It’s early, of a dim and sodden morning. Thin light seeps through enormous flower-shapes painted across the window-glass to settle on the high thick mattress laid upon the floor, gently picking rumples and folds from among the tangled sheets, the pillows piled, lightening them, but not enough to draw out any differences between the pastels lurked within, only just enough to define the heights, the crumpled peaks and ridgelines, the window-facing slopes. He shifts, the shape of him turning from side to back, a massif obliterating, remaking the bedscape, crumpling ranges, raising up plains, geologic time made legible for one brief turbulent moment before all is settled in a new configuration. His face now visible, the summit of his nose, that light too weak to find many at all of the white hairs hatching the lush black copse of his mustache. A snort, air roaring through the caverns of his nostrils, and he blinking opens the lightless tarns of his eyes, “Gloria?” he says, when he can.
She’s sat at the foot of the mattress, jet-black hair a finely threaded shawl to drape the bulk of her shoulders, spill down her pale bare back.
“Sweetling,” he says. “Your friend will be fine. All is well.”
That hair unsettles as her shoulders lift, a sigh, a slump to still again. “You don’t know Olivia.”
He sits up, sheets slipping, “It happens,” he says, “the first time one,” a breath, “overindulges,” he reaches for her, but falters, falls short, his hand settling instead on his sheeted knee. “An embarrassment, yes, but hardly more than a wince and a blush, and it’s not as if she’s part and parcel of what goes on hereabouts, your friend from school. And when her father came to fetch her, he was none the wiser,” but he surges up sheets falling away to take hold of those heaving shoulders as she chokes out a sob, “oh,” he says, roughly gentle, “my deckled dove, my darling dear, what is it, what,” his arms about her now, rough cheek against hers shining wetly, holding her until she catches hold of herself, her sobs resolving in a deeply determined breath. “Melissa,” she says. “Not Olivia. Melissa. She didn’t, didn’t have to,” as she curls herself against him, “you told me to, play the game, change it, stay at the table and change the game. But I couldn’t, I couldn’t, if I had, if I did,” and he says, “Sweetling, don’t,” but she’s saying “she wouldn’t have, she wouldn’t be, dead.”
A kiss for the top of her head, grizzled mustache pressed to sleek black hair. “That’s not on you. None of that could be on you.”
“Isn’t it?” Pulling away, looking up. “This is my place, Jim. It’s supposed to be my place. I mean, fuck, you wouldn’t be here, you wouldn’t have, if I wasn’t, calling the shots around here? Admit it. You wouldn’t look twice at me. If I wasn’t.”
His broad brow ripples with concern. “Well,” he says, agreeably enough, “and it may well be you have the right of it, my deftly diddle. Iffen you weren’t the ball-busting bitch of the walk who every living day is the one to whip this hall into whatever shape it can manage, well,” a smile tenderly hints the corners of his mouth, “it’s true enough, you’d not be resting sweetly in Jim Turk’s arms of a night. You’d not be yourself, but someone else,” and he soothes her scowl with a fleeting brush of his fingertips, “and it’s not anyone else I’d want to be holding,” words worn down to a softly burr, “not anyone, but the entirety, that’s you.”
“Oh, and you think you’re sweet.”
“Ah, no,” he says, “that, for certain, I do not. Sweet ain’t for the likes of you, no. Sweet is what your friend’d want.” She snorts at that, a smile forming in spite of itself. “I declare,” he says, “you spoil me, my morning glory, with your grit, your gumption, your, don’t,” as she pushes away, as laughter threatens her smile, “your accomplishments. Don’t shy away from this. Your friend, what was her name?”
“Olivia.”
“Olivia,” he says, savoring the syllables. “When Olivia’s father came, yesterday, to fetch her from this place, your place, the place that you have built, and did you see, the look, on his face, in his eyes, as he did so?” His guilelessly open smile, his gentling joy. “I never had a daughter, that I know, but rest assured, you, as you are, here and now, what you’ve done: there’s never a cause in this world that would have a father look as peevishly on you,” but at that she shudders, yanks away, scowly souring, “My father?” she spits. “How would he, look at me? At what I did, with his, bullshit dream?” Ostentatiously looking about, the walls of plaster crumbling, the layer of paint drooped away from the ceiling there, the elaborate bloom of a water stain, details coming into focus as morning stretches to fill the room. “He was gonna have all this torn down, because he couldn’t be fucking bothered. You think,” and the look turned to him then, and he blinks, “you think I give a good God damn how he’d look at me, or even if? You know, you have any idea, what I’d say to him? If he was here, right now? I’d say, go fuck yourself, is what.”
