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Introduction.
<center>http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v9...NES/gaelaw.jpg</center>
Name: Noe Meza Torres.
From: El Zumbador, Venezuela; thick in the Andes.
Age: Twenty-three.
Resides: Everywhere. Drifter.
Background: As a child his village dubbed him the second coming. Whether it was strange coincidences or miracles, he had been witnessed healing the sick on more than one occasion. At thirteen, after his gift was being taken advantage of time and time again, he failed on two people. They were eager to call him a hoax, and turned their noses up at him. He never lived it down until he left.
OOC:
Images of Gael Garcia Bernal.
Screename is Of fables.
Any roleplay is welcome, don't be afraid to IM.
Player is Erica.
I'm not fluent in Spanish, and because I was too lazy to do English translations, the quotes from the characters in the following posts labeled as 'acts' were in Spanish.
<font color="#FFCC00" size="1">[ June 05, 2005 06:27 AM: Message edited by: Of fables ]</font>
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Act I.
Through the paper-thin walls she could hear his voice. It carried like a song, but she knew that he was born tone-deaf. No matter how much vinyl she spun on her crackling, vintage record player, he couldn't hear anything. Not even the lyrics. In the lashes of moonlight barking coldly through the window pane she could make out the wall clock; and it was just seventeen after three. What was he still doing awake?
Theresa Meza thrashed away from her sheets with her long, long twig arms and suede skin. Glistening with nightmare oil, she stood naked, save for her cotton underwear, and shifted wildly through her closet in search of an appropriate robe to confront her six-year-old son. In a flood of dove-white, she maneuvered down the hall, and cut a right into the boy's room.
His three older brothers were all sprawled out together on the queen-sized bed, watching dream matinees behind their lids. But the youngest was on the floor, sitting indian-style in his underwear, smiling at the clay wall parallel to him. She stood astonished as he addressed something that wasn't there, ignoring his mother's presence in his periphery, giggling boyishly like a child staring down the sun in an island of playground mulch and cedarchips.
"We're not supposed to up this late, Nicoleta. Mama's here." He turned to his mother, his eyes light-bulbed and mischevious, and he took a lunge at the bottom of his mattress. One of his brother's stirred and grunted, but Noe soon writhed into a patch between one scrawny arm and another roasting chest. Pinching his nose, he slammed his oldest brother's shoulder, who began to wake.
"What are you doing, Noe? ---Mama---he's shoving me off the bed!"
"Make room for Nicoleta, Jorge! You're taking up all her room! You'll sleep on her!"
"What are you talking about? Nicoleta?" His brother was on the verge of throwing him off the bed, unti he caught wind of his mother's eyes -- dwelling in the doorway. Her tear ducts were spiked, and her mouth was swollen and trembling. She braced her foreknuckle beneath the hook of her nose and whipped around on heel, skittering from the sight of her four boys.
When his brother sidled from him and launched off the bed to travel behind his mother on bare feet, Noe wrenched a complacent grin, nuzzling his temple in a plump, shared pillow.
"There Nicoleta, now you have room. Goodnight."
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Act II.
"How does he know that was her name? I never told him about Nicoleta! Now he has an imaginary friend named Nicoleta! He says she's his twin sister! He never stops talking to her!"
"It's a coincidence, Theresa. Please, calm down, take a seat."
She muffled a sob in the framework of her knuckles, her stringy gothic veil of hair emphasizing all of her harsh angles and hollow bone-structure. She ate moderate rations to supply for her boys. The father spanned a palm across her frail spine and accompanied her to the chair opposite his desk. The sacristy was one of the only rooms in the village that was lined with electricity; his desk was mahogany-furnished, the holy, diamond-encrusted vessels were a thief's wet dream. Even in her state of hysteria, she couldn't help but to suck down the smell of fresh wood and new leather. It was so unfamiliar to her it made her heart tumble.
"Now, tell me again, what is the problem, Theresa?" Father Ortiz placidly folded his hands on the table, looming on her through wire-rims, pressing a tightrope smile.
"Ever since he's been coming here under your care to study every weekend Father, he's changed. He tells me he has a sister that looks just like him---a twin and calls her Nicoleta. Do you remember Nicoleta?" She nearly shrieked it, lurching towards his desk, grinding her nails into her mangled roots.
His hand took flight, pantomiming that she should keep the volume minimized, although his natural shadows were expunged in favor of empathy.
"Yes, I do. Your sister. And once again, I am very sorry for what happened."
"How is it then, Father, that a seven-year-old boy can name his imaginary friend--his imaginary sister the same name as my sister? Nicoleta. Surely, he hasn't even heard that name before! What kind of sick coincidence is that?" She was rattling off a thousand-miles-per-hour, burning the wick of her tongue on the roof of her mouth. "Oh, he never had this problem before. He was fine until he began to study here. Oh ..nono." Her forehead just dropped into the strained cradle of her hand, her emaciated shoulders withering without grace.
"Are you saying that this sudden problem, this imaginary friend is affliated with our church, Theresa?" He canted back in his chair, the bone-wire of his jaw vividly tightening, until it flushed a whiter shade of pale.
"No, Father. No, that's not what I'm saying at all. I just don't understand it."
"Listen, Theresa. We will take care of it. This is out of your control. Let us take Noe for a couple of weeks. Let us talk to him. We have plenty of beds, and you know that."
"Plenty of beds for orphans. My son is no orphan!"
