The Paris Review - A Literary Wonderland

Fake It Till You Bake It Fake It Till You Bake It by Jamie Wesley is $1.99! This is also a Kindle Daily Deal. This is a contemporary romance with baking and fake dating. A reality star and a cupcake-baking football player pretend to be a couple in order to save his bakery in this sweet and sexy romance from Jamie Wesley, Fake It Till You Bake It… Jada Townsend-Matthews is the most reviled woman in America after turning down a proposal on a reality dating show. When she comes home to lick her wounds, Jada finds herself working at San Diego’s newest cupcake bakery, Sugar Blitz, alongside the uptight owner and professional football player Donovan Dell. When a reporter mistakenly believes Jada and Donovan are an item, they realize they can use the misunderstanding to their advantage to help the bakery and rehabilitate Jada’s image. Faking a relationship should be simple, but sometimes love is the most unexpected ingredient. Fake it Till You Bake It is a sweet confection of a novel, the perfect story to curl up with and enjoy with a cupcake on the side. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. The Duke Who Loved Me The Duke Who Loved Me by Jane Ashford is $1.99! This is book one in The Duke’s Estates historical romance series. Catherine read this one and gave it a D+, so maybe peruse the review first. The Duke of Tereford is accustomed to getting his own way, but she’s going to teach him a thing or two about love… James Cantrell, the new Duke of Tereford, has inherited a dukedom in disarray and is overwhelmed by his unaccustomed responsibilities. Then he gets an idea. Cecelia Vainsmede served as liaison between James and her father, and she knows a great deal about business matters, his own in particular. She’s also quite pretty. Ever the pragmatist, he suggests a marriage of convenience. Cecelia has always been good at working with James, but she doesn’t understand how he can be so obtuse. He clearly doesn’t realize that he’s the duke she’s always wished for, or that his offer is an insult. But when a German prince arrives in London and immediately sets out to woo Cecelia, James will have to come to terms with what he really feels for her. Is running away worth the cost of losing her, or will the duke dare to win her once and for all? Bestselling author Jane Ashford takes you to a dazzling Regency England you won’t want to leave! Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. An Unkindness of Magicians RECOMMENDED: An Unkindness of Magicians by Kat Howard is $1.99! I would recommended this if you’re in a “burn it all down” mood. The book is violent, graphic, and the characters experience racism, sexism, and the like. But the main character is a witch who essentially wants to dismantle the ruling magic party because they’re terrible. I loved this one. There is a dark secret that is hiding at the heart of New York City and diminishing the city’s magicians’ power in this fantasy thriller by acclaimed author Kat Howard. In New York City, magic controls everything. But the power of magic is fading. No one knows what is happening, except for Sydney—a new, rare magician with incredible power that has been unmatched in decades, and she may be the only person who is able to stop the darkness that is weakening the magic. But Sydney doesn’t want to help the system, she wants to destroy it. Sydney comes from the House of Shadows, which controls the magic with the help of sacrifices from magicians. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. Truthwitch Truthwitch by Susan Dennard is $3.99! This is the first book in the The Witchlands series and it’s YA fantasy with some romantic elements in later books (not sure if there is any in this first installment). This series has been on my TBR pile for a long time, but it keeps getting passed over for other things. On a continent ruled by three empires, some are born with a “witchery”, a magical skill that sets them apart from others. In the Witchlands, there are almost as many types of magic as there are ways to get in trouble—as two desperate young women know all too well. Safiya is a Truthwitch, able to discern truth from lie. It’s a powerful magic that many would kill to have on their side, especially amongst the nobility to which Safi was born. So Safi must keep her gift hidden, lest she be used as a pawn in the struggle between empires. Iseult, a Threadwitch, can see the invisible ties that bind and entangle the lives around her—but she cannot see the bonds that touch her own heart. Her unlikely friendship with Safi has taken her from life as an outcast into one of reckless adventure, where she is a cool, wary balance to Safi’s hotheaded impulsiveness. Safi and Iseult just want to be free to live their own lives, but war is coming to the Witchlands. With the help of the cunning Prince Merik (a Windwitch and ship’s captain) and the hindrance of a Bloodwitch bent on revenge, the friends must fight emperors, princes, and mercenaries alike, who will stop at nothing to get their hands on a Truthwitch. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. View the full article

It may not be possible to definitively pinpoint when horror movies turned into racial minefields, but there’s little doubt that 1968 was a watershed year. That’s when two films that would help shape the genre through the turn of the century splayed high-profile Black deaths across the screen, ingraining these images on the minds of future generations of filmmakers and moviegoers. Spider Baby or, The Maddest Story Ever Told and Night of the Living Dead were grimy little black-and-white indies whose provocative content—and eventual success—reflected the anti-establishment shift of the decade. It was an era of social and political upheaval that forced the nation to confront its long-held standards of race, gender, religion, and sexuality, while cultural shifts in drug usage, fashion, music, literature, film, and art pushed boundaries of morality and personal hygiene. Spider Baby—released in 1968 but finished way back in 1964 before its producers went bankrupt and their assets, including the film, were frozen—actually doesn’t revel in explicit, bloody displays of violence like contemporary “splatter” films from Herschell Gordon Lewis. It does, however, gleefully mine the macabre (its original title being Cannibal Orgy) by telling the tale of a family of inbred, cannibalistic serial killers suffering from a degenerative mental illness that drives them increasingly insane as they age. And their first victim? The “Black Guy.” The “B.G.” in question is portly comic legend Mantan Moreland, whose brief appearance in Spider Baby may be his most impactful role outside of his trailblazing heyday of the ’30s and ’40s, when he regularly starred in all-Black “race films” and played supporting roles in studio productions, most notably the long-running Charlie Chan series. These mysteries, along with horror fare like King of the Zombies (1941) and Revenge of the Zombies (1943), played to his vaudevillian strengths, cementing his legacy as a poster child for one of the primary Black archetypes used in horror movies: the “Spook.” In the early days of cinema, the Spook was a happy-go-lucky, dim, nonthreatening sidekick (read: servant) who provided laughs with high-strung reactions to scary situations: wide-eyed exclamations like “Feets, do yo’ stuff!” Think Shaggy from Scooby Doo, as reimagined by D. W. Griffith. A celluloid descendent of minstrel show performances by bumbling blackfaced buffoons, this portrayal exploited the stereotype that Blacks were overly superstitious—and by inference, ignorant and cowardly. But in that kinder, gentler era, bloodletting wasn’t as much of a prerequisite for horror, and as the likable comic relief, Spooks were particularly safe from danger, despite their perennial paranoia. Spider Baby writer-director Jack Hill, a protégé of B-movie king Roger Corman, chose Mantan Moreland in part to undermine those expectations. Moreland was recognizable to audiences as an amiable comedic actor who, in previous decades, would never die in a film. The shock of seeing him bumped off so viciously in the opening scene would set the tone for this audacious horror-comedy.5 In this way, Spider Baby helped introduce the modern horror concept of the Black character existing solely to die, adding to the bloodshed in order to establish the movie’s genre cred. Of course, in this new age of edgy horror, Black characters weren’t the only ones dying, but since Blacks were still allowed to play only ancillary roles, they suddenly found themselves in the cinematic crosshairs. And the more ancillary the role, the greater the chance they would die first, before the character is developed and audiences can come to sympathize with them. Not even Moreland’s charismatic charm could save him in this bloody new world order. He plays a version of his old Spook character, in this instance an unnamed messenger delivering a letter to a creepy, isolated house straight out of the Norman Bates edition of Architectural Digest. After knocking on the front door, he asks, “Anybody home?” And then, using his well-honed comic skills, he ad libs his own punch line: “Please say yes, somebody’s home!”6 Unfortunately for him, someone IS home: a homicidal girl from a psychotic, inbred family, who slashes him to death when he peers inside an open window. It’s the end of one era and the start of another: the literal death of the old Spook stereotype and the birth of the B.G.D.F. (Black Guy Dies First). _____________________________ From THE BLACK GUY DIES FIRST: BLACK HORROR CINEMA FROM FODDER TO OSCAR by Robin R. Means Coleman and Mark H. Harris. Copyright © 2023 by Robin R. Means Coleman and Mark H. Harris. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Saga Press. All rights reserved. View the full article

Fifth Assignment: Hook line/Logline for each woman's story (originally drafted in first assignment and edited here) Hannah’s Story: With her family dead or scattered, on her arrival to New York City from war-torn Poland in the early 1900’s, Hannah is determined to keep her family intact despite an arranged marriage to a narcissistic, abusive husband. Core wound: Loss of family Conflict: Husband is uncaring and abusive to Hannah and her children Rachel’s Story: Against the strong urging of her parents not to, Rachel marries a narcissist equally as self-absorbed as she is. Unable to out run his demons, her husband is completely unable to meet her expectations and her parent’s “I told you so” haunts her. Core wound: Her beloved parent’s rejection of the man she chooses to marry Conflict: As much as Rachel tries to show her parents she made the right choice in a husband, he continues to sabotage her efforts and prove them right. Jeanne’s Story: After being told by everyone in her life (parents, 5 siblings, teachers, peers) that she is the “black sheep” of the family, Jeanne struggles with her addictions and self-esteem trying to find some aspect of her life her family can take pride in. She can’t look in the mirror without deep sadness and prefers to involve herself in everyone else’s lives because hers is too painful to examine. Core wound: Lack of self-esteem from a childhood of being told she’s the “bad girl” in the family Conflict: Despite her best efforts, her “bad girl” reputation follows her into her marriage driven by the “magical thinking” her addictions inspire which contribute to a continuing downhill spiral of her self-esteem. Celia’s Story: Being raised in a strict Irish Catholic family, Celia breaks off an engagement and enters the convent as a compromise she knows will make her family happy. This prevents her from entering a marriage that would be a misery as she comes to grips with an emerging knowledge of her sexual orientation, but she exchanged on misery for another. Core wound: Inability to live an authentic life within her family’s values and beliefs Conflict: Celia escapes a scam marriage to find herself miserable in the Dominican religious community Madeline’s Story: As a cubby, shy, young woman, Madeline finally finds the man of her dreams, but turns her back on every sign her new husband is gay, willing to ignore and deny what she sees to be true and confronted by their son with the truth. Her denial allows her to save face with her hypercritical and demanding mother. Core wound: Madeline is the only child of a widowed, demanding, hypercritical mother whom she can never please. Conflict: She married a gay man, she can’t let her mother know!

Photograph by Ottessa Moshfegh. This one time, my dad bought me a house in Providence, Rhode Island. It was a two-story fake Colonial with yellow aluminum siding on Hawkins Street. We bought it from the bank for $55,000; it was one of many properties under foreclosure in the city in 2009. Dad and I had spent a few days driving around and looking at these houses. In one driveway, I found a dirty playing card depicting the biggest penis I could ever imagine—I still have it. In one basement, the realtor had to disclose, the former owner had tied his girlfriend’s lover to a chair, tortured him, and then shot him in the head. The man who had lived in my house on Hawkins Street had owed more on the house than it was worth. It was in an undesirable part of town, or so I was told, but I loved the neighborhood. The houses were small. There was a permanent lemon icee stand a block away. I was about twenty steps away from a bodega that functioned as the neighborhood grocery store. My next door neighbor was an elderly lady from Portugal who spoke almost no English and yet complained to me about all the dogshit in my backyard while bragging about the tomatoes in her garden, which looked exactly like her breasts beneath her housedress, heavy and sliding. We were separated by a chainlink fence. The layout of the house was nothing special. When you walked through the front door, you could go up the staircase on the left. Or you could walk straight down the hall, past the small living room, to the kitchen, and from the kitchen you could take a u-turn and step down to the side-door to the driveway, or continue on down to the basement. I had never had a house of my own. When we signed the papers, I felt myself moving into a new phase of my life, a rite of passage with my father in the chair next to me. It was a beautiful and slightly terrifying experience I know I was very lucky to have, and I loved the house, I loved the light and the intimacy of the rooms, and I loved writing in that house. I wrote McGlue in that house. But more than anything, I loved that house because Dad and I renovated it together. Every day for months, he drove down from Massachusetts with his tools. We’d work all morning sanding and painting, breaking down walls, laying tile, whatever, then go have foot-long Subway sandwiches at the Walmart, hit the Home Depot, and go back to work until it was dark and the rush hour traffic had died down. This was the most time I had ever spent with Dad. It was fun and emotional and felt like the fulfillment of a childhood fantasy. The biggest issue that needed to be addressed—the thing that made the house unlivable—was the nicotine. I don’t mean that the place smelled of cigarette smoke or old cigarettes or ash or the butts stubbed out on the greasy parquet floor. I mean that there was nicotine syrup soaked into the walls. Have you ever smoked a cigarette in a small room in Providence in the summer, in the still of the night? Cigarette smoke is distilled in the lungs, and upon exhalation, the nicotine adheres to the moisture in the environment, the droplets land, the nicotine is absorbed, and the poison never leaves. The interior of the house had a layer of nicotine varnish that made everything sepia and gross. You cannot scrub this stuff off anything except, maybe, stainless steel. So Dad and I had to rip out all the walls. I can’t really remember what the kitchen was like when we got the house, although I’m sure Dad took a picture. I just remember using a sledgehammer. I had been an on-and-off smoker for many years—something I tried (and probably failed) to hide from my parents. (I finally quit last year thanks to Chantix and the grace of God.) I mention this to stress that I was used to the smell of smoke. But this was something different. It was, literally, the smell of carcinogens. And yet the demolition was kind of sad. When I was breaking up the walls in the kitchen, I found horsehair in the plaster, and a sloppily potato-printed wallpaper I wished I could keep. Upstairs was a slightly different story. The previous owner had painted the walls orange, laid huge white tiles down the hallway, and installed some kitchen cabinets in a windowless area by the bathroom. An old fridge stood awkwardly, wedged as far is it could get under the sloped roof ceiling. It appeared to be a half-renovated rental unit. It wasn’t a bad idea, and I did use that fridge while the real kitchen downstairs was being gutted and renewed. I mention this because it isIt was part of the interrupted life of the house. The previous owner wanted to turn the upstairs into an independent apartment. He had obviously failed to keep up with the mortgage. Maybe if he’d finished sooner, and rented out the upstairs, everything would have been okay. One day, when Dad and I were at work in the kitchen, a guy pulled into the driveway, walked in through the side-door, took one look at the place, and lit a cigarette. He didn’t introduce himself or say hello. We knew exactly who he was. I tried to talk to him. He kind of waved me away, and looked at the crumbled drywall on the floor. He didn’t come any further into the house. Dad and I put down our tools and stood, a little penitent, while he smoked. Finally, he threw the cigarette on the floor, crushed it under his sandal, opened his mouth to speak, but began to cry instead. It was horrible. It was heartbreaking. It was so bad. I looked at my dad. He made no expression. There was nothing to say or to do. We just stood there, respectfully, gazing downward as the man cried and rubbed his face and pulled another cigarette out and lit it. Finally, when he was done crying, he turned to us and said, “I used to live here.” He kicked at some broken plaster on the floor. “I’m so sorry,” I said. He waved his hand as though to say, “It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters.” He took one more long, hard drag, coughed for about a minute straight, and then went out the side-door and drove away. Ottessa Moshfegh is a novelist and screenwriter. Her latest novel, Lapvona, is out now. View the full article

“Being a ghost isn’t that different to being a war photographer. Long periods of boredom interspersed with short bursts of terror. As action-packed as your post-death party has been, most of it is spent watching people staring at things. People stare a lot, break wind all the time, and touch their genitals much too much. Most folk think they are alone and, as usual, they are mistaken. At the very least, there are a hundred insects within spitting distance of you and a few trillion bacteria on everything you touch. And yes, some of them are watching you. There will always be something hovering or passing through, though most things that hover and pass are as interested in you as you are in earthworms. There are at least five spirits wandering the space you’re in now. One may be reading over your shoulder.” Shehan Karunatilaka’s second novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (2022) deservedly won the Booker Prize for 2022. A wonderful and imaginative novel about a murdered Sri Lankan war photographer trying to navigate the afterlife, like all the best fantasy it’s a staggering work of imagination drawing from theology and folklore, whilst like the best literature it tells us profound and difficult truths both specific – about the civil wars and corruption plaguing Sri Lanka – and universal – about mortality and the human condition. The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is beautifully told and vividly imagined. Karunatilaka is by turns lyrical and scathing, effortlessly shifting between mystic wonder and brutal satire, yet always retaining the warmth of humanity as he explores his damaged characters and the harsh and complex world they inhabit. Maali Almeida earns a living taking photographs in the most dangerous places during Sri Lanka’s civil war. This has made him many powerful enemies, but he tries not to think about that during his down time, when he spends his time frittering away his hard-earned money on gambling, drink and drugs in the dodgiest parties in Colombo, hanging out with his best friend and flatmate Jakki and his boyfriend DD, the closeted son of prominent government minister Stanley Dharmendran. This all changes when Maali suddenly wakes up in the afterlife, with no memory of how he died and his dismembered body sunk in the Beira Lake. The afterlife has its own labyrinthine bureaucracy, plus the threats of demons and undead rabble rousers. Maali wants to solve the mystery of who killed him, and to lead Jakki and DD to the secret cache of photos that could bring down the Sri Lankan government, but he has only seven days to do this in before he will no longer be able to enter the next phase of existence. Will Maali be able to solve the mystery before he is cursed to spend the rest of his existence in limbo? The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is a remarkable work of fantasy, one that imagines an afterlife informed by Sri Lankan folklore, where ghosts and demons haunt the world around us until they are able to move on. Karunatilaka’s afterlife is full of wonders, horrors and magic, but also a very human bureaucracy, where those who have already passed on to the next stage return to help administer and guide the recently deceased through all the appropriate rituals and rules of the afterlife. The novel is also a remarkable work of historical and political fiction that paints the Sri Lanka of 1990 in vivid detail, merging the fantastical world of the afterlife seamlessly with the brutal civil war, human rights abuses and ministerial corruption that characterised the period. Karunatilaka has clearly done his research, and the characters and events of the novel intersect with figures from the real world history and political sphere of Sri Lanka at the time. The novel delves into the seedy underbelly of Colombo, where gangsters are hired by ministers to dispose of inconvenient bodies and military atrocities are covered up. Karunatilaka unflinchingly examines colonialism and genocide, like his protagonist Maali shining a light where many would prefer the truth to be obscured or swept away. From the international arms dealers to the NGO that may be a charity or may be funding terrorism, this is a world of complex shades of grey where everyone’s motives are suspect and even those with good intentions can wind up causing great harm. All this might suggest that The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is a particularly gruelling read. Karunatilaka is able to handle heavy subjects with sensitivity and an admirable lightness of touch. The novel’s fantastical and magical elements, along with its humour, mean that the book retains a warmth throughout and never sinks into despair. Instead, the fantastical and the humorous allow Karunatilaka to tackle these upsetting subjects in a way that allows for hope. For all the senseless violence and injustice that frequently characterises the world of the living, the novel is always acknowledging a spirituality to humanity that implies that humanity is part of the numinous and the eternal. And it helps that Karunatilaka’s character work is brilliant. Maali Almeida is a wonderful character, his snide cynicism stemming from the idealism he tries to pretend he’s too worldly to subscribe to. His relationships with his best friend and his boyfriend are genuinely touching, with the novel finding space to explore the bitter loneliness and grief that comes from losing a loved one to violence. Karunatilaka peoples his novel with a vast array of diverse characters, from washed up alcoholic MI5 agents to anarchist ghosts who are fed up with how the bureaucracy of the dead treats them to horrific demons to the spirit of a tiger that wants to be reborn as a human. All of them get their time to shine, and their perspectives taken seriously. The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is a powerful and unforgettable read. Karunatilaka has created a novel that combines the best aspects of the fantastic with the best aspects of the literary, demonstrating how well these approaches can compliment each other when handled with skill and care. The end result is a novel that is moving and funny, frightening and entertaining, in equal measure. It’s wonderful to see such an unapologetically speculative book honoured by the Booker Prize, and one can only look forward in anticipation to whatever Shehan Karunatilaka does next. The post THE SEVEN MOONS OF MAALI ALMEIDA by Shehan Karunatilaka (BOOK REVIEW) appeared first on The Fantasy Hive. View the full article