“Sweetling,” he says, hushed, “I never meant,” but she holds up a forestalling hand, “Did you hear something?” she says, looking to the brightening windows. “Like a crack?”
•
Yearning rings in the piano notes, as a bitterly chipper voice sings for you, cause blondes here don’t jump out of cakes. Two women crowded close on stools before a mirror far too bright, both with the same blue eyes, that same nose, the same yellow hair blown out and rounded in enameled bobs. The one to the left shapes her eyes with charcoal daubed about the lids, above, beneath, as the one to the right limns her lips, leaning toward herself in the mirror as rich thick red’s stroked along, around, and the piano changes gears, chin up, put on a pair of these roseys.
“How’s this,” says Chrissie, to her left.
“Let me,” says the Starling, taking Chrissie’s chin in one hand, delicately, lipstick in the other, peering a moment before touching it to those painted lips. “There,” she says, letting go. “Wait.” Neatening a line with a fingertip, lifting away a crumb of color.
“Spoiled, I guess,” says Chrissie, taking up a mascara brush. “You’d think it’d be like riding a bicycle.” The Starling, moueing herself in the mirror, sets to with the lipstick.
“Y’all should already be dressed,” says the harried man in the doorway, an aloha shirt predominately blue over an ivory Henley, “y’all needed on set, like, now.”
“Having to do our own makeup,” says Chrissie, blinking, “takes time.”
“And we’re supposed to,” says the Starling, checking her lips, “whatshername,” says Chrissie, “the intimacy, uh,” a quick stroke, “Terry,” says the Starling.
“I don’t,” says the man in the doorway, scrolling through his phone, “have anything, I just, they’re rigging lights and need you there to check, like, now, so, please, just, get dressed, and, like, go?”
“Dressed?” says the Starling, looking up to him. “In what?”
He looks about the cramped room, the littered counter, the mirror, the two of them perched there, “Shit,” he says. “Costumes. Shit. Let me, just, let me go,” pointing away, ducking out.
“You do that,” says Chrissie, with a sigh.
•
Closing the door on the din, the ringing chains, the swaying paper-laden baskets, the shun and ponk of pneumatic tubes, all subsumed by the howling whine of that brutishly enormous shredder grinding away beneath the balcony. The latch clicks, and a silence falls to strenuously complement the coziness of the decor stuffed within.
He jerkily undoes the buttons of his linen jacket, shrugs it free of one shoulder, the other, folds it to drape it over the back of a floral armchair stood before that polished desk. His sun-browned head quite bald, slack cheeks grizzled with a dusting of white stubble, eyes bereft of any appreciable emotion, or intent. Turning toward the brick fireplace set in the opposite wall, mantel crowded with a gaggle of matryoshka dolls, a white porcelain vase top-heavy with roses so deeply red they’re black, a throng of sepia-tinted photos in elaborate frames that his emptied eyes seem to fix on, even as his fingers undo the white cuffs of his smoothly cerulean shirt.
He lifts a photo from among the rest, a pudgy woman in a stodgy dress, a pillbox hat swallowing her sculpted curls, a smidge shorter than the men to either side of her, the one in rumpled linen and a wide knit tie, the other in three sharp pieces and hand-painted silk, both quite bald, though their cheeks are each neatly grizzled. He strokes the frame of it once, elegant curlicues of brass suggesting tendrils, or vines, then lets it fall, crack, to the coldly empty grate. Another, the short and pudgy woman in a differently stodgy pantsuit, stood at the very desk behind him, proudly displaying the squat black box of a machine, a lever upright to one side of it. The frame’s an asymmetric thing of slender, overlapping arches that falls from his fingers to the grate with a broken chime of glass. Another, he doesn’t even bother to look at it, and another, this one thrown, smash, and again. Somewhere outside a dim alarm’s begun to sound, just loud enough to trouble the silence here.
The clamor redoubles as the doors swing open, a harshly monotonous blare so loud the shattering of another photograph is lost. The man in the doorway, ink-dappled apron and a blue-backed sheet of paper in his hand, tosses a brusquely dismissive wave at someone, and the klaxon abruptly cuts off. “My lord,” he says. “My lord Welund.”
The last photograph, lifted from the mantel. “It’s been three weeks or more,” says Welund, and drops it to the grate with the clattering others. “Why was none of this cleared away.”
“My lord the Glaive never asked that her, my lord!” as Welund turns away from the hearth. “Your, your brother’s, tie!”
