hollywood

<center>http://i107.photobucket.com/albums/m...shollywood.jpg</center>There she is.

The voice that screamed the loudest.

I know she wants to come out tonight because
I feel like going out and buying LOTS OF DRUGS
and talking to BIG MEAN BOYS
and going out to DRIVE REAL FAST and LUMP OUR BLOOD WITH POISON

She pokes at the shallow of my ribs and points out to the bright bright lights below and tells me the best thing is that someone's always dying somewhere!

With that stupid-crazy smile on her face:
Let's go sing songs with our fists, because it's a REAL LONG DROP when you look at it from up here and there's ALWAYS someone DYING.

She says you can learn these things
If you want
By sucking them right out of the fine young men on the east end but you can always read everywhere that you can tell if he loves you because "he doesn't come in your mouth."
I tell her that she's sick
Too tired
Iced

And she screams NO WAY
Someone who's sick would never turn down such fine pussy! Pussy that'll leave her strung out like the cheapest cocaine for days, frantic lines defining her
But tonight she doesn't demand candy or sex or drugs, she just wants to be let out for awhile.

Stretch her long, bruised legs.

Turn out into the city, cut the stars from the sky and

Illuminate the whole world with a primal scream.

<font color="#ffffff" size="1">[ March 28, 2007 02:27 PM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

<font color="#ffffff" size="1">[ September 02, 2007 09:19 AM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

It was Labor Day.

Juels had finally emerged from the house -- lime green paint sandwiched between her tits and a dirty wifebeater -- to join Renton on the lawn. She had spent her morning finishing a lovely needlepoint of a lynching, superimposing it onto a lacy throw pillow, swathed in superfluous blooms of crack-smoke.

"My God! Oh my God!"

From two steps behind, Renton giggled at the gaudy belt of bulletholes slung fashionably over the waist of their humble home. The houses on either side seemed to shrink away from their wounded breatheren, or maybe that was just the wash of narcotics webbed between them in glimmering threads wilting in daylight.

"Oh, God!"

"Who, who do you even call?! Hello, police, some lunatic RUINED MY HOUSE?! Do you know a GOOD VINYL SIDEIST?!" She shrieked into the faux-phone of her fist.

The lady of the house crowed, a shining vision of white plastic sex boots and latex-based paint that clotted a blown-out mane of black hair that flapped dramatically like a cloud of attacking birds. Tippi Hedren-a-Go-Go gone haywire.

She penetrated one of the sooty holes like a young, adventurous lover with paint-lubed fingertips, marveling at the uniformity.

"My, what kind've ammo was that?"

She pulled her best Bob Evans, gashing her eyes and baring her teeth in a botoxed sneer. "Classy!"

"Oh, maybe it works."

"Aye," Renton agreed, "Chic."

"Some men."

It had to be gasped with a fist tattooing her chest, shrieked while she slumped over a cheap Formica countertop or whispered into a dirty mirror while she pulled at her eyelids and checked for heavy dialation.

Sometimes it was growled into flesh as she knock-knocked on ribcages, searching for hollow spaces.

The destute Russian blowhard didn't need much room and she prefered the shadowy real estate behind hearts, across burned bridges, where she could easily use fists to make lumps in their throats when they thought about what life could be without her.

Where she could lovingly grip trembling lungs and even control the air they breathed.

It wasn't stolen air or bruised throats that she wanted but they were the closest things to home she could find, faking a passion for life out of constrewed beaucephus boy-bones consetellated over her dirty matresses, roped by strands of unfiltered cigarette smoke and that please take everything roll of her eyes.

Most nights she just sealed her eyes with thick ropes of mascara and kicked back into colder green water, tumbling soft and funny, maybe sometimes ferocious, slipsliding over asphalt eventually, and blinking at the dirt on her palms in the morning -- leaving muddy handprints on backbones she shoved out from underneath the sheets.

<font color="#ffffff" size="1">[ December 12, 2006 11:47 PM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

Behind hollow red doors, crooked signs phosphorescent with NO VACANCY, she would peel the white pleather fuckboots off and he would kiss her feet. She was enchanted, she would stay for weeks. He would psychoanalyze and she would tumble from the bed, to the floor, across cumstained carpet to roll in the moonlight stealing though a greasy window, making his toes curl up in his expensive wingtips. Trauma and neglect had bleached her cocaine white, with charcoal edges and cold red aureole around her eyes so he would photograph her in grainy monochrome.

Wide-eyed, overexposed-- clawing out of a filmy bathtub, voguing nude through the fish-eyed swell of the peephole, draped over the static glow of a antiqued television and hanging from the seventh story window, calves scissoring red felt curtains.

She would sing to the dark shadows behind his eyes, claw at his lapels and plead into his neck. "Does it burn you, too?" Waiting for his ribs to turn to ash, for his chest to open in a flood of sulfur and sin, betrayed by skin that ignited with a whisper of flame. She would ply him with passages from the King James' edition in the bedside table when she wasn't hoovering rails of blow off the leathered cover and he would answer in hexing monotone--

"No, no, no. We owe our lives to the wolf. The snake." He took his rails from the withered slab of her hip, or the groove of her sternum, the sunken juncture of ribs that caged the yellow canary of her heart, chirping an alarm at the unbreathable air inside of her.

Things would turn to God. Things always turned to God. Dusty-lunged lunatics with tongues seeping gospel into pink young months, recruiting hopeless youth. More sentimental garbage with the holy Ghost in the attic, sin laid on the heads of infants, who would bawl in cathedral mouthed unison through a bubbling veil of rosewater. She related him to the gritty salt taste of Christ on her blistered lips, he drenched his feet in the Mother mary eddy of hair, tonguing each other in scripture, sliced from a bloated vein of vulgarity and spraying onto water-stained ceilings.

"He's sick, but she's everything he's ever wanted, I can see that look in his eyes. He wants to take her in those clumsy hands and have her until he's shooting spinal fluid into her guts. He's positive that this is the cure."

. . .Home is where he found her submerged in the astro-turfed womb of their soon-to-be-former bathroom, tub lined in the coarse faux-sod boiling over with effulgent bubbles and the exaggerated limbs, swathed in bruises, of a damp, heavily wigged junkie in hiding.

"Jeuly." His throat was clogged in syrup-sweet sympathy as he dropped the astroturfed lid onto the astroturfed seat and sat down. Just the mirror and some chrome fixtures glinted, everything else pulsing shaggy electric green. Every time he took a crap, he silently marveled at Jeuls' determination to completely obliterate all sense of normality, even in this cookie-cut townhouse. "Whott're y'doin'? 'is can'nt be healthy. Yer gittin' all pruney."

Her body was bent and blue, the water long since gone from lukewarm to cold, dingy like dishwater. Sinking lower into bubbles, she hissed out a plume of smoke that stretched for the ceiling and continued to glower.

The paranoia of an addict was not pretty. It was dark bruises and eyes that rolled to whites restlessly and a heart you could see bloating against straining ribs every time a car growled down the street. It was the sound of teeth grinding into dust down black throats, the color that skin turned after weeks of living behind blacked out windows and symphonies of deadbolt locks clattering shut.

"Were you eating .. eating pork with that woman? In the kitchen? Is she still here?"

"That wis like, two days ago."

She propped her ankles over the lip of the tub, bathwater lapping at a tattooed neck.

"Oh."

