Authors note: I was asked a few times for a sequel to ‘The View from the Fishbowl’. This story is related to it, but it is not a direct sequel. You do not need to have read The View to understand this story. Thank you.

Her nails were not long, but they were painted forest green and drew attention to the fact that she was gripping the sides of her face as she stared out into the static colored water beyond the edge of the pier. Her ever faithful leather hat made her look a little bit like a Leatherman. So did her high-set stud earrings and her aggressively hunched shoulders. But her short auburn hair flipped up over the rim of the hat and curled against the brim, and her loose sweat suit was a nauseating bubble gum pink, which ruined the picture entirely.

And her name was Violet.

“Wanna play a game?”

My eyes focused then unfocused on her, and the brisk wind and brittle plank of the pier were making me nervous. My hair blew into my eyes. She waited for an answer, her hands releasing her face in favor of folding under her chin. I wanna play a game. Oh God I wanna play a game so bad right now it’s like having no sugar for a month and then walking into a candy store dead broke.

“Sure, I guess we have a little time before the movie.”

She leaned back from the edge of the pier, jogging in place subtly and humming something, her eyes darting back and forth. She spotted whatever it is she wanted and her pupils dilated noticeably, black encompassing green in a matter of seconds. She sprinted off like a crane on speed, long legs propelling her through the air as if she weighed less than nothing, and I wandered along after her, watching her sweat suit jacket flood with wind, hanging like a parachute above her viciously active bubble gum legs. She stopped and stared blankly forward when she reached her unremarkable mark, her left hand stretched out to the wooden rail of the pier’s fence, fingertips barely brushing it as I sauntered behind, slowly approaching. Only when I was close enough to breathe on her hat and realize she smelled like antiseptic and dirt at the same time did she retract her left hand, her delicate safety line to the rail, and twist her head around. She looked up at me from underneath her unkempt eyebrows, her mouth a solid line of non-expression.

“How ya’ wanna feel today Marcy? You wanna feel really sad? I got a new game, I got a new game and I swear you’ll cry for hours.” Her voice was conversational.

“I don’t want to feel sad Violet. You should know that by now.”

“Should know by now.” She echoed my sentence halfway, in a dismissive, parental tone. “Okay Princess.” She nodded, turning on her heels to walk over to the safety fence around the pier. She ducked under it like I duck under those red ropes that mark the lines at movie theaters. I inched towards the edge myself, peering over. It was relatively shallow water at that point, only about seven feet from the shore, and there was an incredibly dilapidated ladder going down to the foam. Violet was already half way down it, her fingers curled around the barnacle swathed wood, her feet, clothed only in stark white tube socks now, finding easy holds on the lower rungs as she stared up at me.

“Well?” she stressed impatiently. I sighed, jumping from foot to foot as I removed first one stiletto, then the other. She was already waist deep in the water, her hands hanging carelessly at her sides, bubble gum sleeves slowly becoming inundated, when I ventured my first foot onto the first rung. She sniffed impatiently; face twitching ever so slightly, as I descended, making my own distorted face as the water touched the pads of my feet.

“It’s frikin’ cold.”

“Yes it Is Princess. Now get down here.” The water felt like a blanket made of pudding as it sucked its way up my thigh, and I continued to shiver. Impatient, Violet punched through the rung that my right foot was currently rested on, and I plunged backwards into the foam. She grabbed my forearm as I flailed, dragging me back up. My hair felt heavy plastered to my back, and my clothes clung to me obscenely. I glared at her, saltwater running down my face.

“You still wanna play?” she teased, grabbing my arm with her own, now splinter riddled, hand and smiling wildly. The grip made me think of the school nurse when she takes our blood samples for HIV testing: rough and slightly sadistic. She used her newfound leverage to slam me into a pillar holding up the pier, and I heard the darkly satiating noise of mollusks being crushed to death by my back. She smiled, pushing my sleeve up to my shoulder, the sand from the seawater scratching at my skin, and licked the inside of my forearm. I stared at her, my face twisted in antipathy, and she merely sent her eyebrows skyrocketing to the brim of her Leatherman cap.

