Brone Barnheart
“Hey Mister, want to buy a rat? It’s good for a scare.” She held up a little black ball, complete with tail and whiskers. I grinned back,
“Sorry, this time I’m sober.” My feet walked on. My eyes unfocused and glazed over all of the grey in my view. Then a strip of red caught my attention. There next to the gutter, soaked, was a dainty red scarf. I looked at my watch as if I had something better to do than go pick it up. As I lifted it, I noticed it was complete with tire marks. Looking around to see if anyone was taking not of my peculiar behavior, I saw a laundry mat. “What are the odds.” I took the scarf in, holding it by one end, away from me. The laundry mat manager lifted an eyebrow. I just blankly stared back; this was definitely not the strangest thing he’s seen. As it was washing, I slouched down, put my feet in another chair and lit a cigarette. The manager cleared his throat and pointed at a no smoking sign. I kept puffing. Two cigarettes later, the scarf was out of the dryer. I carefully rolled it up and placed it in my inner suit pocket. As I was leaving I herd “asshole,” under the manager’s breath. I was tempted to show him the wonders of a window punch, but my feet had already guided me away. Back, past the little stand.
“Are you sure?”
“Get me after I leave the bar,” I said without stopping. Huh…the bar it is then. I took a slightly quicker pace with a destination in mind. At the door to the bar, I paused. In the refection I saw the woman in red. Except it was a red shirt, not a dress. Hand propping her head up, she had a look of absolute boredom. This time, there was no work to do. I turned around and put my hands in my pockets. Ding ding ding, she glanced at me, but did not move. Her expression gave away nothing, I like a challenge. I wiped my feet and hung my dripping trench coat on a hanger, careful not to make more work for her.
“Hey, I’d like a coffee, black.” I said.
“What size,” she responded automatically.
“Medium,” she finally got up and started getting the coffee. As she turned away to get the cup, I admired her figure. She had perfect curves and the right proportions in all the right places…Looks like I was going to find out the hard way why she lived here.
“That’ll be 2.50,” she said. Again rehearsed, this was going to take some time. As I gave her three bucks I said,
“Want a scarf?” She looked right at me and her eyes gave away nothing. It looked like she was capable of anything, “daunting” I thought. She handed back two quarters and I tossed them in the tip jar. I took out the scarf out and put it on the counter, snagged my coffee and put on my trench coat at the door.
“Thanks,” she said apathetically. I walked out into the crying world without looking back. I tossed the coffee in the gutter, and tried to light a cigarette, “A challenge alright.”
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
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She brought the glass of red liquid to her lips, reflecting on the events of the
day, pondering over what would happen next. Her legs covered in dark boots crossed, swinging in the air off the stool. She didn’t lean on the bar, as did the gentlemen who had been continuously consuming shots since he got here. She hadn’t seen him before, at least not before she left. He’d looked at her only once and ignored her the rest of the time—she hated him.
Bored of the rather dull atmosphere—no music, no entertainment, no men—she finished her numbing elixir in a soft gulp, head tilted back, long dark hair sweeping her back in fierce strokes. Rising, she grabbed her leather jacket and proceeded to the door. Putting on the jacket, she reached to pull the door open. A wave of shock hit as the blinding white light met her eyes—and he entered. Compared to the atmosphere, he was a God.
“Excuse me,” I managed to purr, as I brushed past, careful to graze his perfect arm as he held the door for me. She’d have to keep special tabs on him.
Her boots echoed as she made her way on the pavement, boots echoing her every step, unable to penetrate the noise of the city traffic. Without a destination in mind, her thoughts crept to the men she’d just met. She envied them. The alcoholic, in all his distasteful existence, seemed to even then have purpose, a reason. Since she got back, the direction of her life seemed elusive. She’d always lacked specific direction in her life, but she had an overwhelming sense that something needed to be dealt with—she just didn’t know what yet. It was like an itch that couldn’t be scratched, no matter how much alcohol she consumed. Wine—she needed more. Interestingly enough, her mind had been one step ahead of her; she had somehow made it to the front of Manny’s Grocery.