Welund’s hand to the lopsided knot of it, silk striped rigorously blue and rosy pink. “Do you see my brother here?” he says.
“My lord?”
“Do you see my brother in this room?” suddenly sharp, and loud. “Then do not speak of him. Why has the work stopped?” Looking past him, out to the chains hung still, freighted baskets restlessly a-sway with the momentum of their halting, tubes and valves all holding their great breaths, even the monstrous shredder’s stopped, teeth of it quivering visible, and all the clerks in their striped shirts and aprons stood by their roll-top desks. “My lord,” says the clerk beside him, handing over the blue-backed sheet of paper. Welund takes it, then looks down at it, then frowns. “I don’t know this account,” he says.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
“It is quite large, my lord.”
“I see that. It mentions subordinancies?”
“Thirty-seven, sir.”
“So many!” Blinking, peering more closely at the fine print. “How is it I’m not familiar with this account?”
“We’ll pull the file, milord. But note,” the clerk leans over the paper, seeking a clause, pointing it out, “one is held by the Queen’s Outlaw.”
Expressions did animate Welund’s face, of concern, annoyance, puzzlement, but all of them now fall away to leave a slackly chill. “I see,” he says, looking up, from the document, to the clerk. “The closure’s noted as of shortly before six,” he turns his wrist to check the watch about it, a silver nest of gears and dials, numbers and hashes picked out in something that gleams like mother-of-pearl. “Three hours lost, already. This account,” handing back the document, “is now a top priority. Any and all collections, repossessions, foreclosures, are to be taken immediately, and thoroughly.” The clerk nods, crisply. “What are you called?”
“Illicuddy, milord.”
Welund collects his jacket from the back of the armchair. “Empty this office. Arrange it as might best suit you. It’s been long enough without a director here on the floor. I trust,” looking the clerk up and down, the white gloves, the gartered sleeves, the ink-splotched apron, gabardine trousers with the cuffs rolled, “you’ll dress accordingly.”
“My lord,” says Illicuddy.
“Get back to work!” bellows Welund, shoving his arms into the sleeves of his jacket, rattling down the stairs even as switches are thrown, pumps chug to life, tubes trembling hum and ring, chains set to back and forth motion and their baskets swinging with them, and with one final decisive flick, the great churning shredder is set in tumultuous motion.
•
“I’m sorry – wait – ”
“It’s all right – ”
“No, but – ”
“Cut,” the patiently exasperated annoyance, “cut.” Crisply, from over in the corner, “Reset?”
“No,” that patient weariness. Someone else says, “Position two?”
“I’m so sorry.”
“No,” that patience, nearly exhausted, audibly reins in its edge. “No, let’s just, break a moment, in the moment, and then we’ll pick it, we’ll pick it right back up, we’ve got, we’ve still got – ”
“Really. Sorry.”
“Don’t,” that sharpness, loosed, the reins sawn, hauled back, “we’ve got, just a few more moments, to capture, from this vantage, let’s use this, as an opportunity, play it out, play with it, let’s let it take a shape we can, we can use, in the master, these are, these would be, intercuts, I mean, easy money at the brick factory, right? Still rolling?”
“Hadn’t stopped,” crisp as ever, from the corner.
“We got bytes,” slowly lugubrious, “what we don’t got, is time.”
“Okay. Ladies. Gus. You’re looking, fantastic. The, ah, tableau, it’s, it’s working. Now. Assuming we’re, we’re all ready to, get back to it, let’s roll with it again, let it play out, don’t worry so much about – ”
“He can’t touch her,” says the Starling, brightly lit there, on her knees at the foot of the shining white expanse of bed, smokey stockings and a wisp of underwear about her hips and her yellow hair blown out in a rounded bob. “It’s all right,” says Chrissie, sitting up beside her, stockings of smoke, underwear a wisp, “it’s all right,” yellow hair a-bob, “I can,” taking the Starling’s hand, “he can,” her other hand, her arm held awkwardly over her breasts.
“We, ah, talked about that, restriction, when there were, there were three of you.”
“Triplettes,” two syllables ludicrously mournful.
“We talked about it,” says the Starling. “We agreed. Where’s Terry Prudhomme?”
“It’s okay, Star,” says Chrissie, but the Starling’s shaking her head, “No, it’s not.”
“Actually?” says the tanly smoothly man, supinated between them under all that bright bright light, naked the stretch of him from close-cropped hair and clean-shaven cheeks past the broadly sculpted utterly hairless planes and angles of his pecs, the shining tight-packed ridges of his abdomen, the sleekly length of his thighs, his calves to his gleamingly pedicured toes, “this merkin-thingie’s pinching something fierce, the glue or something, I don’t know,” an oddly delicate gesture with one wide hand coming not at all close to the stark green bit of cloth that cups his genitals. “I could use a minute to adjust, if that would help y’all get more, ah, comfortable? Too?”
