"Sherlin wake up." He states with them hollowed cane banging the railing of balcony, all of a sudden the honking from the midday traffic introduced itself back to life.
"Sherlin wake up!" The woman in rocking chair had blood on half of her face but it couldn't change the fact that the contour of the slide, from the end of her blood-stained and hair-tagged forehead to the bump of her nose at the halfway point of the bridge. A fine work of man and woman hating each other's guts, only an urge to get away could dim the sculptural features of hers the melancholy they all carry by the cave of shoulder.
"Sherlin!" The cane struck from left to right and cracked a lump on the tile behind the rocking chair. She lumps over unmoved but fairly conscious, just as the way a character in a painting. The only measly difference is that she's half naked with a blazer's torn off sleeve still on her arm like a tacky glove, her bra unbuttoned and a side of her breast out with thin blue veins pulsing her back to life but so far, no chance.
"Wake the fuck up!" Despite the fact she's as faint as a corpse's breath. It's amazing how little could someone care, little things, little attention. It's staggering how she's good as a victim in monstrous details yet holds the presence of a fine woman in her mid-20s. Slender waist carved by scriptures of foreign languages you'll never learn. Bruises of stilled blood, chunks of them purple and black made her look more like a dirtied linen doll than a broken human being.
The cane struck true, right on her heel. The old wounds of torn muscle and bruised, smithed skin tissue rasante the girl. Like a blunt figure standing at the edge of a landslide of a dream, with their arms open as wide as the jet-black sky.
She jumps up with hands reaching for the handle of the rocking chair, the raven hair looks as dark as her bruises but a faint of solar noon sunlight glazing from the left begs to differ. Thousand dollar crocodile purse, Damascus weaved sandals with smooth white soles, the blazer was from some Italian stuck up in Via Martinase now it's a rag that covers half of her body, not even in a seductive way. Ain't nothing seductive about a loosely dressed woman, just....forlorn I suppose.
She looks up, hair sticking to the edge of her mouth like a feeding tube.
"How much?"
The woman asks, her voice coming from her mouth instead of her lungs. The man surveys the disarray on the 59th floor, thinking about others' opinions before he hears the woman asking.
"You couldn't afford it. What you lots done last night." The man counts while looking at another unconscious girl on the floor.
"They were going to cut off Nico's....."
"Fingers?" The man turns around at the girl in rocking chair with no fury in his eyes, but the pale of the black stretches, eating away his eyelids. "Toes? Nose? Ears? Tits? Tongue? Link her cunt to her anus?" The man keeps his gaze about five inches from the woman.
She blinks to herself and lower them shut and turn to the back of the chair. Inside is more of a mess than what little she remembers, even those preserved seem dubious for how violent they are.
"How much......" The cane thumps down on the wooden ground, a platter happens like a cork off a bottle.
"You can not afford it! Neither can I! But forget about it, that's the least of your worries since three hours ago." Now the woman finally turns at the man's narrowing gaze and the man and the woman and the broken bottles on the ground.
She counted four. And count again.
Four. Three. Two. One.
"Where's Nico?" That shed the first light in her numbed senses. A pale, bleak light straight down the bottomless ocean. A bird fell through that light as if flying wasn't its way.
"...Fingers. Toes. Nose."
The woman covered her mouth with acid and champagne from last night she tries to get up as well as run but her legs failed to do both. She swallowed the burning liquid down her pipe but the taste stuck to the taste bud as she kneel on the ground.
The bird fell into the deep ocean, on impact all her feathers scattered like a buckshot at brick wall. Her bones, though still sticking out like withered olive branch, are of no use.
A bird can't swim.
"What do you expect?" The man hangs the head of his cane on his shoulder like a guard on duty and crouches next to her. "Someone's got to pay. It'd be me and her, otherwise all of y'all will be skinned and packed in a vacuum bag next to the fishes."
The woman, with a drop of translucent saliva hesitating to fall on the marble balcony, grips her fists and slams them down on the floor to get her head up, get her eyes up.
"But you're still here"
The woman spits, the man hums.
"Of course I'm still here. Businessmen. They'd want compensations for the mishaps, the bloodshed is principle, the money is mandatory, I paid one, she gladly paid the other after sobering up to comprehend what the fuck she done last night." The woman wants to scream at the man's words, she wants to chew her fingers off, to gauge her eyes out and keep digging till her eye socket drips all the blood out. That or jump off the balcony.
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
The man picked up a rolling bottle by the wind, it lay horizontally with half a ring of dried stein across the wooden placate. He choke its neck and take a swig of what's left in it, little by little, tab by tab. With the white in his eyes reflecting nothing, and the pupils unmoved.
He places the bottle upright next to the hand of the unconscious woman on the balcony.
He checks the watch and the sun before making up his mind and his way back in front of the woman whose name isn't Sherlin.
"You're off." She struggles to sit back on the floor from a kneeling pose but with her back on the rocking chair's leg and her head by its handle. She manages to utter.
"What is this?"
"This is a liability. All of you had become liabilities. And by the time I'm leaving this cesspool you better get your legs working and pray you can make it out of this room." He speaks as if counting.
The woman's mind was gone from gazing upon the pond of clear water, not daring to dip her toes in or leaping off into the black.
