She's A Rotten Kinda Cute

[masterofmidgets]

I think I have been listening to too much Voltaire this week (is there such a thing as too much Voltaire?). I can't get Zombie Prostitute out of my head, and that's the kind of song people look at you for when you start singing while you are walking in the quad. And I can't stop thinking about Goodnight Demonslayer, which on its own is fairly adorable, but when my head puts it together with tiny!SamnDean, suddenly becomes kind of heart-breaking.

Anyway, it's Tuesday, and that means Int Fiction, and that means I have writing to share!

 

I've dreamed about killing Jacob Fulbright every night for the last ten years, nine months, and twenty-three days, which is exactly as long as I've known him.

I am not a violent person - you should know this - I give spare change to homeless veterans, I catch spiders in canning jars and set them loose in the garden, I apologize reflexively when strangers knock into me on the sidewalk. I've never raised a hand to anyone. But if you'd ever had the misfortune of knowing him - even if it was only long enough to shake his bony, greasy hand and meet his beady glass-marble eyes - you'd understand why he made me want to cast off a lifetime of keeping my peace for thirty seconds of my hands around his neck.

I don’t think he knows  –  I’ve mastered the personal assistant’s smile too well. It doesn’t betray me, not by a twitch or a rolled eye or a sarcastic snap – not by a letter opener through his eye or a power cable around his throat or arsenic in his take-out, and I’ve dreamed all of them. Instead I smile blandly, a professional smile that suggests nothing and reveals nothing, while I call him sir and agree with him, whatever he says.

This is my job: to get his coffee, to answer his phone, to keep his schedule, to fill out the paperwork he is too lazy to do. To smile. This is his job: to sit with his feet on his desk and drink coffee, to yell at people on the phone, to take long lunches, to forget his paperwork, to lose and spend the company’s money.  To remind me that everything I see belongs to him.

At night I go home to my apartment half the size of his office and dream of Jacob Fulbright’s face, frozen eternally in its smug self-satisfied grimace after the last of life has fled. When I tell my friends over drinks I want to kill my boss they think I’m joking.

On weekends he drives his sports car into the mountains to go climbing. One Friday he invites me and I almost say no – I’ve seen the look in his eyes as he walks past my desk, and I don’t want to be alone with him. But when he says it it’s not a question. I tell him I have a backpack and hiking boots and he can pick me up at nine.

Halfway up the cliff face a ledge crumbles under his weight. I can hear the dry crack of bone when he falls; blood is soaking through his pants onto the rocks.  From above, he looks as pale and pathetically crumpled as a used straw wrapper.

I have my phone out and open to call for help. And then, my fingers on the number pads ready to dial –  I smile, and I stop.

 

 

When I dance in the club everyone watches, a thousand eyes fixed only on me.

It used to be different, you know? They used to be afraid of me. They told each other stories in the flickering candlelight – Fox is so clever, Fox is so wicked, Fox will steal you away and never give you back – and they made charms and offerings to ward me off.  I took them anyway, when I wanted them, luring them from the road with enchantments and illusions and the dart of foxfire. Sometimes I just got them lost, sometimes I played games with them – catch my tail, guess my name, find my heart – and let them go. Sometimes I kept them.

Now all the magic’s in the glitter at the corners of my eyes and the way my leather pants cling to my hips, and none of them know what I am. Empty kids with empty heads and empty lives, and I’m just another pretty in the club to them. But what I am will never change and even if they don’t know, when I dance they all watch me. I’d say it’s like worship, but it isn’t, and I should know.

 It’s still fun.

Tonight the club’s half empty,  no weekend tourists and beer-brave kids to fill the floor in the middle of the week. The only crowd is around me, pressed close and grinding to the bass beat of the club music. We’re all skin to skin and I can feel their heartbeats, feel the shower of sparks in my blood when we touch. This is why I come here – it’s pure energy, lust love anger fear pouring off them and it fills me up and leaves me buzzing.

Well, that, and finding someone to play with. I get so bored, if you know what I mean. The centuries will do that to you after a while, and it’s been awhile, I can tell you. And even though they’re empty, stupid, mute, all of them as far as I care, they’re still good for a few hours of fun.

