"is this the way a toy feels when its batteries run dry?"

Constance sat alone in the waiting room, listening to the whirr of air conditioning and buzz of fluorescent lights. Fingers flipped through a magazine; highlighting an athlete she had never heard of, from a sport she had never watched.

"Miss Duke," the petite nurse was leaning in the doorway, chart in hand, watching her expectantly.

"Heh, yeah, that's me," as if there would have been a question as to who she was, when she was the only one sitting in the room. The magazine was discarded into a basket in passing, while eager fingers crept to the waistband of her sweatpants. She followed the nurse like a small child in a game of follow the leader; weaving through the maze of hallways until they reached the room, herroom.

"Doctor Kolano will see you shortly," her voice was annoying, high pitched and wheezy. Almost as annoying as her bleached blonde hair and bright red lipstick.

"Yeah, thanks," spoken absently while she hoisted herself onto the edge of the table, long legs dangling over enough for toes to touch the ground. Fingers drummed along her thighs, tapping morse code into her veins hoping that her message would make it to her brain and spark something. Wake up body, it said, we got shit to do. Minutes seemed like an eternity of waiting, staring up at the blur of artificial sunlight.

"Miss Duke," her eyes cut to the man with the baritone. Tall, dark, and stout he looked more like a football center than a doctor, "so, your physician tells me that you guys found a lump under your arm?"

This part was always the hardest, it brought back the bad memories. "Uh, yeah..in the lymph nodes...it's small, but I guess it was big enough to scare me.." Fingers fumbled to pull her arm from the t-shirt, hoisting it up enough to slide her arm out and extend it upward so he could see. "Do you see it?"

"Mmhmm, right there," his thumb ran over the flesh, inspecting it, "so I take it you want to go over the surgery?" She watched his fat fingers curl around the pen, scribbling over the chart.

"Not, really, I know what happens. If you haven't noticed, I am missing breasts," she realized after speaking that she may have sounded bitter, which she was, but she didn't like people to think that. "Dr. Madison already spoke to me about it all, I am just here with you for the scheduling." She offered a better explaination and an apologetic smile.

"It's all right, um, well, is there any day that it better for you? Maybe the twenty-nineth, since we want to get this back to see if it's cancerous as soon as possible?" He didn't look at her, but his voice feigned concern. Doctors tried too hard sometimes.

"The twenty-nineth is fine," neglecting to remember her trip to Savannah with Edina. Sliding her arm back into her shirt she eased herself from the table.

"Well, we will contact you a few days before the surgery, make sure you are clear with all the procedures," as a professional courtesy he extended his hand, which Constance tangled up in her spiderweb fingers, giving it a squeeze and shake before releasing it.

"Yeah, hello, who's this?" He sounded so different from what she remembered of him. His voice was deeper, rougher like a chainsmoker after a five year binge. She wondered if he looked like he sounded, if the years had been worn into his face creasing flesh and leaving their mark. The mark of years that he hadn't even lived yet. Could it have been her fault? Could she have done that to him?

"Elliotte, it's me. It's--" words didn't even make it up from her vocal chords before he interrupted and chimed in. He knew. Just like she knew he would.

"Constance..." His voice trailed off in the other end of the receiver and the silence hurt more than the sound of his voice. "You...I...I don't know what to say, baby, are you okay?" As if she had never left, as if they were still together.

"I don't know Elliotte. There was a lump, in the lymph nodes under my arm...I..I had surgery today. To find out if it is cancerous," she stopped short of any details, choosing to let him speak if he wanted to, if she even deserved that. Weight was shifted on the curb, long legs stretched out and tangling together at the ankle.

"Baby..." She could hear him fumbling over his words on the other end, seperated by thousands of miles and she could still feel him. "Do you want to come home? I can buy you a plane ticket. Do you want me to come out there?" He didn't even know where there was. She could have been lost in the depths of the sea and he would have dove down to try and rescue her.

"No, I just needed to hear your voice. I just needed to tell you I didn't forget," she should have hung up. She shouldn't have listened to him after she said that. But she did. She kept the phone glued to her ear in anticipation of something dreadful to follow.

"Don't do this to me Constance. Don't give me hope just to take it away. It isn't fair," she heard his voice crack, works getting caught up on his tongue in tangled behind his teeth trapped in a net of anguish. "I love you so much, why can't you come back to me!?" Anger mixed with pain and sorrow, leaving Constance knee deep in a moral quagmire.

"I'm sorry! I can't come back! You deserve better, I shouldn't have called. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have done that to you. You of all people deserve more!" She didn't wait for a reply this time, no, she knew better now. "Goodbye." The receiver was slammed onto the base, and her body was pressed away from the curb. She needed to go home. She needed to sleep, or find someone to spend the night with. She needed a bottle of tequila. But most of all, she needed to forget. She heard the phone ring out a cruel melody of dreams that came crashing down. She didn't answer, she wouldn't and couldn't. He deserved better than her.