“My spit is clean.” She said, almost indignantly, as she dug through the innards of her jacket, discovering at last the Holy Grail inside; a long shiny syringe, pregnant with some foreign liquid that makes it feel like caterpillars are burrowing into your skin.

“You still wanna play?” she repeated.

“We only have half an hour. Make it quick” I strained to keep my voice as unwholesomely casual as hers. She laughed, sharp and short like a gunshot, and pushed the needle in slowly. I felt the sore numbness immediately followed by the sensation of spiders crawling up your throat. I felt like I was going to vomit, any second now, and Violet released my arm to say something echoic and misty. My face twitched, distorting my features, and I distantly heard myself make a few odd whimpering-hissing sounds. Violet entwined her fingers with mine, resting against the pillar, her body swaying boredly next to mine as she popped a few mints into her mouth. Violet didn’t do anything herself. She was a supplier, a door to door saleswoman, if you will. Some women sold temporarily necessary things such as carpet cleaners and nail polish, Violet sold temporarily necessary things such as ecstasy and heroin. She was nice to me. She gave me freebies, like perfume samples folded into magazines or little moisturizer packets. And she never told me anything. She never told me where she got hers or where to get more. She never told me what she was giving me, or how much it cost. But I do know she pays for my hits out of her own pocket, and I do know her parents know nothing about it. She’s promised me it isn’t as addicting as everything else she sells, but then again, I only fly down here one week out of the month. So it isn’t outrageous to assume she’s trying to give me a reason to come here to Podmere more often. She sucked on the mints, watching as my knees gave way and I slowly submerged lower into the murky water. She grabbed my shoulder roughly, pulling me out of the swirling sea, and watching with perverse determination as I found myself giggling for no reason at all.

The flick wasn’t half bad. Of course, we got thrown out halfway through because the usher realized that not only had we snuck into the theater but that we were soaking wet, but I think it’s better because we don’t know how it ends, sort of like an old movie with a missing reel. Violet’s wet socks made an irritated squelching noise as we trailed back down the boardwalk, and she left little peanut-shaped pools of water where the bleached-tan hardwood of the dock stretched out like the taffy-pulled cartilage of a rib cage.

“Hey Princess?” she asked, picking mints, pockmarked with blood, out of her blood splotched palm and sucking on them noisily “Does your mommy know?”

“Does my mommy know what?” I asked suspiciously, stilettos swung lazily over my back, the straps tangled in my fingers so that I resembled a model walking down a runway holding his suit-jacked over his shoulder.

“About.” She responded succinctly.

“About what?” she liked to play this game. She says something. I repeat it with ‘what’ at the end. No actual communication ever happens, which I don’t really mind.

“About…” she blinked with the sudden revelation that she had no words for me, stopped mid-stride, put down the shoes she had been carrying like a parcel under her arm, wrestled the top of her pink sweat suit off, and began ringing it out. I stared pointedly at her bra, which was the same shade of green as her fingernail polish. I should have figured. She looked over at me boredly, like a cat watches a blade of grass grow. “Put down your shoes.” I obliged, if only for the fact that it seemed like a harmless request. She immediately threw her sweat-suit jacket over my shoulders, and the still-wet fabric made a lisping ‘shlap’ sound against the fabric of my floral dress. “Gotta be a lady I do.” She muttered, glancing past the brim of her hat the way preachers glance at God. But I knew she wasn’t looking for any sort of deity. She was staring at the mild grayish clouds that smothered the sky at present, as if they were threatening to pull a gun on us. Now that my attention was drawn to the matter I could feel a mild but appreciable chill in the air. But perhaps it was just the effect of having a load of water-logged bubble-gum pink chemical-smelling fabric draped over my back and dribbling saltwater down my calves.

“Hey Marcy?”

“Yeah Violet?”

“What now?” I contemplated, as a response, the phrase ‘what now what?’, but I could tell the game was over for now, and it would seem too much like a poem for this type of conversation.

“I don’t know.” There was a lull in the conversation. Lulls, when talking to Violet, were dangerous. Because you know they can end at any time. Once I ventured to compare them to the ceasefires that scatter no-man-lands like artillery shells. But no. As long as wars can be reduced to ten sided dice and gridded boards with plastic battleships they can never be used as a metaphor for her. Never. It’s more like domestic abuse. Consensual domestic abuse. The pause between blows to the head.

