Slice of Life

Rain came down, cutting through the ambient grime that clung to the warped glass panes that made up the windows of the Quarter. It was one of those gentle morning storms; freak things that made their appearance when the sun was just peaking over the gabled rooftops of crumbling buildings. Misty rainbows arched and writhed over the mossy slate roof tiles, and gathered in gossamer spider webs drawn like patches of near-invisible lace between the latticework of iron-railed balconies.

In a large, ancient apartment over a Caribbean grocery, a boy slept, curled amongst the dusty cushions of a window bench. Delicately-uptilted eyes, fringed in thick, dark lashes, wouldn’t open again until nightfall.

Until then, he dreamed.

Across the road, a tall, handsome woman dressed all in black from stately head to booted toe, despite the stifling wet heat, made her way through the chaotic cacophony that was mornings in the French Market, parting the loud-mouthed hawkers like some sort of somber, elegant steamship. She paused at a booth tucked against the side of one of the posts that supported the slanted roof, away from the others, its wares far less commonplace and decidedly more questionable then the produce being sold around it. The proprietor was veiled and hooded in a myriad of colorful fabric, the style of drape much in the way of a Muslim woman, making identification nigh impossible. Genderless, it watched the tall visitor with glittering, black eyes.

The woman ran her marvelously long, white fingers over a woven-leather necklace that was lain out against the thread-bare velvet tablecloth. The slender, ivory pendant looked suspiciously like an engraved human finger bone.

They exchanged no words, the merchant and this woman, but after a moment, she produced a crisp, ten-dollar bill and handed it over before plucking the necklace up and stashing it somewhere within the matte confines of her clothing.

A nodded gesture of goodbye passed between them before the woman was off again, strolling impressively down North Peters Street without even a glance back.

The boy drifted in and out of sleep, in the way of most housecats, through the hottest, busiest parts of the day, ignoring the bustle of nasal, yatty voices and rumbling car engines that played out their dissonant symphony on the street below. A sleep-languid tongue lapped at his lips when, at around lunch time, the scent of plantain chips and greasy, fried oysters reached his nose, filtering through his strange, static dreams of half-remembered faces and music, changing them to those of weird banquets and fairy kings with iron-thorn crowns.

He stirred finally, groggily, when the orange yolk of the sun had finally slunk down to a low, red suicide smear on the horizon. Bloody light filtered in through the wavy pane next to his face, glowed almost purple in the spun-ebony curls that lay over his serene forehead.

He squinted his eyelids closed against the ruddy glare, a soft grumble of protest in his throat as he rolled over, knocking half the bedding to the floor. Noises of habitation began sounding from the collection of humid rooms beyond him as the others began waking as well. Diamond-edged laughter slipped out from beneath the closed door to Persephone’s room.

After a yawn or two, he stretched as much as he could within the confines of the tiny ledge he’d been sleeping on and slithered to his feet, naked and pale, to go in search of the bathroom. He stepped barefoot over piles of discarded finery that smelled of ash and sweat, passed the narrow kitchen where a willowy shadow swallowed down pills and continued on to the cracked-plaster hall.

The bathroom was tiled all in pale blue with a frosted, dingy skylight set high into the ceiling. He caught sight of himself in the fly-spotted mirror above the old, wall-mounted sink. The smudges of old eyeliner and abuse beneath his lower lashes told the story of the night before better then he could remember it. His mouth tasted like stale cotton and other people’s spit.

A few pairs of delicate fishnet stockings were moved from where they’d been drying on the toilet lid before he flipped up the seat, trying to coordinate his still half-sleeping brain enough to pee.

He stood there for a several silent moments after the stream of urine dried up, his feet becoming cold from the slick, hard tiles, and just listened to the goings on in the flat behind him. The long, unidentified form in the kitchen coughed on a half-swallowed Excedrin. Ancient beds creaked in dark rooms with black-out curtains, and floor boards moaned beneath bare feet. Plaster sifted down from the water-warped ceiling as a truck drove by outside.

And there, like piano music in the next room, was Persephone’s laughter.

The abrupt roar of the toilet flushing startled him, even though it was his hand that pulled the cord. He blinked owlishly at his reflection in the mirror once more, appraising the traces of black lipstick in the corners of his mouth, the lush jewel tones of shadows that made his eyes look even more bruised and tired then he was.

He washed his face, and rinsed his mouth with rusty-tasting tap water.