Silence would find them following the points their bodies met on a map of desperation and sorrow. Fingernails chipped to the quick, knuckles often bleeding. Bundles of veins swelling and strumming with frustration under oily skin. They were identical twins in their bruises and soft wounded eyes, using long nights and narcotics to craft their hearts into matching hollows. They didn't need blood to bind them, just sticky glimmering threads of obsession and throats trumpeting the same plague of disaster.

"You know, you can't chase three rabbits at a time and expect catch them all."

"But ay'll pro'ly b' dead soon. Yew tew. So why nawt?"

By Sunday she was throwing wrinkled cocktail dresses and blue jeans into hard Mary Kay pink suitcases on either side of the finely embossed birthday invitation opened on her mattress, shrieking "I don't care what you do, but I'm going!" -- her hair still tornadoed around her in a swampy bathwater slick of limp brown Shirley Temple curls. "Like she's not traumatized enough?! You're crazy! Better yet, you're going!"

"Aw, c'mawn.." Jeuls did not miss him dipping for the door, tearing at his hair with fists rattling and wishing he'd gotten the mail first.

"You're going!" She shrieked, kicking a suitcase across the gouged hardwood floor, popping open with a wheeze in the doorway.

"Aw!"

"She's turning six, Renton! Christ, you can't just send her some, some stuffed animal! Call it a fucking birthday!"

"Ay.. ay jis gawtta show 'er 'm thinkin' o'er."

"What?! Who the hell told you that?!" Suitcases snapped shut with twin clicks, leaving her free to turn on Renton with eyes blazing (urgent, thirsty for new air, leaping at an excuse to fly across the ocean) and flat palms shoved him into the hallway, towards his room. "She's your fucking baby, Renton!"

"Tell 'er fucken mother!" Elbows locked in a protective X across his chest, shying from the her harpy siren shrieks. "I can'nt afford t'jetset 'round th'fucken world fer a fucken birthday party!"

"Well, I can." She chucked the suitcase onto his mattress, sheets undisturbed from weeks ago. Little sister wanted to know where he'd been sleeping, sure to cut him with a suspcious glare as she disappeared into his closet, bent on both knees. "Where's your suit? That grey one, the one we wore to Sid Eli's funeral?" Clawed from the depths of the stale-aired closet, she stretched a thinning leather jacket barnacled with pyramid studs and duct tape across her own shoulders, knuckles going white with a buck of her hips. "Oh my god, can you imagine?" Disgusted, she flung it over her shoulder and the halfdead boy went scrambling after it, crowing indigantly.

"Hay, puttit back ona' hanger! C'mawn! Fuck!"

"Here," Pinning him against his bed with an armful of t-shirts, her doe-wide eyes bled into determined gashes. "Finish packing and find your passport."

"But," Arms dripping with tattered scraps of his dumpster rag wardrobe, he lurched for the door, mouth knotting in confusion.

"It's ok!" The still-pruney princess pinched the fuzzy cheek of the stuffed koala sitting crookedly on his bedside table, painting Renton with broad, reproachful strokes before flying through the door, cracking elbows into molding. "We'll get Ryn something nice on the way to the airport!"

Frosting-faced Grecian children, olive-skinned and fierce-eyed ran rampant over the immaculate yard overlooking a sprawling stretch of grassy villa, screeching and swinging pi?ata sticks while Tara and Jeuls looked on (the junkie far more intrigued at the idea of a child gutting another for a tootsie roll than the demon, who's fingers twittered nervously over her silverware, like a mother's should) from a cluster of tables at the side of the yard. It was their second day in Greece, and Jeuls was still reeling with jetlag, keeping herself energized by frequent trips to the bathroom with her thumb against her nose. Her exhaustion was amplified by the demon's transformation from fire-haired loudmouthed activist cunt to jetsetting ash-blonde mother of the year, but those steel blue eyes were unchangeable and Jeuls had seen them flash piteous and sad when she saw her junkie prince. And Renton's still-empty guest room, bed still tucked up immaculate confirmed her fears that this would not be some harmless trip.

"So, how's he doing?"

Jeuls snorted, squeezing a fistful of birthday cake into her palm and slurping the frosting from the grimy webs between her fingertips. "What is this, buttercreme? Great choice. I mean, kinda high class for six year olds, but this is Greece, right? Very Mediterranean."

"Julia."

"It's Jeuls. Jeuls now."

"Right." The demon leveled calm eyes on her daughter, who was dancing on the tops of her daddy's motorcycle boots as they waltzed around the lawn, around the clown mangling balloons into creatures and through a cluster of kids waiting to get their faces painted. All the while Jeuls leaned forward, so curious as to if Tara had tearfully ripped him from every photo, burned his clothes, pawned his jewelry and stereo and spent the money on a pair of six inch fuck me heels, unable to lap emotion from the young mother's eyes. Frustration set in, forcing her to empty the wine from any abandoned glass on the table. "Is he doing all right?"

Jeuls' laugh could strip flesh from bone, turning her mouth mean, ugly, accusing. But the demon didn't flinch, and Jeuls should've known. No one survives eleven months fucking the bonemashing smoke spitting junkie prince in the most deranged warehouse ever and comes out scared of some whacked out junkie whore. Even if she is on vacation and wearing her Gucci stilettos.

"He's doing great. I'm taking care of him, don't you worry."

"Oh really?" Eyebrows elevated towards a gaudy fringe of mousy blonde hair (that Renton had almost lost his airline peanuts over, but was apparently OK about tangling his knuckles through it while he sweat against her belly when it was dark and the baby was sleeping) as Tara leaned a chin into her palm, shooting the junkie princess with a beatific smile. "And who's taking care of you?"

"Mm," Jeuls' eyes collapsed into catty gashes, wiping her frosting-caked palm down her thigh. "Touch?, mamabird. But don't you worry, we're all just fine."

"We?"

"We! Me, the rentboy and Norma Jean!" Jeuls' eyes practically dripped with perverse joy, staining the fine cut of her knockoff Versace dress as Tara's jaw sat like granite and the junkie princess could hear her back teeth grinding. "You remember Norma. She's the fucking original!" Jeuls gushed with a unwavering fondness for the un-doped snowbird who could still pluck at Renton's nerves like a pro, strumming him into frenzy. "All these other girls, they could fuckin' learn a thing or two from our girl. But I think she's finally wizened up, ya'nno? You cannot tame such a destructive force. It'd be like trying to marry a hurricane, right? A big dope-shooting meth smoking hurricane?"

"Other girls?" Eyebrows crumpled into devastated, finely plucked caterpillars lying lifeless above deep blue eyes, the color of the ocean after a nuclear strike, claimed Renton. Who had tangled himself in Tara's sheets not more than six hours ago, laying praise at her feet and spewing promises (that sounded familiar and lame and pleading and she, for a second, had wanted to believe them, fall into those sore wasted arms) against flesh as he tore at familiar bones with tears in his eyes.

"Jesus Tar', you should see this one. They've all got that fucking red hair," A frosting-slick fingertip rimmed the top of an empty wineglass thoughtfully. "Which looked stunning on you, Tar', blonde really makes you look too old. But one of these girls, god, I can barely keep track of them anymore, but it's like, Rent-on! Are you still eighteen?! Hello! The last thing he needs is another junkie holding his hand, right? You'd think he'd learn a thing or two eventua--Tar'? Tara, hey! Where are you going?"