How does an author of “literary crime” fiction make the transition to a straight-up crime thriller? I put that question and more to today’s guest, Damyanti Biswas. Damyanti’s Indian debut literary crime novel You Beneath Your Skin was an Amazon bestseller, and it was optioned for the screen by Endemol Shine. Her second novel, The Blue Bar, was published in January 2023 via Thomas & Mercer. Publisher’s Weekly, in a starred review, described it as an “exceptional crime thriller,” adding: “Meticulous local color matches sensitive characterizations, including of brave Mumbai police who try to overcome the deadly hazards of the corrupt system they have to work in. This searing portrait of marginalized people struggling for survival is unforgettable.” Damyanti’s work has been published in Smokelong Quarterly, Ambit, Pembroke Review, and Griffith Review among many others in the US, UK, and Australia. She also serves as an editor for The Forge literary magazine. I first encountered Damyanti (we’ve yet to meet in person) in one of my Litreactor classrooms, where her considerable talent was immediately obvious. Your first novel, You Beneath Your Skin, was a beautiful novel that had a crime-murder element but focused primarily on the sociological complexity of present-day India and the psychological nuances of its characters. What prompted you to decide to write a straight-up crime-thriller? Not only that, it’s the first in a series — how challenging or exciting of a change is that? I stumbled into writing You Beneath Your Skin. In my consciousness it began as a literary novel, because I began my writing life as a literary short story writer. By the time feedback made me realize that I was in fact writing a crime novel complete with dead bodies and investigators, it was too late to make it a straight-up genre offering. My publishers called it a thriller, but in reality You Beneath Your Skin is more of a book club fiction about the periphery of crime: a whydunit rather than a whodunit. With The Blue Bar, I wanted to challenge myself into writing a genre crime thriller—the ability to create pace and suspense intrigued me. Both my agent and my editor have taught me a lot about these aspects. I’ve also ended up learning much more about plot, and about the beats of Western storytelling in the 3-act and 5-act structures. This is very different from storytelling in Asia, which tends to be low on conflict, and is focused on introduction, development, twist/climax, and conclusion—the introduction and development tends to be much longer than in a typical Western novel. When approaching The Blue Bar, I wanted to write a whodunit without sacrificing the whydunit aspects. To me, characters are the bedrock of any story, and their desire the jet fuel that propels it. In crime thrillers, the desires of the protagonist and antagonist come into violent conflict but in some stories I’ve read, the twists feel forced, the setting generic, the characters forgettable. The Blue Bar was my attempt at writing the kind of procedural or whodunit I like to read: with nuanced, memorable characters, a specific, atmospheric setting, and a plot that is surprising yet inevitable. Readers might judge if I’ve succeeded, but that was the goal. I’d written The Blue Bar as a standalone, with a very different, and far darker ending, but my publisher bought the manuscript in a 2-book deal, and they wanted my cast of characters to continue in a second book. To me, this was a challenge: to retain my artistic vision, yet write a contracted, commercial story. Without spoiling The Blue Bar, I can only say that the ending has brought many constraints within which to write the sequel, The Blue Monsoon. I’ve treated those constraints as a provocation: how do I turn the limitations of a character or setting into a strength? Whether I’ve succeeded only time may tell. To write a fresh story with the same cast of characters in the previous setting, yet changed circumstances forces you to think about your characters, setting and plot from a similar yet different perspective. You must write a new story, but keep track of the continued character backstories, while not letting these backstories weigh down pace. You must explore new corners of the same setting. And you must try and have a character arc over the series as well as the novel. With the challenges I set myself with the ending of The Blue Bar, none of this was easy. I have a new respect for authors who write long-term crime series. What were the hardest lessons you encountered in trying your hand at genre writing? You’ve retained your excellent command of your characters’ psychological subtleties and the cultural richness of your Mumbai setting, as well as your command of evocative detail—two of your blurbs used the phrase “assault your senses”—but you switched the structural focus more centrally on the detective in search of justice. What else was a challenge for you? Thank you for the kind words, David— I’m glad the setting and characters feel vivid. Crime writing caters to certain reader expectations that I struggle with: the pace must be relentless, the story easy to read, and the protagonist always triumphant. I’ll explain the challenge and the lesson, in each case. When it comes to pace, I wrestle with what gets shown vs what is told and when. I tend to summarize important bits of action and show characters in greater detail than needed. I’ve had to learn ways to prioritize the investigation/action, but not at the expense of characters. Pace also suffers when your red herrings are clumsy, or if you explain backstory. Cutting backstory and using it in brushstrokes has been effective. All red herrings must make sense in terms of motive, means and opportunity, and this is a challenge for a literary writer used to depending on language rather than plot. I’ve had to verify during edits that each suspect does indeed have a motive, the means, and an opportunity. The second challenge is cultural: I write stories set in India for a Western audience. Translating not just terms, but embedded cultural beliefs is hard to do with finesse, especially without sacrificing pace. While the rest of the world is used to researching Western terms, Western audiences are new to looking up unfamiliar non-Western ones. Keeping the reader oriented, without disrespectful spoon-feeding, is a delicate balance, especially in a novel with multiple points of view and timelines, as well as a complex plot. I’ve had to use language with as much precision as possible in order to be able to respect both the character/story and the reader. The third hurdle, about making the protagonist triumphant, is not easy for me personally because I come from a background of literary, realistic writing. Corruption is often rampant in an Indian setting, as in many others, and it’s hard to create an ending that is earned, believable, and in line with genre expectations. The lesson here has been to make only the narrative promises on which the story can realistically deliver. I’ve tried to make the context come alive so that the ending satisfies on the level of story as well as on-the-ground realities. The “Lost Woman” is an archetypal theme in all of literature (The Lady of Shalott, Heathcliff’s Cathy, Pip’s Estella), but especially crime fiction (Chinatown, e.g.). The disappearance of Tara serves that theme beautifully, but with a unique twist—for example, her willing participation, the elaborate ensemble, all blue, before she steps into the void and vanishes. How did you come up with that? Why did this theme appeal to you? I’ve forever been intrigued by stories of people going missing. These people walk around, doing perfectly ordinary things, and then one day, they disappear. In the case of Tara, it’s a little different because she’s been involved in, to put it mildly, some very unusual activities when she disappears. When writing her, I was unaware of her vanishing. I wrote her in response to a prompt at a workshop by the wonderful author Romesh Gunesekera, who asked us to flesh out a character who was being watched, but was unaware of it. Tara came to me in those ten minutes of writing, wrapped in a sequinned blue saree like a gift from my subconscious. I knew she was in peril, but not what kind. For more than a year she remained buried among my notebooks. Then, my agent at the time asked me for ideas similar in tone to You Beneath Your Skin, and I dusted off this vignette and showed it to him. He was intrigued and asked me to write it. In my original manuscript, Tara doesn’t vanish—that came about at the editorial stage once I’d sold the book. When it did happen, I was initially terrified of how I’d lose her in the novel, but the part of me that’s obsessed by cases of people who go missing latched on to it, and helped me write her vanishing into the story. Often detectives are portrayed as loners, but Arnav clearly has a rich if somewhat complex social life—his mentor Shinde, his girlfriend Nandini. The early scene when he arrives late for dinner with them is just one example—it shows both his connection to each of them but also his inability to shake his past as he drifts into remembrances of Tara. This portrayal of him as a social person, if still somewhat isolated in his thoughts, was a digression from standard (clichéd) genre convention. Was that deliberate? Yes, definitely deliberate. I felt I’d read enough of detectives given to some kind of addiction, living lonely lives tortured by past events. This is useful and somewhat true to the profession—it’s hard to maintain very stable relationships while being a detective, where obsession, overwork, regular exposure to trauma are practically pre-requisites of the job if you want to solve cases. Arnav is definitely lonely, and also tortured by events in his past, but he does have connections partly because in Mumbai, the social fabric tends to be more inclusive, and a single, unattached man might develop friendships and relationships much easier than other places. This is not to say that people are intrusive in Mumbai, quite the opposite, but since it is a melting pot of migrants, Mumbaikars tend to be helpful and approachable. Arnav’s friendships also serve plot purposes—and hopefully, lend complexity and nuance to his character. I wanted Arnav to be seen and remembered as a protagonist, and sought to achieve some of that through the way he’s seen and treated by others in his life. There is also a real estate element to the plot—a classic setup in crime fiction, especially California crime fiction. But here it draws us into the fascinating transformations taking place in India. What was it about the financial legerdemain in real estate that prompted your decision to use it in this book? Being the nation’s financial hub and glamor capital, Mumbai is the most expensive Indian city to live in. Real estate prices often range between 150 USD to 1000 USD per square foot, and counting. A lot of this land is encroached by slums, or sitting around in factories that closed down, or covered by greenery. Much power gets exercised in getting this land converted to high-rises, often in a corrupt nexus between the government, businessmen, organized crime, and the police. Since much of Mumbai’s major crime is either connected to or openly run by this nexus, adding a real-estate element to The Blue Bar seemed quite natural. It was part of the first draft, but as I researched, connections became clearer, especially when I spoke to a Mumbai Police historian about Mumbai’s mangrove swamps and the conflict with the land mafia. It is sometimes said that the detective’s true concern is not crime or criminals but human nature. I think Arnav suits that to a T. Once again, was that intentional? How so? Those who study psychology seek to observe, predict and control. That’s not very different from the role of a police officer. Once a crime occurs, they study the scene as well as the people closest to, or likely to have interacted with, the victim. Based on their observation and analysis, a police officer must try to predict suspect behaviors, and then, using the power vested in them by the state, attempt to control the outcome. In that sense, yes, Arnav is a student of human nature. In the course of his long career, he’s been in close proximity with the dregs of humanity, and as experienced police officers do, has developed an instinct for chasing the right leads. That doesn’t make him infallible, but it gives him an edge when trying to solve a crime. Much of my writing is instinctive, and springs from character. Like Arnav, I try and study my characters, and based on that analysis, try to predict and control the story outcomes. When writing The Blue Bar, though, I actually spent much more time on the antagonist and on Tara. I’ve come to understand that for the sort of novels I write, I need to have a strong, believable villain, one whose desire would be powerful enough to go the distance of the narrative. In many ways, Arnav is a foil to their nature and actions. It is only in retrospect that I can see Arnav’s studying of human nature as an asset to the story. When I wrote him, it was based purely on method-acting my way into the character, and instinct. Have you ever had to change an ending to suit the requests/demands of an agent, editor, or publisher? Why? How did it work out? Have you ever had to change your narrative approach in terms of description or characterization to enhance pacing? What did you learn? If you’ve ever had to explain specific details of a certain culture to a readership unfamiliar with that culture, what tactics did you use to avoid “information dumps”? Do you have any questions for Damyanti concerning her transition from literary to genre fiction? [url={url}]View the full article[/url]

This HaBO comes from Elizabeth. Content warning for the description below: This mystery book has haunted me for around 20 years now. Here’s what I remember about this historical romance: The village and the heroine are attacked by an enemy. She is raped, gets pregnant, and loses the baby. Meanwhile, the hero’s wife/mistress has died, leaving behind a newborn baby. A perfect pairing, no? She nurses the baby, and at one point, the baby was so cold it was turning blue, so the heroine put the baby in the bodice of her dress against her skin. The hero finds them that way and their romance begins. I really wish I could remember more details! But those are the ones that stuck with me as I was in my teens/early 20s, sneaking romance novels. It feels like it was a viking/medieval/Scottish novel, but I cannot be sure. Please, HaBO! A HaBO twenty years in the making! View the full article

As I considered my goals this year, I thought the most important goal was to get back into a writing groove. I actually surprised myself when I ended up finishing a short story this month. With February now upon us, I considered my goals for this month and even the remainder of the year. What would I focus on next? I love the idea of writing new stories, but the truth is, I have to face my writing weakness which is always looming and lurking in the corner: revising. I am certain this isn't the first time I've talked about this weakness of mine. In fact, I only even thought of it recently when I was cleaning out my closet and stumbled across an old short story. Looking at this story that was handwritten and nicely folded in an envelope, I thought to myself, "So that's where you went to." I have another collection of stories sleeping inside a couple of notebooks, dying to come out and at least be typed. What's my hesitation? I'm not sure. It could be that this is the part of writing that really makes me think about the actual story I'm trying to say and less intuitive than the first draft is for me. It also involves getting feedback which is always stressful, even in the best of stories. I can even conquer the But I think as I embrace new writing goals, I'll have to accept that I really need to get the fires burning in the revision process of writing. What are your writing goals? (C) Copyright wow-womenonwriting.com Visit WOW! Women On Writing for lively interviews and how-tos. Check out WOW!'s Classroom and learn something new. Enter the Quarterly Writing Contests. Open Now![url={url}]View the full article[/url]