As the light slowly faded, the more life stirred on the streets, in the bars and strip clubs along Bourbon Street. Neon signs flickered, buzzing, reflecting their garish messages in the shallow, oily puddles on the sidewalks and the wide eyes of brave tourists who had enough gall to wander past Canal after the sun went down. Music, ranging from pump-and-thrust dance music to the ever-present jazz, began playing from deep, propped-open doorways, welcoming a new night.

A gaggle of teenagers huddled together on the corner, suddenly illuminated in a pool of sooty yellow light from a gas-burning streetlamp. They were Parish kids, born and raised on the outskirts of the crumbling City, offspring of respectable, blue-collar suburbanites. It was their accents that gave them away, despite the care they took with their death-pallor make-up and tatty, thrift-store clothes. As they whispered amongst themselves, it was plain. They spoke too fast, and without the sardonic drawl of those who’d survived LNW childhoods. They lacked the hard-edged, smokey twang to their words that the Quarterites had. It made them strangers here… almost as foreign as the hurricane-swilling tourists that came from up north to play in the Gomorra that was offered to them in the French Quarter bars.

They were a mixed group of beautifully done-up boys in leather and velvet, and tall, pale girls in shredded, lacy dresses. All of them wore too much eyeliner and reeked of cheap incense. The sickly smell clung to their clothes and hair, even to their fingertips, marking them as a pack of these faux-jaded, baby-goths that flooded the Quarter each night to listen to whining, clichéd bands in cramped, dirty venues.

“Ten minutes,” one of the boys murmured excitedly to the girl beside him. They twittered like a tiny flock of birds and pressed their way into the similarly dressed crowd that was gathering outside of Midnight Sun, a small all-ages club crammed in between a daiquiri shop and a used book store.

One of them caught the eye of a tall woman dressed all in black walking down the ill-lit sidewalk across the street, a black-wrapped bundle in her arms. She smiled at the boy, and gave him a nod that sent chills down his spine. He knew her face, the handsome angles irritatingly familiar, though he couldn’t place her.

She was quite forgotten, though, when his friend grabbed him by the arm. He turned his attentions back to the line without a second thought and held out his hand to be stamped by the bouncer at the door.

The band was already tuning up inside.

His first thought was that a party had invaded the faded decadence of the front parlor. He’d come from the bathroom only to find that the other’s had woken and were now sitting in jovial companionship amongst the dusty furniture, some clothed, some not. Most of their names escaped him, their faces only vaguely familiar without the added masks of make-up and leering, red-painted smiles, and he found himself edging towards the pile of his own drab clothing that had been kicked underneath an upholstered armchair.

He felt rather like a beetle that had found his way into a room of bored housecats with the way that their eyes fell, interested, upon him as he pulled on the purple velvet pants he’d been wearing the night before.

His own discomfort was forgotten after a moment, his attention caught by the tall, gorgeously skeletal form of Persephone sweeping into the room.

It was always startling to see it for the first time… a strange mix of male and female that was confusing to the logical mind and utterly entrancing to the eye with its flamboyantly theatrical movements. Like a puppet, Persephone seemed glided along by a series of strings into the room, oddly detached, its handsome face with its purple-painted lips stretched in a nearly grotesque, wet grin, and collapsed, in true sunset boulevard style, onto one of the divans pressed against the sweating wood paneling, a carefully built laugh on its tongue.

All eyes were watching with a strange sort of hunger within their depths. Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Wrath, Envy, Pride… all these things were embodied in the nearly farce-like expressions on the faces of Persephone’s acolytes.

The boy blinked. He’d been staring just like the others…

But now Persephone was staring back at him with that rubber smile creased with too much violet lipstick.

In a cold, dingy room at the end of Dauphine Street, the black-clad woman leaned over a table, her elegant face devoid of the collected expression she wore in public, for now she was jubilant. She had found the beast. That ungracious mad thing that took her son… her only son… her sweet Arik…

How it would pay.

She could hear it’s agonized death rattles even now, and it was as sweet as the first breath of an autumn morning.

From a bundle wrapped in a dyed-black tablecloth, moth-eaten and fragile, arachnid arthritic hands drew bottles of innocuous powders, packets of dried leaves, pastes, pictures, and saint-candles to be laid out in neat lines like soldiers upon the scarred table pushed up underneath the single, bare, dirty window.

Mama Lucile’s potion was sure to kill it. Destroy it. Poison it.

Just like it had poisoned Arik.