"I'm nothing." She was worthless. She couldn't do anything right. Too vain to let anyone know how self-loathing she was, but too self-loathing to truely be happy at the moment. She was going to go take her pain killers, pray to God Elliotte could forgive her, and go to sleep.

"Lucian..." she purred, her tongue rolling against a wall of enamel, that trapped all her adorations for her tongue to reel back in. She had so much to say to him while he slept, but her vocal chords only birthed stillborn words. Her mind was pregant with so many thoughts, but none made it passed the tangle in her throat. She knew that she wasn't brave enough to ever tell him it all while she was awake and her tongue wasn't loose enough when she was drunk.

She watched the sun break through her blinds and spill across the hardwood walls lined with posters and pictures of people she had never met, but knew she should have. Her fingers played his ribs like a piano, hoping that the symphony of flesh and bones would set the mood.

No, that was left up to the stereo in corner. Words were foreign to her ears, they weren't English and Constance couldn't decipher them in her current state. They were beautiful nonetheless. She brushed kisses to his neck, and ran her fingers through his hair. "You're beautiful. You're beautiful and you don't even know it..." She waited for a witty rebuttal, but got none. He was still lost in the abyss of sleep and she was happy to curl up against him and listen to his heart beat. The pretty, tattooed girl with long brown hair and the broken boy, they were beautiful.

"When we first met, I told you your hair reminded me of Cinderella's covered in soot," she spoke to him, wondering if she passed through his dreams like a ghost. "And you were my half hour boyfriend." She remembered it all too well and was fond of the...unusual memory. "Then you were almost crushed by a centaur. We had two encounters with her." She shuddered at the memory of Cass.

"I'll love you, if you let me."

She could feel him stirring beside her, not awake but no longer deep in the recesses of sleep. She wanted more than anything for him to have heard her then, but knew he hadn't and knew that she was not debonair, she knew that she was not daring; she couldn't tell him while he was awake. She was confessing all her adorations and she couldn't stop staring at the curve of his jaw. If he opened his eyes and looked in her eyes she was sure he would know, and she couldn't have that.

"I love you."

"Ehrm, hm? Did you say something?"

"I'm going to go make breakfast. I wanted to know if you wanted pancakes or waffles?"

The cockcrow broke the moon’s hold on the sky and the darkness’ vice grip on the city, but it was the breeze born lullaby that lured her to her feet; when she walks down the street, she knows there’s people watching, building fronts are just fronts, to hide the people watching her. Another night spent in the gutter and while she couldn’t remember it she knew she had been staring at the stars. Bloody knuckles were her souvenir of too many shots of Jameson and an unwanted advance from a drunk next to her. It wasn’t the first time and it wouldn’t be the last, she had scars to prove that.

Fingers rolled along the sharp bones that were visible through too thin skin, across the expanse of colorful ink. Flesh was painted up to make up for something she had lost long ago to a surgery meant to save her life. Constance was nothing like her name might suggest because she was fleeting like the breeze on a stagnant summer day. “What the fuck.” A question was made into a statement with a slur of her words that had nothing to do with alcohol and everything to do with the summer swelter that wore the body down. “Eight o’clock and it’s already fuckin’ hot as Hell,” she groaned into her hand as she dragged it down her face, leaving tiger stripes in soot.

“Goddamn Constance, ya here again?” The familiar sweet Southern twang came rolling off the tongue of her neighbor, Elias who was balancing on the broken sidewalk with his dog, Hank Williams.

“Goddamn right I am. Fuckin’ asshole last night tried to hit on me,” which was entirely irrelevant to how she ended up in the gutter, but she mentioned it for the singular purpose of having Elias chime in on the subject.

“Did ya kick is ass, darlin’?”

“Fuck yes I kicked his ass. Hit the fucker in the face with a beer bottle.”

“Good girl,” like a father beaming with pride.

“I’m not a dog,” she huffed.

“Girl, I know. Take the compliment,” Elias Harrison had a charm about him, it contributed to him bringing home numerous women (but never Constance, he knew better than to try that with her).

“Yeah, yeah…” She waved him off dragging her feet across the pavement toward their apartment building. “I’ll catch ya lata’ playa’.” Two fingers were thrown in a salute to the cowboy and his dog while she exited stage right.

“Bye darlin’. Take care now.” There was no doubt that he wouldn’t be coming back anytime soon. No, he wouldn’t be coming home until his speech was slurred and he was brandishing a girl on his arm. It was just the way he was and Constance suspected that it would take a miracle to change him. In reality it was merely a nineteen year old street rat that would have the lady’s man changing his ways and cleaning up his act.

