Ø’s hidden betwixt the Casino’s silver menhir columns, lost between the slot machines.

The mare’s lost in yet another garden. Not yours, that supra-liminal space where you both first connected. She’s planetside. Grounded. Missing are the familiar, safe olive trees that stretch across gravity’s horizon. And you’re gone, elsewhere, fighting for your life.

She’s without allies once more, orgones silent, filled with paranoid dread and surrounded by metallic, bloodthirsty obelisks.

Here, the gravestones around her are alive, their spirits cooing across her physical body’s passage down the thin hallway. In clutches, they react to her heat signature. Visually, a massive sweating figure tip-hoofing from her adversary, constantly looking back over her shoulder, scraped palm impotently reaching up her left thigh, groping a Narragansett not to be found.

Slots fire off their own personalized summons to play. Lightning strikes of cacophony meant to provoke reaction; lightshows sculpted to her favorite cascading red-purple colors, garish noises designed to evoke childhood traumas often forgotten consciously, but dutifully collected within her file above.

Baritone damaru drums tap-tap from ancient silver speakers, spiking her blood pressure as they did when she was a filly, making her chew her lips with stress.

The mare’s walkway is tight. Cramped. Only an entryway on either side of the long rows of slots, placed shoulder-to-shoulder and manned by uncaring well-dressed chainsmokers. Within Ø’s wingspan, she touches each side of the cold, spinning machines as she shimmies from one entrance to the other.

Before blank gambler faces, reels rotate. Flashes of fortune. Cherries, lemons, sevens. Salopes. The jackpot pictographs include a familiar she-ass, the copy-pasted Jenny from the New Kankakee slot machine, the one drunkenly shot through, destroyed in a garish implosion of silver, aluminum, and splattering body parts.

But the Jenny’s changed, her cowboy hat gone.

She’s sans culottes. Reeking of sawdust drifting atop espresso. Caffeinated drinks, served near a seaside window, discolor her buck-teeth with an off-white stain while she ports her overpriced sweets, stuffed wicker basket coltishly pressing up her bust to the tune of high tide waves.

And she’s flashing that familiar, stupid, entrancing Fontvieille smile.

The spinning pictograph is gentler, demurer than your mare, its shoulders thinner, eyelashes bouncier, fuller and more inviting. All put together. Dressed in black, en vue, leaving bare unblemished white-greyish thighs. She’s not cradling highball glasses in each scarred hand. There’s no discarded beer cans flattened at her hooves in spouts of anger, no gunpowder stench or pulsating skin stuck between flat teeth.

The slot machine’s salope is a symbol, a motif of a girl who’s not reliant on cigarettes for basic emotional upkeep, a faire-valoir foil algorithmically chosen specifically for Your gaze.

One Jenny’s spinning jolts still.

The salope drapes over the shoulder of an ossified gambler, blind, deaf, possibly both. He’s a fixture, fixated on the spinning reels. A true ludophilus in familiar sweat-stained overalls and roughout boots, mangled body stitched back together with rusted chickenwire in the New Kankakee sun. Legs, lungs, ligaments leaking puss-filled crimson scabs that he itches without shame, his discolored skin peeling onto his wooden stool, shedding in bloody chunks and sullying the Casino’s polished flooring, temporarily retrofitted with scrapmetal and caked with hardened chewing tobacco spittle.

Towards the good Counselor, the slot’s Jenny smiles. Only out of politeness. She’s really looking through him, locking eyes with the huffing, bleeding, hunted mare.

First it’s just the one donkey, welcoming with a comforting smile, stealing Your attention. Then a second jolt, her twin sister pictograph finally arriving with familiar armfuls of fresh-baked viennoiseries, flakey and honey-sweet across Your lips. Finally, they’re three, à trois, the big hit, the third copy-pasted Jenny landing with a force that would pull any man away, her gravity warping Narragansett barrels, ruining perfectly timed dice throws, and inducing threats from the Beyond.

The muses all spit the same buck-toothed smiles and gush, braying in mirrored ecstasy, chests rising, vibrating with a coquettish joy your mare can never hope to emulate. Their scopophilic performance is beyond Ø’s capabilities, outside her safe sphere of premeditated violence and cynicism, an over-advertised yet comforting femininity too far from her reach.

As a familiar wiseguy recently commented, it’s no surprise, especially with a mug like Ø’s.