"I know, Theresa. But you are in no position to help your son right now. You have three other boys to worry about. I promise you, I'll get to the bottom of this." He suddenly sprung to a stance, splattering the lacquered desk with both hands. This was enough of a hint to cue her dismounting of the comfortable leather. Her bare feet clapped towards the door, which he soon caught for her.
"Bring him over tomorrow."
"I will, Father. Thanks for your time."
When the door dimmed closed, he traveled over to the venetian blinds, and scissored between two to watch her eventually trickle out onto the dirtkicked streets. It never occurred to him just why Noe felt the impetus to invent an imaginary sister. Why not a brother?
Perhaps, because the little boy had witnessed man and wife his whole entire life. Man and woman. Maybe he was installing another half of himself to repent for something he saw as immoral; man was not supposed to touch man that way.
Father Ortiz loosened the border of his collar, and shed his robe, flooding his ankles with bitter inkstains. The thought alone of that boy's biblical green eyes (like the sly snake that encouraged Eve) alone was enough to ignite a pore-tear of sweat.
<font color="#FFCC00" size="1">[ May 16, 2005 06:01 PM: Message edited by: Of fables ]</font>
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Act III.
The aisles of hospital beds were still, the children were bundled up in their starched linen. They were the perfect sleepers; they never seemed to writhe, they never seemed to flip unsturdy from one side to the other, scouring for the perfect position. They were all zipper-lidded angels. But, he couldn't sleep.
He sat lotus-folded on the center of his disheveled kingdom of sheets and comforter. He wanted to wake up Nicoleta aloud, but he knew that he was punished for mentioning her name. Now, when he wanted to talk to her, he managed to through strung dialogue throbbing in his mind. She was always faithful in responding.
He was excited because he knew it was at least midnight! And what an unholy hour midnight was! He wanted to leap to his feet and pogo up and down on his bed, and flail his arms like a skelicopter and boom at all the sleeping children to play! But, he knew he'd be throttled, and thus he held his tongue and breezed a haughty sigh.
The bed next to him was empty, but there was still the delicate impression of a little body left there. Noe remembered falling asleep in sight of Manuel, who was only a year or two older than him. But now, he was gone.
He turned to his sleeping puzzlepiece and shook her tenderly. "Nicoleta, do you know where Manuel went?" He seethed a whisper to his pillow; where a pixelated image of his twin sister was sprawled. "No? Okay."
And as though his timing were impeccable, he heard a sudden shrill howl in the hallway followed by a desperate thunderclap of footsteps. Suddenly, the door bursted open, and Manuel skittered sloppily inside. His nose was an open faucet of syrupy blood, and he was leaving a sickly breadcrumb trail on the raw floorboards. Noe thrashed from his covers and began to skid towards him when he braked dead in his tracks. His heart caught in the clenching pink of his throat.
Father Medina looked as irate as ever; he slammed into the room, alerting a few boys that began to cry out and churn in a dreamscape smog in their beds. Before Manuel could plummet into the symbolic safe haven of his bed, the priest captured a tuft of his nightgown and splattered him face-down onto the floor.
"Nooo!" Manuel's pleading was nailed into Noe's memory.
The profane crack of teeth gnawing wood almost made Noe nauseous. The priest's sadistic black robes hovered over the boy, both of his ankles splitting apart in a division around his battered body. At six-foot-two one would expect him to be gangly, but he was anything but; he was meat-packed and was defined by his grotesque little mustache that all of the children secretly giggled at behind his back.
He used his fist like an epic hammer, and stifled the little boy's cries with blow-after-blow between his weeping, pigeon-winged shoulderblades. Father Ortiz staggered wide-eyed into the room and caught a grasp of his fellow brother's arm, in a feeble attempt to jerk him away from the boy (who had just stopped weeping; he was laying in a puddle of his own blood). The room began to rupture in cries and gasps in unison from all of the boys. Father Medina rewound a few footsteps and it took hushed whispers and violent coaxings from his counterpart to convince him to storm from the cell of a dozen beds.
In the meantime, Noe collapsed to his hands and knees and hastily worked his way to the other boy. When he upturned him, to scrawl limply across his lap, his face caked and stamped with a fresh masquerade of blood, he choked on a screeching whimper.
"Manuel, wake up. Wake up? Manuel? Manuel?"
Father Ortiz turned in the threshold, and began to banish the infest of cries from the other boy's with a flail of his arm. "Shut up! Shut up all of you! Shut up! Noe, get off of him! Noe!"
No matter how sharp or how threatening his tone was, Noe refused to wrench free. He let his chin take a swandive to the ridge of his collarbones and whispered schoolbook-memorised prose prayer, his hand smothering the other boy's silent heart.
Maybe it was because the moment was photogenic, and because the pose of the two fallen boys was saintly and reminiscent of angels with bullet-freckled wings. Or maybe it was because he felt guilty for what had been done. But Father Ortiz stalled several feet from the network of prayer and dandelion wishes. And he regretted defying his vow of celibacy because his faith had been replenished in that very moment. He witnessed his first miracle.
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Act IV.
<center>Santiago, Chile.
Three years ago.</center>
Dario Martinez-Rosa was on the verge of twenty-four. He pinballed around the urban mazes late at night searching for things to do, and old men to con. His father always told him that since he was born with a brilliant mind, he should have put it to an ethical use--perhaps, a doctor. Instead, he slinked around, cutting coke, and placing clever bets in his spare time.