<center>it's time, little sister, to peel your faith from the pavement (in long, pristine white lines) and slip your arms into the devoted dress of your bondage. we know the climb is long and the wet brown earth breaks at your touch (if only you were lighter, if only there wasn't so much blood, if only you could use the silver spoon to scoop the weight from the tunnels of your bones) but it's time to crawl from the shallows of your daughter's grave. time to call the dawn to your palms, cradle her heavy wheaten curls and sing to her your grave-rocking lullabys. these arias of grief are the only way you'll teach her to survive. to shine bright, hot furious white long enough for night to come. </center>

"A sombrero?"

"What?! No! A cowboy hat!"

"What's the difference?"

"It's all the difference! People will see a sombrero and think 'What the hell is that Mexican doing with all those bullets?!'"

<center>http://i107.photobucket.com/albums/m.../vegasbaby.jpg
before you kiss me you should know
papa was a rodeo
</center>

<font color="#f7f7f7" size="1">[ October 05, 2006 12:33 PM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

"What color are her eyes?"

It was the first thing she'd said since they'd left the city. Truthfully, it was the first thing she'd said since last night at the bar, when Renton cowered under the thick blue smog of the dive's atmosphere and refused to defend Jeuls' honor as a red-haired tranny mocked her white leather hot pants. Her last words had been "Fuck this! Some brother you are!", before sulking off down a sidestreet in a fog of amphetamines and techno music. It was for the best, Renton was sure he felt the inklings of a grand mal at the base of his spine after a night bathed in strobes.

Instead of train, or plane, the twins ate up the sunbleached asphalt ribboned across the nation byborrowed convertible. First, Renton wondered if Norma had some kind of play in this, tipped off by the candy paint and long seductive curls of chrome, the auto's body almost hugging the concrete underneath. But with Jeuls behind the wheel, he soon had other things to worry about besides getting busted for speeding down the interstate in a stolen car with a trunkful of dope and two pounds of weed bouncing in the back-seat. Whiteknuckle on the dash, he tried to lean into her mad caddy turns, alert her of oncoming traffic (language stunted at throat-cutting yelps) and steady the wheel when she tried to steer with her knees, to employ tiny fists riddled in scars (like she broke windows for a living) with joint rolling or the perilous task of cutting up lines of coke on a compact mirror. Eventually, the road's curves stiffened into a smooth seam of blacktop and he was able to point an elbow out the window and relax.

Two hundred sixteen miles (Renton was counting mile-markers, occasionally missing a few to lean out the window and point to bovine gangs or a mangled tangle of roadkill in the ditch, trying to get Jeuls talking) west of Colby, Kansas, she started asking questions. Anything was better than her silence, thick and heavy, making Renton clutch his thighs in an anxious gesture. He would rather she be ranting and screaming, tearing at her cheeks and writhing in gut-grinding shrieks.

"Renton." She hated having to repeat herself, but most of her words were stolen by the wind whipping across their foreheads, cleansing them of their citystench. "What color. Are her eyes?"

"Blue." Wistfully and without hesitation, he read it from the heavens, unmarked by clouds and disrupted only by the occasional roar of a low-flying crop-duster. From the stretch of heaven that smeared from one edge of the highway to the other. It was so flat out here. He could get used to this. "Like 'er momma's."

"No, not Ryn, you asshole. Sheeba. Shank, whatever. That girl. Her eyes. What color are they." Her crooked phrases were short and choppy, manipulated by cocaine.

The silence was back, only this time it was Renton who encouraged it, stroked it placidly with a calloused palm. Watching the wheatfields roll by in fast-forward, edited into golden heartland smears that distracted him from the gnawing ache in his chest, the fleeting clutch of panic that fondled the corpse of his heart.

"Tha's a fucken bullshit question." Before she could cleave his slur short with a wide-eyed yelp, he twisted from the window and shoved a finger in her face. "Yew know it. Fucken eye color isnn't important. Ay'm nawt fucken in love wiff'er eyes."

"Oh, Renton. That's right! You're in love with her fucking hair!? Jesus Christ, I'm really rooting for this one!" Porcelain fists pounded the steering wheel in a stubborn tattoo, shaking her head like a spooked horse. "For you! What color are her eyes!"

"Sh' likes olives!" He squealed in his defense, scrambling for memories of his gutter-gaunt princess dressed in tatters, sprawled in his truckbed or veneered in a dopefiend haze. Most of them were bleached white and useless by alcohol, adrenaline. Just flashes of frenzied red hair and desert skin.

"Come the fuck on! She doesn't like olives! That's just all Greece has! And!" The blunt nose of the auto sliced over the gully of the road, shouldering into the opposite lane erratically. "You never even gave them to her! I used them for fucking martinis during fashion week!"

Rubber gnawed at the highway's shoulder as she veered off course, gnashing her teeth in a debased smile at her brother before pointing the nose of the convertible back towards the median line. Her poor brother, who probably wished more than anything that he could remember these quaint, romantic details, who dreamed of a docile life complete with wedding rings and his and her towel sets, her dreary twin who couldn't seem to remember the mistakes he'd already made, no matter how deep they cut into him. And if he did, he refused to learn from them, staggering through life as an uneducated heartbreaker with monster eyes, cloaked in an unshakable sense of failure.

"Renton." She had to consciously unlock her jaw with a click, toes studdering on the gas pedal.

Chewing on the thick, calloused skin of his thumb, he folded his shoulder closer to the car door, letting the wind thread his overgrown black hair out of the window, black greased streamers.

"Aw, Renton, c'mon, don't stress it!" Between cursory glances to the asphalt, she saw that dejected slump of his spine and the uncovered slice of skin across his lower back with "kiss my tara" tattooed crudely in block letters and her heart broke a little more. "I'm sorry! You two are just so perfect for each other, it's disgusting! Just give it a fucking chance. For once! For once in your goddamn miserable life! Grab this by the neck and shake the life out of it!" She was poised in a stumblina's tripfall grace on the edge of hysterics, the wind tearing at her fake eyelashes, foot like a brick in stiletto heels on the gas. They were flying.

"..."

"They're brown, anyway."

And as the mountains rose before them, jagged pieces of broken earth ripping through the edges of the prairie, she sang at the setting sun, eyelashes fluttering down her cheeks.

"Brown, brown, brown!"

<font color="#ffffff" size="1">[ October 17, 2006 01:24 AM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

Pais' ashes had arrived early in the morning, with Renton nowhere to be found. And she'd drained half a bottle of vodka staring at the little brown package jealously. Before she had a chance to flush the burnt up remains down her astroturfed toilet, the phone rang.

"Julie, you junkie piece of shit, wh--"

"Tar'! How nice of you to call! Renton's not home right now. He hasn't been home in awhile! Not a chance you've seen 'em, right?"

"Did you tell him to go back to Scotland?"

"What?"

"You bitch, if this is one of your bullshit ideas, I swear to god, I'll find you and beat you within an inch of your life. With those tacky-ass Gucci heels you wore to Ryn's party. You've got to stop fucking with him,"

"I didn't tell him anything! I haven't seen him in days! He wants to move out, Tar!" The dainty junkie's vocals cracked in that familiar hysteria. The demon knew she'd have to hang up soon. "He wants to leave me!"

"He called and asked for more money, to take Pais back to Glasgow. This wasn't one of your fucking schemes?"

"He what?"

"Talk to him, get his fucking head straight. I don't have time for this bullshit."

And before Jeuls could spit another backhanded defense, the line went dead, and her one good eye rolled to the box of ashes on the coffee table.

