the bastard's carnival

[cutthroat]

<center></center>
name:
blanca teodora seon

age:
twenty three
born august 28th 1983
in san luis potosi, mexico

location(s):
east harlem, new york

family:
dolores seon; mother
guillermo seon; brother
theodore sullivan; father

religion:
catholic, practicing
saint cecilia's church, east harlem

occupation:
ems driver

criminal record:
multiple counts: drunk & disorderly
public indecency
several counts of minor larceny, possession
on juvenile record

demeanor:
martyr/autocrat

vice(s):
pride, chocolate cake, estate sales

favorite song:
atmosphere - the woman with the tattooed hands

<font color="#ffffff" size="1">[ August 24, 2007 10:31 PM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

[cutthroat]

"no 'ospitals."

it's what the emaciated man in the bathtub full of blood gurgled, with his hands flinching dumbly at the end of filetted wrists, ribboned with bows of skin. he was like a skeleton, a character of the diseases that festered in the hearts of junkies who cooked up breakfast in a teaspoon, bonewhite, soaking in a puddle of bright bright red, glowing like the moon as he curved in mocking. there were names tattooed all over his arms, his chest, half-circling over a stomach that collapsed into a worthless chain of acid-pitted blocks of a spine. long, greasy black hair was matted with blood in his lap and his shaved head rolled over colorless shoulders and his lips peeled away from jagged yellowing teeth in the most beautiful smile i'd ever seen.

<font color="#ffffff" size="1">[ November 19, 2006 04:14 PM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

[cutthroat]

<center></center>
name:
guillermo caesar seon

age:
thirty one
born august 28th 1975
in san luis potosi, mexico

location(s):
asbury park, new jersey
occasionally new york

family:
dolores seon; mother
blanca seon; sister
theodore sullivan; father
agueda, hank & stone; goldfish

religion:
catholic, non-practicing

occupation:
line cook at local diner, dorothy's

criminal record:
served 28 months on assorted charges of fraud,
forgery, drug possession & embezzlement

demeanor:
bon vivant/child

vice(s):
lust, high heels, andy warhol biographies

favorite song:
loretta lynn - have mercy on me

<font color="#ffffff" size="1">[ December 10, 2006 06:10 PM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

[cutthroat]

the sun fell in the window lazily and brought a whole new day with it, creeping across the kitschy seventies styled kitchen and warming up the cheap, peeling fake hardwood underneath bare feet. he had to sneak around the patches that creaked with dry rot and buffer the sound of cereal rattling in a bowl with a couple of coughs. but blanca sleepily stomped down the well-trafficked gully of the hallway, like she should. it was her apartment, after all. and her milk he was splashing over his breakfast.

"hey salvaje, mornin'!" guillermo bleated in forced cheer, guiltily cramming the empty carton of milk back into the door of the fridge and hip-checking it shut, wrapping one arm protectively around his cereal bowl.

from behind a bed-tangled cowl of muddy greaseslick curls, he gauged the waxy yellow and grey rings around her eyes, shoveling a spoonful of trix down his throat. "how was work?"

"is there any milk left?"

"hm?" the wildcat's brother made his eyes wide and innocent. very 'what milk?!', with a dribble of white creeping through scrubby brown chin stubble.

"did you leave me any milk?" blanca tried to break the shackles of sleep on her ankles and noosed 'round her neck, growling out the grogginess of her throat as she obliterated the kitchen space between them. guillermo bent his chest over the bowl, baring crooked teeth as his waist caught the lip of the countertop.

"sit down!. i'll make you some bacon and eggs." in a humble gesture, he pulled a chair out from the table and steered his sister's narrow ass into it, slurping the thick sugar-swill at the bottom of his bowl balanced in one heavily boned fist.

"you look tired."

"it's exhausting."

he killed the falsetto chirp of his throat and coaxed her on with his silence, breaking eggs into a redhot skillet with a rattlesnake's hiss and whipping them into a jaundiced pulp.

"it's exhausting trying to save people when they don't even want to save themselves."

it was pretty early for that kind of talk, and she seemed to struggle with the sands of sleep in the cracks of her eyelids, palms slipping over greasy cheeks. guillermo kept his back turned, knowing how her mouth liked to seal shut when it had an audience.

"they want to die, guillermo. the hospitals are full and soon we'll be stacking bodies two or three deep in the grave. they just don't want to be here."

"who can blame them?"

"but why did i decide to save them all?"

<font color="#ffffff" size="1">[ November 23, 2006 12:27 AM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

[cutthroat]

"what if she dies?"

guillermo's heart beat in time with the clatter of silver wear, human hustle and the crow of short orders shouted over the endless spit of a hot fire, and lucian's soft conversation (or his heavy aura of heavily self-medicated panic and insecurity sliming across the countertop) did nothing to the diehard rhythm of his motions. he still passed hot plates over the aqua-netted bouffants of the veteran waitresses and shamelessly turned mourning blue eyes on the underage ass of the new holiday help, shoulders rolling in a shrug as a experience wrist bucked, the gelatinous yellow uncooked eye of an egg, 'sunny side up' crooned the withered geriatric in the corner, winked out in a quick flip.

when the kitchen began to swirl around him, a fury of sweat and sound and pure steam heat, you could occasionally see glimpses of the old guillermo, through the flashes of fire. skill and passion coursing through his veins, sweat following the fine lines of worry along his sallow face, muscles cording with excitement, throbbing, panting, laughing loud as the silvered blade of his knife ate away meat from bone and shaped raw, visceral scraps into cutting edge cuisine. but now, instead of sending his dishes out on $235 plates, to be picked apart by socialites and purged by supermodels, his creations were mashed onto cheap plastic and spun across cheaper, chipped linoleum into the withered faces of truckers and seedy business men fresh from the equally seedy hotel down the street.

both blanca and guillermo had hacked out a living with their hands and whip-quick reflexes, but where his sister overcompensated, with her eleven finely boned fingers working miracles, guillermo came up short, knuckles bound by bubblegum pink globs of scar tissue, his right ring finger accidentally amputated at the first knuckle. but he managed. and in between skewering a pile of slivered potatoes and whipping a duet of egg yolks into a froth, he even managed to refill lucian's coffee.

