream and brown and yellow and red flowers. He seemed to crave what she privately called The Excitement Girls. She thought of them as wet things: oiled spines, sweating lips, damp laps. She saw one of them once, kissing him goodbye no more than fifteen minutes from their home. She’d scuttled behind a stone pillar to peep. The girl turned away after the kiss. She looked happy. Her chest was jiggling, bra-less, the nipples like bullets.
So that’s what they look like then, thought Mrs Neecy Brown.

She paused at the entrance to Wood Green tube station. One turn to the left and she’d be on her street. No, she wouldn’t go home, not yet. He’d be there for his tea, pirouetting through the house with his broad grins and smacking her bottom, his voice too loud. How stupid he thought she was; didn’t he know she could see, that she knew him? In love he was alternately lascivious and servile and too easily tempted into things – brawls, TV shows, games of poker for too much money. Gone for too long and out too often, and when he came back he would lunge at the family: Come, let’s go to Chessington Park next Sunday, or-we-could or-we-could, and he’d get his grandchildren excited, and she’d fry chicken and make potato salad and buy Sainsbury’s sausage rolls, 39 pence the packet of ten and pack tomatoes like a proper English family, in a proper hamper basket with thermoses of tea. Then, when all is ready, the greatest of apologies he comes up with. Once he even squeezed out tears: Can’t come, Mrs Brown, he calls her, or Mummy on affectionate days, Can’t come, my dears. They working me like a bitch dog, you know. Errol, she murmurs, language! Then he’s heading out the house, tripping up on his own sunshine, free, free. Make sure you come back in time, Errol boy, she always thinks, in time to wash that woman’s nipples off your neck-back.
After all.

She loves the London underground; it still seems a treat, an adventure, paying your fare, riding the escalator, choosing a seat, settling back to watch the people. So many different kinds, from all over the world! She settles into a corner and watches a Chinese boy struggling with a huge backpack. The straps are caught in his long hair. She’ll ride with him all the way to Heathrow, she thinks, see if he untangles the hair before Green Park. Then ride the way back. She leans her head on the glass partition and steps outside of her body.
Last night, Mr Brown did something he’d never done in all these years of his lying, stinking cheating.
Walking in, midnight or thereabouts, easing himself onto the edge of the mattress – she pretending to be asleep as usual, groaning a little, turned on her side – he rolled into the bed, after casting one shoe hither and the other thither and his tongue was in her ear, digging and rooting. Snuffle, snuffle, like a pig. Then she became aware of the smells. Vicks Vapour Rub. Someone else’s perfume, and… Mrs Neecy Brown lay trembling and affronted and frozen in the first rage she’d let herself feel for a long time – not since the first time he’d cheated, and repented and wept so much and talked to Pastor for weeks and then just went out and did it again, and she’d realised that it was a habit, this love-falling, and that she could never stop it, only fold her own self into a little twist of paper and stuff herself near the mops and brooms in the downstairs cupboard. No not since then had she let herself cry.
He’d come to her bed unwashed, with the smell of another woman’s underneath all over him.
She’d felt as if her head was rising; would never have expected to recognise such an odour so immediately when it assailed her. But it was just like the smell of her own underneath, the one that she made sure to clean and dress, like a gleaming, newly-caught fish, lest it flop from between her thighs and swim upriver.
She clapped a hand over her mouth as he snuggled into her, so she didn’t leap up and scream it at him: Is so all woman underneath smell the same, Errol?
If they were all the same, why turn from her and seek another?
No, she wouldn’t cook for him. Let him eat what bits he could find in the fridge for tea, and vex with her. Let him use it as an excuse to storm off to she.

The Chinese boy has sagged next to the centre pole, holding on for dear life. There are empty seats, but perhaps getting the mammoth backpack off and on makes the option too tiresome. There’s another young man sitting to her right. He’s wearing a creased blue shirt and stained navy-blue pants. His black socks are covered in fluff, like a carpet that hasn’t been hoovered in days. He has a dry, occasional cough and he sits with one hand akimbo, the other on his jaw. His eyes dart around. He’s a man in need of a good woman, if ever she’s seen one. Then she looks closer and sees she’s wrong – someone has creamed his skin and it gleams amongst the other imperfections.
Furthest away are a mother and daughter, stamps of each other, but even if they hadn’t been, she would have known. Mothers and daughters sit together in particular ways. Mother is shorter, more vibrant. She rubs her temples, manipulating her whole face like it’s ginger dough. Daughter has a face like a steamed pudding, two plaits that begin above her ears and slop straight down over them. Her hand’s a wedge of flesh, rubbing her eyes. She smiles at Mrs Neecy Brown, who finds she can’t smile back. She can’t take the chance. She presumes that Mr Brown finds his girls in north London. He’s lazy. This latest one is near, she can feel it; she could even be this young woman. She wonders whether they know her face, if they’ve ever followed her.
The train stops, empties, fills, whizzes past stations: Turnpike Lane, Manor House, Finsbury Park, Arsenal, Holloway Road. Where was she, this latest one, casually breaking off bits of her husband and keeping them for herself? She’d had to feed breakfast to a limbless man at least twice; can’t forget the week he didn’t smile at all because some selfish woman had stolen his lips.