Next door to his hotel (which he saw as a skyscraper, just like the ones in America that clawed at the heavens in the womb of their bustling cities) was a brothel that was swollen with a circus of lipstick-smeared supervixens. He loved to watch them click down the street in their impossible, lethal stilettos, throwing their hands up and swatting at the air, dismissing the pathetic boys with rickety knees that couldn't afford them.
It was almost a permanent residence; his hotel room. It was stylistically reserved; he had a blanket printed with flowers that were nostalgic of the sixties, a dresser with a tall mirror, and the holy bible was printed on a quaint circular table adjacent to his bed. He'd been there for two weeks, ever since his girlfriend threw him out for catching him in the midst of entangled limbs and shared sweat. Dario still had yet to plan what his next step was. Maybe, he didn't need a next step.
He wasn't the tallest boy in the world, he felt stout at five-foot-five, but his gritty, peppered beard and inkwell black eyes gave him the significant posture that it took to be dubbed a man. It was undeniable, even by the blind harlots below that he was a visual masterpiece.
He grazed the salmon-pink, tasteless window curtain aside, abandoning his vulture view of the street six stories below. Tonight, he'd get a drink.
<center>______________________</center>
The bar was alight with tension and cramped with an overflow of testosterone. Everyone was glued to the football game (soccer, if you will) playing on an overhead T.V. that kept catching the blinking glitter of plugged-in Corona logo. Blatantly disinterested in the metaphorical circle-jerk that was male-bonding over a fucking game of football, Dario nursed his beer with his smug grimace becoming more and more eclipsed by the moment by anger.
"Fucking faggots," he made sure he pronounced it loud and clear for everyone to hear. But he only earned an accusatory side-glance from the towel-kneading bartender.
He stubbed out his cigarette in a plastic ashtray, and contemplated knocking the peanut bowl awry, but he caught wind of something gorgeous on the opposite spectrum of the seedy bar. She was gorgeous.
She had long dandelion hair, her lashes were tweaked to mascara-speared perfection. Her mouth was wrist-slit red, and her dress was classy---which was an anomaly in downtown Santiago. He wasted no time in speeding towards her. She passed a calm grin to him, and offered a flimsy wrist and a delicate hand. He crushed his mouth to her knuckles. They exchanged maybe two full sentences:
The men here are pigs.
They are. Would you like to leave?
before setting off into the wilderness that was the cobblestone city streets.
Dario twinged the resonating deadbolt in his hotel room, and once it clicked, he swiveled on his heel to admire her. She was arranged like a babydoll on the ledge of his grotesque mattress, her neverending legs crisscrossed. He spied a peekaboo spiral of garter, before she modesty tugged the fringe of her black dress down to better suit her sequined, conservative halo.
He marched across the room, and took her hand. Her novel-thick lashes peeled high, and the studded green of her eyes blossomed on him.
"What is your name?" Dario asked, slowly submerging to his knees, bathing in the radioactive glow of a goddess.
"Nicoleta," she replied, curtly.
He nodded before he shivered the ripples of her skirt up to her thighs.
"Nicoleta...." he pondered aloud, the tunnel of his throat rumbling in sexsick hymn.
Dario folded over, and sucked her off.
<font color="#FFCC00" size="1">[ May 16, 2005 06:08 PM: Message edited by: Of fables ]</font>
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Act V.
We've been wild for weeks. I swear I had fallen in love with her until this morning she woke up as though she had a revelation in her dreams. She didn't shave her face, she left her wig and makeup behind and disappeared in a pair of blue jeans and a t-shirt. She took all of my money when I was weeping in the bathroom. She was rambling something mad when I had the bathroom door closed, clinging to the toilet bowl, nursing my hangover. She said she was leaving herself in Chile, and that she'd forever be mine. I followed her into the hallway, and before she hit the elevator she turned to me. I was startled to see her without her makeup, without her cosmetic dust and spiraled hair. He looked so tough and so strange to me ---his beard, his moppy black hair, his squared jaw. Then, I understood what he meant. He was leaving Nicoleta here with me, he was leaving that fraction of himself here with me. The sinner, the homosexual. And he was leaving to become a better man. I never learned his name.
-- Dario.
<center>___________________________________</center>
<center>San Antonio
California</center>
Mindy had been swept off her feet. She was constantly clogging her phoneline with dribbles of gossip between her web of jealous friends. His name was Noe, he was from Venezuela, his English was a bit brittle though---oh but, yes, they were going to fuck soon. She had a feeling. She met him at a Border's on Washington Avenue. He scrolled past all the books in the film noir category with wide-eyes and a bridged mouth. She had been chirping into her cellphone at the makeshift cafe. But, once she caught wind of the jagged blur in the rugged black beanie and bland gray t-shirt staggering around aimlessly like a little boy in a candy shop, she had to slaughter the conversation with Beth. Cosmopolitan magazine said that thirty-eight percent of women believed in love at first sight--she was one of them.
Their first date he seemed too meek to kiss her. When she asked where he was staying and how to get in touch with him, he shrugged it off almost urbanely, and blotted her ear with sugary promises instead; he'd meet her tomorrow, same place, same time. The second date they lounged on her sofa and he cradled her persian cat. They threw back straightlaced whiskey and he tried to dismantle the concept of reality tv. She grabbed a chokehold of his shoulders and tugged him into a kiss. She remembered his bones becoming puddy, leaking into the Crayola-red cushions of the couch. His tongue budded so softly.