Try to turn that into a board game.

“About what you do when you come up here to Podmere.”

It would be easier if she just hit me, because then there would be blood to tell her to stop. You can’t hide your own blood like you can hide your own depravity. Because the answer is no. we know the answer is no sort of like you know you aren’t hungry, but you eat anyway. Because something, something deep and primitive stored in your internal organs doesn’t know when you’ll be able to eat again.

“No. she doesn’t. She wouldn’t…” I struggled for words, staring up at the grey sponge-painted clouds and tracing the seagulls, like you follow scattering centipedes on the ceiling, like you follow the light the doctor shines in your eye.

“She wouldn’t.” violet confirms my dead emotions.

“So, wanna get some coffee?”

“Or we could just eat a bag of caramels.” I feel a sort of whiplash reverberation inside me as our positions reverse and she stares at me. I had forgotten. Podmere doesn’t have a theater or a movie rental store. She recoups the balance a few moments later by knocking her ankle firmly against mine; tripping me as we descended down the dehydrated steps to the beach. I contemplated giving her the fake flowers from some sort of sweatshop, which mom’s manger gave me for Easter, but she would refuse them. Like any other gift she isn’t giving herself she would resent them.

“Let’s get coffee.” She nods.

So we take the two-hour train ride back to Podmere and get coffee. Closer to milkshakes with caffeine, but still good. Better than those European tea-cup caffeine shots I have to drink when I stay with my mom. I really think she needs to meet someone. Someone like some 1980’s yuppie with a watermark on his business card. I tell Violet. She agrees, but in a Styrofoam-uncertain way. She finds herself preoccupied with plucking splinters out of her knuckles, which have ceased to bleed. I wonder what or if anyone will do anything about the missing rung. I conclude they won’t.

“We should get back.” she teases me. “We should get back to my Daddy Princess” I contemplate using my heels to gouge out her left eye, because people like her rub off on you like cats on banister rails. But the bubble-gum-pink jacket drips onto the floor, reminding me of its presence, so I decide against it. I hunch over the table as if I’m an anxious poker-addict. As If I can smell the chips already and the cards too. As if I can hear them flip through the automatic shuffler. I close my eyes and breathe in. The sugar of the drink in my mouth is fading, replenishing its self in the reincarnation of coffee-flavor. It’s rather disgusting.

“Can we play another game?” I hate asking. She adores it when I beg. We compromise.

“Kiss me.” She says immediately. “Kiss me Kate, my super dainty Kate, for dainties are all Kates.”

“No.” she leaps onto the table-top, her still-moist socks squeaking against the linoleum, her legs in an awkward sort of froglike position, and hits me straight in the face. I sputter blood as my chair seems to go into cardiac arrest and falls to the floor, and I stare up at her, covering my face like a muzzle. It seems out of place, here in Podmere, for her to leap atop the table and hit someone. But then again, we’re in a chain store right now. We’re in a place that charges seven dollars for a cup of coffee. Its out of place in Podmere too. People would stare anywhere else. They would, normally, to oblige us. But they don’t. I’m from California. And Violet is Violet. There is no need to act surprised. There is no need to call for help. It’s just violet. Violet and that girl. That girl from California, you know the one, visiting her father. Her mother, isn’t she an actress? Isn’t she some sort of actress? Isn’t she getting re-married soon? ‘yes’ I think, responding to the muttered snatches of thought subconsciously as Violet wretches me up by my arm ‘yes she is. But it doesn’t count, you see. It doesn’t count because he’s an actor. She needs a yuppie. If anyone really knew her they’d know she needed a yuppie.’ My father was a good yuppie. He was a good husband. But he supported mom. He told her to follow her dreams. He told her- Be an actress, if you want. If you really really want.

“I’m sorry.” She mutters once we’ve left the store and walked 3 miles in a circle around the ‘shopping center’ consisting of a grocery store, a butcher, two clothing stores, and the coffee shop.