All three Jennies leak chips onto the gambler’s shot-through, craterous lap and still-bleeding stump leg, hee-hawing with their toothy grins, nude, whizzing with the streamers and bright lights of jackpot, finally exploding, ripping apart the slot machine’s silvered frame, dusty discolored wires catching fire in a New Kankakee blaze that kills the Counselor in a fit of mortal probation, his chest becoming a scattershot potpourri of toothpicks, broken glass, and unlit Keowee cigarettes.

But Ø’s mistaken. Lost in her thoughts. She blinks.

An ossified gambler awakens, screeching with joy. It’s a woman, a gargoyle with crow’s feet and short-cut bangs, black gown thrown over her frail frame. Her inhuman shriek is one of happiness, catching chips in her upturned dress without regard for modesty, as the mare breathes herself back to reality.

Eager for more blood to recoup their losses, the machines vibrate, targeting your mare and seeking her as prey, damaru drums tap-tapping with renewed malicious intensity.

Ø stumbles backwards at a new cascade of flashing lights, stunned. Mane brushes the slots behind her, split hairs caught between mechanical notches, sculpted metal exteriors of miniature putti angels and francisque axes, their edges digging into her long vertebrae. She spits, nostrils leaking. Her hands still sting from the concrete, and a stray tongue licks the taste of the doorman’s blood, caressing a blotch that had splattered across her huffing snout. Her pupils dilate, trying to regain composure, reminding herself of the real threat pursuing nearby.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

Her bun’s unfurled, oily hair drifting down her long face, sticking with sweat, as she looks from side-to-side, up and down the thin hallways of slots. Puresilk sticks to pelt, chafing at her thighs, groin, twisted ultralight underwire metal pulling at her hemline, corset ripped, leaking alcohol-bloated flesh and cutting skin where the pressure is too great. Lightbulbs trail up the menhir stack before her, cascading flashes of purple and ever-spinning reels intertwining at tap-tapping rhythm.

The damaru beat swells.

It changes slowly, gaining tempo, like a heart beating out of control.

Klaxons sound, backup chirps complimenting the tap-tapping, clashing into an inhuman mixture of fearful memories meant to induce action, to create a sense of dread only gambling can solve. Chemically-created stenches of human flesh and khat envelop the mare, leaking from the surrounding machines’ hidden silver ports. Familiar, but foreign. They’re aspects of a memory, of a ship breaking within an atmosphere, cooking living meat, melting tungsten screeching with a final wailing of galley slaves, all boring into her jaw.

The second-hand memory is jarring, so much so that she nearly misses the twin black loafers encroaching on her skull from above.

From just over the spinning fruits and fillies, beckoned by the menhir, the One-Armed Man pounces.

He dives from above, missing his downward slash, bayonet screeching against slot machine. It’s a quincunx as he falls into the menhir channel, smacking a handmade cherrywood stool, his contorting neck landing against antique metal casing, his only fleshy hand caught in gilded payout tray, nearly dislocated, skin cut with a thin stripe of crimson.

The mare’s at her feet when he’s arises, dodging his errant swings once more.

She trots backwards, elbowing hypnotized gamblers caught unawares, who curse her for accidentally saving their lives. Bayonet slashes smash lightbulbs through the thin corridor, spitting hand-blown glass, popping with sparks. Silver crunches against missed thrust, screeching with pain, chipping the jagged edges of bayonet. Spinning, smiling, boasting Jennies are cut down with rage as the One-Armed Man howls, whipping across his body, slashing the shiny façades and tilting, disemboweling machines until they bleed chips.

Uncaring slots chitter, improvising vocalizations of Chushitic-coded hisses, belted anashids boiled to unintelligibility. They layer through one another, mechanical spirits belting, cascading through the chase. Forgotten memories.

It’s the Jazan. Growling with her metallic pain, hemorrhaging riches into the atmosphere like cut veins. Flashing bulbs of purple then red and yellow explode at contact like a ship’s magazine, heat and glass peppering pursuer and pelt. The One-Armed Man’s eyes are shut, teeth gritted, scowling once more, sobbing, cursing the Prophet under his breath as the gravity pulls him closer once more, towards his penultimate destination.

A swing to her chest, batted aside with a furred forearm. Skin shreds, missing vein, blood splattering on a nearby reel. Ø grits her teeth, incisor scraping plastic incisor, sprinting backwards, whinnying with pain through reflexive tears.