Three was a charm. She fretted over herself in the cramped capacity of her bathtub for nearly an hour, meticulously scraping at every patch of her legs, curling her volcanic-red hair, and modeling on the catwalk of her bedroom carpet in front of a mirror that matched her height. When he showed up, sipping her in with a cool grin and dusky eyes, she braceleted his wrist, roping him inside.
"Where do you go every night, Noe?"
"Home."
"Where's that? Do you have another girl?"
"No, I have no one. I live by myself."
"But where?"
"I ah.. have a room. At the Holiday inn."
He couldn't resist her bubblegum-pink pout, and its candied veneer--even if he had to lie.
The headboard groaned and threatened to carve its initials into the rose-trim wallpaper behind her bed. When she turned the lights off, he shook his head. He wanted to fuck with them on, but he wouldn't have been so vulgar as to say so aloud. He fell in love with the way her pinched hips ferociously rocked up and down; and he was intoxicated by the way her insides eagerly nutured him. Every time he tried to coax her spraying hair from her face, she'd overlap his knuckles, and force enough pressure so that he'd take a temporary fistful. There were moments where she felt guilt-tripped, as though he were a virgin beneath her, and she was fucking his the layers of his innocence away. There was something about the way his brows seemed to twitch, and his mouth seemed to falter. Right before the defined muscles in his abdomen lynched before he came, she could've sworn she saw his lips mouthing a prayer.
But her friends always did tell her she was crazy.
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The stairs were well-winded, wheezing beneath the sloth-wary patters of his boots. Once he took to the second floor of the house, he hunted out the room with the ladder. It was cobwebbed and the walls were full of patchwork plaster and paint-stains. But the ladder was soaked in the gaping window's moonlight, and always baited him in. Trapping the wood within his fist, he climbed as quick as an arachnid; all dextrous and mounting the small uppercase landing with its floorboard planks and dangerous ledge.
He couldn't explain why he liked it there so much. Maybe because it was about as inconvenient and as uncomfortable as being stifled in the hot breath of a Venezuelan summer with your three older brothers and older sister in one queen-sized bed. Either way, the farm house with the antisocial boards 'x'ing out the window (save for the bedroom which he subtracted it from) and its throne of lopsided dandelions and warped weeds seemed euphoric to him that one morning a week prior when he was scraping down a dustkicked dirt road.
Pinching the teeth of his nylon bookbag's zipper, he took a handful of tea-candles - most with the vanilla-white wax half-waning, and meticulously carved an oval about the height out of his body with them. It was like fancy chalk outline in the wake of a murder. It only took one match, one complimentary match that came on a reservation with his pack of filterless cigarettes to ignite the hazy constellations around him. He sat lotus-folded in the middle of the circle, shaking his wrist loose to murder the flame of one, before the lit wick of that fed all of the other thirsty candles.
Soon he was wading in a makeshift euphoric hum of stars. It was so warm to him that even though winter was still encrusted on the shingles outside, and there was no heat, that he peeled away his battered suede jacket and the solid black t-shirt behind it. He was a roasted olive with his ribs and muscles biting his skin in all the right places. He plucked out a tiny-printed photograph, spiked with white dimples from being folded a thousand and two times, and the color pixels hanging onto his memory and propped it up against the solitary squatting candle he didn't light.
It was his mother, and although her face was somber, her smile told tales of better days. In her youth, she was the most beautiful, untouchable woman on the northern end of the Andes.
He sprawled out then, writing messages with his wing-robbed shoulderblades against the nail-toothy floorboards, and used his backpack as a pillow. For a moment, his lashes fanned out, and he stared at the ceiling. He felt musky, and his stubble was thick. His hair fell in glossy bootlaces, and clung to the spontaneous sweat that mounted his pores. It was the memories that made him sweat; it was the memories that gave him a thin moustache of transparent garnish over his clever upper lip.
And if he hadn't let them down. If he hadn't let them down----
He wouldn't ever have to whimper in the face of winter again.
"Buenas noches, mama."
<center>http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v9...dlcnov04-6.jpg</center>
<font color="#FFCC00" size="1">[ May 16, 2005 06:43 PM: Message edited by: Of fables ]</font>
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<center>(dialogue cut from play between sun blister's player and i.)
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v9...NES/gaelss.jpg</center>
"You know what I read in a book? It said that you follow the north star to find your way home. So I left my home and followed it. When it stops moving, so will I. I'll settle right there. Even if it's in the middle of the street. But the fucker won't stop moving."
"Of course it'll never stop moving. The sky is so high. It's like the moon. I always thought the moon was chasing me when I was little, when I pressed my forehead up against the car's window. My mom told me that it was so high in the sky that it just looked like it was following us. But I guess, since it is too cloudy to see any stars tonight, you will have stop and make this your home."
"Your mother was wrong. The moon is really following you. You have to be careful, or it'll land right on the roof of your car and crush you to bits. The scientists, they know this, but they keep it a secret. I will. Until the North star begins to pace impatiently. That's how I decide."
"It'd be an awful way to die. I'd like to photograph you looking at the sky. I have a feeling that that's where you belong."
"No, it'd be so romantic, having your ribs crushed by the big angel in the sky. But the moon wouldn't just land on you, it'd massacre a whole part of the earth. Genocide."