A match flared to life between tobacco-stained fingertips and dropped into a cheap cylinder glass filled with pallid, greasy wax and a wick, a picture of St. Joseph taped to the outside. The little light guttered, coughed and then caught, the caustic smell of chemical lilies briefly filling the close, stale air, masking the old, lingering scent of animal death and sweet, rich rot.

There was a certain madness in the way the wavering candle-light caught the insect-flicking of the woman’s eyes to the sheet-draped form on the ancient trundle bed in the corner where the hackle-raising taste of decay seemed to be the strongest.

“Yes.” She hissed, pouring a portion from one of the bottles into a bowl of murky water sitting in front of her matronly black-clad form, “Yes.”

Snatching up a piece of folded, lined paper from the pile of objects on the table, she opened it and reread the letter that Mama had written for her. The woman’s handwriting was scratchy and jagged, like broken sticks, and her spelling left a little to be desired, but Mama Lucile knew what she was talking about.

Mama Lucile was a mambo. She talked to the Ghede… the dead. Of course she knew. Arik was not the beast’s first and only victim.

The carnivale dog goes in places where people is drunk and have lust in them. Look in the bars and places with lots of people. The dog need people who can see them, like drunk, lusty, crazy… that sort of thing. That’s how they eat. They suck out all that crazy and stuff and leave just the empty shell behind. Don’t let it touch you. It can make you crazy too, and then it will eat you. Wear a cross or carry an old fingerbone in your pocket. Both would be good.

I give you every thing for poison in the wrap. Mix everything together in riverwater, and then let it set out three nights with a cross in it. Put it in the big bottle and fill the rest of the bottle up with wine, whisskey, rum, bourbon and herbsaint. Draw a circle with three dots inside of it in the patturn of a triangle. Leave it in front of where it lives and you will poisson it.

She reread this several more times before reaching into the black bosom of her dress and pulling a gold chain bearing a tiny gold cross from around her neck. It made a slight ping as it hit the bottom of the bowl.

Like a pack of wolves, Percephone and its court of beauties slunk down Rue Royal towards Bourbon, the raucous group causing even native passersby to stop and stare.

Persephone, dressed like a nightmarish ragdoll in a cornea homicide of color, lead the way, a lush pied-piper trailing silken scarves and strand after strand of bright Mardi Gras beads, even though the parade season was more then over. All manner of gorgeous young outcast followed her… dark-eyed skins, bruised-mouthed lollies and Goths… hippies, rockers, rule-breakers and whores… They loved it because its hedonistic affairs and charmingly erratic mind embodied everything that their jaded hearts could desire.

Anarchy, youth, rebellion, beauty, sex, drugs, love, music, art, booze…

They were the underbelly of the techno generation, and everything was there for the taking if the price was right… if you were pretty enough.

Then, there, at the back of the cavorting, jester hoard, trailed the boy, with his skin-slimming purple pants and black shirt, his face bare of everything but the last stale smudges of the make-up he’d put on the night before. He had tried to tuck away back to the cramped two-room apartment he shared with his brother, but each time he had turned to leave, one of that gorgeous crowd had touched him, smiled at him, whispered to him that he should come tonight.

Come out and party.

Come out and play.

They lived for the moment of nightfall when twilight was still a purple heather blot on the horizon, when they saw the last dregs of day fall away, but he was tired, and rather then being the greatly entrancing thing he remembered from the evening previous, Persephone and its people had begun to scare him slightly. He couldn’t remember the sound of a single voice… couldn’t put a face to a name because they all seemed to blend together as this one amorphous thing with many faucets, like the eye of an insect or the sides of a die. They were separate images that belonged to one big thing… a thing that he wasn’t sure he wanted to become a part of.

But still, he followed. So desperate for a kind touch or a soft kiss on his chapped-lip mouth, he followed, the promise of Persephone’s love eternal, however much a lie, too tempting to pass up. He’d been so lonely… so very, very lonely.

And that was how it liked them… lonely and desperate for kinship. It called to the strange, for Persephone itself was strange. It called to their desire for a people to call their own and gave them what they wanted…

That is… until it took what it wanted.

Lust. Gluttony. Greed. Sloth. Wrath. Envy. Pride.

Now is the age of hedonism where sin is fashionable and innocence is cheap. Just about every vice a person could think of was readily available if one knew where to look, and madness was as abundant as grass.