<font color="#ffffff" size="1">[ October 28, 2006 09:57 PM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

<center>http://i107.photobucket.com/albums/m...rty/lameat.jpg


i wear my scars like the rings on a pimp.
i live life like the captain of a sinking ship.
</center>

<font color="#ffffff" size="1">[ November 19, 2006 05:17 PM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

these were all memories that would end up on the cluttered floor of their subconcious, the intricate knots of their brains already so stuffed with this hospital room drama that there just wasn't room for anymore. neurological pulses raced through them, reminding them that they were getting too old for this, that the body was running of of places to store such sorrow.

"please don't tell tara."

without his oily curtians of black hair to hide behind, he trembled in the sick white wash of the industrial lighting. soon they would roll him out of this hospital bed and back into the gutter, blood barely done weeping from his wounds.

"don't tell tara what? about that ridiculous haircut?"

so he pulled back into his empty-eyed silence, knowing his sutured secret was safe in the vaulted heart of his ash-eyed twin.

<font color="#ffffff" size="1">[ November 20, 2006 11:48 PM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

This was not the first time Renton had thrown his fates into the wind with such reckless abandon, flexing his body in a beautiful swandive off the mortal coil. Rewind to four years ago, the night that Jeuls still had nightmares about, sitting bolt upright, ripped from a nightmare and muffling a shriek into the lingering stench of chlorine and vomit. If Ryni wouldn't have been sobbing so loud, if the cold night air sneaking in through a broken window had not teased her from sleep, she never would've found him there, floating face down, blue and bloating.

It was Chicago all over again, only without the bullets and the blood, and at least she wouldn't have to scrub Renton's brain off the bathroom tile. It was like the stopping of a heart had a Pavlov's effect on the deranged hustler, she would always coming running, mouth splashed in drool to the call of a lonely man's deathrattle.

When the paramedics fished him out of the pool and rolled him onto his back, he coughed up a lung full of water and vomit, gurgled a name and slipped back into unconsciousness. The medics had to bind the wild junkie queen's withered arms to keep her from flinging her wrists around his bloodless neck in a fit of manic affections, but they couldn't do anything to silence her symphonic of screams that harmonized with the crib-rattling wailings of the little girl in the doorway.

But it wasn't suicide, Renton was just trying to win the race. Beat his blood, before it had a chance to cripple him indefinitely, before the claws of this disease dug in too deep and weakened his bones and thinned his blood to a useless slush of dope and regret.





"Who? Who? Stupid fucking junkies! Who the fuck did this to him? How could he be so stupid?!"

When the doctors mouth split and the terrible news came pouring out, it was Tara's turn to cry, while Ryni clutched her hand in confusion and Jeuls stared dead-eyed into the night as the bustling hive of the hospital worked relentlessly around her. While Jeuls had been bred for panic and long nights outside of a hospital and eased through the tension with a undeniable grace, Tara wore her sorrow like a badly tailored dress, tripping over the hem and constantly trying to keep it from falling off in a liquid swirl of red. While she couldn't feel death creeping 'round the corners of her arteries, she still worked her mind in a frenzied rewind, to remember the last time the sad junkie prince had sunk between her thighs, and Jeuls could read the panic there, marqueed across her lovely blue eyes.

"It was Jacqueline, Tara." Jeuls had long ago trained her mouth to move in the methodical motions of smoking, able to function past the smeared black tearstains around her eyes and ragged hike of each breath. "Remember Jaq?" Of course she did. When putting together the inventory of their crumbling marriage, they should've scripted her name at the top of the list. Another wisp of smoke punctuated her weary sigh, eyes cutting from Tara's hysteric-stretched features to the earth, concrete beneath her feet and continually tilting underneath her knockoff Prada stilettos. "Maybe they had some kind of death pact."

"Why wouldn't he tell me? Why would he keep something like this a secret? Julia, how long have you known?"

"I haven't," The meth-soured Soviet snapped irritably and pulled the faux mink lapels of her fur coat around her throat, bitterness born from secrets, betrayed again. "I didn't know, he didn't tell me, either."





Four years later, and their life was rerunning like a bad sitcom, set to a screaming riot soundtrack. Only this time, Tara just sighed wearily into the telephone and shook her head, comfortable enough to forget this time with the buffer of the ocean between them; and Jeuls, she just straightened her wig and disappeared into the night, leaving behind the badblood Prince and his miseries.

<center>
she wore a nightie when she worked on the ave
in shiny black stilettos and a red leather bag
she tipped her dope up front and went south
she would pick your pocket with your dick in her mouth
after she left a trick broke, she'd hit 'em up for a smoke
then count her loot and go shoot some coke
she was cute as a button, sweeter than a muffin
but she'd slit your throat if you didn't pay her for her lovin'
me and her first met on vine and sunset
she was pourin' sweat out the corvette
she looked at me and cringed said, hey you over there
if you've a syringe follow me and i'll share
we went back to my room and used my harpoon
noddin' off on the couch, watchin' cartoons
and when the sun went down she said see you around
last i heard of her moved up town
keepin' the place tidy for some high payin' fool
one night she thought she was a fish
and drown in the pool</center>

<font color="#ffffff" size="1">[ January 03, 2007 09:29 PM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

<center>
http://i107.photobucket.com/albums/m...g?t=1167877841
</center>

unlike the desert skinned hellbaby, jeuls had years of experience in tracking down the young, cripple-soul junkie king when he would disappear down his blackout rabbit hole of self sabotage and fear. so instead of knocking fruitlessly on windows and fighting the silence with gashthroated whispers, jeuls used the misery they shared to find him collapsed in a sleazy hotel's bedroom or getting blown in a dirty shadow of his favorite dopeden. all she had to do was press her ear to the concrete and wait for the slow throb of his heart to whisper from the cracks in the asphalt, so she could follow it's broken down melody through the familiar maze of filth-fouled alleys and whorehouses, track it to it's source that had tricked the traumatized organ to pump poison instead of blood.

this time, the stunted whispers led her to the muddy banks of the river where he was bent and blue underneath the cheshire moon, letting the thick black water lap at his fingertips, but too afraid of washing away the terrible things he needed to remember to slip too far into the tide. so she grabbed him by muck-crusted belt loops and drug him back to the streets, to the shadows that bowed and opened up filthy and wide to the sickly trash gemini.

the sky was a midnight marbled blue, greasy purple clouds of pollution bearing down on the jagged curve of the earth and blending with the billows of smoke that left their mouth as jeuls led her brother up the rickety rungs of a wrought iron fire escape that squealed and spit rustflakes in objection when she started pulling on it with dirty little hands. she moved quick and catlike in tight blue jeans and a stealthy pair of sneakers, kicking dirt down on renton's white face that he turned skyward as clumsy feet tried to mimic jeuls' easy ascent.

clawing onto the tarred roof, even closer to god now but not as close as she'd learned she could be, jeuls dropped a bag off her shoulder and turned on renton, gesturing for an empty hand.

"here, i need you to time me."

"time wot?"

"me. here." she dropped a stopwatch in his crumbling palm, cracking at the joint where long leg bones met to rifle through an oversized gucci knock off purse. she wouldn't be caught dead with one of those gaudy black duffle numbers devon kept stuffed in his trunk. turning the bag upside down, the twisted gemini sister let it's guts clatter across the black rooftop that occasionally caught a flash of the moon and splintered it into a million impersonators captured in tarslick gravel. "i want to surprise devon."