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Quinn Rosalin's stem-thin legs worked like determined spiders, spilling down three zigzagging concrete flights of stairs. Her generic cotton socks dodged trash and disabled bottles, until she mounted the base floor. Her arms were twist-tied around the plastic belly of a basket that seemed too big for her, streaming with a downpour jeans and long-sleeves, boasting that she only scrounged up change for the laundry maybe once a month.
The laundry room was pure grunge. It didn't dispense free soap anymore. It was ran rugged into the ground, vines of mildew splattered like ink along the base of the walls, the string of clumsy machine units, and the dipping jaw of the sink. Heaping the slats of her basket to anchor one of the washer lids, in the dull, cold teal of the room, with an idle whip of her ponytail to the side, she glanced towards the sink.
There was a rainsoaked man with his hand thrust beneath the open scrawl of faucet tapwater, his clingy sleeve wringing his elbow, the water diluting the syrupy virgin-red of his blood, his fingers checkered and graphed over his wrist-throbbing pulse. He offered her nothing more than his profile; his suede pores freckled with the sponge of the clouds, his eyes wire-rimmed and mouth set into a crooked-fumbling line.
At first, she decided to mind her own, hitching up the mouth of the washer, drooling denim inside, but when the water didn't relent, she tore away and hovered behind him. They were about the same height; her skin was white and her pro-ana arms were an animated whirlwind of tattoo collages, stamped in a pair of gray boxers and a white beater. He was just bonedrenched, his jeans proving immobile, his socks sloshing in the cryptic black furnish of his unlaced boots. When he noticed the vulture peering over his shoulder, he shrank into himself, clawing at the knob to murder the frail creek of water.
But she wound up to his side, snakeslick and highlighted with curiosity.
"What did you do to your hand?" She snagged his wrist in a bony cufflink, and stared at the fresh wounds. The gypsy-arches engraved in his palm were overwhelmed with tiny slices that came like tallymarks. There were only six, but one slashed a diagonally across a row of four.
"What happened?" There wasn't a doubt in her mind -- he was a psycho, and cut himself in the weirdest fucking place.
He tore his hand away on whim, but without the air of a hostile little boy. Instead the feathery markings of his brows beneath sheets of oil-black, spliced hair were nothing but gentle.
"My wound opened up again," he spilled somberly, in an italicized sway of something distinctly foreign, and Spanish-barbed.
"Well, running it over the sink won't help, kid. Here." She squeaked the faucet to a halt, and she enclosed a fist around his. He seemed detached and wild-eyed like a lost puppy, swerving around the aisle of washing machines toward the door of the basement. She shot up the stairs with him lagging behind her, with a maternal grace that no one would ever suspect she actually carried. He lagged behind her, his teeth clipped to his bottom lip, leaving a breadcrumb trail of stamped puddles.
Pivoting open the door of her apartment, she led the soggy boy inside.
"Gonna have to dress that up." And for good reason, she had supplies.
Swinging by the low-dive of her coffee table, she pinched her pack of cigarettes, tapping one out into the pillowed seams of her mouth, and lit up in a blurring mess of bones and ballerina twirls. He waited close to the door, his hands matted in his backpockets, elbows outward-jaunting and winged.
Quinn teetered at the threshold of her bathroom door, cueing the light, ravaging the medicine cabinent for the ingredients. There were fresh-packaged hospital needles, stout and tall neon-orange Rx bottles, half-empty boxes of Midol, medical tape (for the days where a belt just wouldn't do the trick) bandages and ointment. Everything seemed to clatter on the rust-sullied lip of the sink when she abandoned the square of the bathroom and rounded back into the general living room proximity. She took a seat on the floor, elastic and indian-style, and curtly paddled the carpet with her hand, miming for him to settle parallel.
He did, with a furrow of reluctance, and crashed opposite her, offering up the red spree span of his hand. She was meticulous like a vintage nurse in greasing him in ointment, and peeling he bandage free from its strip.
"I'm Quinn, by the way," she blandly offered, her cigarette wagging around her words. The foreskin of her cigarette's collected ash dribbled on her milkspilled thigh, but she impatiently grazed it away with the broomstick flutter of her knuckles. She'd vacuum later.
Behind the squared ridges of his glasses, he nodded, his eyes plunged low, the green-thicket of his eyes stapled to the circulation-startling spiral of tape.
"Noe."
"What the hell 'ya doin' Noe? All soaked and hangin' out in this God-forsaken building?" She whipped around with a resilient twist-tie of her upper body, settling he cigarette in a crystalline ashtray groove.
"It's raining and I had to wash my hand. The door was open."
"Why'd it start bleeding?"
"I don't know. It does sometimes." Then, he changed the breed of subjects, motioning to her arm. "You are the most beautiful girl I've ever seen, why did you do that to yourself?"
At first she thought he was alluding to the faded plum constellations grape-vining down her forearm, and she was prepared to twig-snap in her defense, until it dawned on her that he was speaking of her tattoos.
"Oh, I don't know. I'm a tattoo artist. I get it for free. It's addicting."
He just solemnly shook his head.
"Where do you live?"
"Under the sky," a very vague answer.
"Where under the sky?"
"Wherever."
"You want to stay here tonight?"
"No."
"Yes," she insisted, tasting his reluctance.
"Alright, thank you."
The ashtray girl plucked herself from the floor, towering over him then.
"Well, let me get you some clothes, kid."
So much for the laundry.
