Antlers
Eddie Brock
Pirouette
Captain Uni
Supermaxx
Natty
Ezekiel
Nemaisare
Cᴀᴛᴡᴏᴍᴀɴ
Nine Lives I. Lɪᴍʙᴏ
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
² ᵐᵒⁿᵗʰˢ ᵃᵍᵒ; ᴺᵉʷ ʸᵒʳᵏ ᶜⁱᵗʸ
The rain is coming down hard enough to make the windows tremble in their frames and swallow the city whole; all that noise and life becoming a reduction and distant muffling pulse somewhere. Hissing of water against brick and fire escapes. Every now and then headlights smear over the condensation fogged glass and warp into pale ghosts.
It’s all just moments in the inbetween.
Screamlight pours in from above; the moon sharp and peering from behind clouds as they part and fold back against the canopy of night and she paints out weak silver slashes that catch the exposed curve of dead skin. Pinned. Two heels in the speckled wallpaper and my hands white-knuckled and braced against the border piping where those same walls meet the ceiling. I remain still and watch three cops below me struggle to find a clue. The heat is building in the apartment to make it wet and suffocating; mildew and old cigarettes sitting beneath a sweeter rot beginning beneath all of it.
I stay still and watch three police officers below me contaminate a grave.
Just them, and a woman bowed stiff on her knees forever.
Rigor mortis must have locked her that way days ago already and whoever she had been before no longer mattered to the room. Whatever name her mother gave her, whatever she sounded like laughing and whatever little things she carried inside of herself were gone by now. And come morning she’ll just be the stripper known as Autumn Rain and she’ll be remembered as being found like this, bound and on her knees, left in some apartment, her golden hair full of roaches.
That will be her story and the paperwork will gather dust and fall beneath paperweights and turn yellow with age at the edges.
Even like this with her eyes wide open and dry, she is beautiful. An honest beauty. They see a stripper known as “Autumn Rain” when they look at this body and they fail to see the intended symbol left behind on purpose. I see the child she was and the woman she’ll never be coexisting in every shape the mist carves and from this uncomfortable corner of the ceiling that I have contorted myself into, I see myself too.
The bruises around her neck have become mottled and grey-violet where the blood sat and pooled and remained there; her lips are purple and blue. The fabric of my trousers squeaks as I strain to stay in place while the cops below take their sweet time and I’m hardly surprised that in some way they are getting off on this. One of them shudders as he takes another look at her and I catch the way his tongue just slips out to caress the corner of his lip and the way his eyes linger just too long at the arch of her back at the way her vertebrae are stacked so beautifully and poke just so against the white of her skin; a delicate ladder to climb.
He’s pushing the middle of his fifties and she’s nineteen; even like this he sees her body.
Outside, an emergency calls elsewhere and perhaps that siren will arrive in time to save a life or save the day and I only briefly think of it before it dissolves back into the storm. Life persists beyond the windows, blurred and distant.
She’s the first I will see like this.
Autumn is not the last.
The rain hadn't stopped since. Autumn Rain's private joke, perhaps? It hadn't stopped, only changed the way it was heard and the way it pressed itself against glass. It had been two months and Autumn Rain was filed away into a precinct cabinet and everything had moved on. Backwash into the gutters that carried away the dirt into the overflow.
Selina stayed perched and held perfectly still on a fire escape by Vicki Vale's apartment. Vicki Vale who she had observed as boots on the ground of the crime scene apartment building with a camera weeks after the body was taken away. Vicki would be there in the nights and occasionally during the day as if the untouchable sun would cast light on anything new.
Selina did not move any closer, she did not need to. Across the narrow divide, a window burned with a tired light. Vicki Vale was at her desk again, huddled over it in study of her collected evidence. When she couldn’t be seen at her desk or breaking in to the now forgotten crime scene, she might be seen at the deli. Rarely the deli, but often enough that it could be deduced that at least she was surviving. Every trace of this woman that Selina had encountered suggested a woman who had decided that rest was for everyone else and not her. A woman after my own heart. It was respectable, truly, but who was she really? Photographer and independent young nuisance, a rebellious student? Photographs layered and re-layered until their chronology had become irrelevant. Two women lived here, Selina thought. Vicki Vale and the ghost of a woman whose life was being reconstructed in her evidence and notes.