“Please don’t be sorry. Not for that.” I mutter, looking away. Because I don’t want her to be sorry. It’s like seeing a rabid dog or a horse with a broken leg being euthanized. You know it should happen. You know it’s done with all the best intentions, with all the best faith. You know it’s better for them. But you still don’t like it. You can never learn to like it. The blood trickling down my nostrils to the right of my mouth and down my neck has dried to a dark flaking maroon color, and it crinkles when I turn my face. I scratch off a little bit, look at it briefly, and suck it out from under my fingernails. It doesn’t taste very much like wet blood. It doesn’t taste very much like anything. That disturbs me.

After a few laps around the shopping center the skies have cleared somewhat and I stop to put my shoes back on. I sit down at a forest green thickly-repainted bench with a little plaque screwed onto it mentioning offhandedly but luxuriously the name of whomever donated that particular bench. I wondered if donating benches was anything like buying stars. I wondered if you get screwed over, and you have no idea where the bench is. I wonder if people every sit at their own benches. I wonder how I would feel if someone donated a bench in my memory. I decide I wouldn’t like it myself, and that Violet would probably vandalize it anyway, were it placed here in Podmere. I strap the stilettos on, and Violet doesn’t hesitate to stare lewdly before sitting down like an upturned infant at the foot of the bench, legs splayed widely as I perch at the edge of my seat slightly to her left, knees practically glued together. I sigh, and my entire body seems to lose air pressure like a mute accordion. She folds too mirroring me, and the wrinkles that form on her stomach seem almost appealing to me. When the girls at my school bend over, their stomachs don’t wrinkle, only compress and fold in on themselves hollowly. I have to say I am intrigued by her exotically realistic shape. She hums pleasantly on the asphalt, groping at my shoes absentmindedly, pushing her thumb over the toes and then against the kink of the shoe, where heel meets sole. She explores the indent temporarily, before moving onto the actual heel and trailing her hand over its surface, now looking casually at my foot. I hope that she isn’t going to break these. They were very expensive; my mom’s boyfriend hadn’t hesitated to inform me of that. She seems to be casual though, in her movements, so I allow myself to drift slowly and sluggishly into my surrounding environment and away from her. Bad move. There is a loud snap as she rends my heel away from the rest of my shoe. She takes the piece and stows it in her pants pocket. We say nothing. I hobble the rest of the way home. She follows, flirting with stepping ahead and then behind me, and after a short while I give her her jacket back, which she flips on like an expensive suit. The garment is almost completely dry, along with her socks and our clothes. Her sneakers seem to have retained the most sea-water, still dripping as she let them swing as her side like a pair on num-chucks, having previously tied the laces together. My floral dress blows in the slow, casual wind.

When we get back to her house Violet flips out her key from under her Leatherman cap and jiggles the door open with a shuddering lower-middle-class-quality sound. We take off our shoes and my stilettos, the right one now an amputee, rest on a mat next to her sneakers. A pair of woven sandals and polished business shoes next to ours informed us that we were not alone in the house. I noticed the conspicuous absence of the army boots she had worn to my birthday. Violet owned the only electric guitar in Podmere, you see. It was beetle-blue and smothered in duck-tape, and she had bought it herself with profits from her work as a temporary necessity saleswomen. She liked to play it with white silk opera gloves. She had used industrial strength wire clippers to shear the fingertips off and a motel-room sewing kit to stitch some cheap plastic beads around her wrist like a bracelet. Once in a while during a performance she would go into a solo and bang the strings with the underside of her wrist, making an uneven, slightly chaotic sound. It was nice. She was in a band which spread over three states and met, practiced and recorded together through webcam. It was called Penny a la Vodka and she let me watch them perform once. Their songs were completely filthy, but catchy. After they practiced a bit I met Jackson: their drummer, who enjoyed non-virtual solitaire and civil war re-enactments; and Vygt: their singer, who was in culinary school and wore suits to bed. Their pianist, flutist, and songwriter, Daphney, was visiting her Amish grandparents, but I heard she had fluffy red hair and was only 11 years old. Violet refused to tell me Vygt’s real name. On my birthday she lugged her guitar and two speakers on a red-eye flight all the way to California with her own money but without her parent’s knowledge or consent. She didn’t bring a change of clothes or any money. She brought her army boots on, and tracked electric-lime-green footprints all over the salmon carpet of our den. On her way out of the airport she had found a spray-can next to some fresh graffiti and brought it in the house. After playing guitar in front of our fake fireplace for a small group of ‘my friends’ (she was booed extensively because she didn’t take requests) she painted her shoes and stomped on the trains of their dresses. I chastised her publicly, and followed her around to minimize destruction until all of the other girls, the little carbon-copies of their actress mothers, left. As soon as they were gone we burst out into fierce and explosive laughter. I hugged her tightly as we giggled together like little children. I missed her. I ask her what happened to the boots. She says something about losing a bet and having to express mail them to Jackson. I ask where Jackson lives.