-
Saturday morning cartoons waltzed and whizzed across the television screen. The whole entire apartment was antisocial and dark; venetian blinds battling the general overcast bright spraying from the sky. The blues and whites scrolled over her face, and the quirky tinkering of tiptoeing cartoon characters crackled through the floor-set television's speakers. It was ten am and she was sprawled on the beer-splotched carpet, the chainlinks of her spine molded against a couch cushion. Her indian-style knotted legs cradled an empty beer bottle between, the ashtray angled beside a knee sending a billow of smoke signals up to the blackened ceiling. She was sporting the same loungefly wear as the night before; boxers, beater, socks. When a commercial for play-dough spun in lieu of a break in 'One Saturday Morning' she started draining the filter of her cigarette, once more.
The door just about six feet away sprung open, and behind it was the boy with the caramel-twined kinks in his hair from upstairs -- the exact apartment above her. He was cradling a crumpled brown bag like a child, and he whipped the door to a firm tightlip closure with the unsturdy knock of his sole.
"Whatcha get me?" She groaned, peeling her phlegmatic lids in his direction.
"Just milk and bread, why?" Solomon's footsteps finally stuttered short, and he nicked his ten o'clock shadowed chin in the direction of the couch, and the creature flung across it. She worked her way to a stand, brushing away imaginary ash, the dwindling cylinder implanted like an extra finger betwixt both her fore and middle.
Noe was spreadsheeted across the couch, the nape of his neck relying on the hilt of the arm, one arm tangled behind his mussed jet-black skull, the other working a sling across the tender launch of his flannel abdomen. Chances were, he probably thought about complaining about the pair of black shorts she gave him, because they were too small. But beggars can't be choosers.
"That's Noe. Some kid I just found in the laundry room. His hand was bleedin' real bad. 'Guess he cut himself. 'Ain't he adorable, though? He's like a brand new puppydog. 'Got that heavy accent and all. He fell asleep in his glasses but halfway through the night last night he took 'em off and saw just fine without them. Then he freaked out and mashed them back on his face again. He's weird," she confided in a long lapse of mutter to her towering counterpart.
"Why did he cut himself?" Solomon spun around, swinging into the quaint commodity of her kitchen, unloading a plastic-wrapped loaf of bread on the counter top, and grinding her quart of milk against the myriad beer bottles on the second refridgerator ridge.
"I don't know." She stalked him in the kitchen, her arms ribboned at her stomach, chasing away the riot of goosebumps that crept up in the wake of detaching from her boyscout-knot of body warmth. "Cher stopped by at nine to gimme somethin', and she fell in love with him. She almost woke him up. The poor bastard probably hasn't slept in weeks."
He edged in, plucking the cigarette from her mouth, claiming the last drag before he stubbed it on the side of the trash can. "Since when were you a charity case?" His London trashccent breezed in a playful lilt, before he strolled back into the living room.
By the time he arrived, the boy on the couch was already awake. His squared glasses were folded like origami across his thigh, the bladed heel of his palm sketching across a weary eye, chasing away tear-duct sleep dust.
"Hey, I'm Solomon," The Brit offered awkwardly.
"Noe." He casually stood up to offer a hand. They basket-wove and rocked off a wiry concrete shake.
Quinn vanished down the narrow route of the hallway, quirking a left into her bedroom to collect the dryer-warm clothes from her dresser, returning with a grin.
"Here y'go."
_________________________________________
The leftover, neon-green rubberball pogoed in a cursive 'v' like a the sky-high splash of the collective wings of migrating birds. Noe sat opposite Solomon on the subway. In between excerpts of conversation they idly sent it off back-and-forth, and they only stopped when the doors hitched open and a new flood of passengers clustered from the underground platform. They had hopped the rails, skipped the petty tolls and were rattling from Thirteenth Street to evade the endless splatter of rain to Eighth and Market.
"So how long are you here for?"
"Until I get bored."
"Is that what you always do?"
"Mas o menos," The Venezuelan replied with a polished, reserved nonchalance, his left shoulder leaping with a shrug.
They soon stumbled from the train, strangling poles for stability as it screeched to a halt, clapping down the platform. The difference in their height was nothing less than winsome. Solomon was tall and lanky, Noe was short, slight, but toned. Soon they were spat out onto the street. The city was busy, and the antique museums and white-flaky buildings pervaded them at every ankle, caging them in. The rain had subsided to nothing but a whimpering drizzle; just enough to annoy someone.
Amongst the Saturday sidewalk bustle, the boys were two ants crawling along the seams of something huge, knifing through people clotting the sidewalk. Noe pinpointed a tourist; the fanny-pack and the accordion of a map said it all, and he collided into him. Solomon strung to a stop to watch him recover with a wide grin on his face.
Two blocks later, he offered Solomon fifty dollars. Tourist's wallets were always bulging. He denied it with a swat of his hand.
"That was wicked. I didn't even see you take it."
"It took forever to master. I was chased by bigger men for years. Two broken noses later, I finally got it right."
Noe tailed the other into a cramped corner deli/diner. Solomon strolled right past the hostess and slammed his weight down in a back booth. The girl that greeted them had glittery fawn eyes, she was college-age, had serpentine blonde highlights strutting through her scrunched dark hair, and a tight mouth.
"Hey, Sol. Who's your friend?"
"This is Noe."
"Hi, Noe," she seemed sheepish when she took his hand, clipping her teeth to her bottom lip. "I'm Kimmy."
"Hello."
"What can I get you, boys?"
"I'll have lemon tea."
"Water," Noe added on top of the order before she cut away.
"You come here often enough for the waitresses to know your name, huh?"