Highway 75 cuts across southern Florida, through the Everglades, going from the beaches of Fort Lauderdale to the beaches of Naples. Highway 75 has another name. It’s called “Alligator Alley” for the obvious reason that the knobby-headed reptiles thrive in the swamp on both sides of the eighty-mile roadway. And traveling down this highway, as I have done, it’s not hard to imagine two killers on a dark night dragging a body into the swamp knowing the gators will dispose of the corpse—which is pretty much how my new Joe DeMarco thriller, Alligator Alley, begins. I set other parts of Alligator Alley in Key West and Naples and Miami, places we passed through as my wife and I drove from Key West to the panhandle when my son was graduating from the Navy’s diver training school in Panama City. On this road trip, we saw Hemingway’s house in Key West and the feral six-toed cats that roam the place. We saw swordfish and mahi-mahi hanging on the piers where the charter fishing boats docked. We drove the hundred-mile highway that crosses the Florida Keys archipelago from Key West to Key Largo, where you ride just above the waves with the Atlantic Ocean on one side and the Gulf of Mexico on the other—the whole time imagining what it must be like during a hurricane. We took a tour through the Everglades on one of those boats with a big fan on the back and saw the gators slithering into the water and cypress trees dripping with blue Spanish moss. We saw Miami’s skyscrapers perched on Biscayne Bay and the pastel-colored art deco buildings on Ocean Drive and giant billboards advertising jai alai games. On the waterfront in Fort Lauderdale, we walked by gleaming two-hundred-foot yachts owned by billionaires. In Tampa, we watched brown-skinned women sitting in storefront windows rolling cigars with their quick, hard hands and on the Florida panhandle, we saw the casinos of the Redneck Riviera. Yes, I saw all these places and when I wrote Alligator Alley, I felt comfortable using some of them as settings in my book, but I also knew that I saw Florida as a tourist and not as someone who’d lived there for many years and knew the state and its people intimately. Fortunately, I was able to compensate for my lack of time on the ground in Florida because so many other books have been set there, books written by truly talented authors, and I’d read many of those authors’ books. The Deep Blue Good-by by John D. MacDonald The first author that comes to mind when I think of books set in Florida is John D. MacDonald. I’ve read every one of his Travis McGee novels—The Deep Blue Good-by, Nightmare in Pink, A Purple Place for Dying and 18 More—and I imagine there are a lot of authors writing crime fiction today that were inspired by John D. MacDonald as I was. Travis McGee is without a doubt the prototype for many of today’s lesser-known crime novel protagonists. He isn’t a cop or a licensed investigator but the guy you go to when the law won’t or can’t help. He’s a flawed knight-errant. There are moral lines he won’t cross—but the lines tend to move. He lives on a houseboat in Fort Lauderdale that he won in a poker game called the Busted Flush. His partner, known only as Meyer, is a wealthy, connected economist, but I imagine that if MacDonald was writing today, his sidekick would be a hacker because one thing about MacDonald’s novels is that they reflected changing times. His first Travis McGee novel was published in 1964, the last one in 1985, and as culture and attitudes and politics changed over those two decades, MacDonald’s books reflected this. Reading the Travis McGee novels not only gives you a better sense of Florida as a setting, but they also show how an author and his characters change with changing times. Skink No Surrender by Carl Hiaasen I love the titles and covers of Carl Hiaasen’s crime novels: Sick Puppy, Bad Monkey, Paradise Screwed, Razor Girl, Skink No Surrender, and so on. He’s famous for the humor and satire in his books, almost all of which are set in Florida, and the seemingly over-the-top yet true-to-life characters, like the corrupt politician played by Burt Reynolds in the movie Strip Tease. And then there’s Skink, the protagonist in eight of his books. Skink is a one-eyed former governor who romps through the Everglades fighting criminals and commercial development and dines on roadkill. But what I find fascinating about Hiaasen is that he’s a former journalist nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. He did serious investigative reporting for the Miami Herald about the issues plaguing the Sunshine State—yet he chooses to write about these issues in his novels in a humorous way. I watched an interview he gave, and he was asked: “Why do you set your books in Florida?” His answer was: “[Because] there’s so much crime and corruption … and after every disaster, the scammers come in. One of the first people who got arrested for stealing COVID relief money bought a blue Lamborghini and posted a photo of it online.” Can’t you just see the blue Lamborghini on the cover of one of his books? Out of Sight by Elmore Leonard I don’t know how many Elmore Leonard novels have been set in or started off in Florida but just the ones that have been adapted for movies makes an impressive list: Rum Punch (Jackie Brown), Out of Sight, Get Shorty, Stick, The Big Bounce, Cat Chaser. What you won’t find in Leonard’s books are poetic descriptions of the Florida landscape. One of Leonard’s Ten Rules for Good Writing—and if you’re a writer and you haven’t his rules, you should—is: “Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.” Leonard, like Hiaasen, is fascinated by Florida’s grifters and conmen and petty criminals. In his own words: “The bad guys are the fun guys. The only people I have trouble [writing] are the so-called normal types.” And it’s through the words of his characters that Florida comes alive in Leonard’s novels: “It doesn’t bother you,” Nolen Tyler said, “you call this place the Coconut Palms, there isn’t a single palm tree out there?” “The high rise on the south side of us, nine stories, is called the Nautilus,” Moran said, “but I don’t think it’s a submarine. The one on the other side, it’s ten stories, is the Aurora. Tell me if you think it looks like a radiant glow in the upper atmosphere.” I would give anything to be able to write like Elmore Leonard. The Corpse Had a Familiar Face by Edna Buchanan In the interest of full disclosure—and knowing in advance that I’ll embarrass myself by displaying my ignorance—I’d not read an Edna Buchanan book until I began doing research for this article. But if you Google “Famous Florida Writers” in addition to the three mentioned above, you’ll almost always see the name Edna Buchanan. I came across her name when I read Naked Came the Manatee. Naked Came the Manatee is a thriller parody written by thirteen Florida writers, each writer contributing a chapter, and the idea for the book, according to one source, came about at a boat party attended by Carl Hiaasen, Elmore Leonard and, drumroll, Edna Buchanan. Edna Buchanan won the Pulitzer Prize while working for the Miami Herald. Her beat was crime and politics, and from her experience came her non-fiction book The Corpse Had a Familiar Face, a book which spawned two movies and is comparable in some ways to Homicide: A Year on the Killing Street by The Wire’s David Simon. To date, Edna Buchanan has written sixteen novels, mostly set in Florida, and three other non-fiction books. I’ve never met Ms. Buchanan but would love to, especially after I read one line from The Corpse Had a Familiar Face: “To entrust to an editor a story over which you have labored and to which your name and reputation are attached can be like sending your daughter off for an evening with Ted Bundy.” Florida by Lauren Groff There are many talented, well-known crime fiction authors who have used Florida for a setting: Randy Wayne White, Lawrence Sanders, John Lutz, James Swain, Lucy Burdette, Stuart Woods, and John Grisham to name a few. But the last author I wanted to include in this article is not a crime novelist. It’s Lauren Groff. Her book Florida was a finalist for the National Book Award and in the words of one reviewer: “The stories … span characters, towns, decades, even centuries, but Florida—its landscape, climate, history, and state of mind—becomes its gravitational center: an energy, a mood, as much as a place of residence.” Another reviewer said: “Groff has grasped the true grotesqueness of Florida, an ‘Eden of dangerous things’ spliced with stinking bodies, living and dead.” I’d suggest you put this book on your reading list if you want to get a phenomenal sense of Florida as a setting. *** View the full article

John Humphrey Noyes, in his youth, was so painfully shy that he could barely endure the company of women. “I could face a battery of cannon with less trepidation,” he wrote in his diary, than “a room full of ladies with whom I was unacquainted.” Born in 1811 on the Vermont frontier, he was the fourth of nine children of John Noyes Sr., a former congressman, and flame-haired Polly Hayes, whose nephew—the feeble, emaciated Rutherford B. Hayes—would grow up to become the nation’s nineteenth president. John Humphrey was a precocious student, and he enrolled in Dartmouth College at fifteen. He went on to study law, but his shyness was so paralyzing that he stammered and stuttered through his first court appearance. Crushingly self-conscious, he felt daunted by life’s uncertainties—until the fall of 1831. Religious revivals were inflaming New England that year. Farmers, backwoodsmen, and frontier families flocked to these frenzied emotional festivals—wailing, jumping, barking, and speaking in tongues in ecstatic expressions of salvation. John Humphrey had little interest in these displays, but after attending a four-day meeting, he felt transformed. Dedicating himself to God, he left the law and entered the Andover Theological Seminary in Massachusetts. He soon found it too hidebound for his religious zeal, so he transferred to Yale Divinity School. A liberal theologian there, Nathaniel Taylor, urged him to seek his own truth, even “if it carries you over Niagara Falls.” Through study and revelation, Noyes found and announced his truth—that he was a perfect human, incapable of sin. God, he said, gave him special protection. But his fellow students declared him crazy, and Yale nearly expelled him. He was stripped of his license to preach, but Noyes began traveling to promote his gospel. In the winter of 1835, the twenty-three-year-old set out to win converts in Massachusetts. When he arrived in Brimfield with a fellow preacher named Simon Lovett, the free-thinking, religiously inflamed townspeople welcomed them with rare enthusiasm. One young woman, inspired by Noyes’s shining gray eyes and expressive manner, kissed him seductively when he said goodnight. Panicked by her advances, Noyes, still blushingly shy, fled Brimfield that night, telling no one, and trudged sixty miles, through snow and temperatures below zero, to his family’s homestead in Putney, Vermont. Lovett, meanwhile, remained in Brimfield. One night, two young townswomen—Mary Lincoln and Maria Brown—slipped into that preacher’s bed to test the power of their faith. They aimed to prove their religious zeal by showing that the spirit could always win out over physical passion. Predictably, however, Noyes later recounted, “flesh triumphed over spirit.” The sexual scandal that resulted—infamously known as the “Brimfield Bundling”—was so explosive that Mary Lincoln fled to a mountainside, stripped off her clothes, and pleaded with God not to set Brimfield afire. The whole sordid episode was blamed on Noyes, although he had no part in it, having fled the town. But Noyes chose to embrace that notoriety and soothed his own sexual jealousy over the next two years by professing a maverick theology. After a young woman he loved married another, Noyes—filled with anguish and envy—declared that, when God’s will was done, marriage and sexual exclusiveness, guilt, and jealousy would no longer exist on earth. “In a holy community,” he wrote to a friend, “there is no more reason why sexual intercourse shall be restrained by law than why eating and drinking should be, and there is as little occasion for shame in the one case as in the other.” His declaration was published in 1837, to widespread outrage, but Noyes threatened to shout his new theology from the rooftops. “I cared nothing for reputation,” he said, and vowed never to join any religion again “unless I was the acknowledged leader.” He was only twenty-six and still a bashful virgin. But in 1838, he married a practical, plain disciple named Harriet Holton. Their marriage, he told her, would be open and unsentimental. They would each be entirely free to love other people. But Harriet, an heiress, would be able to finance his passion for publishing his religious doctrines. The newlyweds spent their honeymoon in Albany, New York, purchasing a printing press. Newspapers were a thriving business in the 1830s. There were twice as many of them in America as there had been in 1810. Alexis de Tocqueville, a French aristocrat who traveled the young country in 1831, was amazed at the number of periodicals. Every village, he reported, had a newspaper, and the power of the press was impressive. Noyes—God’s self-anointed messenger—planned to launch a religious newspaper that would serve as the pulpit of the world. As early as 1834, he had published a monthly in New Haven called The Perfectionist. It quickly attracted more than five hundred subscribers. Three years later, he launched a new paper, The Witness, in upstate New York, but he distributed only a few issues. Now, back in Putney, he and Harriet planned to ignite a new religious revival through the printed word. Noyes recruited three of his eight siblings to help with the publication and attracted a small coterie. Within five years, he had more than thirty disciples, who drafted and signed a “Statement of Principles”: “John H. Noyes,” they pledged, “is the father and overseer whom the Holy Ghost has set over the family thus constituted. To John H. Noyes . . . we submit ourselves in all things”—including carnal relations. Two followers, Mary and George Cragin, agreed to join John and Harriet Noyes in a group marriage. Other converts soon followed their lead. Although the arrangements were an open secret, townspeople in Putney were outraged after Mary Cragin gave birth to Noyes’s twins—Victor and Victoria—and authorities learned about the group’s conjugal customs. In October 1847, Noyes was arrested and charged with adultery and fornication. Fearing mob violence, he fled the village. Weeks later, he found refuge in central New York, with a follower named Jonathan Burt. The owner of a sawmill on Oneida Creek, Burt had read about and passionately embraced Noyes’s theology. He invited the Putney group to settle on land adjoining his forty acres of fields and woodland. The property, once owned by the Oneida Tribe, had a barn and a primitive cabin on twenty-three rolling acres. Noyes purchased the land for five hundred dollars and summoned his devoted band. *** On an icy March day in 1848, his wife, Harriet, and Mary and George Cragin arrived by train at the Oneida depot. Blasted by the biting wind, the three disciples gazed out at a bleak landscape of barren snowdrifts and bare trees. Soon, bundled into open sleighs, they made their way across frozen fields, where they would transplant the seeds of their new religion. They were not the first to find fertile prospects in upstate New York. It was a hotbed of eccentric theology. In 1776, an Englishwoman named Ann Lee had settled near Albany with a few followers. She claimed she was the female embodiment of a bisexual God, and her disciples committed to complete celibacy. The sect, known as the Shakers, grew from nine original members to six thousand by the 1840s. In 1823, in Palmyra, New York, a teenage treasure hunter named Joseph Smith claimed he had found golden plates inscribed with the true gospel. He later alleged that he had translated their hieroglyphics into The Book of Mormon and founded a new religion based on local New York legends about a pre-Indian race and the radical practice of polygamy. Rochester, New York, was the hub of a massive movement founded by William Miller. In 1831, Miller, a Baptist preacher, declared that the world would end in 1843, a prediction widely promoted in a newspaper called Signs of the Times. Thanks to an aggressive publicity campaign, as many as a million Americans were waiting for the ecstatic moment when the wicked would burn up and God’s children would fly into the sky to meet the Lord. Believers were said to abandon their crops, shut their businesses, and wait for the rapture in white ascension robes. The frenzy of anticipation was so great that the New York Tribune published a special issue refuting Miller’s predictions. The American Journal of Insanity warned that thousands of American citizens had become deranged. After 1843 came and went without the rapture, Miller revised his calculations and declared that the world would end, instead, on October 22, 1844. On October 21, disciples climbed trees and hills to be closer to heaven, but they were still earthbound on the twenty-third. The celestial flop, known as “The Great Disappointment,” was reported in papers around the country. Believers had been “up a few nights watching and making noises like serenading tom cats,” wrote the Cleveland Plain Dealer, before they gloomily gave up and went to bed. The region was so aflame with religious fever that it was later called the Burned-Over District. But social and religious experiments had bloomed across the country after the War for Independence. The revolution had shattered institutions and traditions. Charismatic leaders filled the void with new, imaginative social structures. In America’s new democracy, any man could do pretty much as he pleased, declared the New York Tribune’s founder, Horace Greeley. The individual was the world, said philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, and almost every reading man had “a draft of a new community” in his pocket. Inspired by faith in freedom and divine revelation, Americans launched more than seventy utopian experiments between 1800 and 1860. Some, like New Harmony, Indiana, were secular communities. Founded by a Welshman named Robert Owen in 1825, New Harmony was formed “to promote the happiness of the world” through communal benefits and cooperation. In its first weeks, eight hundred people joined the community, but by 1828, New Harmony was divided into fighting factions and dissolved in discord. Other utopias, like the Kingdom of Matthias, promised disciples divine salvation. Its founder, Matthias, was a carpenter named Robert Matthews. In the early 1830s, he announced that he was God the Father and Jesus Christ. He strolled Manhattan in a coat embroidered with silver stars, carrying a great key to the gates of paradise. Matthias soon moved into a follower’s mansion in Westchester, New York, where he attracted a community of devoted converts. In a ritual called the “Fountain of Eden,” members of his kingdom would surround him, naked, in a circle while Matthias sluiced them with a sponge and declared them virgins. The spirit of the age was singularity. As Emerson urged, “A man must be a nonconformist.” Life in America in the early nineteenth century was a grand experiment in which every man, he wrote, could build his own world. *** In 1848, John Noyes’s world on Oneida Creek was bleak and frigid. After they arrived by sled at his crude homestead, Harriet and the Cragins moved into the log hut, with its single room, but soon built shelters for families who followed from New York, Vermont, and Massachusetts. By the end of the year, there were eighty-seven men, women, and children in the new community. Together, they constructed a three-story mansion, with sleeping quarters for a hundred people. The bedrooms were still unfinished in December, so the whole community moved into a thirty-by-thirty-five-foot room on the second floor. They divided the space into twelve compartments, flimsily separated by hanging sheets. Neighbors whispered about the group sleeping chamber, and scandalous tales multiplied when Noyes published his First Annual Report. The document chronicled the assets, members, and history of the Oneida Community. As a branch of the Kingdom of Heaven, Noyes wrote, the society banned private property, monogamy, and sexual shame. Physical union, he maintained, was as holy as the Garden of Eden and God in heaven. And perfecting it as a form of worship, Noyes insisted, required what he called “male continence”—the suppression of ejaculation. Members mastered this technique through careful practice. As Noyes explained, a boatman, approaching a waterfall, would reach “a point on the verge of the fall where he has no control over his course.” But if he was willing to learn, “experience will teach him” how to remain, devoutly, in “the region of easy rowing.” Noyes was eager to send his report to a wide audience, including the governor of New York and Horace Greeley at the Tribune. He was sure that Oneida’s publications would draw legions of new followers. From his printing office at Oneida, he mailed his weekly newspaper, The Free Church Circular, to everyone who wanted it, with no charge. He was certain of the power of religious journalism and aimed to create a theocratic daily modeled on Greeley’s popular New York Tribune. So when a fire destroyed his press in early 1849, Noyes seized the opportunity to move his publishing office to New York City, where he could reach people of importance and influence. By April of that year, he had set up a satellite branch of the Oneida Community in Brooklyn, on Willow Place—with a brand-new printing press, a staff of reporters, and easy access to railroads, telegraphs, and steamboats. He soon managed to give copies of his First Annual Report to Greeley and to Henry James—an eccentric intellectual who was the father of Henry James, the novelist, and William James, the psychologist and philosopher. The senior James was a frequent visitor at Willow Place and encouraged Noyes to share his ideas and theology as widely as possible. Upstate, too, the Oneida Community won many friends, despite their exotic practices. Members considered themselves a family, and its head was indisputably John Noyes. His power over his followers was so complete that even his own mother called him “teacher and father.” He controlled his subjects through a process called “mutual criticism,” in which members appeared before a committee that frequently humiliated them with brutal critiques of their personalities and actions. Noyes alone was exempt from criticism—but a challenge soon came from Oneida County’s district attorney. ___________________________________ Excerpted from An Assassin in Utopia: The True Story of a Nineteenth-Century Sex Cult and a President’s Murder, by Susan Wels. Copyright, 2023. Published by Pegasus Books. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. View the full article