“I’m sorry,” says Chrissie, and both arms wrapped about herself now, “it was, it won’t, it won’t happen again.”
“Doing fine, darlin,” says the naked man, sitting up to swing his big feet over away off one side of the bed.
“Where,” says the Starling, peering into the darkness beyond all that bright light, “is Terry Prudhomme?”
“It was, her flight got, screwed, the holiday, logistics, are, she’ll be here, when she gets here, but we’ve got this room, this room we’ve got today, we need this, today, it’s all we’ve got, but we’re all professionals, this is good, this is fine, it’s a break, mandated break, definitely a cut now, let’s, let Gus get himself settled, we’ll reconvene in fifteen and pick up right back here, and can somebody get Gus a robe?”
“I’m sorry,” Chrissie’s saying, as the Starling yanks loose a sheet, “I’m sorry, it was just a, like a, flinch. It won’t happen again.”
“This is not,” mutters the Starling, draping that sheet about Chrissie’s shoulders, “what we agreed.”
•
The first card turned over a single, unmarked color, a brightly yellow laid on the blue-painted floorboards, fnap. The next a metalled bronze, sheenly glimmering in the floating daylight, set down off to the right of the first. The third a glimmering russet placed, after a moment’s hesitation, between and above, and the fourth, turned quickly over, placed below, a dull nut brown, quartering the circle.
She contemplates them a moment, sat on the smooth blue floor at the foot of the mattress on the pallet in the middle of the room, the floor, the sloping ceiling, the attenuated walls all the same flawless eggshell blue, clear and plain and cloudless, her white briefs, her cloak of tattooed ink.
The fifth card is much smaller, eggshell white, cut not from glossy stock but something more like linen. She sets it in the center of that square, taps the back of it, once, then quickly turns it over, snap. Frances Upchurch, say slender, sans-serif letters, and beneath them, in the same font, a simple, ten-digit number. “Two,” she reads, “two, zero. One. One. Sev – ”
“Must you?” says the woman now in the room with her, not too tall, hair bound tightly in a sheaf of tiny corkscrew curls, broad shoulders bared by a sturdy grey tanktop, Miner Normal, it says on the front of it, over a stylized Corinthian capital.
“You’re driving,” says Ellen Oh, setting the rest of the cards to one side. To the other, laid on the smooth blue floor, the flop-empty goggle-eyed head of a horse. Mrs. Upchurch purses her lips. “That so.”
“Why were you in the house, that night.”
“I should’ve thought that was obvious,” but then, with a sigh, Mrs. Upchurch plucks at the knees of her baggy blue sweatpants and, wincing, sits herself across the spread from Ellen. “Forgive my tone, and appearance. Yesterday was an utter bear. Today was to have been a me day.”
“You, ah,” Ellen frowns, “took my call.”
“You summoned me, Ellen Oh.”
“But,” Ellen looks down, at that card, “you gave me your number.”
“I wasn’t expecting you’d,” says Mrs. Upchurch, as Ellen says, “I never thought you’d,” and they both bite off frustrated stops.
“I forget,” says Mrs. Upchurch. “Who you’ve known. What you might’ve picked up, along the way.”
“I wasn’t thinking you’d actually, appear,” says Ellen. “Physically. I’d, uh, would’ve had something, to drink. Snacks.”
A snort too brief to be considered a laugh. “All right,” says Mrs. Upchurch, “so. Tell me why I’m here.”
“The monster,” says Ellen. “How do I kill it.”
Mrs. Upchurch shrugs. “How should I know.”
“You,” Ellen frowns. “That’s what you do. You know things.”
A hand to her breast, “You flatter me, truly,” and the performance of a smile, an eloquently simple mask of those naked eyes, unpainted lips, “but I do have my limits.”
Looking down, at the cards between them. “But you want it dead.”
That smile folds into something at once admonishing and disappointed. “You’re the one who wants to kill, Ellen. Do try to keep up.” And then, head tipping judiciously to one side, “Awfully first-person singular, this morning. Where’s your partner in vengeance?” Ellen, still looking down, her hands on her knees. “Too distracted? Her celebrity crush, perhaps?” Mrs. Upchurch looks up, away, around, the bed, the blue, the gently sifting daylight. The cards. “Her troublesome brother?” The only other anything besides themselves a photograph, hung out in the air of the room, invisible threads secured to unseen anchors set in plaster, between the floorboards, a hand, the back of it roped with veins in rich greys, crisp blacks, reaching for something, or warding it off.