"No, I work here," Solomon snagged the ashtray adjacent to the jelly tray, plucking his silver cigarette case from his backpocket, loading up the splinter of his mouth with Marlboro Light. He was cutting down. "So you can get whatever you want. It's free."
By the time the girl returned, both boys were cozy in their silence, contemplating the pastel grays smeared beyond the stretch of fingerprinted window pane. Solomon's blunted nails chiseled at the dry skin of his slivered bottom lip, and Noe built a pyramid out of multicolored jelly packets. She was beaming at the spectacle.
"Ready to order?"
Eurotrash draped the teabag into the scalding clarity of the cup, until an inky brown spelled out, before he flung the soggy remnants on a napkin.
"Who's back there?"
"Uhhh, John and Brian, I think," she ventured.
"Fuck, just get me toast then." Solomon wasn't going to risk it. Those boys didn't know how to cook. But, he did have to talk to Brian.
"Can I have a bagel?"
"That's all your getting?" The other interjected.
"That's all I'm hungry for!"
"Sol, that's all he's hungry for!" Kim added on with a snicker.
"Oh, fine." He twitched ash into the 'tray.
Before she could saunter away, Noe warily eyed his tall glass of water. "Can I have a straw?" He had no interest in her ass when she swayed away -- she wore too much makeup.
"I met a man yesterday. He has my bag."
Solomon churned and clinked his spoon around, upturning sugar. "Yeh?"
"His name was Warren. He was a photographer. As soon as I got off the train he was sitting right there. He took my pictures and sent me on my way."
Suddenly, the other's demeanor changed, his eyes pinballed away and his jawline wired in a bleach-white tightrope. "Mnhn..."
"We talked for awhile and it seemed like he didn't believe in anything. But, he was still one of the most interesting people I've ever met, because when he was inspired he had the most insane spark in his eye. As soon as that spark faded, he looked dead again." Then Noe shamelessly added more. "I saw a picture of you on his wall. I thought: 'That's a handsome man. I wonder if they were lovers?' "
Solomon prematurely nuzzled out the headlight cherry of his cigarette. "Ah... maybe at one point. Something like that, I was more of a subject than anything. --Hey ah---" The transmution of subjects was rickety, the spiderwebs haunting the cryptic tunnel of his throat were soothed with an earthquake rumble. "Maybe I can get you an application."
"No, thanks," Noe seemed to have faired just fine with the awkward shift in conversation. Then it dawned on him that maybe, if he took a job, he'd run into that photographer again --if he stayed just a bit longer. The sky was still cloudy. "Well, maybe. Yeah, I'd like one."
"I'll be right back, then." The waiter pushed off the table and left Noe alone, to puzzle over the cooing pigeons pecking the sidewalk outside of the window.
Knocking past the double doors into the backdrop of the restaurant, the radio was fauceting trashy pop, and Brian had the phone attached to his ear, one shoulder slumped against the tile. Solomon took an application, and creased it into his back pocket. The cook promptly hung up and veered over to him.
"Hey, Sol, what's up?"
"Nothing. Tired as fuck," Mr. Stills ravaged his back pocket, and tipped the Rx bottle at the other who promptly swallowed it in a khaki pocket, fishing over a crumpled twenty. The kitchen exchanges were always discreet. The sound of clapping dishes and hissing steam played like an unlikely orchestra. "By the way, I can't get that for you for awhile, so hold yourself over with it."
"Why not?"
"Because I haven't seen Ty in forever. That was the last bottle I had left. Unless you want me to just give you Xanex, instead."
"Naw, man, I can hold over."
Solomon nodded and shoulder past the winged doors into the mainstream of the hallway. He was about to round into the bathroom to check his other pocket, but when he quirked the door he found Noe hovering over the sink, his thumb bladed and trimmed over his pulse.
Curiosity baited him inside the small, handicapped bathroom, and he stood beside the diluted bubblegum-pink water and loomed on the snared slits of scars.
"Christ, what's that from?"
Noe folded his hand, and smothered it with a paper towel. "Nothing." But Solomon was persistant, and wild-eyed, only snapping his wrist right back, unfurling the thick fingers to peer at the eccentric incisions. "It looks like tallymarks. How the fuck did it open again?"
"I don't know, it just does, sometimes."
"Why do you cut yourself like that?" It didn't matter to him, he had to paint it now---it was pacing like a caged panther through the labyrinth of his mind.
"I don't," Noe rocketed a vivid sigh, replacing the bandages and securing it with the still-adhesive lick of tape. "The scars keep opening up."
-
Sprained in prone, his arms shot out like a double-jointed tight-rope, Solomon basked in the sweltering humidity of premature summer. His fan was whirring, the blades of the overhead ceiling fan were sketching in blurry circles, barely minimizing the salty taffy sweat varnishing his long strain of his tattoo-printed body. But all of the white noise couldn't drown out the thunder of footprints through the hollow ceiling, as though Quinn and her guest were doing some wild tango. Pinching a pursed tight-line of his ash-pink lips, his switchblade body took an abrupt roll to the side, pressing into the empty queen-sized pale of his mattress. He dug his temple into the pillow, and curled up despite the heat, his lavender-pouched eyes taking a dizzy carousel ride around the room, moody and soon crashing into a thick zipper of vinyl lashes.