Twelve flights of stairs; twelve hellacious flights that had her panting by the time she reached her hall. “Jesus Christ, it’s so hot,” she whined into the splintered door, trying hard not to slam her skull into it. Fumbling with her keys (which she kept hooked onto her belt for fear of losing them in a drunken stupor), she finally managed to connect the puzzle of her key and the keyhole of the door. With a simultaneous turn of both the key and the handle she managed to shove her way inside, struggling to remove the key which had a habit of getting stuck. “Goddamn key.”

After her undeclared war with the key, the door was slammed and she stopped to survey her apartment. “Goddamn apartment.” Chipping paint was meant to be offset by the pictures she had hanging, but her attempt failed miserably. The fact that the things in her apartment cost more than the apartment itself bothered her; it was a thing. She eyed the cello in the corner, it called to her in its silence; a catcall only she could hear. Despite herself, Constance was something of a musical genius; at the age of fourteen she had attended Julliard, by twenty she was the chair of the music department at Martin Luther King Jr. High School in Atlanta.

“Goddamn dishes.” She eyed the tower of dishes piled up in her sink. She flicked the top with a spindly finger, watching them shake and clink together.

"i just want to see a field of wild flowers in bloom..."

her reflection was not one she recognized. fingers traveled over the paperthin skin of her cheeks which seemed constantly hollowed out. you look like a victim, she told herself. ravaged by disease, her body was far too fragile and thin for her height. auschwitz baby, with her sharp bones protruding through flesh and spiderweb tangle of veins. her frown remained in place, deepening as her eyes shifted her attention up, up, up to what once was a halo of brown hair, but now was nothing but flesh. we can't survive this constance, her body ached. "yes we can, we have to. i have shit to do..." despite the running faucet that sloshed water around in the stark white sink, enough to splash up onto the counter, elliotte had heard her. she had been hoping to drown out her crying.

"constance, baby?" he leaned forward with his forehead against the door. he'd been standing there for her entire stint in the bathroom and knew exactly what she had been doing. she hid away when she cried, she hid away a lot nowadays; like an animal waiting to die.

"yeah?"

"are you okay?"

her voice threatened to crack and she swallowed her words back down a dry throat while she stopped to think about something more appropriate to say than 'yeah, m'fine', like she always did. "i'm cool. just washing my face." her features contorted into disgust with herself over such a lie, not even a good lie! she cleared her face of the trails of tears by splashing water up onto her face. because before he did it she knew elliotte would come into the bathroom.

"constance," he pleaded while stepping into the bathroom, his movements soundtracked by the creak of the door and the shuffle of bare feet across the tiled floor. "baby..." she was a mess of water and miles of skin and bones, and even broken he had never seen anyone more beautiful. he didn't give her time to speak before he swallowed her in strong arms and brought her in close. her drilled his love across her face in kisses. but all she could do was cry and cry. cry for the disease and cry for the love she couldn't return.

tomorrow they'd go to the doctor, and he'd tell her the cancer was gone. next week he'd buy an engagement ring, but wait to ask her until it was too late because by next month she'd be gone. next year she would be miles of hair and inked skin, laying in bed with a boy who she could love, but wasn't sure he could love her back.

"I love you," she said. "I really love you. Not like people before you, never like people after you."

She watched the shadows creep across the room, winding up her ankles and over long, thin limbs. Like a plague they spread up her body, over bare hips and a bare chest until she too was a shadow. Her cigarette bobbled in her mouth, spilling ash across a colorful chest and stomach.

"I don't need you to love me back," she explained through the but of her cigarette and a veil of smoke. "After all, love isn't something that you give and expect it back. You hope, but you don't need it...you just need that person."

Her fingers itched along her shoulder, over the bandage that hid away her newest tattoo. It was for him, but he'd never know. She'd never tell him because she was scared of what he would think or say. Worse yet, what he wouldn't say. "If you'll be my star, I'll be your sky".

"Someone asked me why I was with you today. Someone from your work who was in the tattoo place. I just told them all the great things about you," she chuckled, smoke spilling from her mouth and nose. "I told them that I don't get a choice in who I fall in love with, but at the same time...I wouldn't want it to be anyone other than you. You have your problems, but so does everyone else." She felt like she was rambling on, but since he wasn't awake (atleast she hoped) she saw no problem with it.

"I told them that you made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside and that my dog liked you. I told them you always smell like tea and you have soft lips," pausing, her smile crept slightly wider. "I also told them you were great in bed. Thought I'd help out your reputation a bit."

She snuffed out her cigarette in a nearby ashtray before climbing to her feet. Her body a symphony of aching, grinding bones and throbbing muscles.