My husband and I fell in love with Kauai when we went there for our honeymoon. We’ve been back many times since, and during the pandemic, we decided to live there so I could research the book I was working on. It was supposed to be an upmarket novel like my first two books, but pandemic homeschooling coupled with the state of our world put me in a dark place. My solution: I started killing people in the book. There was an accidental death or two, an intentional murder, stalking, and a drowning. All of which I wrote while sipping Mai Tais at the beach under the sunny sky, sand between my toes. I didn’t know I’d accidentally written a thriller until I showed it to some writing friends and my agent. Someone Else’s Life started off about a Taiwanese-American woman who had lost everything, and she and her husband decide to move to Kauai to start over with their young son. But that’s when things get creepy. As she’s trying to relax in paradise, reality begins to fracture and she feels like she’s being watched. And then a stranger shows up looking for refuge during a terrible storm. But as the night goes on, she realizes this is no stranger and she just might lose everything. For me, thrillers set in stunning locations like Kauai are all the more delicious for the juxtaposition of beautiful settings and dark deeds. If you want to be creeped out or solve a mystery all while arm-chair traveling to a magical paradise, check out the list of books below. The Goddesses by Swan Huntley Nancy and her family move to Kona on the Big Island of Hawaii to start over. Her husband has cheated on her and her kids have been acting out. But she is hopeful that the beautiful paradise will help them make a new life. Then she meets Ana, a charismatic yoga teacher she is drawn to. They become close and Nancy has never been happier. But she will soon find out Ana is not as she seems. The Guest List by Lucy Foley A remote island off the coast of Ireland is the perfect backdrop for this twisty tale, told from several points of views including the bride, the plus one, the wedding planner, the best man, and the bridesmaid. The spotty cell service and rough waters off the island only adds to the chilling atmosphere of this swanky celebrity wedding turned oh-so-wrong when a dead body is discovered. Who is it? And who among them is the murderer? You’re Invited by Amanda Jayatissa When Amaya gets an invitation to her former best friend Kaavi’s wedding to Amaya’s ex-boyfriend, she knows she must go to Sri Lanka to stop this wedding. Taking place at the private beach at the Mount Lavinia Hotel, this over-the-top wedding is the backdrop for possible murder when the bride disappears and is presumed dead. Amaya has a target on her back but not everything is as it seems. Set on the outskirts of Colombo overlooking the sea, Jayatissa masterfully brings you to Sri Lanka as she unravels each wedding guests’ motivations. Bones of Hilo by Eric Redman A young, inexperienced detective from the wet, working-class side of Hawaii’s Big Island gets the chance of a lifetime when the mainland developer of an unpopular resort on the island’s tourist side is found murdered on a luxury golf course, an ancient Hawaiian spear driven through his heart. This book is a deep dive into the Hawaiian culture and people, and the island’s ancient past. Filled with local color that goes beyond the tropical paradise that Hawaii is known for, this mystery will suck you in while showing you a whole new side of Big Island. The Beach House by P.R. Black A couple, Cora and Jonathan, are vacationing on a private island in the Caribbean, and things are looking up when he proposes. At first, it feels like paradise and Cora couldn’t be happier. But they soon realize the island isn’t private after all. There’s another couple, who look eerily like them, and are a bit too friendly for Cora’s liking. Things soon become sinister and turns deadly as their vacation becomes their worst nightmare. Destination Maui by Ann Shepphird A travel writer, Sam Powers is excited to go on her first official press trip to a luxury resort on the Hawaiian island of Maui. There, she meets her fellow travel writers and the resort representatives hosting the trip. When one of the writers (someone who almost everyone else has a reason to want to kill) is found dead in his suite, everyone becomes a suspect. Sam used to be an investigative reporter, and uses her skills to help the handsome, single Maui detective solve the crime. This cozy mystery set in paradise will transport you to Maui if you need an escape. Or it’s the perfect book to take along if you’re going on vacation, a tropical drink in hand as you lay out on the beach or by the pool. *** View the full article

TERROR UNDELETED CHAPTER 1   Why bloody fingerprints on that note from his dad? Now was the wrong time to ask—a smear of senseless... as senseless as killing men he knew nothing about. But here he was. They moved up across the park-side to the back entrance, the one where the dope-fiends gathered in a tight company of pissy whiffs and shit-talking with hands…. The fiends made way without a third thought, keeping their chatter steady and casual, as the hooded men wedged through, guns downward….   Nico counted four men, between his own desperate heartbeats, himself included. Being 14 didn’t matter now.   “Look here lil’ nigga,” one of men shot back with a turn of his head, the corner of his lip curling with a snarl, “don’t be stallin’ and shit when we get in here.” The man turned forward again, the back of a black hoodie the contour of a bald head beneath. The rest of the thoughts emanated as a halo of sound from that shifting oval. “Still not sure why Chauncey made us bring yo lil’ ass anyway. But time to man up.”   Nicco heard the tone more deafening than the gruff whisper that it sounded. A loud secret that all of them knew as they breathed lower through the dirty hallway.   The growl of anonymous stereos moved the walls like blunted speakers, people mindin’ their own business somewhere. Even the few roaches kept it casual, movin’ up and along that pale wall alongside them. Nicco rolled his eyes up there too... along with his thoughts. If he could listen through those rooms two floors up…. The dudes in there had no idea what was coming—not when….   Like the sun setting away from a day overcast as this one, everybody in the ghetto looked forward to death at some point. It came from a way off, like a sun going down, while that moment could be right there. Like looking out the window and seeing how dark it got outside. In the hood it turned darker than that—this far side of the ghetto. This was a world where, for them, dying from these gunshots would be like dying of natural causes.   They’d all cocked their guns—carriages slid back and slapped forward—before crossing the park outside. So the first gloved hand to reach that battered, steel door to the stairway pushed with confidence, a chrome barrel pointing dull next to the spread fingers.  From here there was not so much as a whisper. And at the pace of gestures and glances they made their way to the second floor. Up there the door was missing to the hallway, and a steady exhalation from that square throat put many things on Nicco’s mind; beer poured out in memory of that special, dead homie... the linear multitude of such rituals, and the pissing sessions that followed them all.... There was a gravity he could feel with those deeper vibrations of music, and his black-gloved hand, smaller than the others, slid subconsciously along the hallway wall in passing—shhh. He heard the sound, a tranquility of heaviness infused into the essence of this space, an aroma of heated chicken somewhere, (probably frying in old pork grease, next to that slab of salt and butter cornbread).    “Them niggas gotta die this evenin’. It is what it is.” Chauncey’d ordered in the gravest of tones earlier that day, his stare turned focused and telling, as if projecting himself into this very moment. They stepped towards that apartment at the far end, many things on their minds, doubtlessly, or just one thing... and Chauncey’s orders resonated in Nicco’s mind, those deep vibrations… the chicken and salty cornbread… those pissy eulogies… all part of the natural causes they brought—locked and loaded—to the door in front of them.  A boot shifted amongst them in the hall, and a screech shot from inside the door.  “Haa yea bitch!”   It was laughter, that gleeful pitch a black man can make when he wins at dominoes or something.... Nicco had wanted to listen more, his hooded attention coming closer to that door. It was in that split-second that Dozer kicked it, no raising of gloved fingers to count down first, but all guns lifted to catch up with the action.   The door caved from the heavy Timberland boot, that pressed wood moving away in shards from Dozer’s heavy stomp, peeling open that space from the outside in. Frame by frame, Nicco pictured himself in that moment, a witness in the rush of deafening sound, those barrels of natural causes pointing their ways into the small apartment.    That screech of laughter continued, breaking into panic as the door yielded. Same pitch, it was a pleading cry now as the pairs of black boots shuffled wide into stances over the worn, earthen carpet.    “Shut the fuck up!”   Lex slapped the dude whose teeth flashed in open contrast to dark skin, and those first strands of red traced the air in agreement, arcing down like the man’s falling head. It was an open-handed slap that Lex hit him with, along with the pistol in his palm. The man raised his face again, slowly, his large brown eyes leading the way up.    “That’s right,” Lex answered that eye contact, his voice lowering but keeping the tension, “shut the fuck up. You already sounded like a bitch before we came in.” Lex pulled a silencer from his cargo pocket and began to twist it onto the barrel, looking around as he did. There was one other victim there; a tall, lanky dude with skinny jeans and frowning sneakers, a dude with two barrels at his solemn face. The other barrels stayed on the first target of focus. “Dee. My man...” Lex said almost proudly, “Where’s the shit you took from the trap bro? And don’t say nothin’ dumb.” He put the last tightening squeak on the silencer.  Dee hesitated, looking around the little apartment but then stopped, aware of the other eyes that followed his own. He opened his mouth distractedly, teeth flashing again and before a word got out, Lex smacked that grimace like a professional batter, knocking a big tooth onto the bloody tongue. Dee cringed, a tear of acceptance squeezing from the side of his eye. His throat flexed, and the tooth slid down with a gasp.   “Lex.... Bro...” Dee started, his eyes darting quick and round. If he produced the property, he was a dead man. If not, then he would be a tortured soul and then a dead man. They all knew it, as they kept their eyes on him, that reality reflecting more with the sweat on the man’s skin. Dee looked over at his partner just as dead, like looking to a mirror which shared the same, dark fate.    Amidst the heavy breathing, Lex cocked his pistoled hand back, but Dee beat him to the punch, that voice lifted high with a trembling hand.   “Stop! Lex, my nigga! You know I know better than to rob the clique, bro? Yea, we hit dealers and traps and shit around here, but never over Westend.”   Dee’s gaze met his dead partner’s again, the wild ideas orbiting.... His partner’s eyes opened wider at the sight.  “Was it you Skinny?” Dee asked suddenly, determined now to get the answer for himself. “Did you make a move without me Skinny?” his voice ran high again. “You fucked with the clique’s shit....”    Those last words sounded like a final sentencing, not the way questions were supposed to end. And before Skinny could answer with a hell naw I ain’t rob Westend, or something like it, his mouth busted mid-expression, harder than Lex would 'a did it. That gloved hand then wiped the barrel unclean, smearing that nickel dull with the sticky polish.     “Damn Dozer don’t knock the motherfucka out. Might not be able to wake his ass up. Give the nigga brain damage or somethin’ and he won’t tell us what we need to know... he be like duh uh....” Lex’s tone trailed into thoughtfulness. He was searching around the room for himself, his looks retracing the way they’d all seen a scared Dee looking.  Nicco followed so closely he could see the flexing on Lexes chiseled, black face as it slowed, jaws still moving as if he chewed on something.   The apartment was a space defined by the unmoving off-white that they made all the walls in the projects, the perfect pallet for the errant bug no matter how clean one lived. In the middle of that main, indifferent canvas, hung a four-color poster of Tupac Shakur. The rapper watched it all from the corner of his keen eye, no matter where one thought to move in the room.... It reminded Nicco of how rare it was to see the front of anybody’s face around here, how people turned away from you, even when they looked right at you. Tupac followed Nicco from that side eye as Lex led the way.   They stepped past a PlayStation that sat on the floor in front of a large tv, that image of them flexing through the dark screen. Lex passed tall and fluidly, his near stomping motions stretched slower in passing. Nicco’s adolescent physique followed closely, his almond shaped eyes watching edgewise. In the little kitchen Lex threw open cabinet doors—face out of the way just in case—and began rummaging through everything from Chinese takeout containers, that spilled out as Tupperware, to little avalanches of condiment packets. He opened the refrigerator and shook his head over that cold empty light, before turning back to the others.   “Dozer... Nicco, ya'll check the back rooms. Hurt you stay up front with me. And if Skinny moves....” Lex hesitated. “It’s Skinny, right?” Skinny nodded earnestly, and Lex reasserted. “Yea. If that Skinny nigga try somethin’ then you blow his skinny brains out early.”  The two back rooms were systems organized at random, a bed in the center of handle-less dressers, strewn tank-tops under worn ball-caps—store tags dangling—and kicked-off sneakers orbiting closer to the doorway. They circled into that static action, Dozer pausing here and there, mumbling to himself as he came across things of interest. At one point lifting a red and black jersey, he whispered loud over to Nicco, if only because the kid happened to be over there, a quiet sounding board for the gruffest voice.    “Damn! This a throwback jersey from the Bulls last run with Jordan!”  Dozer’s respect stayed with the jersey while Nicco looked from the sideline.  “Ya’ll found anything?” Lex called from up front and Dozer turned with a look of apology, his expression as if the leader stood there before him.   “Nah man,” Dozer recovered visibly, “just some ol’ bullshit.... Lex these niggas got a throwback from the last season of the Bulls with Jordan man...”   “Leave that shit Dozer,” Lex answered, reading those thoughts and questions that would follow from the other room, “when the cops find these niggas it’s gotta be clear this wasn’t no robbery. The more fly shit they find with the bodies the better.”   Up front, Lex turned his gaze back to a sweating Dee. The man’s face was downcast, but those eyes stayed up—a plea of hope, maybe, the kind of hopefulness that understood this was the time of his death. But like a reflex which moved a man to shield his face with a hand of flesh and blood when it was a clip of bullets being fired from the upside of his fingers, Dee’s brown eyes fired-up a pleading look. It was a look that Lex recognized, not shying away or even defending himself. Lex kept eye contact with those teary browns, his own figure wavering tall in those deep watery mirrors.   “I feel you Dee,” he said after a moment of looking, sounding surprisingly empathetic. “Ya'll did what you had to do. Same as we do now.” He placed the hand that was pistol free to the black chest of his hoodie. “I trust you feel me on that....”   Deep in those watery, twin mirrors Lex was seen craning his jawline back towards the bedroom.  “Nicco!”   Nicco stepped into the way from the other rooms, standing there as if he was already expecting to be called, so that Lex might’ve questioned where the teen had come from.... Nicco said nothing if not by the look in his eyes, that recognition of a kneeling Dee before another man, an unnatural position, with a thread of blood trembling lower from his bottom lip. It was a sight that narrowed Nicco’s own gaze with realization. They’d told him the stories that made his skin crawl and now he was here. At a glance’s shot across the room stood the other dead man—Skinny, another barrel pointing-out that defiant posture, a chest swelling with an acceptance greater than its narrow size. Skinny was looking preemptively at Nicco, not a sorrowful or fearful look, but one that glinted dark with understanding... and perhaps, in the end, of forgiveness. Nicco felt his own lips move—an inexplicable mumble at the point of saying God knows what....   Lex interrupted.   “Hey.” he called Nicco’s gaze to attention. “You know what gotta be done, right?”   Nicco swallowed. “Yea...” he answered with a nod, the concerns behind his forehead showing as clear as sweat.   “Yea, that’s right.” Lex nodded with him. “Time for you to put in that work Gee. No shakin’ this one. Since you Chauncey’s favorite and all that, a made man, so to say, we gonna make you a man.”   Nicco’s gaze fell from Lex’s, down into the stares of those about to die, and his head shook slowly between the two—one hopeful... the other accepting....  “Over here Nicco.” Lex rescued him from those haunting looks of deep regret. He motioned for the child to come closer to where he stood taller, that barrel extending through sheets of light that slanted-in from the blinds. The sun was going down outside. Lex pulled off his hood as Nicco approached, that smooth of his bald head looking down over the younger man to be.    “Take off your glove Nicco.” he said in a closer tone that everyone in the room noticed. His was the only voice there, not counting the heavy breaths... the chiming-in of birds and the shrieks of intervention from poor, invisible children somewhere in the distance.... But there was the deafening hum of an empty refrigerator that drowned it all....   The lone witnesses in the room looked on with differing expressions; some of them matter-of-factly, some amused, perhaps, while those that knew understood why Lex had Nicco to take off that glove... why he was now pushing a gun into the boy's hand, wrapping that entire childish grip around it under cover of those larger, gloved fingers.  Nicco felt his own hand twitch then, caught between pulling away and holding on, the consequences of either sparking chain reactions through his mind—into the future. Why without a glove? He wanted to ask and feared that he knew, despite what he wanted to believe. The leather pressed tighter, creases that stretched smoothly over adult knuckles.   “You see, Lil’ Nicco, poppin’ these pussies is like poppin’ your first pussy. You wanna do it raw. It’s feeling the gun in your hand... the begging in their eyes right when you’re about to bust....” Lex took a deep breath and let it go quickly, as if reliving a moment of his own. His eyes opened wide then with a compassion that Nicco swore he felt for himself. “Trust me Neek, you don’t wanna fuck this memory up with no damn glove....”   A gripe arose between them then, a shriek from a kneeling Dee, who’s eyes were wide following the whole thing. Lex raised a thick, rawhide finger to cross his lips, a silent motion heard in the imagination if not the ears—shhh.... “A man is better off dying alone than a man tortured alive with family,” Lex reminded the dead man with the big eyes, a refrain that sounded suspiciously as if thought up under halos of weed smoke, and the philosophical killer looked down with an eye of self-promotion. But it was the pleading gaze of Dee that called for Nicco’s attention, moving his heart with compassion and with it, the even stronger feel of that leather around his hand, the squeeze that Lex was giving him—softly at first, a reminder of where he was and where his life was headed....  ****************************************************************************** Nicco’s head lifted from the desk with a jerk, a movement quick enough to catch the word before it left his lips—No!   It was the sound that always ended the memory, those vivid details fading before his eyes were fully open. The deep regret lingered though; a flashback of scattered blood plastered like abstract art painted by a child’s hand. Now he struggled to fill in the details. His fingers massaged his closed eyelids, pressing luminous prints into that blurred vision inside. To say the memory haunted him was realer than the saying. It was a literal ghost from the past, a fearful nightmare that fled by the time he woke up, a hide-and-seek demon too scared to face him when his eyes were open.   A bell rang, calling his eyes to that metallic orb over the door. With that bell came screeches around him, classroom desks being pushed away—that bustling of the young, standing bodies. School was out, and everybody moved like two-legged racehorses from the start, bookbags and saggy jeans snatched into shuffling airs of sights and sounds out in the hallways.   Westend High had everything from basketball to basketball, without a team, everything from 13-year-old seventh graders crammed in with gown-ass seniors (niggas long out of their teens about to graduate into cars loaded with smoke to circle the schoolgrounds), to teachers who just came to pick up a paycheck, to weave tightly through the droves of budding but experienced teenage bodies.   Nicco felt himself somewhere in the middle of it all, his balance brushed from one side or the other as he made his way through the bustling hallway. There was one thing on his mind, for now, get rid of the last 10 bags by the end of this week. That would put him over the 1000-dollar mark and justify that new virtual reality headset that he needed for the metaverse. He turned the combinations on the thin, orange locker between glances in each direction. The black backpack sat inside, just the way he left it, the zipper closed to two thumbnail-lengths from the top right, a single black thread laced through the eyelet. Nobody had touched it. Nobody would dare unless they wanted a war. He’d pinned an old cafeteria nametag smack in the middle of its face, one he’d laminated himself under strips of clear tape after marking a clear message in permanent black—W.E.C..   Who in their right mind would mess with merch belonging to West End Clique? The answer was nobody in their right mind, which meant somebody around here just might.   He wore the backpack across his chest, like a vest, until he broke from the commotion of the building.   Outside was an overcast day, cottony grey blankets moving over his head with just enough sun peeking through. He thought-up the best way to get rid of the tiny bags of cocaine that slung from his back with other things—schoolbooks, thin stacks of paper and thicker binders.... over everything he felt the weight of those little packets. He was getting tired of being a runner for the clique. He was tired the day he started. It was overcast that day too, though he’d forgotten for the moment in that third-floor room, far behind the reinforced doors laden with gunmen that talked shit through four-hour shifts. It was there that Chauncey handed him the first bundle to run across westside—15 minutes standing on an electric scooter, according to the GPS. It was an overcast day and he felt just as tired as he ever would. It wasn’t long after that he got the big idea to cut a little from the bundles, dropping bits of the coke, each time, into tiny gram bags.   