When I push my way out of the crowd a girl grabs my hand and tries to stop me. She has a morning-glory tattooed on her wrist. I raise her hand to my lips and brush a kiss across her knuckles, and flower vines twine up her arm. Under the heavy reek of sweat and body mist I can smell bright summer mornings.

I think about luring her home, about giving her dreams or making grass grow under her feet when she steps, when she dances, but she's suddenly shy at the kiss on her fingers and I think of Jamie.

I do that sometimes – not often, because Jamie doesn’t come here, and it’s hard enough remembering how to make tomorrow come after yesterday without thinking about people I can’t see. But then I see flowers like he wears on his coat and my coffee is the color of his eyes and a low curl of jazz is the sound he makes when I lick up his spine and then I think Jamie, I should go find Jamie and see if he’s forgotten me yet.

Which of course he hasn’t.

As I spin out the door I toss the girl a dazzling grin. There are flowers in her hair and spilling down around her face, and she doesn’t smile back. I might find her again, if Jamie isn’t as interesting as he usually is.

Jamie’s apartment is where it is supposed to be, which isn’t always the case. I’ve moved it before, by blocks or days or dreams, just to see the look on Jamie’s face when he goes home and it isn’t there.

From the sidewalk I can see Jamie’s dark bedroom window, and when I get to his floor the door is locked, which doesn’t really matter to me. It’s been a long time, sure, but I once stole the emperor’s first consort from her chambers, the Yata no Kagami from Ise, Kusanagi from the sun herself. A five dollar deadbolt and chain isn’t much to speak of, and his door falls open to my hand.

He needs better security, or something. Of course, it’s not like anyone else could get past the door. I’ve got ways of making sure of that, even when I’m gone.

I’ve never been in Jamie’s apartment alone before. Mostly I find him places – the bookstore, the café, the subway – and take him home with me. Without him the apartment feels like a corpse, and I can smell the graveyard dirt on the carpets and the walls. Even with the lights on I can see the pinhole-mouth ghosts and the black-haired ghosts skulking in the corners, until I shake my head and they disappear again. One day I’m going to have to teach him how to do an exorcism, the kind that won’t banish me, just the ghosts.

I’m lying on the couch when Jamie comes home, humming a song I thought I forgot a dozen lifetimes ago, and he doesn’t notice me at first. When he does, he drops all his bags, and papers and pens spill out onto the wooden floor of the hall.

“Fox. Why are you in my living room?” he asks me flatly, eyes screwed shut, jaw clenched tight. He’s never happy to see me, but I can usually change his mind.

“The club was boring,” I say. “And I missed you.”

Jamie swallows, bites his lip. “The door was locked, Fox.”

I wave a hand lazily. He should know by now that doesn’t matter to me.

I could spell him now, smile at him and make him see what I wanted, do what I wanted. I could lead him off the road into the woods. Jamie would never know the difference.

Instead, I step close to him, close enough to catch the scent of flowers in his hair. “You don’t really want me to go, do you?” I say into his ear.

He stays still for a long moment, like he really has to think about it. But finally he shakes his head and sighs. “Only for tonight, do you hear me?”

He presses a light kiss to the top of my head, a promise of things to come, and goes to the kitchen to make me tea.

 

1. The boy presses up close to her on the dance floor, neon lights streaking his pale hair blue and yellow. After he washes up and leaves, she thinks the dancing was the better part of it; she'd felt closer to him then.

2. The girl has a morning-glory tattooed on her wrist and she tastes like cane sugar. Mara doesn't have to ask her to go - she vanishes as surely as a shadow with the rising sun.

3. Mara is okay with the handcuffs, until she isn't, and then she screams, shrill as a siren, arching her back and wrenching her arms to get free. The boy bolts like he thinks she's crazy, and he's not half-wrong.

4. It's late when they finish, or maybe it's early, and the girl makes them breakfast before she leaves. She burns the bacon, and uses too much milk so the pancakes are thin and vast, but her embarrassed smile crinkles her eyes up so exquisitely Mara has to kiss her again.

5. She doesn't know the boy's name until the next week, when she sees it on the police report, printed next to the autopsy photo. It leaves a sick curl of guilt in her stomach that lasts for days, thinking what happened to him after she threw him out.