"deh..wot?" renton's mind was still a swampmash of blurry dope-fucked nights, struggling to make the flickering images of his sister affectionately palming the dismembered limbs of a rifle connect, trying to lay it all still against the sprawling cityscape that glittered and burned to the back of his eyelids. she wanted to grab her bony shoulders and steady her himself, but he could feel his own hands quaking, matching the sudden panicked lurch of his heart. "wot?"

"devon. i want to surprise him, so i need you to time me!"

"ay.. iss'at a gun?"

"yeah. after i get under two minutes, we can start working with the blindfold."

she looked so happy when she turned her face to him, a gaping smile and eager eyes, so renton didn't protest, just beeped the stopwatch to life once metal clicked against metal as she started bringing the rifle back to life, piece by piece, letting her fingertips dig into every little crevice. measuring the stock and stroking the barrel, imprinting the ways the parts mated on the grimy slick of her subconscious. it brought a smile to her face and made adrenaline stew at the base of her spine, washing up memories of that first night on a rooftop, the satisfaction of a distant bloodsplash. ever since that first shot, her dreams had played out in the skillfully ground swell of a rifle's scope, twenty stories above civilazation with devon's smokeclotted voice humming a little ditty of tragedies turned into millions down the back of her neck. with all the dirty tricks she kept strapped like bombs to a hollow stomach, it was not surprising that she was so good at dressing up and playing god.

she can see the reflection of the horizon in his eyes. and it is flat and brown and useless, and she wonders if it is even worth it.

"and the guy, this fucking guy in a department store suit, he says to me.."

jason marcus was a good man.

he had a great job that bankrolled his wife's extravagant shopping sprees and had already funded the private education of a couple of kids, paid for a big house on a sprawling hill on the north side of town and even kept him comfortable in a plush assortment of luxury automobiles.

the job even allowed for a heavy cocaine habit on the side, that made his mouth chatter in a hyper-ego frenzy and his dick rock hard under the papery veneer of his dockers, turning him from a soft-spoken business man into a brass executive type that waved his cash around in sloppy fistfuls and demanded strange and awkward sexual favors out of his whores.

jeuls had met him two years ago, when her hair was short and black and her johns called her lola, outside of a bar where she was serving drinks and occasionally twisting her long-boned skeleton in an erotic origami around a sleek steel pole bolted to the bar top. it was good money, and her side business was booming. after doing blow of the dashboard of his bently coupe and fucking to a deranged chorus of his wife's name panted over and over, jeuls had scribbled her number on the hem of jason's shirt in gaudy red lipliner. already clawing into the niche a haggard housewife had left for her, or any other street-struttin' beauty who's standards limped through the deepest gutters.

and while he didn't become a regular, he would call every couple of months with his voice full of want and seduction, tempting her with wads of cash in exchange for her drugs and sloppy red mouth, her frustrated fists. tonight was no different. he had hoovered down half the bag of coke before they even reached his apartment, and he couldn't keep his hands on the wheel, strange fingers caressing the slope of her thigh, clumsily clawing at the glittery silver skirt that cut high over her thighs as the chromed-out nose of his bently careened dangerously close to the street's median. and jeuls closed her eyes, another pair of ink green eyes flashing against her subconscious and making her writhe like a junkie on the ass end of their last fix. jason read her uneasy undulations all wrong, interpreting them as encouragement for his filthy groping that continued from the parking lot to the elevator where he used wide hips to pin her into a corner. trapped under the assault of his numb mouth that slipped over her lips in a throb of impotent frustration towards his frigid wife. but he was telling stories as he led her towards his apartment, restraining wandering hands just in case a familiar face appeared in the hallway. he was confident his wife had no idea about jeuls, or cindy, tiffany, any of his girls, and wanted to keep it that way.

"..and you never close a deal that way!"

as they stepped through the front door, jeuls threw back her head with a bubbly laugh, an automatic reply to his stuffy high rise office stories she had practiced for years, and only her brother could've recognized the flat shine to her eyes, an emotionless front that she wore like a plate of armour. to keep them out of the dark shadows of her heart, or even worse, the plush swamp of her subconcious where nightmares lurked and raged every time jason's hand slid against her skin. so she would close her eyes and go through the motions of a devoted lover, actions that came to her so naturally, even more natural than true love itself, her hand dropping to the crotch of his docker's because the sooner she got this over with, the sooner she could be back on the streets. where she felt safe, where she was bonded to the violence and filth, where she did not have to pretend that her blood was hot and red like everyone else. but as the drug-twisted couple twirled for the bed, their heavy petting reverie was shattered by the shrill shriek of a telephone.

"fuck." jason growled, prowling up between jeuls' thighs with a violent light shining in his eyes, hands already going hard against the soft curve of her hips as he pushed himself up. "hold on, lo' baby."

"mm...it's probably mrs. marcus, anyway." propped up on one elbow, the slightly sightless bombshell reached for a pack of cigarettes on the bedside table as jason recoiled from the bed and staggered for the telephone. "tell her i said hello." jason smirked at his bedroom gem over his shoulder, and as she lit her cigarette, eyes washed of their phony adoration sketched a quick line from the window to jason's back as he raised the receiver, her heart jumping into a frenetic throb before her brain even had time to catch up.

"hello?" the filthy city air whispered back through the wires, and jason frowned. "hello? is anyone there? who is this?"

her realization was too slow, like the lazy rise of her arm, body lifting off the bed as time seemed to shriek to a jarring halt.

"jason, no wait--"

her words were substantially louder than the gun shot itself, born from a point too far away to do anything but whisper in deadly, reassuring tones as it obliterated the window and met it's mark, before he even had a chance to turn and see the terrified mold of his young hooker's mouth. a single bullet crumbled the well-dressed CEO and brought the high-heeled hustler to her feet in one shocked sweep as the wind followed the bullet in a shattered window and tornadoed her shaggy white curls.

"jason! fuck!" she didn't even realize that she'd hit her knees at his side until she was bloody up to her elbows, memories of chicago's suicide flashing through her brain and mimed on her palms in discrete chunks of scalp and brainmatter. but her panic was a momentary lapse in her judgement, fueled by the coke and kicked into overdrive by a sex-buzzed brain, arms pinwheeling in a bloody circle as she rolled backwards on clumsy feet and tried to put as much atmosphere between the bleeding-out body and her as she could.

"oh god, oh god, fuck, god." once, she had been curious, to know what it was like at the other end of the barrel, but now she knew and her nerves burnt out in a fantastic supernova flash as she dashed for the bedroom door. she didn't even make the connection between the green eyed street assassin and her cash-flushed john until her blood-streaked hands were fumbling with an uncooperative doorknob, the phonecall, the single shot, had she seen jason's face in one of those black folders before? there was only one place she was headed once she burst from the apartment building, all blood and sweat in a short silver dress, high-heels reporting against grimy concrete as she cut across the boardwalk and made a beeline for dorothy's.

<font color="#ffffff" size="1">[ January 17, 2007 03:45 PM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

"what the fuck do you think you're doing."

"my job..as you were yours." even when she was blinded by a smear of blood across her eyes, his street-slick voice gilded her heart in a crumbling shine of lust. what an asshole. "wrong end of the scope, sweetheart."