“Somewhere in Alaska.”

“How do you re-enact civil war battles in Alaska?”

“Frequent flier miles.” Terri greets us in the kitchen.

“So girls, how was the movie?” she smiles at the both of us.

“It was fine.” I reply reasonably while Violet looks around as if unfamiliar with her own environment.

“And the beach?” she stresses her nouns in a nasally patronizing way, cleaning the dinner table with a wet dishrag.

“It was fine.”

“Violet, how was the beach?” Violet stared at her mother, slightly startled, having assumed that my response was satisfactory. Before she answers our father comes down the stairs from his workroom. He isn’t a yuppie anymore. He kisses Terri stoically, and Violet looks away. It’s odd how she changes with them here, how utterly uncomfortable she acts, as if they were complete strangers. Terri is married to my father, of course, but in a rather awkward sense. A rather guilty sense, as if the whole ordeal was just a bit embarrassing, but they both refused to admit it wasn’t really the sort of ‘soul mate’ thing they had told the tabloids about. Well, that’s what they get. But then again, that’s what Juliet and Romeo would have gotten as well. Funny how tragedy can help you overstep mediocrity with the same awkward poise that you always see depicted in chick flicks, when the woman is stepping gingerly over her husband’s recently de-functionalized body. Funny how many people, who, if faced with the two, would choose tragedy eagerly and optimistically, just like horny teenagers and mid-life baby-boomers seem doomed to. Terri doesn’t talk to my mother much, not after the wedding at least, although I hear tell they used to be reasonably close. After all, Terri did meet him through my mother. Violet trails over to the backdoor, composed of wire mesh and poorly-painted wood, which looks back at the yard, a malnourished and diseased patch of land sealed strictly with a picket fence and overflowing with early-summer dandelions and crickets. The sun was inching lower and lower. It was threatening to jump, any fool could see. And it had hostages. It had the light and the warmth. It was threatening to end this whole drawn out masquerade, this laughable farce. And this time it meant it. You could tell by the reds and the oranges splattered across the horizon of that fence. Violet breathed in with a small sucking noise, and released with a sound of pained relaxation, as if she were receiving a particularly intense deep tissue massage. She pushes the door open and slinks out, sitting down on the basic concrete steps down into the yard. I follow after a few seconds, sitting next to her so that our elbows brushed just the slightest bit.

“You know what’s funny about people?” she said quietly enough that I had to lean against her to hear “When we go to the zoo- when we go to the zoo we’re just fascinated by the bears and the- the lions and the sharks. We’re just fascinated by these things because we know they could kill us so easily, but we look for them. We go out and we look for them all the time. We want to see them at feeding time, that’s why they have those shows were they- where they toss meat to the lions and they- because we want to see them tear stuff apart, because we love that shit. We eat it up. And we actually search for them, for the ones that can hurt us, and we actually take pictures of them and throw sticks at them. Because we’re really really egotistical. We like to feel superior to them. We like to think that they’re in cages because, because they’re just stupid violent animals. But if we were lost. If we were lost in the woods, we wouldn’t look for a bear. We wouldn’t want to watch it eat, we wouldn’t feel the same way about the tearing and the blood. If we were in the jungle we wouldn’t look for a tiger. Would you? Would you look for a tiger? Of course not. Because we’re terrified. We’re just terrified, because they’re stupid violent animals. And no one can feel superior to an animal that sort of place. No one would look for the tiger.” Violet stares out blankly into the small, closeted backyard for a few seconds. My Aunt Terri calls us in for dinner.