He shifted his shoulder without looking around, raising that weight of the strap a little higher.   Finding the right time to cut from the bundles was no small feat when a tracker flashed—a winking in the background of Chauncey’s ongoing conversation, he imagined—whenever the scooter stalled for more than a couple minutes. He found there were always dead spots though, the signal indicator spinning where he could do his thing along the route, burning the plastic cuts back together and slipping out of that alley or from beneath an underpass. He’d do it in time for Chauncey nem’ to suspect the weak spots in the tracking signal. As long as the product made it with no complaints from the buyer, everybody came to trust him more, as in distrust him less. It was that, or he wasn’t greedy enough for anybody to speak on it. He was, after all, Nicco Myles, the only surviving blood of the late Terrance Myles, original founder of West End. That name meant something. It was an inheritance that dudes would kill for around here; the bodies and the rep that they built, like laying bricks, the status of being family of a Westend ground-layer. Yea, that Terrance was a bad motherfucka, as his Aunty often said so affectionately, and so everyone else reminded him. The problem was he didn’t get to know the man. More than that, this was an inheritance he didn’t plan to show up for. The hood could have it.   “Son get out these streets if it’s the last thing you do. If you have to die, then do it.”   He was whispering aloud again, his daddy’s words from the grave. They passed with a breeze and a highschooler’s voice that was growing deeper. He heard it for himself and smiled before reciting the message again.... But a timely wind took it from his ears and the howling was all he heard. He had the note at home. That crumpled note was all the man had left him. It was all and it was everything. It was the note that put words to what he’d felt but could never say. He didn’t belong in the clique, not even as a runner. And the day that Chauncey finally delivered that message from his father, that note written in the man’s own dying hand, the bloodstained fingerprints impressed on his mind forever. He had eclipsed those bloody prints with his own anxious touch that day, that larger halo of crimson around his fingertips. Reading from that piece of torn paper, word by word, he had felt a stronger voice passed down to him, a voice in which he could no longer lie to himself. He wasn’t meant to take his father’s place—not in the streets. That bloody generational curse had to be broken. And so help him God, he was the one to break it, if he had to die to do it.     CHAPTER 2 “I don’t know what the fuck you think this is! I know you makin’ more than you been givin’ Nicco—way more!” She pushed strands of lifeless blond from the eye that she kept on him.   “How you know that, Aunty? I don’t be makin’ moves out here like that. I be focused more on my schoolwork.” He stayed calm between breaths, holding his voice lower than hers. He’d learned before he could even talk, that getting carried away with her feelings would take them both to the same place—nowhere-and-back.   “Aunty for real I’m bout to make some moves and it’s gonna be all good trust me.”   “Nicco you can’t make no real moves in a fake world. That online shit ain’t gonna pay the rent no matter how good you get at it.” She looked at him expectedly, her breath of silence like a loud warning. He had to say something that made sense to her.   “Aunty, I am making real moves in the streets. The internet games is just a hobby... for real.” His voice elevated at the end, but not in a way that questioned. In the end he had to meet her where she was at, bring her back down to earth. He didn’t bother to explain about the tournament, how he could win ten thousand just for fourth place. He didn’t plan to settle for fourth though. And to take first place in the tournament, he had to put the tournament in first place. Fifty thousand dollars... an all-expense paid trip to Newyork to play in the nationals... his brand mentioned in articles and all the gaming reviews... endorsements and fame... and he wouldn't have to kill nobody. He stood unmoved in front of her scrutiny, that excitedness of his thoughts being wiped behind blinking eyelids. The best prize would be getting out of this raggedy fuckin’ house... outta Westend Clique... outta Chicago... outta this fake, fuckin’ world.  “Hmm....” she gave him the side eye as she turned away. “Well next month gimme two thousand Nicco.” She overtalked those suspicions that she couldn’t quite articulate, strands of the synthetic hair returning listless over her expectant eye.   He knew she was tryin’ him, just like everybody else. He knew that the rent was only 800. He provided his own food, and the utilities he used was the showers and sips of water he took between gaming modules—less electricity in reality than he felt when he was connected to the meta-world.  “Okay aunty. I got you.” he said, the look in his eye borderline telling as he turned away. She was already sitting back on the couch, her leg flexing loosely over the other, that fluffy pink bathrobe parting from a brown thigh. Her favorite show was on again, Real Ghetto something, and she ended that whole intermission as easily as changing a channel in her mind. He shook his head in that short distance. Now she looked happy. For better or for worse, that was good enough. He took what he could get.    Upstairs he went straight to the computer and pushed the power. It would have time warm up while he went to the bathroom. He’d wait until everything loaded before turning on the surround sound, less static build throughout the module that way, real science to work in a downloadable metaverse. That smile on his face teased him from the inside. He washed his hands and splashed water over those tight, black curls and the forehead beneath them, before raising that look, almost hesitantly, to where his face awaited—split between that long crack that ran-up the length of the mirror. The water streamed down the cheeks on both halves of himself, where it felt natural, more soothing than he cared to admit as it trickled from his eyelashes, like teardrops he had to make himself feel. Here in this bathroom, it was the closest he ever came to crying. His focus lifted, the water sparkling with the almond of his gaze to where the note hung at the top of the glass.   Son get out these streets if it’s the last thing you do. If you have to die to then do it  Those blood-prints over time became what sealed the message more than the few words that a dying father could say, his last breaths weakening with the grip on a sticky pen.... He turned from that broken mirror, determined as ever, leaving those sharded reflections of himself to merge behind his back as he left the bathroom.   ****************************************************************************** In that world of concrete and tar he was Nicco Myles, heir to a kingdom of unthinkable violence, a kingdom whose rulership was over unruly poverty, the drug-dealing and recklessness that really ruled the streets, all those loyal subjects, on the inside and out, being users themselves. While here, in the meta-verse, he was The Black Scarface Samurai, the meta-man who took no shit and kicked ass that tried to give it to em’.   Nicco’s pupils constricted with the seriousness, that figure of his avatar dilating onto the screen, those flashing hues of animation changing the angles on his face. He breathed it in, and he swore that he could feel the game loading with the emotions inside... a surging courage that he would need to face his enemy on this next level.... His focus returned to the screen that his eyes had never left.   It was the gleaming bust of the Black Scarface himself. As it spun larger into view, that telling scar on the left side of his scowling expression became visible for a few rotations... and the close-up panned away... until his whole body stood turning slower. The teenager’s fingers touched along the keyboard and straight-away, the samurai agreed with a nod, the spin of his kimono soon flaring from a dark red into silky black with deep crimson borders....  “Colors to match what I’m about to do to these bakas.” Nicco professed, his voice deepening to project real tension into the scenario. He had to go there in his mind, as good as he was, his eyes closing at times as his perceptions sharpened.   The samurai held a veiny-dark hand over the hilt of the sword. It gleamed long down his right leg, the other hand was cloaked in a black glove and rested on the butt of a 50-cal. pistol that hung at his left hip. His bare hand raised reflectively to gather the ponytail of braids that graced the nape of his upper back, a tail slung to one side as he looked suddenly up and to the right. There was lightning overhead, the rumblings of thunder that surrounded the room with the downpour of online comments came streaming down from the top of the screen.    “Blackface! Where the fuck you been?”   “1000 BF for real bro been like 2 whole day my nigga....”   “Black-face ain’t black don’t call him nigger....”   “Let’s hurt em’ today BFS....”   The rain continued until the hand of Nicco turned off the feed of live comments. He needed to focus, get a good lead in the opening as the Black Scarface took-off to the right of the home screen, leaving the static animation there—slow greenery and still bamboo shoots—to fade without his presence.   The next screen opened like walking through a curtain, that oculus rising around the furthest of his peripheral. The sky was overcast here, darkness to overcome the random streaks of lightning over the roving fields around him. In the distant, surround sound could be heard the hordes of the soulless, their sleepless howling at the horizon. The soulless never slept. It was the one advantage they had over the living. And they were sniffing his lonely presence, a telltale of the downwinds and he heard them, doubtlessly closer than they sounded from against the breeze. It was a closer screeching of their boney talons as they sharpened, as they did, across the faces of stone that they scraped in passing. The time was soon upon him, with only one way to kill them all.    CHAPTER 3 The Black Face Samurai in all his glory dashed from the scene, tucking under her right hand that touched at the screen, the leaves tumbling after his wake and the crimson of his kimono a fading hue….   Sasha watched it closely, feeling those last scintillating moments as her own breaths slowed to the pace of the bonsai trees that roused languidly, fading alone amidst the stiff reeds. She heard that breeze with the breath that escaped her, saw that delicate reluctance in her own hand as she reached to close the laptop.   She had been following the Samurai, a guilty pleasure since she first saw his play a year ago this day, back when he had a mere dozen followers. Now he was big, so big that he didn’t respond to her comments like before. Everybody had comments on what he looked like, who he really was. He seemed childish to her, a highschooler at best. After all, what mature adult would name themselves Black Scarface Samurai? Maybe he was black, she considered and not for the first time, touching her bottom lip with a pointed finger. What had really captivated her at first was the catch-phrase he used….  “I am honestly of the weeds that grow-up through cracks in their concrete,” he had wrote and left it there on his home-screens, graffiti-style on a weathered brick wall. She loved it instantly, opening her eyes as large as she’d ever felt them when she saw it for the first time, shocked that she could share so much in common with a stranger far across the earth.   In a rush it took her back, recalling what she had said as a small girl, that teary reflection of herself returning her gaze from those shallow waters of the black sea. She saw herself there again, wading barefoot from the shore as she revisited the moment.     “I’m the rose that grows along the way…” her small girl voice reminded her… the child’s face undulating through the waves of time between them—murky, but unforgotten, “…the unseen places that fat men step,” the girl snapped.       Sasha shuddered from the memory, looking around the sky-level balcony, this new reality for her that spanned the entire westward face of the luxury condominium. Rubbing her hands together, she stood from the unyielding Victorian armchair—the high price of discomfort, she thought. It was cooling out on the balcony. She looked away to where the balcony ended, enough steps to walk a private roof. The sun was lowering to crown the horizon, its reaches of crimson holding her vision level with its own. The city of Paris stirred in the evening as she did, the glittering of headlights starting to course the veiny expanse freeways far below. Forgetting her upright manners, she felt herself crouched for a closer look. That graceless arc to her back, she was as those statuesque angels overlooking the land, the goodness in her heart overruling the bad, as far as she could tell.   What will be like in American city? She wondered quietly between the few languages that she understood, her lips mouthing those thoughts that stemmed from feelings as inarticulable as they were familiar.   “I will go some day.” She said aloud, the heights of the luxury condominium keeping that secret between her and the passing wind, as it consoled her long, raven hair. She raised a hand to gather those billowing strands, the thoughts collecting in her eyes. The sparkles of the city below kindled in that vast darkness, as if awakening in agreement.    Vladimir Ivan Abdulov would take her across the face of the earth, “to the reaches of money and the farthers of willpower,” as he put it, inventing the words when he needed them. The part about love went without saying, she assumed. The fact that the world had labeled her man Vladimir a terrorist, a mass murderer as real as he was now imagined, did nothing slow her resolve. It was that same world with its high-brow society that condemned her once, and for all, to eternal poverty—a Romani whore of the Ukraine being her filthy lot. They stamped her rejected behind the curtains, those silky bangs that still draped her forehead, and all the hopes within.           But here she was, thanks to God and to Vlad, overlooking gran Pa-hee into the distance. She wiped a breeze-driven tear. This view was all the proof that she needed. She believed in this man, this one out of countless living and dead, even of those to be born. Vlad was the one. He snatched her from the deep brothels of Odessa, an action as ever present as the memory. With that same rough hand, he had paid a lifechanging dowry to her poor father before taking her away to France. And then, the most courageous thing; Vladmir waited until she was no longer a child in body to have sex with her. Though she had long lost the innocence in her mind, skipping gratefully into the room to jump on his bed in socks schoolgirl skirts, her laughter rising ever-higher. Once she tried in just a t-shirt and panties light green, his favorite color and that of his eyes… but he scolded her. He had scolded her, and then he waited.  “Let all things be done decently and in order,” he proclaimed, standing up to her—often, she noticed, when it was hard for him to resist himself… to put the long and logical plan ahead of what feelings dictated. It was the phrase he had quoted to a room of his comrades when they told him they would kill roughly twenty-five to one-hundred children, women and men, but only if they struck the train station at the best time, peak time. She had overheard, his dispassionate tone resonating strictly within the walls of that room… as they did in her mind. And she had cried just as many times over throughout their seconds together. But just as many times over she was grateful. For whatever Vlad did he did for the good of them both, for the good of the world.   He had sat her down after finding her there in the hallway, that rough hand softly on her knee, and explained through the tears that streamed her face, the naivety of her expression stopping to tilt with pigtails. Despite how plainly he spoke, it took her to understand, because she wanted to. Besides whatever his words were in that moment, the euphemisms that went over her head, she had seeded her own explanation with the tears. It was a reasoning that made sense to the frightful girl behind the dark, silken curtains, one beautiful brown eye peering through. In order to make things right in the world, people had to die some times. People died all the time. So it was better for them to do it for the right reasons. He had looked pleasantly surprised when she had recovered her skip by the end of that fateful day.   Fast-forwarded to this moment on the balcony, as the years had done, and Vlad and his contacts were planning something big. It was something that would touch millions of people the world over. She didn’t know what it was this time. But she knew it was just the beginning, what would be the epitome of his life’s work and resistance.   “Sasha come, please.” his voice sounded there with her at the edge, and her face turned to that balcony door, the drapes parting there with an unruffled billowing.   The hints of jasmine potpourri lingered higher with the sundown, mingling with the evening and the warmer aromas of chicken confit. Her cheeks lifted with the scent, the smooth olive of her skin burnishing in the dimness. He was cooking her favorite food. And it was her favorite time of day, the end. Along with that first step, she draped her shoulders under the woven shawl, the satin slipping down those bustling contours of her body, and brushed inward with the patio curtains.   CHAPTER 4   The cheering rose as a standing ovation in both his ears, their presence from the headsets filling the whole room and even his mind with the unspeakable possibility. It was something that could only be shouted as they did, and still he sat in disbelief.    Nicco felt himself swooned from their waves of praise, his body unmoving in front of the computer, as it all unfolded. It was a flaring of celebratory lights like rain rising and falling again, a storming of commentary typed-in by fingers of every color, a rainbowing of nations around the word—around the metaverse, and smart devices, more precisely. And it was all for him, The Black Scarface Samurai, secret identity; Nicco Myles.   He had just finished the high challenge of the 3rd round, the one that mattered. More than that, he finished number 1 out of the elite players! moving him with a waving kimono one step closer to finals—one step out of three ahead, a distance too short ignore and too infinite to think about.  “You kicked ass Black Face!” Skinny sounded like a high-note reaching him in there in the clouds. Skinny was the only one of the squad who never failed to pull him from those distracted planes.   “Black,” he emphasized, closer in his right ear, “it’s your moment bro! you might wanna be here.”        Skinny’s avatar was a tall, lanky ninja that stood there shrouded in white (ironically), something that made the veil under his sky-blue eyes look more like a surgical mask. His face pulled away from the camera as Nicco looked, that slender arm sweeping away with a large hand, motioning to all those comments in the backdrop.   “Say something to somebody bro.”   The comments from around the world rained enough to animate the sky, the lapses of lightening outlining those clouds of dark letters that drifted in the distance…. The letters continued to gather and rain, streaming down into discernable words and sentences that grew close enough to read before fading at the bottom of his screen.  “I believe in you BSF…” BigAsMidget.  “Never give up on your get down Black…” MeSheLeft.  “Black scarred face Samurai… are you a nigger?” WiteRiteBoy.  “One day world bigger than metaverse will know you….” TheRoseThatGros_AlongTheWay.   He lingered in the comments longer than he realized, that last one not fading, as the others had, until he realized that it was still on his mind. That weird thing was happening again, when the moments seemed to slow with a vague familiarity, almost stopping time… taking him back to a moment where he had been before. It seemed to happen when his heart raced past a certain point, a certain speed. Finding himself in this space again, it dawned on him what it was; he remembered seeing those exact words somewhere…. But it was here…. It had to be here, since this was the first time he won the 3rd round of this competition—the only time. This was the only time that TheRoseThatGros could have ever congratulated him for it. He moved to grip the sides of his head, cupping the headphones there instead. His eyes closed with focus.  One day, a world bigger than the metaverse will know you.   He thought about it. And with a budding sense of fear, decided that it was impossible. Deeper in his heart though, down in the subconscious, the questions remained as always.   In the room he shook his head no to the impossible, watching that comment erase as the others had.   Whatever these strange moments where, when he remembered being where he found himself for the first time, he hoped he would grow out of them. They were happening more often in his moments of excitement, stronger since he had reached puberty, since that first wet dream, as his aunty put it. He sat there, his hands patient at the sides of his head until he felt it pass, the beating of his heart as normal as his breathing again. He took off the headsets, feeling a smile broadening to take up the space. This moment was real. He had really won. On top of that, he had finished 1st place! Time to flex on these bakas.  “I can’t have y’all talking me into starting another board yet.” He sneered at them all, alone in his room. “A Samurai’s got to heal from his wounds before the next battle. I’m out stage right!”   The words typed nearly as fast as he voiced them, his lips in sync with the clicking of the keyboard…. The last period was pressed with a pointed finger.  ******************************************************************************    “Man you be on one with all that internet shit bro.”   Buck pulled out the slender, brown cigarillo like one of his own fingers, jabbing at Nicco as he emphasized the point.   “If you spent as much time on the scooter as you did on your ass in front of that computer…. Man….”  He stalled, apparently not able to finish on the positive note he’d had in mind. His eyes aimed harder at Nicco instead, as if to make his friend see something that he himself had no words for.   Nicco slowed the pace of his steps, turning his attention to the muted. It was unlike Buck. The two matched gazes too brief to be awkward—the far shriek of a car almost crashing somewhere and the insistent barking of dogs in the background.    “Buck, how many times I got to tell you? It’s for the championships, bro, nationals. Think basketball. If I win it—when I win it—I’m a get up out this hood bro. Stacks and racks my nigga… geeky bitches that come in paisley panty, the color of money and freedom.” He grinned, the gleam in his eye a persuasive focus. Buck looked unconvinced. The blunt jabbed again, now smoking, and Buck answered to the contrary, a voice pushed between inhaling breaths.   “See? What the fuck I mean, my nigga. You weird. The fuck is paisley? Who says that?” His eyes opened slightly wider. “You spendin’ too much time on the internet with them white boys and shit. They puttin’ that crazy shit in your head.” With that, he offered the cigarillo, his whole arm extended for as long as it took for Nicco to reconsider.   “I’m good today bro.” Nicco said, returning to that normal pace. His focus went back to the street ahead, while Buck’s gaze lingered at the side of his face, the scrutiny of someone who examined a problem on feet.  The last few blocks to school turned the conversation back to the usual, the two of them meeting in the middle over females… fights… over who died recently and how…. In the end, Buck always asked about when he’d get to run packs for Westend, make some money like his friend. In so many words, questioning if his bro was really doing enough to make it happen. This time, surprisingly, the subject didn’t come up. They made it to school, ending the exchange on mutual grounds. The word was fuck the police, and niggas ain’t shit.     ******************************************************************************    School that day was a different kind of normal, like every day in a free-for-all body-grabbing, teeth-bared with reckless laughter, dashed with droplets of smashing red now and then... all before the odor of foodstuff grew from the cafeteria enough to cloak the back of their minds with nauseousness… cheese-stuff, fish-eyed day all through the hallways, another reason to get the hell outta Dodge before the bell rang.   Anyway, he still had packs to get rid of—lighten his bookbag, so he could at least wear it as a backpack and not a vest for the rest of the week. He looked forward to it, a week closer to the final boards in Angels Over Dragons, Secret Societies, the game that had brought promise to his life and now, shit was getting real. He was really moving into the last phases, and had to make sure he played it just right. To that end, during 5th hour, he leaned over and told Buck that today was the day. “Today’s the day bro,” he whispered, as if somebody might sense what he said amidst all the noise. A few heads did turn in time to see him leaning back in his chair, a sly return to his drawing of the scar-faced samurai, that nonchalant expression of black and white. Violence of the mind is the foremost runner of warfare, he wrote the black samurai’s thoughts carefully below the picture, sensing it somehow relevant. It was a good time to let his friend in on the game, shut the nigga up for a while and let him make a little money. He could tell that the news excited Buck who, if past experience was any teacher, was thinking about a car packed with heavy bass, heavy smoke and heavy booty, in that order, sort of. The dude was so excited he held the smile in, acting instead like everything was cool… not asking out loud, but not turning away.  “Yea bro, I’m serious,” Nicco answered that silent interrogation, “Today we’ll go down by the park where them skateboarders be.” Buck started to look away then, satisfied before Nicco called him back for one more look. “Buck, you know you just helpin’ me right? We gonna get this little weight off. This just between you and me.”    Buck smacked his lips, of course, and looked elsewhere, eyes turning away before his face.    “Hey Angie,” he voiced triumphantly across the room to where a girl’s dark face turned, her grin widening with the preemptive surprise… “what color is your paisley panties?”   The room thundered from the tennis shoes to lifting hands all the way up until the bell rang. That Buck say nothing about the packs went without saying, especially in Westend. It was a small world.  *************************************************************************************   After school they walked the way of the skate park, after finally breaking Buck away from much fun and people. Nicco told him that business wasn’t about fuckin’ around unless you was a hoe, a friendly reminder that triggered a slap-boxing session between the two, a ready-made crowd there watching, just in case. Sometimes shit got real, but never between Nicco and Buck, nothing more serious than the skin stinging on their faces.   At the fourth block they passed that same German Shepard that snarled and barked for no other reason—pissed off, they both could imagine.   “You dirty bitch! That was your last time motherfucka!”   It was Raymond—his new name straggly dope fiend—that shot from a tight space between houses to the right. Nicco and Buck fell back within the click of a second hand, their eyes trained already with the sudden curiosity.   That dope-fiend floated out followed by the hiss of a bowie-knife. The knife jabbed at his sweaty temple in passing, tumbling ahead with a clanging into the street.   “What the fuck…” Buck broke the spellbinding shock, but stopped short again, his eyes flaring….    Lex himself came shooting into the space of a few long strides after the dope fiend, the two boys standing straighter as he passed. He seemed to sneer with an awareness of the figures drifting motionless past his left, his full intent steady towards that dope fiend that now stumbled past the shore of the boulevard, falling hands-out into the street.    The addict flailed into the middle of the hard, black flow-way after the momentum of that bowie knife and Lex landed in tow, his black timberlands stopping into stomps, a piston blending of effervescent crimson and tarry backdrop….     That bigmouthed German Shepard edged it on now, blood in the air exciting beyond words he barked, teeth and gums baring…. Lex joined-in at the hectic pace of the stomping.    “I-told-you-motha-fucka!”       Still spellbound, Buck moved to join them.    “What you doin’ yo?”  Nicco grabbed him, an instinct that drew back as Buck turned.     “Nicco this our chance to put in work for the set bro!” Buck exclaimed on a higher note, that explanation short as a wild urge barely contained. And in those eyes Nicco was forced to acknowledge something that had been revealed to him countless times. His friend was more of a subdued savage than a rebellious adolescent. He had to face it right then and there; Buck was cool with life in the hood, always had been, down to do whatever it took to get a gangster’s respect, which was fear.   Moving past Nicco’s hand, Buck had gone down into the street with a nod, helping Lex by pulling rearward on the dope fiend’s shoulder-length dreadlocks. That fiendish, slender neck craned backward as Lex stepped over to recover the fallen bowie-knife, the measure of a man’s forearm. Nicco covered his own eyes then, not with a steady hand, but with steady shades from within himself, a dark and solemn reality that he had grown to accept. Everybody wore shades in the hood, though they were different kinds. Seeing what Lex and Buck were doing to the man in the middle of the street and broad daylight, he needed shades to face this ugly reality. He was more alone than he liked to pretend.     “Neek.” Buck chose to call him with a graver, stranger voice like the one inhaled in his chest with blunt smoke. “Nicco,” he breathed heavier, you gonna help with this?” His desperate tone, along with the pleading slant to his eyes, was on the verge of demanding outright... get some dirt on your hands to stay clean in these streets, is how they said it.    Lex looked too, but only briefly. He turned back to that path of the bowie knife in his own hand. He was making a point with the man’s pleading face, pulling reflections along the surface of that metal turned sharp and blinding in the sun…. Lex’s gaze seemed somewhere beyond the screaming dope fiend by now, gone to some happy place ahead of that roving red line that zippered slowly up the side of the fiend’s neck, those screaming veins popping even more as the tip of the knife drew up towards the jawline.   “Please Lex,” said the screams, now tuning like through a harmonica of desperation. “Promise I’ll get you the twenty dollars todaaaay!”  “Today is over,” Lex said simply, his words leveled as if to someone beyond, someone equally as calm in that place where his attention seemed to had gone... while the man beneath him was all-out screaming again, his body contorting from the neck down. Buck pulled back harder, his eyes squinted invisible while beneath them, the sharpening of that knife drew its red streak to the side of a bulging eyeball. The fiend looked like a dumb horse when bridled, struggling to turn his head and see, that big eye at the side trying to look around behind.   Buck swirled his wrists, a winding of several nappy strands and reined back harder, his fingers threaded and clenching with the fiend’s dreadlocks…. His eyes still shaded, Buck turned that dark and disappointed expression towards his friend beyond the street.  Nicco stood unmoved up on the sidewalk—topside of the boulevard. From there he could see that thin, red line Lex had drawn in the skin—the ink of deep red and an artful side-eye…. That line expanded from a zippering into a streaming of blood and veil, masking the fiend’s gasping face under that translucent paint, those tendons and sinews animating down that neck over slender shoulders.   Nicco’s eyes blinked, those flesh and blood lenses capturing this memory while the alarming of that German Shepard sounded louder in his ears, the sharp teeth flashing again…. Sirens were coming from more distant streets.   “We gotta get outta here!” he barked, his own teeth flashing at Buck who, like an afterthought, let go of the nappy hair. The man’s head nodded with a crack to the street.  Lex stood from his work too then, gathering himself within a few deep breaths. Sirens grew noticeably, the wailing of a different mankind, as he pulled a black glove more snuggly onto his right hand…. Then, as he turned away, he pointed a single finger of the bloodstained thing back towards Nicco, sending that message far across the street.   Lex might have winked… or it was a trick of winking sunlight. Nicco couldn’t tell then and there. There was only the rising sirens in surround sound… a breeze of blood turning from an unwashed body in the street, and the hysterical snarling of a chained animal whose wilder instincts had been triggered.    Nicco felt himself turn the opposite way, his shoes leaving from the sidewalk once Buck stepped close enough to match his momentum. The two ran between the same houses from which it had all unfolded, the sirens on the block behind them close enough to see.   They shuffled thinner between the walls, panting over the worn ground where Raymond likely slept, smoking any bits of money he got his sorrowful hands on over time. Nicco thought about it, his eyes opening to the right as they swerved. They dashed through old man Jackson’s yard, the white of a Raymond’s deeper flesh expanding bright in his mind.   Old man Jackson knew the boys and so did his two pit bulls, their barking more excited than anything, as the teenagers leapt the fence and sprinted across. The dogs trailed in full stride to keep up, sniffing Buck and Nicco recalled, with a reflective blink, that image of Lex and the blood-soaked finger… the heaving as the man pointed his way.  He ducked quick under the crossbar of a metal fence torn open, a makeshift gateway through which the footsteps of his friend followed behind. He knew intuitively what Lex meant by pointing that way, but that same intuition put to words could be said in very different ways, all of them just as real. The reality was that he would never say anything about what happened to the police or anybody like em’. In reality he was highly favored by Chauncey, the leader of Westend, and therefore had to be acknowledged and respected. It was also a reality, however, that anyone can be touched. All these different conclusions could be drawn from the pointing of one, bloody finger… and at the same time, they were all just as real.   “Which way we goin’ Nicco?”   Buck asked with the last, pounding steps that it took him to catch up, and left it at that, his chest heaving. He really had more to say and they both knew it. For the moment, those heaving breaths and teary stare said it all.  “Buck, Just walk home man—”   “—Just walk home?” Buck echoed, his tone asking if Nicco was crazy for real.   “Look we done bent the whole block.” Nicco explained. For some reason he could see old man Jackson was peering from a slit in his blinds, his cottony head nodding the way old heads did when they knew everything. “You know how many niggas is out on the streets right now? They ain’t got enough police to run everybody down and ask questions, especially not over just another black man with his face cut open.”   Nicco’s look was as steadfast as it was from the sidewalk. Buck looked as if he wanted to speak to it—speak to that just another black man shit.   “Nigga, what you talkin’ about?”   “Buck it’s coo. They ain’t comin’ for us over Raymond the dope fiend bro. That’s what I’m sayin’.”   Buck seemed to listen quicker then, his head turning down as he nodded.  “Yea yea…. You right.” he agreed, but lifted his head with eye-contact. “But we gotta get them packs off though Neek. Don’t get them packs off without me bro!”    Buck only called him Neek when it was something as important as this, the equivalent of grabbing him by the collar, a stare before shaking.     “Alright Buck damn. Can we not go to jail first?” He brushed the front of his T-shirt where something had stuck while they ran. “Hit me up tomorrow. We can go after schoo—”   “—School?” Buck looked confused, but didn’t ask. He started to shake his head, a turning away that didn’t look back. “Alright weird as nigga.” He left the words over his shoulder.   ******************************************************************************   The pretend chase was over, the men in uniforms circling back to brighter places, Nicco imagined, to share jokes of tragedies all part of the job—peeling red stories back over black coffee. The sirens that had called for them in passing had died, the more natural alarming of unseen crickets filling the wake by the time he headed home. He had doubled back and rested for a while under Old Man Jackson’s porch, one or another of the dogs keeping whining company with him until, with a yawn, he’d arose to leave. The police should’ve eased any searches by now, he thought. Regardless of what he’d said to Buck at first, or himself, on second thought he wasn’t taking any chances. At home, the metaverse was waiting. It was this greater reality that flourished in his mind, those crickets sirening higher in the night. In the anticipation of it he thought up one of those starry evenfalls over Japan…. If this were there, and he the samurai, a fitting proverb would unfurl as a scrolling from the heavens right about now… even over the ghetto. And to the wistful serenade of wayward flutes he would recite it for himself.   He had done better to put the metaverse off for a few hours, as he hid from the real white people, than to be dead to it for 3 to 6 months as he grew older in juvenile detention. This was especially true when it came to consequences for an act in which he had taken no part.   Hm....   He touched his chin thoughtfully, wanting for more stands of beard as he mulled-over that proverb, thinking about where he was. And when his eyes came down from the sky, opening to the level reality around him, he added two sentences of his own. “And perhaps Buck is right. Perhaps Nicco Myles is getting weirder by the day.”  ******************************************************************************   Upstairs was waiting, and he was damn-near there, on levels deeper than the subconscious, mumbling something that he wouldn’t recall as he walked into the house. It was unusually dim in the front, and within a few long strides he found himself in the aroma clouds of incense. It was a tearful barrage of cheap Black Love, the brand that his aunt loved to burn for her “special occasions.” She had special occasions for everything and every time he turned around.   “Nicco where you been?”    Her voice reached his ears and the image of her eyes big in the dimness was as real as it sounded. He looked across the living room into the kitchen, where he pictured her to be, and saw the man first. It was a taller dude, dark and loose clothes draping him in part-silhouette. The eyes were there, down as much as the brim over his forehead, tipping up a little to acknowledge the surprise.    What’s up, the dude said with a nod, his lips never opening.  Nicco looked at his aunt instead, not as surprised as a normal teen would be to find a stranger different than the last one in the house. His aunt passed the smoking blunt to the unknown dude, who took it with a slowed reflex.   His aunt, lips curved to the side like a deviated cannon, blew out what was left in her lungs in one long stream, not taking her eyes off her newly arrived nephew. The time and it took with that blank expression said he had to wait. “You got the money?” she said finally, almost coughing, and struck that satin robe that jiggled loose over her breasts. The unknown dude looked ready to help.   “Well?” she pressed her nephew, the lashes over her eyes curving upwards.     “Aunty I got you. Something went down today and I couldn’t get to the spot. but I’m a pick it up tomorrow after school.”   “You got school?” she asked, moving strands from her eye.   “Tomorrow’s Friday, aunty.” He reminded her. “I got you.”   As he turned away, she was turning towards the man, a soft smile replacing her gaze. As far as Nicco was concerned, that smile of hers was misguided—always at an angle other than the front, something that used to make him move his own face around, trying to put himself in line. But he had long given up on being the target of her eyes and teeth. Her eyes were always glossy with anger or something else, her teeth appearing only for her to laugh.   She was laughing behind him as he went upstairs. When went into the bathroom, recited his father’s words in a lowered voice and, after looking those split versions of himself in the eyes, went to give his undivided attention to the next board….  “Aaahh stop it!”   His aunt shrieked from downstairs, stopping him in a crouched position over the chair, the headset held short of crowning himself.   “Stop I said.” her voice again, now softer… too soft, he thought, for the command she was giving.   There was a crashing sound, like dishes pushed aside on the counter, a couple of them tumbling to the floor.    Yeah, he thought. Just the way her lazy ass would make space on the countertop.  There was more of her commands, even softer—heavier, as he envisioned her bounced down on the counter, that flashy satin robe spreading from the rounded gravity of her hips.   “We gotta be quiet Allen.” She commanded. “He up there with them headphones but I don’t want em’ to hear.”       A moment passed, heated long enough for a raptor nail to point at the television remote, which then turned up louder than they could stand down there, some news story about the latest violence spiced with random moaning and profanity… a couple dishes breaking.   Bitch, he thought, or he actually heard it, between himself, Allen and the face of that newscaster down there…. It could’ve been any one of them, or all three together. Frowning with frustration, he turned up the surround on the game all the way. If he went deaf, he would simply change his name in the metaverse—add D to it or something. But at least he wouldn’t have to hear all her bitching and moaning. *****************************************************************************     He couldn’t turn that background music on quick enough, though he did it quick, something to fill-in the down times in the game, instead of the clapping and clamor that competed from downstairs. Tupac was a voice strong enough—So Many Tears, says the man. Pac was old school, dead before he was born, but this old school was a throwback to when rappers had something to say about the world beyond the block. He felt like an old soul like that, and put the track on repeat when he went to the comments screen to scroll, catching up with those foreign thoughts past and present. A smile blossomed on his face until he stopped it, his teeth partially revealed.    The Rose That Grows had left him another message. He couldn’t believe it. Out of all his followers she managed to stand out, giving is eyes something to see whenever he looked. He couldn’t avoid wondering who she was, especially at times like this when her timing, right before his eyes, was impossible.   “Fuck them BFS. No distractions here.” Her letters were feeding across the opening screens, rounding over those dazzled nuances in his eyes. He thought about her being somewhere in the real world. She was typing in real time right now, and he wondered where and what that scene was like. “You got this, my samurai,” she said, and he wondered if she whispered where she was, or did she only say it with her fingers…. “Congrats on winning next phase. We all are wait for to see you go national love…. You cannot longer hide the face….”   He touched the high side of his cheek as he read, surprised at a drop of wetness that smeared with the tip of his finger there—a tear? but then, it was only because he hadn’t blinked. He took a breath, that sniffle outside the headsets. He didn’t hear it. He tried to place her accent in his mind—Dutch?   “You must be following me outside this metaverse Rose That Grows…” he clicked into the screen “…cuz girl your timing is unreal….” He paused, wanting to say something clever that would read as natural, the questions and possibilities expanding his brain inside the headsets…. He typed faster with two fingers. “What time is it where you at?”      He waited and he watched…. Could’ve been a whole 4 seconds, as the last of her last comment vanished in 3-D at the bottom of the screen, short of where his chest heaved in the room. There was nothing more, only the stream of hollowing words that came like a conveyor belt from the rest of the faceless followers—some sincere, others sincerely antagonizing.  Ducking the dreads of his ponytail as one through the rains of commentary, The Samurai passed through that veil of them—their voices sharper as he did but then, falling-away like sirens past his headset—as he emerged into that far-side…. It was a city grown of shifted bricks and steel buildings, the cracks and poles thereof sheathed in high-reaching foliage, the natural hand of an encroaching countryside.   A samurai could only look at first, the incessant chiming of birds and the like turning his head… while a sudden roar from the distance kept that same head still. This board spoke for itself.   “Well I’ll be damned,” said an astonished teenager, somewhere between an upstairs bedroom in Chicago, and this dystopian City of Wasure Rareta. “The challenge of No Teorisuto, (The Terrorist).”  CHAPTER 5 By the time she saw that she was not alone on the balcony it was too late. Vlad came from behind her, his broad-shouldered reflection taking over the screen before she could close the laptop. At that point she did not try, would have shown something to hide. Instead she moved the pointer innocently, her head curiously to the side as the shopping results loaded. “Who is this that asks you the time where you are?”   His voice rose above the wind on the terrace. She felt as if it carried just as far, as the climbing roses on the trellis fluttered eastward.   “Who is this, Sasha?”   He had experience in espionage and intelligence extraction, his senses sharper than that blade strapped under his pants leg. The chances were slim that he would not notice, even though she had changed the screen in time. Now it was a slim chance cut in half that he would ask a third time. She had better answer.    “Sasha….” The impatience in his voice agreed.   She turned, showing her eyes dark with innocence, the jet black of her hair swiping her face…. She captivated his attention, though it was all but too late. He looked at her with new admiration but lingering suspicion, as he took the laptop from her yielding hands.   Gazing close into the screen, across those virtual spaces wherein real oceans of the world were crossed as quickly as the space between himself and where his eyes reflected in the screen. In that screen, they opened no larger with the surprise but rather, they narrowed with the discovery.   “You are talking with man in U.S., Sasha?” The question posed the same ending as a sentence. And in her mind, time slowed to the point that the world had to stop, the real oceans sloshing. The outcome of this situation—the excuses she could give and the consequences of each—occurred to her so instantly that she did not think of them. They were simply there with real honesty. It was a gift of hers, and she reached for his arm without a hint of doubt, the first move in giving the best answer. Her voice was layered with the softness of her skin on his, her fingertips in perfect position to tease those hairs of his forearm.   “Vlad you make me cry with laughing and with pain at once,” she admonished him, her eyes repeating the message. “How is this possible Vlad? You think I would compromise with American.”   She thought of throwing the laptop from the roof… or stomping it at his feet as evidence of her sincerity. But he held it fast, his larger hands tightening. And in her own slowed time, she pressed her advantage, closing the space between them so that her voice struck a lower chord.    “Love,” she spouted with a pursing of her lips, “This is game, love. It is simple game where foreigners of the world they chat shit. I am anonymous there.”  His eyes half closing, he seemed suddenly convinced, if not of her truth then of her softness, an essence of her that drew him in to the point he no longer cared if she manipulated him. She would suffocate him in that bottomless affection. But that would be later. For now he thrust her back, that laptop crashing at her feet. She felt her shoulders shrugging higher with his grip.   “Sasha. I am international wanted man. Which make you also wanted woman. You cannot take the chance to be traced, to be hacked. You do not know who these people can be….” He paused, as if being struck again by that memory of what he had just seen, and looked down at that broken machine. “This Black warrior to whom you write, whom you encourage…” his lips twisted with the thought, then pressed hard together, whitening with the unspeakable stress of what he tried to say. “If this man is real and you messaged him….”   Before she thought of the move she struck him with an open hand, that reckless offense in her eyes not flinching. She stood defiantly, even as he drew his own hand back, a recoiling of anger in his eyes. She stopped him quickly, striking again with the strength of her emotions.    “How do you think such things Vladmir?”   His hand stayed, wavering….   “Is he nigger—"  “—You will do less insult to smash me like computer there…” she slung a pointed finger, her tone rising sharply to try his wavering hand, “or throw me even from rooftop. I do not care. You cannot accuse me of such. You cannot think it!”   He scrutinized her more from within the recessive greens of his gaze, his face lowering then along with his hand.    Indeed, the two seemed equally convinced after hearing her out there on the terrace, the emotions of her voice as moving as an out-of-body-experience. She believed because she had to.   The truth reverberated-away on a deeper level, a level safely out of reach even for his dog-like senses.   They went inside together, that computer with its solitary lens dimming on the ground behind them. There was hardly a thought of looking back, as she smoothed her wayward hair.     The intimacy that evening started with a probing for trust between them—something real to bridge the distance—but ended with a relentless thrusting from the subconscious, his and hers. While she convinced him on the surface with her yielding, they felt it together. The truth had gone deeper, unreachable no matter how hard he tried to go there....   It was there in the back of her mind, far behind those strands of disheveling raven, that veil of pleasure and pain on her face, that it dawned on her. She would have to walk away from the metaverse—disconnect from the American, whoever he was. There would be not so much as another message, for his own good. Vladmir was a man beyond merciless, a man for whom life’s passion and death’s ruthlessness, were indistinguishable in his eyes.  She could feel it as that shallow green intensified the way it did.... She closed tighter her own in anticipation. Turning her face rather—to the side with the thrusting—she buried those glints of sadness into that pillow next to her.  ************************************************************************************    She watched him for a long time afterwards, the shadows of the evening now blended so thoroughly that there was no more contrast between the day passed and where she found herself in this moment.   The time it is here, she thought, watching him sleep less peacefully than the stilled branches of a winter tree when the winds breaks… less peaceful than the stilled flag of Mother Russia in that same lullaby… the outskirts of the storm. They were planning something big, and she felt it, something bigger than the great Vladmir himself….   He stirred as she watched, his head nodding at first but then, his neck stiffening as if to keep the secret. Inside of his twitching eyelids he held the secrets, but not as much as he thought. She had seen his diary more than once—his journal, as he had corrected her on the occasion that he caught her looking at it.  “Sasha what are you doing in here at this time? What are you thinking?”   It was evening then too, far too late for her to be in the back study without him. Sometimes he forgot to lock the door and she would steal inside to browse the more reclusive collections of literature. This time he had locked the door. She had picked the lock the first time, something he had taught her to do, though he seemed to underestimate her ability to do so now… her ability or the deceptiveness, something in which he had also trained her, how to believe in her own innocence as much as he had when he first laid eyes and heart on her. She let the red-bound leather book slip from her hand when he caught her, his face cringing as it struck the table-top. He looked at the thing for a moment as if not recognizing that keeper of his own innermost thoughts and dreams.   “I swear I did not know it was your diary….”   She spoke to his mind still in disbelief, the best time to steer his feelings.  “My journal….” He corrected, speaking absently to himself at the same time.   It was one of the rare occasions he had grabbed her by the throat without his hips grinding into the space between her legs. It had struck that fear into her, a fear so familiar that it was all but normal, the tears squeezing from her eyes as his grip tightened her neck.   She played the role well, the wetness on her face and tricking lower, she had walked away from that moment as if she only started to scan those pages of his mind…. While in real time she had been in that room for hours, struggling between her poor Russian and those thoughts inconceivable in any language….     These (people) are suicidal. While as with everything they put to schizophrenic mind, they go about their own demise slowly and lazily. One foot in the grave always to avoid harsh reality of life. They have no conviction in this life, being therefore, hardly deserving of death, that eternal rest reserved for the purposeful and hard laborer. Thus terror must form as an integral part of their psyche, a consequence of their lack of earthly conviction. A redemptive quality to an otherwise pointless existence. Ultimately, and within the concentrating scope of benevolence, we will usher them along to their final destinations. It is the end of all man and beast alike, for they all go to the same place. Yes, as one dies so does the other, and within the same breath. The select of them we will bless to be expedited from the slower, torturous death that they walk over years in their wicked world. They are chained together as vessels bound as to one, hell-bound locomotive—one twisted railway are their deviant paths. In this way our cause is one as expressly for them, sparing the meaninglessness of a thousand stops along the way.  Only begotten of the Old Country,   Vladmir Ivan Abdulov, sincerely.     That was then. She had veiled that shocking revelation from him with one of the dumbfounded looks she often showed for his approval, that astonishment on her face realer than she knew.   She had gone back to that place many a time, to be sure, sneaking into that back study whenever he was away. She fed her insatiable suspicions—what would he do the next time that he left? She could see by reading what he had done before. Skimming those pages, she came across recollections in that journal of his mind that were her own now. It became too much for the imagination at times, reading a world through binoculars stained of bloody lens. The last time she had closed that red-bound book, she did so with a tear, thinking to wash her hands of it all.    Now a smile teased thinly upon his lips as she watched him more intently, those orbs roving behind his eyelids as if feeling or searching for her in his sleep. She wondered if his dreams were as vivid as the nightmares he painted in the journal with the stroking of a pen... the ones she could now reminisce for herself.... If those dreams of his were nearly as detailed as his plans for the future, then both were more certain than this present moment. With an interrupted breath, he rolled over, turning his back to her. She had chosen to be a part of them, his dreams, to be at his side. But he only shared so much with her, the rest she had to see for herself. That was the part that scared her, even her, who as a child used to get her thrills out of fear. That was back before she knew how real fear could feel, playing dangerously close to the whorehouse of the town. She was like a stray pussycat that none could catch, a pet of sorts to the madam, that elegantly gray woman who let the girl brush against the visitors in passing, the men who reached out to stroke and to feed her. But she was a prowler, the pussy that slipped always from their grasp. Some of the whores placed bets on how long it would take for the little one to get busted.   Her virginity always in the balance, she meandered the hallways of the old apartment building turned brothel, luring the men with pristine promises unspoken. Some of them ditched the older women to pull her slender, underdeveloped frame by the waist or the wrist. She was led to countless rooms, the situations mapped out ahead of time in her childish mind.   It was simple. Collect up front, (rules of the house). Then go to the bathroom to freshen up. The last thing was to squeeze out of the window. As long as the men thought she worked for the brothel they cooperated, even when they were right not to trust her. The last time she drug herself from one of those windows, the tip of a nail stabbed in her thigh though. Its three, rusty inches inside her, it should have been nothing to pull it out. But one of the bigger men was pounding on the bathroom door, his voice frantic with Russian obscenities. So with the weight of her pressing down, she had to escape, the tip of that nail dragging a valley of flesh and blood deep along her thigh. She had screamed because she couldn’t help it, sounding like the young girl that she was for once. For the first time, reality was a dousing of fear, her mind soaked with the sights of her own blood, clinging heavier like the skirt drenched to her thighs. She heard the reproofs of those older women in that moment, as she drug herself through that little portal, voices altogether louder than when they had tried to warn her so many times. It was the only time had she truly prayed as a child. And by grace or God she had escaped, torn as her skirt was, but alive.  The old man down by the sea sewed her up good like one of his trapping nets. She did what she did not because she loved candy and marionettes, (which she did), but because he was a real father in her mind. The fact that the poor man had adopted her made him more so. He was all she had since she was a crying baby, her real parents having been publicly lynched in the Ukraine—one of the relentless gypsy hunts so timelessly fashionable. Her new father had told her the story. She could remember nothing of if she tried, and she did not, outside of the inexpressible nostalgia that swathed her when she saw the young, Romani couples stroll together, childless or not. And seeing her stare, they gave her their own looks of understanding, smiling in a certain way.   She risked it all, haunting the whorehouse countless times for herself and her father, so that they could be a family of two. As he sewed her up, the threading pulled wet with her blood and moist with the drops of her tears, he asked her questions. He asked plenty in his soft voice, never the hard questions to which, in hindsight, he had to know. But she did not have to tell him the answers nor the lies. After that, he looked the other way when he straightened up after her carelessness, washing the stained underwear that she left lying around, acting as if he did not notice the shortage of Peanut Butter from the pantry.   Cleverly, she had started to swath her panties with the stuff before going to hunt the brothel....   Vlad sniffed hard in his sleep, his eyelids squeezing with some dreamy memory.     She still thought that the Peanut Butter trick was quite clever for the time; that if she were to ever be caught, even the dirtiest man would not touch her upon seeing that mucky, creamy brown that spread with the cracking of her legs… but she was wrong. The last man to catch her, once he got over that initial shock, had smelled her, then tested her with a scoop of his fat finger, his eyes as widening as hers with the same realization. But she belonged to the brothel, unofficially at least. So, upon her ranting demands, the man had taken her to the madam. With several women lined excitedly in the background, some disappointed next to others vindicated, the madam nodded her grayed and elegant head very slowly. The two held eyes, that now remorseful woman looking down into the innocent face of a ravaged future.     That is where Vlad came in. The madam had no choice but to put her to auction, the last-ditch effort to keep her from the fat hands of the one who claimed discovery rights, the salivating one known to be more inhuman than man. But that other one, a young and more impetuous Vladimir, having one, slowing look at her on that stage, flew instantly into a bidding war against the animal. Looking between the two she could only hope for the best, not knowing either fate. But when Vlad lost the bidding, her expression reflected that sadness that she saw on her madam’s face, that feeling that her worst fate was sealed. They had taken her to another room, one where she was supposed to wait minutes, as the fat was anxious. She waited in that room for hours for an embattled Vlad to stand finally in the doorway, the cuts beneath his green eye enhancing his smile. He and the madam had made a deal in the end. The woman had approached him with an offer he could not turn down. Pay half the money. Kill the fatted pig. Take the girl. But he had to take her from the Ukraine forever, for the rest of the madam’s life, take her from the whorehouses and the little fishing villages that fed them. She was yet virgin.    Those stylish, black SUVs were out of place stopping in front of the little cabin. And when she skipped from a little dust cloud near one of them and fell into the arms of the simple fisherman, his surprise was a nervous reeling of questions. Vladmir held the answers, this time. There were conversations spoken and unspoken between men, promises and such that a young girl did not concern herself with. There would be no more shortages of Peanut Butter, or mending rifts with heated fishhooks. The two never told how much Vlad had given her father in dowry, just that it was enough to make him an old man by the sea no longer. But the fisherman that he was wound up staying, owner of the stone’s throws of land that he walked from the renovated casita to the old waterfront, those last days of his life as changing and steadfast as the tides that came for him. He welcomed repeated sunrises, no doubt, there at the shore with his thoughts, until the last one that he had merged with a final sunsetting—a miracle just for him.     That is the way it was, the way she imagined it when constructing those memories that she missed out on. Because she had left.   A cough sounded in her ear, turning her head across the room to see Vlad. He was protesting something in his sleep, his arms working in circular motions that nearly propped his torso up from the elbows. She watched in curious expectation as those arms fell full limp again, plopping his back down as a dead weight on the bed. She flinched with a thought before catching herself, that she was happy to not be under that body. She was unsure where the thought came from. And she did not let it entertain her. She was grateful for the life he provided for her. Back from where she had come there were girls who killed to be in her place and yet, they were not here... not all the time at least. It was just her and the man on the bed, the one who seemed to watch from his sleep—stirring now, his head turned her way. More than the disheveled, dirty blond that moved restless before her eyes, she could feel the man. His sleeping reactions were like an undeniable consequence of her thoughts, more so if those thoughts of hers ever crossed into intentions....    One time, a next morning under sunlight and over shimmering coffee, he had repeated something he asked her in his sleep the night before. All she could do was blink when she heard it, knowing she had not uttered a word about leaving. And as she withdrew from the question, in denial, he came in a forward way, grasping her hand before it left the table.  “Do not lie to yourself, Sasha. It is greater sin than lying to me.”   She blinked still, feeling something like fear in her next heartbeat and yet... not sure that it was her own. Looking her in the eyes, he nodded in slow acknowledgment of that feeling, and said the rest.   “...for one I can forgive you, Sasha. For the other, I cannot.”    