Out on the uneven sidewalk in front of a Caribbean grocery that had already closed for the night, the woman in black stood, a paper bag clutched to her chest as gravel-colored eyes looked up at the darkened windows above the shop. This was where it lived. This was where the beast dwelled.

Liked an all-too solid shadow, she moved to place her tainted offering at the steps that lead upward through a hollow black alley to the rooms above, a slight clink breaking the faux-silence as the glass contents of the bag met the stone slab of the first step.

The woman stood there looking at her revenge sitting in that innocuous paper bag for several long moments before a smattering of lupine laughter prompted her to move away.

She strode back the way she came, marching with imperious self-righteousness through the sotted men and ill-clad women. Eyes, like so many misplaced buttons, followed her passage, leers on lips and eyebrows raised. What was a woman like that doing in this part of the Quarter at night? Stately, graceful woman like her should be way down on the other side of Canal… not down here.

The woman ignored them. She had done what she had come here to do, and, that purpose complete, she had no reason to stay.

If they bothered her, there was always the tiny derringer pistol she kept tucked, the safety carefully on, within the folds of her clothes.

The boy’s first impression of the club was of great volume. He couldn’t quite grasp what sort of music was being played, or even if it was music at all and not just noise with a beat that made his heart rattle around behind his skinny ribs.

Persephone and its group took up almost four of the place’s larger tables, their party tucked away off to one side of the dance floor.

Its beetle eyes watched the young flesh cavort in time to that painful bass thumping, a certain hunger there in its plastic-featured face. Purple-smeared lips smiled, stretching over sharp white teeth in a gross mockery of indulgent mirth.

The boy wondered how he had ever found it so entrancing… it looked like some sort of miss-made doll. Too perfect. Too eerily and strangely lovely with its long, delicate limbs and uncanny, willowy form.

He once more got up to leave, but his wrist was suddenly wrapped in the grip of a green-eyed girl with bright, burnished blond hair all done up in braids.

Don’t go, those emerald, jewel-bright animal eyes of hers said, stay with us. Love us.

With a sigh, he sat back down.

After all, what’s the worst that could happen?

Everyone knows those are famous last words.

He sat and watched as others left the tables to dance, flitting back and forth from chair to floor like bats hunting moths in a cave. Back and forth…laughing, kissing, touching, drinking. One androgynous lovely in the corner had bent his lips to the shoulder of his black-garbed companion, a pearl-handled razor in his grip. He sliced little nicks into the other’s skin, long pink tongue lapping at the rich red that welled sluggishly up.

So entranced was the boy with watching these two that he did not notice Persephone, moving like a disjointed skeleton, whisper up behind him. Bone-white hands fell to his shoulders, feeling like there were far too many joints and moving parts to the fingers. It was disturbing, intriguing, and he tilted his head back to look up at the smiling charnel visage that looked down, in turn upon him. He almost gasped…for beyond the questing tongue and slick, lewd lips there were teeth. Pulling teeth, dog teeth. Hungry, wanton teeth.

It drew him up and hugged him to its painfully slender chest with surprising strength, his face tucked into the curve of its elegant neck. He resisted the urge to kiss it as he would have done with a lover, the sickly sweet stench of funeral flowers thick in his nostrils.

He was still new, still interesting. A pointed nose snuffled at the soft curls just behind his ears like a dog would, seeking a scent, its breath disgustingly hot and warm. That was what broke the spell that held him still and complacent. He leaned back, his hands against bird wing shoulders.

He had felt them. All of them… like light bulbs flashing one by one in a dark room until he was blinded by them, drawn to them and their charmingly shabby decadence.

Don’t go, it not-whispered, embracing him as if he were its most favorite, love you…want you. Don’t go…need…need you…

Need. It was such a relative term these days, and he continued to pull away, repulsed by the plastic stretching of its smile, the creases of its expressions too deep and dark… like some sort of Greek theater mask. Happy… sad… angry. Each emotion was elongated and taffy-stretched until it was a representation and not a real thing at all.

Fake… it was so fake.

Illuminated by the light of a single bare-bulbed lamp in the corner, the woman stood beside the trundle bed where the lumpy, sharp form lay covered by a light-stained sheet.

Lovingly, she reached out and drew the corner of the cloth down, folding the spotted material down as if it were the flag at a soldier-man’s funeral, revealing bit by bit the source of her out zealous insanity.