“The monster,” says Mrs. Upchurch. “Let’s call him, Charley, for the sake of convenience. Charley was, once, something of a colleague.”
“Not,” says Ellen, “their grandfather.”
“What? No. No, the Pinabel is, gone. Destroyed. Overwritten. Charley has, gone through some changes.”
“You,” says Ellen, “you were there to see what would happen. When it was threatened. What it could do.”
“You took your shot. You failed – but you did make it out alive, which is no small accomplishment.”
“And,” says Ellen, looking up, small smile slipping into place, “now I know how to hit it.”
“What you hit,” says Mrs. Upchurch, “was only there to hold the teeth he was using to rip you open. That gonna be your strategy for round two?”
Ellen lifts a hand to the crook of her neck, where leaves and vines have been tangled by a jagged discontinuity, a frozen slash of lightning violent through them.
“The meatmongers,” says Mrs. Upchurch. “Renny, and Brankowicz, his daughter, Jill. Have you told them you’ve quit? Or were you just going to leave them to figure it out, eventually?”
Ellen, both hands back on her knees.
“Your housemates, Daniel, Montaigne. You’re just going to leave them in the lurch, with the rent?”
The corners of Ellen’s lips, pinched.
“You must know,” says Mrs. Upchurch. “This is the last time you will ever get to leave a place. It would be well to do so properly.”
“I was, already,” says Ellen, tipping back her head, looking up, and up, into all that seamless smoothly blue. “This room,” she says. “I’d finally made it what I’d seen it could be, would be, when Monty and me first found this place. I walked in here, and I saw it, and I made it, and I was done. I was thinking, maybe Accra. There’s a guy there, usually sets up by the Makola, he does, just, amazing shit, with goat. So I was already thinking, maybe, Accra. When Phil climbed into my car.”
“It is a lovely room,” says Mrs. Upchurch.
Ellen looks down, takes up the horse’s head, there by her knee. “I used to live in a world,” she says, “wherever I was, whatever I was doing, I’d know, any minute, he could just, be there. Both of us in the popcorn line at the Qaraghandy Zoo, or, or he’d be sitting at the only other table in a gasthaus, in Bissen, or just, I can’t even remember where, Antananarivo, not looking where I was going, and boom, and just, knowing that? It was, like, an echo, that never stopped ringing.”
Both her hands on that mask now in her lap.
“I don’t live there anymore,” she says. “I’ve already left. Just one last thing to tidy up.”
Mrs. Upchurch leans forward, looking over the cards spread between them. “Purpose,” she says, musing, “through a sense of propriety, and – oh, but I’m reading it upside down. The body,” she says, with a gesture to her right, “through grounding, and firm boundaries, achieves a purity of purpose.” Looking up. “What else could we require.”
Ellen picks up the fifth card, small and pale. “Do I need to,” she says, but “No, no,” says Mrs. Upchurch, getting to her feet. “I’ll show myself out. I know the way.”
•
Disappearing into a sweatshirt, wrestling her way up and through, glossy bob now mussed, a suggestion of yellow curls unsprung, as sharp notes toggle a simple phrase over an airy space of strings, can’t plan for anything, except the rain. “I guess we won’t be getting a check today, either.” She bends to scoop up a squiggle of tie-dye.
Wiping the last of the cold cream from her face in the far too brightly mirror, the flags will all fly green at the embassies, you’re here next to me, except you’re not. She frowns. Turns away from herself in the too brightly mirror to look to her there, pulling up swirling tights, “Hey,” she says, “you’re,” a gesture, up by her face, her hair.
“What?” Leaning close, there beside her in the mirror, their hair of a length, thereabouts, but hers undoing itself in artfully definite curls, and noticeably darker, and her blinking eyes bright green. “Oh,” she says.
“You should probably,” says Chrissie.
“Why bother,” says the Starling.
Chrissie smiles. “Would’ve been funny, if it happened out there.”
“Funny,” says the Starling, skeptically. “Go on, get dressed. I want ever so much to be gone from here.”
“I miss Cos, and Aya,” says Chrissie, dabbing the corner of her jaw with the greasy cloth. “Why don’t they ever come out to play anymore?”
“Should’ve just brought the blasted screen with us,” mutters the Starling, plucking up jars and vials and tubes from before the mirror, dropping them clink and clatter in the bag at her feet.