Upstairs was a different story. Quinn and Noe were both enjoying the summer smolder. The windows were closed to seal in the damp crackle. In the very corner of her disheveled bedroom, he had her pinned like the dried wings of a monarch butterfly against the cracking plaster of her wall, beyond the slope of her mattress. The thick crease of his bandage-free hand was sculpting the outline of her throat, keeping her nailed violently, and leaving behind a lovenote necklace of plum bruise for future explanations. She was hitched up on his hips, in a messy, glossy scrawl of askew legs, and fingernails launching raw onto his shoulders. She dug red war-trenches, grinding for a root, provoking peekaboo-glimpses of blood.
Their mouths were stifled in their union, these two thick pairs of lips competing and swallowing one another. Their jawbones strained wide, their tongues laboring in a polished flurry, churning every which way to get a better angle at one another. His hand receeded down her throat, and plated her collarbone instead so that he could run his tongue down her neck, his hips brashly throwing a jolt out of left-field that baited a cry from her.
She was nailed there, her hair in a rapidly-loosening knot, her lids crashed closed against her cheeks, her skin oven-warm and cherrypink. Their chests were nailed together, and he duct-taped down her breasts with the plateau of his moist skin. She scraped in an up-and-down waver against the wall, her hands fumbling over whatever she could grab. She'd smudge his cheek, his forehead, his mouth, his shoulder, his throat, she'd cling like a little girl to his shoulderblades, folded over until the nailed bone of her mid-spine chafed against the white.
Solomon had invited himself in, and was now leering at the bedroom door which bore a delicate crack. His eyes weren't all startled at what he saw. Grazing a shoulder against the door, he sauntered in.
Noe cupped the apple of her ass and turned. In his periphery he sensed his voyeur, but threw her down into the mattress anyway. She squirmed until her stomach was concave, her soles printing the flimsy mattress springs, her thighs wide. Her skull lolled back, and even though she caught a glimpse of Solomon, warming up to the ledge of her dresser, daubing his thoughtful thumb to the lower bridge of his lip, she wasn't deterred.
The boy shot down onto the ledge of the floor-laden mattress on his knees. He snared the writhing ashtray girl by the skeletal lumps of her ankles and dragged her until her whole entire back lit on fire from friction back over to his level. The black bootlace fell in his face and shielded the hungry possession star-studded in his pupils from Solomon, but she was well-aware of what a brilliant fuck this man was. The loopholes his hands made around her ankles drew the neverending stems of her legs high over his shoulders until she took the hint and her calves fell limp, and scissored over his twitching shoulderblades. He lunged deep inside, and swung back only to thrash harsher. Quinn's fingers took rioting handfuls of the bedsheets, kniving them between her delicate knuckles, her whole entire body surrendering to an arch. She was convulsing around him again, and no matter how hard she tried to tear away at his skin, no matter how much she tried to hit him, it was all in vain, because she couldn't reach, and he kept bubbling snickers between his boyish whines and pent-up grunts, slapping away at her feeble attempts.
The Brit stared onward, watching them lash out at one another like lunatics, one with his hips, the other with her arms. She was howling at the ceiling, and his teeth were cinched tight, sawing away at the sound brewing in the tunnel of his throat. The weak bedsprings were grieving every greedy ragdoll toss of her body, until she finally caught his hair by a fistful and tore at him. She steered him away from her body, and he whined with the most gorgeous masochistic scowl(grin). Solomon watched on as she shamelessly mounted him in a diagnol-scrawl across the bed. She edged forward and held the bouquet of his wrists far over his head.
He shifted, crossing one ankle calmly in front of the other, burning holes into their skin, writing every spastic muscle twitch, every cry, every bite into his memory.
Quinn ditched his hands to splatter his chest for more support, she fucked him literally into the mattress, until there was an impression around him, and his toxic-waste-green eyes were panned so boyishly huge over the ceiling, his mouth borderline beaming. His adam's apple took a chainsaw trip into the air, his scalp pressing further and further back into the bed, like a crippled Christian healed by a t.v. evangelist. Her tidal wave, her violence rocked into him until he swore he saw black stars of God bordering the lense of his glossy vision. She bruised his hipbones and syced her talons on his chest, scratching him to ribbons. His hands took a landlock victory over her hips, coursing them tighter, and tighter, buckling her down until she could barely move. She protested with a fanned-out slap that resonated all the way across the room and might've shocked Solomon, but he seemed detached enough. Noe's profile nailed to one side, and while he gasped and his breath ran ragged, his knuckles rinsed white. He refused to let go of her hips. His swung upward, keeping her perched on a slant midair, his adam's apple straining until he let go. And when he filled her, she relaxed too, even if she was on the verge of another. She hiccuped something pleasant and almost-giddy, before she slumped over into sweatsheened retirement his side.
The two stared up at the ceiling, squirming, swallowing down oxygen by the mouthfuls, having choking fits. Their chests rocketed raw and endlessly, teetering up and down quick, quicker, quicker, faster, harder--slowly, slower, slower, slower, shallow. Noe wore his battle-scars like a painted up model; this wonderful shade of Venezuelan-suede all sugarcoated in her blood bristle. It ran like holy wine down his chest, along the flatboard tension of his stomach, his lip was caked and dry from a bite-mark, the red on his shoulders refused to actually trickle, but it was inevitable there. Both were well-aware of the loitering boy on the other side of the room. Who, after the show turned and prowled out without a word.
Quinn spilled to her side and giggled half-heartedly into Noe's shoulder, and he, after smoothing away vines of hair, did the same --- but he snickered instead, at the ceiling.