Inside, the redhead tapped at a photograph with the blunt edge of her pen. Then she leaned back in her chair; gaze drifting upward to look at the ceiling at an old a water stain in its corner; a crack that ran through the plaster. On the nights that Vicki had gone without sleep, it would move and wriggle and open to her like a smile.
Vicki had come to New York looking for someone who was already gone. The pen between her fingers turned and she began writing again.
She was folded into her work; shoulders carrying the weight of too many hours there. Her hand moved intermittently across the page, writing, stopping, writing again. From the outside, Selina could see the angle of her neck; slightly strained with a faint tension that never left. The desk lamp held her into a small island of visibility inside the room and everything beyond it was softened down to shadow and indistinct furniture. Selina watched her without moving.
The rain thickened for a moment and slid down the glass in uneven trails and Vicki held up a photograph. Vicki wrote again. Her elbow found a stack of newspapers – none of which for two months had even mentioned the name "Autumn Rain". A sound cracked through the street outside. The sound of New York City at night but it still had Vicki lift her head to the window, her pen stopping mid-line. She listened, motionless by the desk as if in anticipation of a follow up noise to be the explanation but only the rain filled the gap by the window to smooth everything back into a steady and indifferent pressure against glass.
She pushed her chair back slightly to turn toward the window. The street below washed with the halo shapes of streetlights and headlights that dragged through the wet. Nothing moved with intention and nothing suggested danger and yet Vicki held a moment longer than she needed and her hand tightened slightly on the edge of the desk. “Nothing,” she muttered to herself, as she turned back she reached for a sheaf of papers without looking. A single photograph.
This was older, this wasn’t from the apartment or case file; a personal print, slightly worn at its edges and handled more than it should have been. Two women stood together, caught in a moment that had not been posed carefully enough. Vicki was recognisable immediately, her hair shorter than it was now, and her face less tightened by the habit of staring too long at things that refused her understanding.
Beside her was a woman with golden hair and an expression open in a way that felt disarming now, far from the imaging the city would later assign to her. Someone leaning into the frame, and into a friend like she trusted the world not to misplace her. Vicki and Holly. The air briefly grew warmer at the memory before she set the photograph back down on the desk beside the others and her pen returned to the page; determination renewed.
Outside, the city kept moving through water and distance. Selina followed the roofline once more.
The rain is coming down hard enough to make the windows tremble in their frames and swallow the city whole; all that noise and life becoming a reduction and distant muffling pulse somewhere. Hissing of water against brick and fire escapes. Every now and then headlights smear over the condensation fogged glass and warp into pale ghosts.
It’s all just moments in the inbetween.
Screamlight pours in from above; the moon sharp and peering from behind clouds as they part and fold back against the canopy of night and she paints out weak silver slashes that catch the exposed curve of dead skin. Pinned. Two heels in the speckled wallpaper and my hands white-knuckled and braced against the border piping where those same walls meet the ceiling. I remain still and watch three cops below me struggle to find a clue. The heat is building in the apartment to make it wet and suffocating; mildew and old cigarettes sitting beneath a sweeter rot beginning beneath all of it.
I stay still and watch three police officers below me contaminate a grave.
Just them, and a woman bowed stiff on her knees forever.
Rigor mortis must have locked her that way days ago already and whoever she had been before no longer mattered to the room. Whatever name her mother gave her, whatever she sounded like laughing and whatever little things she carried inside of herself were gone by now. And come morning she’ll just be the stripper known as Autumn Rain and she’ll be remembered as being found like this, bound and on her knees, left in some apartment, her golden hair full of roaches.
That will be her story and the paperwork will gather dust and fall beneath paperweights and turn yellow with age at the edges.
Even like this with her eyes wide open and dry, she is beautiful. An honest beauty. They see a stripper known as “Autumn Rain” when they look at this body and they fail to see the intended symbol left behind on purpose. I see the child she was and the woman she’ll never be coexisting in every shape the mist carves and from this uncomfortable corner of the ceiling that I have contorted myself into, I see myself too.