She doesn’t realise that she’s been asleep until she wakes up.
‘Hello, ma’am?’
Balding head and a large beauty mark on his left jowl. He hunches forward in the seat; he’s been sitting like that for years; she knows the type – bad habits you couldn’t break by the time your fifties set in. There’s something young about his chin: it’s smooth and plump and might quiver when he cries. He’s wearing a horrible, mustard-yellow jacket and red trousers.
The man is bending forward, gesticulating, and Mrs Neecy Brown sees that her tartan scarf has fallen to the floor. She leans forward, feeling creaky, bleary, feeling her breasts hang, glimmers at the man who’s smiling at her and beats her to it, scooping up the scarf and placing it delicately on her knee, like a present.
‘Thank you.’
‘You welcome.’
She looks around; they’ve reached Heathrow. She must have fallen asleep soon after Green Park, half an hour at least! The train hisses. People come in slowly. They’ll be heading back soon. She’d like to be a movie star, she thinks – to pack a perfect set of matching luggage and leave the house, a crescent, golden moon above her. She would come to Heathrow and… what? She sighs. The fantasy won’t hold. She doesn’t have a good suitcase any more, because triangle number one borrowed it and still hasn’t given it back, and she knows what that means. Last time she asked for it, the triangle brought her three packs of heavy-duty black garbage bags from Sainsbury’s, where she works.
The train jerks and the scarf jolts forward again and spews onto the floor. The man picks it up again, before she can move.
‘Look like that scarf don’t want to stay with you.’
Sudden rage floods her.
‘What you know about me or anything? Mind you bloody business.’
‘Oh my,’ says the man. He touches a hand to his forehead. ‘I’m very sorry, lady.’ His voice is slow and wet, like a leaf in autumn. A crushed, gleaming leaf, in shades of gold and red and yellow.
She grunts, an apology of sorts. He recognises the timbre, inclines his head.
She thinks of her girls. If any of them is a cheater, it’s the second triangle – with her vaguely cast-eye and that pretty pair of legs. Never could stop needing attention. She sighs. Anger will help nothing.
‘You alright, sis?’ The autumn man looks concerned.
‘What business of yours?’
‘Just…’ he gestures. ‘You look like something important on you mind.’
‘Nobody don’t tell you that you mustn’t talk to strangers on the underground?’
He hoots. ‘That is the rule? Well, them tell me England people shy.’
Silence. The train doors close and it starts back home. The man has a suitcase. Marked and scrawled. She remembers arriving in London, so long ago, and how it seemed everything was in boxes: the houses, the gardens, the children and how big and cold the air was and how the colour red snuck in everywhere: double-decker buses and phone boxes and lipstick. Mounds of dog doo on the street, and you could smoke in public places those days. She, a youngish bride, Errol like a cock, waving his large behind and his rock-hard stomach. He’d kicked up dirt in the backyard that he would eventually make her garden and crowed at the neighbours. Mrs Smith, from two doors down, came to see what the racket was; she brought a home-made trifle and was always in and out after that, helping with the girls, her blonde, cotton-wool head juddering in heartfelt kindness. She’d needed Mrs Smith.
‘So you come from Jamaica?’ she offers.
‘St Elizabeth. Real country.’
‘Where you headed?’
The man consults a slip of paper from his lapel pocket. ‘32 Bruce Grove, Wood Green.’
‘Well, that’s just near where I am, I can show you.’
They regard each other for some seconds.
‘You come to –?’
‘You live near –?’
Laughing and the softening of throats, and her hands dance at her neck, tying up the scarf. He has a grin perched on the left hand side of his face.
‘Ladies first,’ he says.
‘You come to see family for Christmas?’
He nods. ‘My daughter married an English husband and her child is English. So I come to see them.’ He seems to let himself and his excitement loose, slapping his hands on his thighs and humming. ‘Yes boy, my first grandchild.’
She smiles. ‘I know you have a picture.’
He scrabbles in his wallet and passes it over. His daughter is dark black, big-boned and big-haired, her husband tall and beaming, the child surprisingly anaemic and small-eyed. She has a snotty nose. Mrs Neecy Brown thinks that an English person must have taken the photograph, for anyone else would have wiped it. But they look very happy. Grubby but happy, Mrs Smith would have said. Dead now a year or so. She hands the picture back.
‘Pretty.’
He nods vigorously, slaps his thighs again, stows the photo carefully back inside the dreadful coat, blows on his clenched fists. He must be cold, she thinks.

Night lies down on Wood Green station as they puff their way up the escalator and stand gazing at the road. My, how they’ve talked! Not easy; she can’t remember the last time she spoke to a man who was listening. The sound of her voice was like a tin, she thought, rattling money. But he’d opened his mouth and made sounds, and so had she, all the way home. The smell of vinegar and chips from a nearby shop; three boys play-wrestle in front of the cinema across the road – some wag had named it Hollywood Green. She doesn’t know whether she thinks it’s clever or stupid. She points.
‘What you think of that name?’
He reads, shakes his head. He doesn’t have an opinion. She smiles. That’s just fine, with her.
A cat tromps by, meowing. Lord, the noise.
Mrs Neecy Brown drops her handbag and grabs the autumn man’s arm, and reaches up to his shoulder, fingers scrabbling, her wedding ring golden against his terrible jacket. She hates cats. They don’t seem to care. He puts his suitcase down and pats her hand. They stand like that, arms interlinked, her hand on his shoulder, his hand patting. She is aware of happiness.
Eventually she moves away and he picks up the suitcase. Her fingers tingle from the shape of his shoulder. She waves towards the darkened roads. ‘I show you where.’

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