"when did you job become k-killing my clients!"

her voice shuddered in bretrayl of her stony glare, exposing the terrified flutter of her heart in a trembling fragment of speech. she did not know what to do with the anger he offered--it was such a foriegn emotion, one that most people abandoned when it came to manipulate jeuls because she was so much easier to mold her emotions with sweetness and chemicals. but when he cut into her with those big green eyes, she flinched and spit abruptly.

"or are you just jealous? scared he might be a better fuck than you?"

"jealous? i don't have time to kill the entire east coast because i'm worried about who you happen to be fuckin' in the nearest back alley."

"you saw me, you had to have seen me, what the fuck?!" she knew, even from three hundred yards and ten stories up, she was impossible to mistake for your next street hustler, with her trademark white curls and extravagant tattoos. and her anger flared in defense of her sisters, her fellow streetcorner bombshells. "would you've just shot the girl too, if it was some other whore? would you've even bothered to call, or just fucking blow 'em both away?"

"just be glad mrs. marcus didn't request the slut die to. she very well could have." the black folder he dropped on the table was all too familiar, but she didn't reach for it with her usual eager thrust of weightless hands, instead she avoided it like a leper's kiss.

"you wouldn't have fucking done it." she tried to meet his eyes, because truthfully, she wasn't sure. if the scorned mrs. marcus had asked, flashed enough fluttering green, jeuls didn't doubt she would be laying right next to jason, their narcotic-spiked blood mixing in pools on his expensive oriental rugs. her hands had started their steady shaking again, trying to calm them as she picked up the folder. "what the fuck is this?"

"what the fuck is that? what the fuck do you think it is? and you're a fucking side note. she offered me twice as fuckin' much to do the whore as she fuckin' did 'im. i told her no. told her i'd deal with it. and then i go to do the fuckin' hit and you're tongue is wrapped around his god damned tonsils."

jeuls absolutely hated those midnight black sunglasses he wore sometimes, and tonight it was because all she saw when she looked up at him was her own ragged reflection staring back. wide mismatched eyes, a disasterous swirl of blonde and all that blood. so she stopped looking at him and stared down at the folder, finally slipping a bloodied thumb between the covers and flipping it open. jason stared out from a glossy 8x10 and stopped her from going any further, snapping the folder shut in her palms as a tremor ate down her spine.

sure, jason was just another john, another whiskey-dicked asshole that used her as a device in their sadistic dreames turned reality, but she always got so attached. and they were never all bad. there was always the gifts, the diamonds, the furniture, the cars and sprawling lof apartments, the clothes. but more than her flimsy attachment for the two-faced CEO, confusion was clouding her brain and making her ears buzz with flat, white noise. she could barely hear devon speak, so she lifted her eyes again, watching his mouth move to help her along. she tried to remember all of what devon woud've seen. none of the grotresque pawing and heavy breathing in the elevator, but he had barreled her through the door with both hands on her ass and her tongue down his throat. surprising even herself, she blushed. hard and red, but nothing in comparison to the blood.

"it's not like i went looking for him.. he just wanted some blow.." jeuls frowned deeply and stared back down at the folder. "i wasn't even going to go, but he.." had sounded so desperate. it was so hard to deny someone when they were screaming in a language so familiar, making the cripple-hearted junk queen feel like she was the only thing that could sedate the monsters that clawed from the dark, repressed edges of his subconcious when the want came whispering through like a foul wind. more than the coke and the sex, she was addicted to being their saving grace.



( note: all dialogue pulled from play session. )

shock-swole moon humping in a drunk grind across a polluted shine of three midnights, the slithering bloatbelly queen, the gator mama voodoo cunt, turned another year older in the arms of the super diamond hearted and grenade-eyed, a rotten hero/chivalry slipping off the bone, on the ides of march.

and the wings tremble to the tune of twenty seven more years nibbling on the poppies, lamb's eye black hole b-l-e-e-d-ing onto bloodless lip flatline past the jagged swerve of thinning teeth, at the rusting edge of a halycon creation.

<center>
won't say sorry when she offends
she comes over to my place in her old man's Benz
in gold and silver and jewels of all colors
and she doesn't take them off when we're tearing up the covers

c'mon kid, before i change my mind
c'mon kid, don't waste my time
so rich, so pretty
the best piece of ass in the whole damn city
</center>

<font color="#ffffff" size="1">[ August 05, 2007 01:53 PM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

<center>i shoulda known better than to be out here fuckin' with you
knowin' the shit you do
i shoulda known better than to be out here fuckin' with you
all that shit you took a man through
i told myself that everything would work out fine
fucked 'round an' slipped an' hit that pussy one more time
and got caught up in something that's worse than drugs
i'm a motherfuckin' fool for love
just a motherfuckin' fool for love</center>

renton watched with a sick wave of incestuous lust when the lights dimmed and his scabby-kneed juliet limped across the stage, dragging a plaster cast on a lame leg, gleaming cumshot white underneath a trembling spotlight.

she moved like flames on gasoline, money flying out the window, a stray bullet, trains derailing.

fondled by trauma in a perfect circle, from familiar back alleys to chrome poles, the naked wolfbitch tilted her head back to force the rejection down and cloaked herself in sex and sweat and returned to a place where no one ever said no. and when they did, it was shriekstitched onto words like shame.

decency.

future.

<font color="#ffffff" size="1">[ April 02, 2007 11:50 PM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

tonight found the cinder-hearted gemini trash sixteen stories above the babbling nocturnal roar of the city, far above the breaking point of a foaming black ocean of hustlers, addicts, innocents and murderers, degenerates and pretty women. so far up it was impossible to even stick their toes in for a numbing taste, the two of them sitting on the edge of a low wall that crept around the corners of juels' apartment building. even there, thrust into midnight with the stars on his shoulder and eyes dazzled by the orgy of neon and steel below, renton was still choking on a brittle sense of paranoia that had urged him to the highest point he could find, scaling past sooty windows and grime-slick brick, doing an awkward shimmy up a rusting fire escape. with juels biting at his heels, a splintered leg in a plaster cast dangling uselessly.

"ay dunnay trust 'im, juels.." the fall-down king fell, appropriately, to his knees on the black tar rooftop, a chin hanging off the cheshire curve of his spine resting on the edge of the wall; while juels pulled her legs up and stretched hollow belly-up along the top of the wall, endless and swathed in silver satin, letting a single shoestring limb lambasted in a swirl of fading ink stir the air over the edge of the building.

"mm.." she'd let one fist of tangled knuckles fall over paper-thin eyelids, smearing at unmovable bruises and a stain of tears.

"juels."

"what?" she snapped with a torpid whisper of smog and pollution whipping blow-white hair, tempted to roll off the lip of the roof under the clouds, letting one leg dangle over the edge as well, as if she was testing the waters.

"ay sed, ay dunnay trust 'im.."

"yeah, well, it's not about trust." how could it be, in the glamorous business of sex and murder? she peeled open her good eye and watched as the stars seemed to drop lower and lower through the slats of her fingertips, and when she closed them again, the smut hungry mongrel expected to feel their whitehot sharp points pressing into her skin. "especially yours."

renton struggled to hold her with rheumy eyes made the drunken darling's edges blownout, so it was hard to tell where the milk-white hustler ended and a stormcloud-clotted black atmosphere began, and after a moment with his hand twirling in his pocket, he reached for her with a permanent marker point and started doodling a sinister-looking crocodile near the plaster-white curve of her ankle.