The bruises around her neck have become mottled and grey-violet where the blood sat and pooled and remained there; her lips are purple and blue. The fabric of my trousers squeaks as I strain to stay in place while the cops below take their sweet time and I’m hardly surprised that in some way they are getting off on this. One of them shudders as he takes another look at her and I catch the way his tongue just slips out to caress the corner of his lip and the way his eyes linger just too long at the arch of her back at the way her vertebrae are stacked so beautifully and poke just so against the white of her skin; a delicate ladder to climb.
He’s pushing the middle of his fifties and she’s nineteen; even like this he sees her body.
Outside, an emergency calls elsewhere and perhaps that siren will arrive in time to save a life or save the day and I only briefly think of it before it dissolves back into the storm. Life persists beyond the windows, blurred and distant.
She’s the first I will see like this.
Autumn is not the last.
The rain hadn't stopped since. Autumn Rain's private joke, perhaps? It hadn't stopped, only changed the way it was heard and the way it pressed itself against glass. It had been two months and Autumn Rain was filed away into a precinct cabinet and everything had moved on. Backwash into the gutters that carried away the dirt into the overflow.
Selina stayed perched and held perfectly still on a fire escape by Vicki Vale's apartment. Vicki Vale who she had observed as boots on the ground of the crime scene apartment building with a camera weeks after the body was taken away. Vicki would be there in the nights and occasionally during the day as if the untouchable sun would cast light on anything new.
Selina did not move any closer, she did not need to. Across the narrow divide, a window burned with a tired light. Vicki Vale was at her desk again, huddled over it in study of her collected evidence. When she couldn’t be seen at her desk or breaking in to the now forgotten crime scene, she might be seen at the deli. Rarely the deli, but often enough that it could be deduced that at least she was surviving. Every trace of this woman that Selina had encountered suggested a woman who had decided that rest was for everyone else and not her. A woman after my own heart. It was respectable, truly, but who was she really? Photographer and independent young nuisance, a rebellious student? Photographs layered and re-layered until their chronology had become irrelevant. Two women lived here, Selina thought. Vicki Vale and the ghost of a woman whose life was being reconstructed in her evidence and notes.
Inside, the redhead tapped at a photograph with the blunt edge of her pen. Then she leaned back in her chair; gaze drifting upward to look at the ceiling at an old a water stain in its corner; a crack that ran through the plaster. On the nights that Vicki had gone without sleep, it would move and wriggle and open to her like a smile.
Vicki had come to New York looking for someone who was already gone. The pen between her fingers turned and she began writing again.
She was folded into her work; shoulders carrying the weight of too many hours there. Her hand moved intermittently across the page, writing, stopping, writing again. From the outside, Selina could see the angle of her neck; slightly strained with a faint tension that never left. The desk lamp held her into a small island of visibility inside the room and everything beyond it was softened down to shadow and indistinct furniture. Selina watched her without moving.
The rain thickened for a moment and slid down the glass in uneven trails and Vicki held up a photograph. Vicki wrote again. Her elbow found a stack of newspapers – none of which for two months had even mentioned the name "Autumn Rain". A sound cracked through the street outside. The sound of New York City at night but it still had Vicki lift her head to the window, her pen stopping mid-line. She listened, motionless by the desk as if in anticipation of a follow up noise to be the explanation but only the rain filled the gap by the window to smooth everything back into a steady and indifferent pressure against glass.
She pushed her chair back slightly to turn toward the window. The street below washed with the halo shapes of streetlights and headlights that dragged through the wet. Nothing moved with intention and nothing suggested danger and yet Vicki held a moment longer than she needed and her hand tightened slightly on the edge of the desk. “Nothing,” she muttered to herself, as she turned back she reached for a sheaf of papers without looking. A single photograph.
This was older, this wasn’t from the apartment or case file; a personal print, slightly worn at its edges and handled more than it should have been. Two women stood together, caught in a moment that had not been posed carefully enough. Vicki was recognisable immediately, her hair shorter than it was now, and her face less tightened by the habit of staring too long at things that refused her understanding.
Beside her was a woman with golden hair and an expression open in a way that felt disarming now, far from the imaging the city would later assign to her. Someone leaning into the frame, and into a friend like she trusted the world not to misplace her. Vicki and Holly. The air briefly grew warmer at the memory before she set the photograph back down on the desk beside the others and her pen returned to the page; determination renewed.
Outside, the city kept moving through water and distance. Selina followed the roofline once more.