At first glance, it was hard to tell what was under there, for the shallow lumps and little bumps seemed too few to belong to a body… but then you saw the golden hair pooled on the pillow, as bright as it had been when the boy was alive. Next came the twisted features of his once-handsome face, the mouth open in a peeled-back scream, its teeth white against the flaking tar-black of shriveled skin. Death filmed eyes that had once been the same intriguing slate-tile grey as his mother’s, now were set, wide and pearl-like in his last expression of orgasmic terror beneath the exaggerated fringe of yellow lashes.

Arik. Oh, how beautiful he had once been. How proud she had been of him.

And now…here he lay, a hollowed, sucked-out and blackened husk of a thing, slowly rotting away onto the greasy sheets just where she had uncovered him.

They had been from Midtown, wealthy and privileged, but he came into the city at night to let his starving addictions, hidden away during the day, to drink their fill of vice. He had gone missing… and here he had been found.

Mama Lucile had found him.

She had told the woman, a respectable, upstanding Christian lady, what had done this…how it had been done. She also told her of how she could take her revenge.

Poison is the way to kill vermin, she had said reasonably.

Down in a tiny shop in an alleyway off of Chartres, she had watched as the mambo gathered bottles, candles, pictures, and powders off of cramped and dusty shelves, putting them all into a makeshift satchel that she had fashioned from a dyed-black and frayed table-cloth.

Before, the woman would have never come to this place, but Mama had promised revenge.

It was nearly dawn before the club closed its doors, forcing its patrons back onto the uneven sidewalks. Persephone’s group once more was on the move. It was that golden time where the bars actually closed, the streets still buzzing with the last staggering wanderers trying to find their way back to hotels and steamy apartment rooms, and they reeled down canal, laughing, clinging to one another.

The boy looked up from his position at the back of the group once again, watching the sky pinken over the sharp, jagged peeks of and glint off of the pedestal-raised effigy of Our Lady Joan. It had always amazed him how lovely the city was just before the dawn came.

His stomach growled.

He was hungry… his last meal seemed so long ago, a night or two at least, but he could wait until they got back to Persephone’s apartment.

They twisted down familiar streets, wolfish voices raising in sweet dissonance with one another… drunk, high. These, mere kids many of them, had abandoned the daylight world for the hedonism of the night. They begged where needed, turned tricks when that didn’t work, and didn’t know enough to be grateful for the life and beauty that they had left.

Persephone was their distilled voice of God.

One by one they filed up the stairs and back into their roost over the Caribbean grocery, all of them stepping over the bottle in the brown paper bag that sat innocently on the bottom step.

The boy, though, he paused, contemplating it for a moment with dark eyes before picking it up and placing it into a near-by trashcan, the sound of shattering glass filling the alleyway as it exploded upon hitting the bottom of the metal barrel. Satisfied that he was doing his part to clean up the city, he turned and slipped silently up the stairs.

It was raining again, the soft droplets pattering against the smoky windows like the beckoning fingers of illicit lovers. Morning traffic honked and began its slow two-step through the winding streets of the business district. By eight o’clock, the French market was full and loud once more.

A stately woman dressed all in black parted the crying vendors, searching out that one particular booth snugged up against one of the poles that supported the slanted roof, but it wasn’t there. The space had been taken up by a small table selling cheap candles and nickel-plated jewelry that would turn the wearer’s skin green after a day or two.

Standing there and staring for a few moments, the woman finally sighed and turned, her head bowed, defeated, as she turned down North Peter’s street.

In a large, ancient apartment over a Caribbean grocery, a boy slept, in the way of most housecats, through the hottest, busiest parts of the day, ignoring the bustle of business and the yatty cries of the natives below on the street.

He was content now, fed and happy, a flush of health bleeding into his pallid cheeks. A soft noise of satisfaction left his lips, and he burrowed his face into musty, perfume-scented sheets, his willow-limb arms lovingly wrapped around the dried and rotting husk that he had held all through the night, the meaty copper scent of decay thick in his nose, his nearly-black locks mingling companionably with the shining violet that lay strewn luxuriously over the pillow.

He had been wrong. It hadn’t been disgusting…repulsive… merely a different kind of fare. That smile…plastic… flaccid now… still disturbed him slightly, though, and he turned the thing, ragged strips of dried-out, flaking black flesh clinging to the bedclothes, before cuddling up again to its back and drifting back into his dreams of strange banquets and fairy kings with iron-thorn crowns.

Silence drifted out from behind the door of Persephone’s room.

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