"You're cutting us off?" She asks. The silent pronunciation at the end is open to imagination.
Her head pokes out the surface to breathe, and a monster surfaces as well, bout two feet away from her wet flowing hair. But unlike her, the monster doesn't have a face and seems desiccated.
"Consider it with your best interpretation or worst. Either way, the four of you besides Nico are out of my hands. Call it an….emancipation." The woman takes a deep breath through the burning windpipe. Then she takes another one.
"What about the debt?" The man laughs for the first time, as far as the woman's memory goes. It sounded like a question mark. His eyes went feral for a single instant.
"Let's just say the prospect of letting you whores stay under my name had neutralize them." The woman felt a sweetness in her throat as if the acids are rushing back because the monster now had a face, and it smiling while reaching out a calloused handshake. The woman shakes her head. And climb back on the chair.
"What about my fund? There's gotta be a quarter million by now."
By that time she didn't notice, but as life eventually goes on and reshapes her more times than counted, she'll realize this was her bravest moment.
Her hand reached to the monster's with a smile of her own.
"Nico woke up couple of hours before you did. " He takes a step back and lean on the balcony railing, the cane spins between his wrist and back palm.
"It took a lot of composure to lay it out on her, but she's a quick learner as always." The man's eyelids fall halfway down, took a second before the woman noticed he's staring at her. "She proposed a poor offer. But it's that or sucking those oriental cocks for the rest of her life in a basement."
With the last word kick him off the balcony wall and stride two steps back in front of the woman. A thumb reaches out at her left eye as the woman backs her head onto the chair, trapping herself. But the thumb stopped at her eyelids.
The man visibly swallows down something that pulls him back from taking the woman's eye.
"You're still talking to me instead of sitting on a limo to the next hostess because she threw herself in the pit....and threw me the locations of three separate waterproof bags across the city." The woman's lower lip slightly dropped just as her pupils widened.
The monster took her face like taking off a glove after the handshake.
"What y'all had at the share deposit plus the bags for your lives and your wombs." The man breathes in a long breath through his nostrils. "What a scam."
He checks his watch one last time before turning around to the door in the end of the racked room that smells of melted salt and frightened animals.
"Goodbye sherlin."
With that, two feet and a clocking cane step between the fallen furniture, unconscious man and woman, a long strip of chain, broken bottles, masks, bloodstains and so on until the doorknob.
He didn't turn around, but he did waited a second.
And when he's gone. The woman on the rocking chair, whose name is not Sherlin.
She screams.
***
"You better go someplace far where houses ain't higher than the tress, where walls don't surround the sea, white houses slide down the hill with more coming up from its foot."
Someone told her before she left.
Instead, she came to Faust. And now on the downtown of the midday, well dressed leches in arm with her previous line of work. They gave her hell upon with those eyes, hell to a woman who just got her world broken and her way out blocked. She stole a jacket on her way out, and it could barely cover her smooth and bruised skin.
A Greek statue could not walk upon the street,
Aphrodite would be a skank. Much like the woman in their eyes now.
She look around confused, couldn't recognize these walks she strides before. The city towers over her like an angel, like a platoon of them. She thinks they're angry.
She could see some man's tongue, some woman's frown. She drags the white blazer closer to her shoulder to prevent the long sleeves from dragging it down.
She's free. From all that defined her. As abruptly and absolutely as last night, from her twined and wrinkled memories she recalled Nico wasn't the instigator, she was the savior of the woman whose name....well, she don't have one now.
She wasn't Sherlin, and she would bear her fate now before she reminded herself of the name before she came to Faust.
The sun's up and terrorizing the pedestrians as yesterday and last week, she hook the lapels in one hand and blocks the reflection of light from traffic signs.
She's free from the collars and the self-made prison and gilded torments. The pleasure and the clothes and the Sunday strokes through deeper rings of Via Martinase, some fell in love with it, some of the more ignorant ones act empowered. The woman in a white blazer got bored quickly, the downsides are a testament. The c notes in a dog cage, the scent of children and old man. The sweat of a hundred men and women in one room.
She gradually let her hand slips off her face and feel the sunshine.
She couldn't explain it. She's the only one in this world now, without strings. It's a terrifying rush of weary adrenaline. It's not liberating, that would be too romantic for a woman on the street without a dime or a proper outfit.
It's the mixture of fear of unknown, whimsical pessimism, undiluted promises made to self as the world stretches in front of her even though the road had narrowed down by her sides. A newborn couldn't be more vulnerable than she is, but it's futile to care when there's nothing to hold.....
A completely unrelated matter. A boy just walksd out of a crashed crater on the shore where the sewer runs to the ocean. Their states almost a mirror. But of course, a child is more accepting of the new reality.
***
At the last corner of the narrowing road, there's a tarot card nailed on a brick wall.
Judgement reversed.
The woman takes but a single glance before she turns into the crooked alley. Ignoring the construction signs and red bricks and dusts.
As the flop of her jacket brushes the brick wall. The nail and the card cease existing in the present and the past.
But who knows what the future holds. If anyone, it ain't the woman in the alley, or the boy trotting through flowing debris, excrement, broken mast.
They're living, breathing, walking contradictions.