"wot's it 'bout, then?"

a man that she could not easily gut and play on trembling heartstrings, perhaps. a slick-drawling shadow of a man that did not crumble so easily under the weight of her greedy, black-out hysterics, and kept his own secrets hidden and refused to be cracked when she could usually read her lover's like an old dog-eared book. a tremor of unfamiliar adoration took hold of her spine and shook when she thought of him, out there somewhere, sutured into darkness and gazing down the barrel of a gun. it was easier to think of him that way, because when she thought of him stretched out in the early morning sunshine underneath sweatslick sheets, it felt like the building was falling out from underneath her. and she was doing her best to stay still, so the sorrow's son could finish his masterpiece.

renton tapped her plaster toe, scattering her emerald eyed daydream like so many thunderclouds, repeating himself with a pleading bat of 'lashes that drooped in exhaustion.

"it's not about anything." and with a quiet reply, the vein of truth slipped dangerously close to the blade. "please, renny.." renton knew he was picking at a wound too fresh. it was sympathy that moved him from his withering half, with a pained sigh that seemed to draw the last splashes of his energy.

"ay werry, s'all.." rocking up from knobby knees, he stuttered across the rooftop with a visible limp only to circle back completely, with his usual aimless airs, trapped there so far above sidewalks that spiraled on forever. the walk out of the swamp had been long, exaggerated by the protests of a pretty piece of bait and every car passing that ignored his frantic thumbing at the sky. he had to keep moving, or exhausted muscles would lock up under their bruised skin finish, stopping when he was close enough to personally pinpoint various points of infatuation that had left very real scars across juels' skeletonscape. one lover had opened her chest with a unforgiving silver blade, and another broke bones instead, and long ago a lover's quarrel had put two bullets in her belly. using this pattern of logic, it would've been irresponsible for him not to worry. and in renton's eyes, the street thug was the most dangerous yet. the first in a long line before him who seemed to truly have his sister tucked securely under his thumb.

"'e's fucken crazier'n yew are.."

turning her face away from the amaranthine sprawl of the city below, the diamond-eyed witch laughed, abruptly filling the sky with a jangle of smoke-carved amusement that seemed to rattle the moon in it's orbit. forcing her poor brother to amend himself with a sheepish smile under the sudden and reproachful light that bled from slightly sightless eyes.

"almost."

<center>http://i107.photobucket.com/albums/m.../hollywood.jpg

"..i keep an alligator in the backseat.
i think a gun would be overkill."</center>

<font color="#ffffff" size="1">[ January 26, 2008 03:31 PM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

<font color="#ffffff" size="1">[ January 26, 2008 03:32 PM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

"are you really worried?" swarms of pampered pooches streaked in flea-bitten orbits around the crooked twinset and two snuffling shar peis at their feet, mangled hangover expressions screwing juels face into a grimace. the dog park was crowded, and a soft summer sun had turned juels from diamond-edged predator to a limp-lidded ragdoll, suspended off renton's elbow. a strange dog would come up to hike a cold nose up her thigh and she'd wave a cigarette-holding hand in it's face, gin-swollen lips crushed into a frown. tyson and caine swung hippo-heads to and fro, milk-white eyes rolling under an avalanche of wrinkles.

"aye." bending on one knee, one arm chicken-winging to stay knotted with juels' elbow, renton crammed a couple of scar-knotted fingers into tyson's meaty mouth, prying out a splintering stick. up over his shoulder, he focused on juels with a resentful bend of his brows. "'course ay'm werried. are yew kidden?"

"but she said she didn't even do it." unlacing her limb from the crook of his elbow, she tilted her chin down to watch the shar peis break into a jostled gait, baying blindly on the heels of a pack of golden retrievers.

"still. whir is sh', then?"

"i dunno." pausing to spike her lungs with a smokeshot, she crushed her eyes up to keep the boys in her scope of sight. "really," juels grit her teeth against the lingering loyalty she had for the gator-offering terrorist, still struggling with the idea that renton was ready to give up the ghost in a flash of sobriety and familiar obsession. "i don't know why you still care."

still crunched into a crouch, a sober hand rattled across his scalp. "me either.."

"renton," the witchbaby paused, slowly turning her chin towards him as he rose painfully from the earth like a decay bloom sunflower. "jesus christ, renton, did you get her pregnant?"

her question nearly knocked him right back on his ass, head hunkering down between two sloping shoulders that had turned in on his chest.

"no! fuck no!" swamprot eyes were manic for a moment, blood and lungs seizing up at the idea. he tried steadying juels in his focus, eyelids flinching hard. "no."

juels eschewed her brother's fit by watching a blond cocker spaniel wolf down a pile of dog shit.

"then i don't know why you're worried." and she feigned a sympathetic sigh, arm dropping from it's knot around her belly to scrub tyson's bristled back as he bumped against her ankles with a broad snout. "did you ever think she might be done with you?"

"..wot?" turning his shoulders out, renton's flatline lips faultered, focus dropping off juels just incase she could see his eyes flicker wild mustang white as his stomach turned.

"done with you." impatience lurched over her tongue, seasick, eyes gashing up as she clamped onto his elbow. "maybe she's pulling a renton on you."

she could feel a tremor seizing his bones, and tightened her grip, mouth falling open in an exubrent grin.

"wouldn't that be poetic?"

<font color="#ffffff" size="1">[ July 31, 2007 07:47 PM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

the sun was throbbing in a thick swelter, birds were singing, and pre-teen boys were slinging dope just down the street from the stoops of a crumbling tenement building on the sleazy side of the tracks, where hollywood had set up camp with her red plastic cup of gin, a ghetto blaster blaring david bowie's station to station, and a little bucket full of sidewalk chalk. most of the pieces had been ground down to dirt-flecked nubs, tossed carelessly across the sweaty shalt of her shoulders and she had a chunk of red balled in her fist as she rocked back on her heels, long rail-thin thighs and calves folded over on top of one another in a predatory crouch as she surveyed her progress with a squint over the smokeplume of her cigarette.

somewhere down the street, a car horn barked and you could hear sirens.

the Thin White Duke jangled on the brixton briefcase, milk-white curls spilt over splintered concrete slabs as she flung herself back onto the asphalt canvas, and she was the thin white dutchess, with whipcords of muscle draped down the long dangerous swerve of her back clenching up as she laid down broad, frantic strokes of red chalk. filling in filthy gray space surrounding a psychotic looking russian circus bear unicycling inside one ring of a half-drawn three ring circus that included the requisite bearded lady and tortured looking lion shot through a ring of fire from a fat little cannon.

the moon in the fabricated bloodsky above the triple-ring chalk circus was a perfect half circle, and she started scratching sloppy modern hieroglyphics underneath it in sootblack.

occasionally, she'd lift her chin to give bloat-eyed looks of insult to someone walking by if they got too close, punctuating her scribble-fisted frenzy with slugs of gin and sucks on her cigarette. the heat pressed in on her lungs and bleached out her ribs, fattened her mellow streak and made threads of sweat leak from her temples. made her go soft when a gang of skinny kids in hand-me-down jean shorts and goodwill t-shirts scattered across the edge of her sidewalk mural in a scatter of cheap sneakers and knobby-knees.

"elvis!" a tall kid with coal-colored skin and an orange double-pop was spared any foulflung spittle, because instead she was rocking back on her heels with a big smile. jagged at the edges, cut by the broken teeth of some slow-release psychadelic. "share the wealth, brother." and tattooed hands flapped greedily.