"Then she called you a loser and punched her and broke her nose."

"What is this shit?" she grunted, eyeing first her student and then the ratty CD player he had been hiding away so he could listen to this particular band.

She says c'mon c'mon, baby...

"Taking Back Sunday," as if that helped Constance at all, but she listened regardless. Unamused or disinterested couldn't be seen in the flatlined lips and half-lidded eyes.

I still know everything...

"Why do you have it in my class?" she asked with a low groan, sitting forward to peer at him over her desk, "You know you aren't allowed to have them in school."

Then what's the point...

"I had to listen to it."

"But why?"

I'm at the corner of your bed...

He shrugged his response and eyed her through the thick brimmed glasses with a frown, nervously rubbing his hands together. The next song started up, a different song, a different band.

"I'm keeping it until the end of the day."

"You're a bitch!" He stormed from her room, mumbling curses toward the witch-woman he had for a teacher.

she walked like she was weighed down. she carried the burden of time on her shoulders like a cross, and a liar's crown of thorns, woven from guilt on her head. a halo of pain and sorrow. her body ached from the years she hadn't lived yet, the years she doubted she would ever see. her legs begged for rest, but she kept on walking with nowhere to go and no one to see. she just had to keep on keeping on like nothing was wrong.

despite her exit, the car continued to run and music continued to play. her movements and thoughts were soundtracked by houston calls. a shitty band on a shitty cd that a student made for her, that she listened to only because she adored her students. the moon shines bright for them. "this is fuckin' disgusting, who writes this shit, man?" she didn't feel as stupid talking to herself when the pitbull stuck his head out the window. "moshe, who does that kinda shit happen to, anyway?" she canted her head to the side, dropping the dog a glance expectantly. the pooch groaned and grunted, flopping back inside to sprawl in the passenger seat. "yeah, i dunno either. fuckin' love isn't about moons shinin' for'em and streetlights flickerin'." she snorted her retort to the song, forcing disgust to surface on her face despite having cried to the song not an hour before. "ugh!" her hands were thrown up in defeat as she slithered her way back into the car where she slumped into the leather seat. her window was rolled up, despite the cigarette she continued to smoke. evened out only because the passenger side's window was down, moshe needed fresh air. constance, however, was content to breathe the polluted air. only slightly more contaminated by rat poisons and tar than the air she breathed elsewhere and not behind a thin filter.

"who the fuck is calling me?" she snarled into the phone, practically yanking the phone cord from the reciever.

"constance?"

"um yes."

"it's mom."

she felt the muscles in her body constrict and her jaw lock, forbidding any words to come out.

"are you there?"

"mmhm." was the most she could get out over the fury that etched itself into her face. her lips parted and threatened to drip words of hatred, nut she knew this was no time for voices of violence. lucian was still sleeping and she didn't want to wake him up.

"did you hear me? it's mom."

she'd been sprawled on a stretcher in the hospital's hallway for five hours. though it hardly seemed as long through her lapses in consciousness. the constant influx of pain killers clouded her mind and worse yet, loosened her tongue.

"miss duke?" the nurse was trying her best to remain patient with the tattooed woman.

"hm?"

"do you have someone we can call?" she repeated for a fourth or fifth time, constance couldn't recall anymore.

"um," she took more than a moment to think before she replied somewhat coherently. "well, i have a boyfriend, but i think he's at work so don't bother him..." she rolled over on the stretcher and pulled the paperthin sheet over her head.

"he might want to know why you're here, miss duke."

"that is no one's business!" she barked back, sinking further into the stretcher.

"constance baby, where are you?" he murmured as gummy eyes came apart, sutured by heavy nights of vodka and dope. "oh christ, my head.."

lucian slipped out of her bed, naked as the morning he slid screaming from his mother's womb.

"constance..?"

"miss duke..." hesitant to speak for fear that the tattooed bag of bones would spit venom.

"yes?"

"i called your boyfriend."

constance laid in silence, wanting to slap the woman and hug her all at once. mummified in sheets in the dim room (one she had waited seven hours for), watching her i.v. drip to make sure the bag didn't empty.

"not like, living but dealing with chemo and shit." it wore her down more than the cancer did. "i don't wanna lose my hair again!" it was a beggar's catcall to the heavens. "i just wanna live and not deal with doctor's appointments all the time and fuckin' radiation." she didn't cry even if her voice faultered and threatened to crack under the weight of her burden.

"did lucian dress you guys up?" ash aarfed, drawling his bark out into a whine as he plopped down and sprawled; dejected. "it isn't that bad..." she dropped down onto the ground, folding up her legs like origami beneath her. "i'll buy you guys a treat or somethin'. it could have been worse, ya know?"

the dogs looked skeptical.

"you could have been dressed up like princesses."