"people aren't meant to live forever, man."

spinning a grease-spittled spatula between his knuckles, the gaunt immigrant's mind flashed to his frenetic savior of a sister, rushing to knot up leaking veins and scrape spilt gray matter back into fractured skulls, racing through the dark night, working her fingers to the bone and her soul to a thin, tattered veneer under the uncompromising sway of a madonna complex and haloshine of her siren's shriek. everyone seemed so eager to live forever, despite what she whispered into his ear after a long, cold night. despite her gruesome stories of everyone's eventual self-sabotage.

"cancer, car crashes, guns, shit.. life's not supposed to last forever, luce. just make it enjoyable for her. take her on a trip, paint her a picture, buy her a new stove," this was guillermo's subconscious speaking, still pouting over the internal combustion of his four-burner in blanca's rundown loft.

"buy her a fucking boob job if she's one of those materialistic bitches. something. make her happy while you can."

the sickle-tongued mongrel grinned wide, as if speaking from experience with his own mature relationships.

"of course they're good, they're the fucking g. caesar special, motherfucker." guillermo smirked, prodding a renegade brown ribbon of hair back underneath his hairnet, elbows planted on the chipped formica counter, stubble-heavy chin blooming out of his palms. "but hey, bring her around sometime, i'll cook her up something special." he smirked and scooped a burnt crisp of bacon fat from the edge of lucian's plate and aimed it at the O of his mouth, happy to have to squishing between his teeth. "you should get her on some kind've fresh, raw food diet. i was reading something the other day, on c--.."

cut short by the panicked yelp of his swing cook from the bowels of the kitchen, guillermo snapped upright and rapped the ridge of his knuckles against the counter, shouting over his shoulder as he disappeared behind the swing of the kitchen's fogged doors.

"shit, duty calls, but remember what i told you about blanca, if you ever need a refill."

<font color="#ffffff" size="1">[ December 05, 2006 12:05 AM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

[cutthroat]

<center></center>


name:
gonzalo fontenele yanez

age:
twenty eight
born january 1st, 1979
in viedma, argentina

location(s):
east harlem, new york

family:
relative information n/a
marisol; street mutt

religion:
practicing cynic

occupation:
dish washer at local diner, dorothy's
drug mule

criminal record:
served 36 months on drug trafficking
& conspiracy charges

demeanor:
manipulator/visionary

vice(s):
old chairs, cocaine, foto-novelas

favorite song:
los crudos - a los insurgeros

<font color="#ffffff" size="1">[ December 10, 2006 06:11 PM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

[cutthroat]

"what do you want for christmas, petardo? a new pair of gloves? i want those new knives i saw at mancino's, i was going to ask for a casserole dish, but malcolm's getting me one! but what the fuck do you get a mut--"

"i want you to stop bringing that asshole around here."

"aw, c'mon bella, you talk like i'm not right here!"

the three of them formed an unholy, subbleached trinity around the withered spray of fractured artificial tree limbs, blanca's eleven fingers knotted in the twine of last year's christmas lights, belly buzzing with a bubbling stew of guillermo's special eggnog and deviled eggs, nerves severed on the soft, supple edge of comfort. from behind her, gonzalo, slash-eyed with christmas baubles hanging from his wrist, lurked across the narrow plane of her shoulder and put his tattooed cheek against her own.

"have a little sympathy for a man with no one to spend christmas with."

"yeah, well, maybe if you hadn't fucking killed them al--"

"alright, calmarse," guillermo's interjection came in the shape of two tumblers of eggnog, plied between the two with a slippery grin puppeted by anxiety. "'tis the season to live and let live.."

"tell him that! i just..he..oh! goddamnit fucking lights!"

unsaited by a triple shot of rum and yolk, blanca shook her mutated fists in frustration, spewing a tangle of blinking christmas spirit in gonzo's face before disappearing down a dark hallway in a bullet-quick hail of slurred spanish obscenities.

"aw shit, it's not you gonzo, she just--"

"yea, the lights, i saw." stripping a thread of lights from his adder-boned shoulder, gonzo draped it over a branch that reached pathetically, as if trying to separate itself from the highly spirited abomination of it's trunk and brethren. the serpent faced argentine shrugged, winding the tree in light like a spindle. "and she is the savior of the world, afterall. madonna. isn't that how she fancies herself? must be hard to have the unfixable flaunted in your face.."

"fuck, give her a break, gonz. of course she's upset, you're her biggest failure. but i thought we could all get together in the spirit of the fucking holidays.."

the serpintine man's lips flattened, a back dripping with barbwire prison ink turned on the flame-licked immigrant.

"why don't you tell her that? i'm not the one decking the ex-con, fa la la la fucking la." he stripped his collarbone of the last twinkling lights, barreling down the smooth slope of his eggnog tumbler with a vicious grin. "and besides, i thought you had bigger fish to fry, jefe de cocina. have you got that kid's clock radio yet?"

"fuck you."