She entered the store. Taking a basket, she made her down the aisles to get to wine section. She thought back to the women she hadn’t previously given notice to: the weird woman on the sidewalk and the annoying twit on the elevator; even they had some path that they were drifting along, no matter how insignificant. She stood in the aisle, staring at the glass bottles that would be her sweet aid. Some woman was muttering next to her, she was also staring. She appreciated this woman’s taste, but it was rude to stare, even if it was at Nicole. She left the aisle, and bought her wine. Number one task out of the way, she headed to the coffee shop.
Sun high in the sky, she entered the shop.
Oh dear. Molina was in the convenience store talking to Dillain. The ding of the bell signaled her entrance, and they both looked up. Molina made a smart comment, followed by another. Nicole ignored her and went to the back room. She set her bag down and changed. Dark jeans and red blouse on, she returned to the front. Dillain had left, which only left Molina. How she was not in the mood…
“So?” Molina questioned, hand on hip, impatience in her voice.
“I wasn’t in my apartment, obviously. How can I help you?” Nicole retorted with equal attitude.
“Jus’ wanted to check on ya, hadn’t heard from you in a long time.” Her lack of speaking skills always infuriated her, other than that, Molina wasn’t so bad. Nicole even enjoyed her company some of the time, she’d been a good friend before she left.
“I’ll try to answer my phone next time, or bring my cell phone with me; whichever.” Effectively assured, Molina left.
And so work began.
Dillain entered the shop at 12 a.m., right on time.
“I’ll see you later,” Nicole said as she flew past him in her hurry to leave. She’d bee so eager to leave she’d almost hit him on her way out. She loved and hated Sketch Coffee. Taking ownership from her uncle had been easy enough, but as far as she knew, her uncle got the better end of the deal. Walking back to her building, home, she considered the people who’d come in. A woman, young, pretty brown hair, poor. Taking out change like an imbecile to pay for her coffee, which had been difficult to “make” in and of itself. A man who’d bust in the store, unwashed. She knew that these people stayed in her building, but that didn’t make them any more appealing to talk to, however convenient it might be.
When she stepped off the elevator on the 11th floor, she noticed a strange and eaciated character jiggling the door knob of my apartment.
"What the hell are you doing?"
"Well obviously I am trying to break into your apartment. It's much more difficult than it looks, I usually have someone else do this. Regardless, there is no point in continuing, I shall take my leave."
She'd of kicked his ass, but she had she more pressing matters to deal with; however, she wouldn't forget this encounter--or this insect. She watched him walk away and push the button of the elevator. She memorized his statue and appearance--she stored it in her memory for later. She entered the apartment. She breathed a huge sigh as she threw herself on the couch. Her dress and drinks were in the bag, but she’d get them later. With nothing to occupy her mind, she considered the problem that lay ahead and behind her. Something needed to be done about something, she just didn’t know what. She raised up and placed her arms on her knees, head in her hands. The unknown task harassed her thoughts until impatience flowed into her limbs. She had to get out.
She switched from jeans to her short, pleated, black skirt. She grabbed boots from her closet—red. The cold wouldn’t bother her after a few drinks, so she left her jacket and left the troubling apartment.
The End Begins
Victoria on the scarred hardwood floor of apartment 27 surveys the day's catch -- three chipmunks, two sparrows and an enormous black rat. It's not a bad haul.
She needs to get to skinning before the hides stiffen up. She starts with the rat -- slits it open from tail to sternum and commences to wriggling the flabby carcass from its skin. Her movements are mechanically smooth; not a drop of blood strays onto the hardwood.
She is an exceptional rat-skinner, and it's no wonder. She's had so much practice. Rats have infested every city and each wilderness she's ever visited -- they are a wandering taxidermist's mainstay.
And oh, how Victoria has wandered.
. . .
