Mary lies back in the tub, warm water yinning the chilly humidity outside. She stepped in at sunset so that she could watch the room fall dark, to masturbate her bad memories away stroke by stroke.
The thin girl spells decadence with a k. Her chaperone spells danger with a Roman nose and eyes gone glassy in the hunter’s blind. The tables round them hiss and sigh, dolls and tribunes who’ve denied themselves for many reasons, though none so fabulous as virtue. A toast rings out, then stumbles on its pegleg consonants, aiming for praise but tempered by a glimpse of the ripe corpse itself. No wonder demolition holds such allure, setting the murderer apart as though he were the Archangel’s arrow.
In a bay window just off the reception hall a white cat licks its paws, pads it ear in prophecy of rain. The thin girl, taking a tipsy turn about the banquet hall, tries out her words of cat, gets nothing for her sweetness.
Death comes in all sizes, tailors up the vain from the darkened side of the mirror, making an hourglass shape in the air with its familiar hands, batting its eyes and flirting its fangs one matchtip away from the throbbing jugular. But any sloppy-seconds stringalong can see there’s more to her than just a sodden rosebud waiting to be gathered and pulped. The unself-consciousness of that shoulder hunch, when the guitar dazzles a pretty chord, an almost jazzy star of five-note splendor.
Is it enough? Enough so that tiger moves on? Look away. Tiger will tend to his own.
Mary sighs, sweeps her free hand in the water beside her hip, circulating the warmth, blows over her nipples to feel them harden.
The lights are flickering in the brain’s dumb room, a minor earthquake to vibrate the plate glass windows, pendulate chandelier like a shot of strychnine under the tongue, a cold slicing weight tugging the killer closer to resolve.
A light rain has passed through the suburbs, freshening the air, touching up the lawns, slippering the driveways where the waiting cars gleam under repeating moons. The chauffeurs are passing around potential blackmail, post-card quality snapshots of lovers so voluptuous they look like caricatures of the greedy damned.
Ecstasy, however, no mistaking that look, once its glossed those red-rimmed eyes.
Mary comes, ouching her lips with her teeth so that she makes no sound other than a long, long breath, deep down like a wave spending itself against the seawall.
Mary, wet hair turbaned, sits in panties and tee-shirt at her kitchen table, cigarettes and wine bottle to ease her passage out into the nightlife. Her memory is on idle, fragmented, a Pasolini 88, clinching, stalling, blurring out, bookended by the mix tape in the other room, songs to feel sad by, songs to be alone with, early evening songs to open up the night which may end alone for another listen, or with a fresh bottle for the guy she’s invited home so he can try out his sensitive perceptions on a girl who holds no threat, whom he will fuck in the ass when she asks him to.
The songs? ‘Sister Ray’ by Joy Division; ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ by The Beatles; ‘Israel’ by Siouxsie Sioux; ‘Blue Turns To Grey’ by the Rolling Stones; ‘Pledging My Time’ by Bob Dylan.