Tap-tapping grows, placed between oxygen tanks bursting like cymbals. Cigarette smoke against orange dhonka robes and dry anjeero cakes. Jazan and Chang Tsung-ch’ang intermixed.

Ø’s sandalwood flooring catching fire in Salaam’s orbit, the One-Armed Man up to his neck in swirling mud. The mare’s childhood bhikku caregivers, monks chuffing cigarettes and mantra repetitions, falling like stars across the sky alongside viperous Yassidi henchmen and pitiful galley slaves. Tumbling through clouds, accelerating before cratering, breaking necks and spines atop sand dunes before sinking, prayer-beads and evil-eye amulets strewn about the oases. Their corpses entombed in glass, like insects in ember, from detached engines burning until implosion.

The mare hits the marble.

Oblong head knocks floor, her eyes shut, right fingers gripping left forearm, stemming bleeding, writhing with pain. Pickled cabbage and childhood rock-sugar sweets flood her nostrils, then human flesh, marrow bitter. Injections at her armpits that make her squirm with stress, gingered with performance-enhancing steroids and eventually numbed with opiates. Drifting between sleep beneath mandala of yab-yumming goddesses, Ø’s nightmares intensifying, comatose corpse finally regaining consciousness at the most embarrassing of moments.

Like everything on Fontvieille, it’s just a Punta del Muso mirage.

Yet Ø rears. Out of instinct, spooked. Shoulder blades contort against the floor. She bucks from her hips as if jolted awake, hooves kicking upwards.

The newtons of force behind her kick, enough to crush beer cans, mangle ribcages, lands in the gut on the One-Armed Man.

He falters. First to a knee, then at his chest, groaning with pain, wind elsewhere. With his might, struggling through tears and groans, his final thrust misses. His attack lands just to the left of the mare’s skull, chipping the floor’s marble, tungsten screeching as he slumps, cutting imperfect stonecutter ridges to high-pitched squeaks. He’s sprawled across the mare, head reaching up to her thigh, writhing in impromptu salah, dirtying her ruffles with drool as his eyes widen, blinking rapidly, grimacing, breathy gasps turning to sobs.

Ø’s trance is lifted. Tap-tapping and klaxons become plastic, quieter and ignorable, the garish flashing of lights somehow slowed. As she stares down at her pursuer, she wonders who gave up the struggle first—him or the Casino.

When you find her sprawled, bleeding, nostrils huffing in a shellshocked silence, her adversary is still breathing. Against all odds, she hasn’t spaced him yet. She’s just staring, stone-faced at the One-Armed Man.

You wonder if she’s the one who gave up first.

“Sonuva,” she spits. She feels your presence as her spine contorts, kicking away at the One-Armed Man, landing blows that pin him to a busted slot machine. Another cascade of chips bleed from its thorax, splattering onto his writhing corpse. As she stands, she nickers at you, swiping you across the cheek with an open-handed smack. It’s weak, one arm still cradling the other to stem blood loss. Just an empty gesture of anxiety. “Don’t sneak up on me like that.”

“Okay,” you shake your head, brushing away the complaint.

Your neck is bruised, discolored from the attempted strangling. Above the menhir stacks, the Casino floor’s chorus of commotion is already subsiding. Fights are winding down, some criminals beating hasty retreats and others shelling out payouts, buying out contracts and collecting loot. The vacationers have decided it’s time to split.

“Come on,” you plead. “We need to get out of here.”

“I’m sorry, don’t you have a job to do? Monsieur-master-thief?”

“I did it. Well, you did it,” you argue. “Listen, we don’t have time for this anymore. I’d call this a distraction,” you gesture towards the One-Armed Man. A sleepwalking gambler pokes at him with a stiletto heel, attempting to move him out of the way, plucking slot machine winnings from his person like ambergris off the shoreline. “And you just had to kill this one too, didn’t you?”

But the man turns away from the gambler’s prodding, sobbing with pain, leaving Ø scowling in reprise.

“Oh, yeah?” she growls. “I think he’s lucky you got here before I did.”

Eyes rolling, the both of you trot. Single-file, kicking up marble. As Ø nears the moaning One-Armed Man, her complimentary departing kick to his ribs does little to slow your stride.