As the cruel wind howled through Chicago's neatly gridded glass-and-steel canyons, Victoria huddled on the bus-stop bench. Hunched over her opossum, shielding him with her body from the gawking, chicly upholstered philistines on the sidewalk, she poured the strong-smelling liquid down his plaster gullet as directed. Then she cupped her hand to her ear and listened.
"You're not far enough gone, girl," came the faint, rasping reply. "Not near far enough gone, but must keep running. Run, run to the ends of the earth, for the thing you seek waits there."
She sighed at this familiar refrain, then wrapped him up and put him back in her bag. She heard the equally familiar hiss of the bus's breaks and lurched to her feet. Must keep running.
In the woods along the northern Pacific coast, she paused again to consult her oracle, hoping that he did not instruct her to clamber down to the shore and strike out for Japan. She set him down on the damp pine needles, plied him with his favorite drink and waited for her answer.
He seemed to sniff the air with his pink-painted nose before finally croaking, "You need to turn around."
"Could have told me that before I started walking," she muttered as she dutifully put him away and started back towards Seattle.
Victoria tarried a while in Phoenix -- it seemed a reasonably likely candidate for the glorious title "ends of the earth." She waited to confer with the opossum on that point, however, being well aware of the tremendous regional market for jackelopes. When she finally allowed her marsupial helpmeet a drink, he shrieked at her, "Time is running out! Go now, go now -- that man in the blue pick-up is heading for the place where you should already be!"
And so it was that several days later, Victoria found herself in Baltimore. She caught the bus that the oppossum recommended, and sure enough noted a sign reading "Think twice" as the bus turned onto a street off of which there was no exit back onto the highway.
"The ends of the earth."
Victoria stepped off of the bus, and a tall, uncompromising box of a brick building met her gaze. "It'll do," she announced to no one particularly.
. . .
Victoria tans the rat's hide with lighning speed, having already mixed her plaster. She's something of a virtuoso -- most taxidermists need months to complete a single specimen, but Victoria has almost halfway finished her task some 20 minutes into the work.
Grandmother taught her well.
"Although what she saddled me with you for is anyone's guess," Victoria remarks to the vulture. She brought him back up to her apartment after closing the stand -- she doesn't like the way that drunken would-be gambler looks at him. "Your furred counterpart may occasionally change his mind about things, but at least he attempts to fill his allotted role."
Silence.
No surprise there. He had kept his beak shut similarly tight when that malicious Chicagoan child had very nearly pushed her into Lake Michigan's frigid maw. And when she had been almost brained by a falling tree branch in the north woods. And as she had narrowly avoided a rattlesnake in Phoenix (she made the reptile rue the day, but still). The vulture hadn't even warned her about the blue pick-up driver, whose intent had proved vicious even if his execution was lacking.
"Useless," Victoria grumbles as she commences to modeling the rat's skinned carcass.
Only to nearly jump out of her own skin when the vulture lets loose a blood-curdling screech.
. . .
And so into the dully dripping night Victoria runs. Past the cat lady who was always throwing her dirty looks, past the young man out fetching coffee. There was that scream, and then, through the window, something . . . she didn't know what. But it was why she was here, whatever it was. And it was headed for her empty lot.
She sees something now, a big, dark shape that stinks of fish, spoiled vegetable matter and some other element that she doesn't recognize. For all its enormity, the thing moves with an odd delicacy. She sees a hand, a mouth. A hand going to a mouth -- it's eating, after the fashion of an aged lady picking at her salad. Then she steps closer and sees.
It's a raccoon the size of a city bus.
And it's eating . . . what is it eating? Victoria squints. Her eyes must be playing tricks on her -- she has the impression of a little black rip in the fabric of existence, a tiny patch of void which widens with the beast's nibbling.
And then it looks at her, and she could swear that it grins a ghastly grin, that its dead white eyes gleam with recognition.
"What are you?" she whispers, and its grin widens.
"I am the end."
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