"i'm not your brother." jittering all livewire with youth underneath an oversized nets jersey, elvis pinched two slimey sticks and cracked the popsicle apart. "your brother looks like a zombie."

"yeah, yeah." two-tone eyes rolled as the she accepted her half of the popsicle, immediately swabbing it against her gums as her free hand made gestures to the mural underneath them.

"what do you think?"

the kid frowned at the chalk-scratchings and shrugged, suckling on his ice treat.

"it's ok." his fuzzy little eyebrows dropped in scrutiny, leveling the ninety-pound wreck. "but you did one just like it on jefferson."

"that one was practice, elvis. don't be such a fucking smartass." hollywood shot elvis a glare, chomped off her last bit of popsicle and snatched his from his dangling hand. it was just hanging there, like a ripe piece of fruit.

"stay in school, elvis." she made quick work of his popsicle, too, plucking at sugar-sticky strands of hair clinging to her cheek with lead-boned hands as she rolled the last sliver of orange sludge off the stick and under her tongue.. "now, fuck off."

maybe if any of the twenty two TVs (in assorted sizes, shapes and makes) stacked in stereo against the far wall of her bare-brick loft screened anything more than a 24 hour low whine of static and the home shopping network, juels could've spent her evening indulging in some high end knowledge dropping and presidential debate instead of sunning herself under the sterile glare of half a dozen heat lamps that hung on snarled wires from her exposed ceiling. maybe she would've learned something. but she let the twilight minutes marquee past in a flutterflap of thick gray smoke and glossy magazine pages, occasionally unscrewing a joint from her lips to drool perfect smoke circles from her lips while she commiserated on the newest Giuseppe editorial. dorothy was stretched near one of the floor to ceiling windows in a fashion similar to it's mama's-- all long and languid, blood like lead slowly humping through a degenerate veinwork. but the shrill catcall of a telephone made the gator snap her tail in irritation and made the Soviet buck coke-carved hips off the scrap of terrycloth towel between her and the imitation beach beneath her.

the business line.

"the fuck.."

that phone, it hadn't rang in months. it's singsong alarm had eventually died completely after awhile, frequent rings becoming occasional blips, days turning to weeks and Jason slowly turning gray in the earth. long limbs unfolded slowly, a hurricane of obese bleach-bombed curls swaying across the slant of her shoulders, but she was kicking up sand once she was upright, grabbing for the receiver.

trying to choke down a strange lump in her throat.

"...hello?" whothefuckisthis?!? she tried not to bark down the line.

from the other end of the wire, a polished voice broke on the edge of uncertainty.

"ah, yes, hi... i was given this number by an associate of mine, jason marcus. he said if i was ever in town and in need of some company, i should give you a call."

the milk-skinned darling made herself steel against the fumble of emotions that suddenly battered against her heart..just saying his name. she found herself frowning, wondering where the fuck they were coming from, she was so sure she'd murdered the ability to make feelings like that by now.

"jason marcus gave you this number? when?" half spooked by the finely tailored ghost that had suddenly appeared in her mind's eye and half irritated at the fact she apparently got passed around like a hot trading card, she almost interrupted herself.

"no, nevermind. what hotel are you staying at?" instinct seemed to kick on too soon, it seemed like the ringing phone had turned it on like some sort of Pavlovian response; ring-a-ding making her blood stop and shudder and her stomach knot in an almost forgotten excitement. "shit," slurring around her cigarette, the bikini-clad wildcat turned towards her open stretch of windows looking over the city and smirked.. she'd been out of the game awhile, and had forgotten how far a little politeness and some general niceties could go.

"am i moving to fast for you," she paused, and with no name, she used the industry standard. ".. john?"

"that would be the waldorf, in the penthouse suite, i should be there in.. fifteen minutes, give or take. and not at all, although i'd prefer if you call me lee."

"oh. hot shit." the gatormama commented around her cigarette, slitting her eyes against the whips of smoke that rose from her lips, turning back to the telephone table near the edge of her homemade beach. "fifteen minutes, lee? should i meet you out front? oh," reminded suddenly of how fiercely her old clients defended their anonymity, she corrected herself, pinching the telephone receiver between her ear as a narrow shoulder, a hand bending behind her back to fondle the bows out of her bikini's string.

"nevermind, i'll just meet you at your room." pausing on a moment of disappointment that she couldn't make some cute comment like 'I'll be the one in the silver dress,' she seemed to fumble with the telephone and the conversation traveling across it. as a general rule, juels had a hard time telling people, anybody, goodbye.

it was just so final.

"fifteen minutes. waldorf." she reminded herself, took one last drag off her cigarette and slammed the phone down on it's cradle.

"yer late."

the broken baritone of renton's voice had been mellowed by sobriety.. he didn't sound on the verge of tears anymore, and sometimes juels found herself understanding whole clumps of dialogue when he'd spin off on some gash-mouthed rant concerning the evils of the world and the things that kept him pure. but it was the last thing she wanted to hear as she was sneaking back into her own apartment, keys silenced by a trembling fist and her heels bent in the crook of her arm.

and from a prone position on a dune of sand, renton called out the born again harlot from the lazy shadows draped around the loft, skewered by the high-rise glow of the city, washing her face in three separate shades of pale and making her hand leap to the stuttered throb of her heart in surprise.

"jesus christ, renton.. what the fuck?"

"ay've been waitin'.." rolling onto an elbow, the half-living boy glared through the darkness, to watch the silhouette of his sister cut across the entryway, towards the bar built off the kitchen. he couldn't make out the sweat-rumpled appearance of her dress, or the swollen state of her mouth, but he could smell the sweat from across the room, mingling with smoke and overpriced cologne. "me'n dorth' 'ave been lonely, juels. where ya' been?"

she answered by disappearing into the fridge, knelt behind the door where she could make a feeble attempt at working the sex stylings out of her bleach-bombed curls without renton crunching up his mouth in a satisfied smile. he wondered how far his sobriety would push her, now. he wondered how far she'd slip, how many needles she'd dirty, how many bar-tabs she'd skip out on, how many cocks would she suck before finally breaking? when the fridge door closed, she had a bottle of gin secured in one fist, and a finger gobbed in marshmellow fluff that she spun lazily over her tongue.

"well, was 'e handsome?"

she had to blink back the sudden memory of that dazzled, wonder-eyed look she watched spread over the john's face from the vantage point of his crotch. her stomach knotted, quickly disposing of all the dope-fueled feelings of excitement and sedation brought on by some chance encounter in the penthouse suite.

"handsome enough." pausing on a heavy swallow of gin, she finally stepped close to renton, smeared lipstick and wincing speedball eyes exposed in a shard of moonlight as she worked her finger past her lips and nearly collapsed at the feeling of deja vu cracking her over the skull. "and rich."

"aye?" her brother sounded truly hopeful, flopping over belly-up and reaching curiously for her bare toes. "sounds liek a rill catc--" toes that disappeared from his reach when she turned on a sharp pirouette and disappeared down the hallway. veiled in a static silence and an unfamiliar feeling that she would've pegged as shame if she'd ever felt it before.

and the whole world would shake with the swamp brat's triumphant scream.. as renton tumbled off the wagon, a cat burlger out a broken window, fistful of rings, into her lap with a splash of whiskey. through the stems of terrible stilletto heels she could feel the earth jerk, and start spinning again.

<font color="#ffffff" size="1">[ January 26, 2008 03:28 PM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>