He squeezed her hand before letting go, grabbing a crème croissant with the same pressure. To her if felt like enough to squeeze her heartbeat into stuttering.   “Vlad...” was all she managed, “I would never think of—”   —shhh, he finished her words with the silence, those birds rising slightly in volume around them, as the croissant lifted next to the finger crossing his lips.  “I forgive you the one thing, Sasha... the other I cannot.”   She would grow better at keeping certain thoughts from even her own admission, anticipating the things that he might ask and then lying to that voice in her head.... Never shouting, always softly, always a whisper. Until she had heard him ask out loud that morning she had not realized that dismissive thought about leaving, that it crossed her mind now and then. They were thoughts about what a normal life was like and what it was like in America, for example. They were thoughts that had turned her more curious face, ever-so-slightly, towards a look of intention. That was the expression there speechless before him. From the heights of the terrace it was a look to the east, that far horizon from which the sun arose behind his back.   With his eyelids draped low towards the newspaper, he chewed for a time before sipping the coffee, his gaze not rising to her. He had said what he had to say.   ******************************************************************************  “When they see that we are the source of death which takes them by the storm, that force of nature with the power to surge or subside, then they will pay. If they keep their lives they will surrender their freedom, but they will pay. And in that day our demands will be limitless as the potential for the world to come.”  The wall-sized window behind him was a large screen en vivo, a breathtaking live-feed of Paris in miniature.    Vlad stood from his chair at the base of the stretched wood table, calmly adjusting a cufflink, while in the spirit of the words he had just uttered, he could just as easily have slammed that fist down on the densified oak.   The others, still seated around the table, seemed to see that latter possibility. They certainly knew him well enough and reacted accordingly, adjusting their own collars or looking away distractedly. The solitary woman among them, moving the fiery hair from her strikingly serene face, was the one who stared unquestioningly. It was the same look with which Vlad met that expression of hers, his hard anticipation across from her enduring resolve.    “Yes, Bodhana?” he prompted.   “Excuse me Vladimir, not to question but to ask....”   Vlad nodded to her gruff humility, his ear turning as his gaze lowered to the glinting at his cufflink.   “We have been wanting to know...” she motioned around the table, but her eyes returned to Vlad alone, leaving her with no option other than to say it. “What of NATO and Allied Forces? It is rumored that they are alerted to the plan.” She looked almost worried for a moment, barely a spark in her eye behind a wisp of falling red. “Some of us have trained for this chance since we took our first steps. We must know if is possible to lose this chance? Have we been discovered?”   The men looked her way as Vlad pointed with a slant of sunlight from behind, that cuff-linked sleeve parting the group of 5.   “Exactly, Bodhana. I am glad that you ask.”   Bodhana did not show the sign of relief, rather her expression remained untroubled amidst those swooping, ardent curls of her head as Vlad continued.   “It is very unlikely that NATO intelligence knows any details to our plan. In fact, it is impossible that they know it all....”   He began to pace around the table, his frame towering as high as the confidence he exuded with each stride.   “They cannot know it… since it is impossible to read our minds.” He stopped, turning mid-step as if intrigued with his own admission, focusing for a moment on a slender, T-shirted man who lowered a tufted head. “Close to execution,” Vlad continued his pacing, “each of you will receive one and only one portion of the mission—your own. Together we are 6 in total, the last will be mine to execute. No one will know the details of the other, only the minimal overlap necessary to take the torch and carry to the next. Bodhana, it will be yours to give to me.” he paused his pacing, the entire scene static until he moved again, nodding back over his shoulder at her. Predictably, she had more questions.    “I know you have figured everything Vlad. You are the strong lead in the chain. After you, we are only strong as the weakest link. The information that each of us must receive in a way which is untraceable....” her lips stilled as her eyes opened. Vlad was touching a finger to the side of his head, a temple slightly grey—premature wisdom, as he referred to it.   “Your part of the mission will be given to you as you need to know. There will be no flash drive which can be hacked, no code which can be cracked. It will be in your mind before you know it—as you know it. All the knowledge untraceable, it will be literally placed into your brain by means a technological means facilitated by our sponsors. We will all be retrofitted as per our unique cerebral signatures leading up through a specified timeframe—expect the visit and do not kill them.” He looked quickly at one of the largest of the men, whose Danish-blond head lowered between mountainous shoulders. “They will know what to say. After the fitting we all go to dead zone, not so much as a pizza delivery until activated. Perhaps the first alert you receive will be in a dream so detailed you will take it serious. Perhaps you will be awake, a more natural moment of enlightenment where you suddenly remember something you have never known. But it will be there just like that, as if you have trained for this since could walk....”   It took him two casual strides to stand over her, his large and calloused hand peacefully on the shoulder next to her upturned eyes.    “This way if they kill one, they kill only part of the chain. We can rejoin through time, through the same technology, the ability to reinject that critical link to yet another brain. One cannot be forced to give the plan away, for not a one of us will know it in its entirety. And when you do know your part, that part will come to you only at the last possible time.”   he closed his eyes, his face turning up as he inhaled deeply.     “All things be done decently, and in order....”   They exchanged looks, mingling expressions of acceptance and more questions that would go no further than the room they were in.     Outside in the hallway, Sasha waited—patient for Vlad, impatient as ever to read his mind.... She crossed her legs, that need to know barely contained. She stretched the hem of her red skirt down to her knees and sat still, her expression emotionless towards that large door. Whatever they were planning in there, it would come to her in a few days.  He would write of this meeting in the journal without fail. And without fail she would risk everything to read it. Parts would be coded, for sure, roundabout speech even within the confines of his journal, but enough for her to follow that much closer.    Her hearing was good, even better at listening through doorways and the thinner walls. But from where she sat, without leaning-in, she could make out only bits and pieces—millions, she latched onto... but then billions!   She writhed on her seat a little, a near loss of control. The millions and billions in this lifestyle meant dollars. Or it meant lives. The one was a means to the other sometimes, fortunately and unfortunately, depending on one’s business interest. Whichever the numbers represented in this case, dollars or lives or some combination of the two, the possibilities weighed equally on her mind. It was the highest she had known to be tied to a single job.   It was something big. It was something close. Something that will change our lives, as he had whispered in secret, her lips syncing in the hallway.   She had heard him say it for the third time as of late, half-awakening to her as she had watched him in his sleep. She committed those twilit words to memory, keeping her own mental notes as the evening passed.    She knew it would change their lives. She felt it would change the lives of billions. At what cost, she was determined to know.                                                                                                                                                                CHAPTER 6    “We got Nicco Myles here y’all! We gon’ see what he say about it!”   It was a loudspeaker in a closed basement that called him out. He had let Buck drag him down here—willingly, for the most part. The bass was so heavy that the space felt like earmuffs of sound pressed to his head... a comforting feeling as he looked around. The deejay was smiling with eyes that looked through the smoke and dimness with ease, seeming to see everybody that was there. Rick was a taller dude, a dark lighthouse over the table where two flat disks turned centerpieces of winking electronics. His left shoulder shrugged-up a microphone at the side of his face, leaving his slender arms free to articulate above and below the elbows, his hands spreading at the turntables.   “What Ya'll gon do Nic?” his voice blared like one covering his own mouth throughout the whole basement... too much grave in the gain knob, Nicco thought. But the question had been raised, and Rick’s ten, slender fingers edged forward on the turntables, all ready to make it happen.    Nicco felt more faces on him than he could see, all the eyes and ears that showed up for the party.   “Might as well,” he said, hearing for himself that his mind was made up. On cue it took Buck two swaggered steps to shoulder bump him, swaying his friend with a grin.   “Let’s do it Neek. Let’s free-style this Bitch.”  Buck’s words were a loud shot by his ears and the music turned up the background in agreement—the bass beating heavier and faster with his heart. Cell phones raised as curious third eyes among the packing crowd—unblinking little periscopes for those topside the basement... outside this moment in time.   With one drawn-out scratch of the record Rick called their attention to the deejay table. His eyes were the slits that looked like nobody else—relaxed, his body arcing that same, dangling rhythm with which he held the microphone from the cord. He had heard them say they was gonna do it, or at least showed the confidence that he had, nodding with the certainty that sealed the deal in everybody’s mind.   Nicco took the shot of Remy before he took the first step, crushing that Styrofoam in his hand as the other reached up for the mike.   Having nothing to say, he looked around at nobody special, then down at his own shoe, a brown suede Puma with those dark streaks on both sides.   “I know a lot of y’all niggas black and mild,” he ventured, his voice breaking the ice in the low light, those glints of platinum wrists and flashing teeth as people smirked around him. The whites of their eyes were blinking cutouts from the dimness, a show of anticipation kindling... an escalation rising with the thumping of a pulse that was the speakers coming closer…. It was the deejay ushering in that background. He nodded, his eyes down in concentration. No doubt he felt the people were ready, listening already to what was to come.   Nicco rewound his own thoughts with the same confidence, the jet black of his curls leaning back at first. He came forward with a snap, eyes open and posture straightening in the midst of them.   “I said I know some o y’all niggas so damn Black And Mild, but y’all don’t want this smooooke!”   The voices around him came together as if his own, joining in laughter and cheering, just as he felt it would, lifting and holding the sound of his own above all else.     ******************************************************************************  “Click click go the stick of the clique nigga stick wit the clique...” Nicco rapped fast as he thought about it, beats between beats where his mouth ran to keep up. “I wish a nigga would run so a nigga could gun... down wit the street you don’t wanna meet.... Nigga trust me if you wanna B...” he glanced to Buck, his rhythm stalling... and Buck picked up.   “If you wanna be down nigga down like the dirt...” Buck was a tempo slower with gravity. His black fingers clenched the microphone with vice, his teeth flashing with tension and promise.   “You wanna be down like dirt nigga fuck around...” (bass bumping in the pause) “Wanna be down like us nigga...” a quick glance to his partner, Nicco, whose eyes opened, “then nigga stay down wit the clique!” Buck raised his hand as for reinforcement, spreading the palm side like a call for cheering that everybody saw.   As more people showed up, the teenagers rode the wave, firing their timely lines and rhyming with the thoughts of the crowd. From the low of a dancing step, Buck pulled a gun. The crowd turned half-away in a sweeping wave of surprise but then, resurged just as spontaneously with refocused ovations.   A hump in his back, Buck was twirling that winking nickel—cowboy style. This how the party go! He could be heard stressing, his speech rising in the confetti of sounds until he brought the mike close again. His face was a gleaming close-up of serious beyond his years, his eyes a thousand-yard stare in a forty-feet basement.     “This how the party go,” he repeated clearly, staggering with a lean to reclaim the flipping gun.   “...If I don’t give yo ass a pass nigga... you know we gonna have a blast nigga.”   The people stomped enough to make the poured cement move, as Buck pushed that fist with the microphone sideways at Nicco, who had leaned away from it with a swagger, slipping his own pistol back into the back waist under his shirt. With that same hand Nicco came with a right cross to grab the mike. He danced then in acknowledgement of the crowd, their laughter and cries in his ears. He took it in a nod of understanding, shifting his arms into that long, running motion, black mike in his right and in his left... someone had handed him an Uzi…. He moved it without looking, a baton taken in stride with this rhythmic marathon—rhyme and timelessness together while without looking, he focused on dropping neither.   He swirled in a semi-circle, the hem of his long shirt slapping at a delicate hand as it reached toward his waist, a turn that made her swipe his hip instead. He made a victorious cocking motion with the Uzi... lifting the mike to rapid fire from his lips, those veins stretching up long through his neck.   “We them done ones! We tha bom bom! We tha motha-fuckas in ya baby mom mom! We the lev pack we the clique clack—niggas in them figgas when you countin’ on your homies’ back....”   he bounced once, his hands lifted higher—time for the last rhyme to sink in... and when the crowd got it with clapping....   “Yea you look alive you nigga fore you ride through. I advise you playa play a PlayStation instead.... Cuz tryin’ to come up on West end you fuck wit the best then...” he crossed himself with the mike—three bumps in surround sound, “yo only come up a be Jesus raise your clique from the dead!”  The crowd came alive, some snatched to their feet, others half away in shock. Even the tall, black speaker, ecstatic with Rick’s voice, was buried under the deepening roars. Over at the deejay table, Rick’s lips could be seen articulating to Nicco—No! don't do it! No!   After a glance Nicco did slam-drop the mike, his body stretching high as a leaping statue of liberty in loose pants, its legs hanging wide…. And hands went up there with him, suspending that moment for all time and feeling.   ******************************************************************************   After the party, people stood around topside. Other stragglers lounged down in the basement backrooms, where the smoke lingered strong enough to give contact buzzes. Nicco and Buck stood atop the concrete stoop, the front of the house a larger frame of their silhouetted conversation. Buck was flailing his arms.   “Bro you was on fire....”   He looked at Nicco but then, almost suspiciously as an afterthought, the congratulations lingered into more of an unanswered question. Nicco said nothing. His eyes were a dark and neutral space, which made Buck take a second look without ever having turning away.    “Nigga,” he demanded, his expression closer, as if trying to place the face of a stranger, “do you be hearin’ yourself? What’s that shit you be sayin bro?”   He was really searching now, his eyes narrowed with scrutiny.  “What is that one word you said? Ee-yay-yah?” His lips got stuck with the twisted pronunciation.   Nicco responded then, his eyes opening.   “The word is lev...” he said, his voice returning. “I think you say it like ‘n-y-eff....’”   Nicco’s lips were stuck then, stopping to question himself... Buck chimed in.   “What you mean, you think? You the one who said it, foo. What does it mean?”   “...It means lion, I think, in Russian....” Nicco said with strange recollection, his gaze going beyond again. Buck pulled him back.   “Russian? Nigga? Russian? You know you black, right? like every other nigga around here. Russian?”   He aimed a finger at Nicco. “You need to keep yo ass out of that metaverse shit. You goin’ too far now, bringin’ that crazy shit to the hood.” Buck shook his head hopelessly, a rare occasion when his eyes stayed down. “Russian....”     Nicco watched Buck with a neutral gaze, not making it not obvious what he was thinking. His friend was really starting to question his goals. “You can’t tell everybody everything you do. Some moves you gotta make lonely moves,” was one of the phrases of wisdom that his aunt echoed randomly through the house. Now it resounded just as loudly in his head. He had to be careful about the things he said to people. As lonely as it might feel, he couldn’t share what he was up to in the metaverse with damn near nobody around here. That was a whole nother space.   A few stepped up to give dap, hand slaps and hugs as people drifted, loitering further away along the block and yards. Nina, the young lady of the house, came outside to say bye, something like “Ya’ll really turned the party up....” Nicco heard it only passively, her lively eyes and hips taking priority. He gave her a hug, the right thing to do, since she stood there for an otherwise awkward moment.   “When you gonna come see about a bitch?”       He heard her then, the full promise of her lips, her breath hot at his ear.   “Shiiit...” he responded naturally, his mind improvising as it did when his lips were rapping... “I got you love if you got me... love...” he touched a few fingers in the valley where her butt started. She had on low-rise jeans and the slopes of skin there drew-in smoothly. She smiled with the awareness as his touch drew barely back from that fallen waistline, separating with the broken hug, she gathered both his hands in her own as she leaned back, seeing his face for herself.   “You know my dick curve like a motherfucka but ah come straight at that ass!” Buck came between the two with a forward voice… a clever gaze. Nina rolled her eyes from him before giving them back to Nicco, her smiling shameless.   Buck scratched his head, mumbling something that sounded like itch, but was interrupted by a louder cursing.   “Aaaw shit!”    All their attention turned, the three children poised to stay or take flight from the stoop. Their eyes were big with Lex coming up the walkway. They hadn’t seen him approaching. Buck looked preemptively entertained. Nicco shook his head pitifully in feeling, only a slight nod showing on the outside, his eyes fixed on the towering adult.  “Aw shit is right.” he mumbled to Buck who in turn, grinned at Lex disarmingly.   “What’s up OG?” Buck set the friendly tone.   “Fuck’s up with yall?” Lex set a different one. “Ya’ll lil’ niggas out here turnin’ up huh?”   He looked at Nicco, whose grimace was still downturned with eyes up to face him.    “What's up lil’ G? Boy you a hood star. I saw you.” He raised a fist as if to drop the mike. “You live streamed boy!” He looked at Nina, who was retreating meekly into the front door.   “Boy...” Lex was saying before his attention turned back to Nicco, you bout to be gettin' more pussy out here than a lil’ bit!” Those words of his ended sharply enough to slip in through that door as it closed slowly behind her. Then his eyes were full on Nicco as that screen door squeaked its last.   “So, what’s good Nicco? What you on these days besides runnin’ for the clique and givin’ passes to the fiends out in these streets?” With his left hand he massaged the right, the one he had used to cut Raymond’s face open. Nicco barely blinked.   “Nothin’ Lex. You know, just out here. Schoo and shit... just runnin’ besides that.”   The apparent lack of intimidation in Nicco’s demeanor seemed to strike at Lex’s own, his next words the sounding agitation.    “You sure fam? You ain’t got nothin’ else poppin’? You know we ride and die together whichever one. We family Nico. And family’s meant to share the wins and the els as one.”   He struck that right hand to his chest as a statement and left the fist there like an exclamation point. Nicco didn’t flinch. He resisted the urge to look at Buck, who, from the corner of his eye, stayed as uninvolved a big fly on the wall. He might as well had been filing his nails.  “Nah, Lex. I got nothin’ else O.G.” Nicco said with a sincere shake of the head. He turned straight to Buck and jabbed a fist at his friend’s chest.  “I’m out bro. Bout to go crash. That Remmy hittin’ a nigga.”    Buck fist bumped him and then so did Lex, more slowly.   Nicco walked away, sensing the conversation that was sure to start behind his back. It would be a conversation about bitches... likely about knocking on Nina’s door to get in, using the bathroom as the excuse they all knew… and Nina’s guess was as good as any as to if she would let them in... depended on their mouthpiece, most likely. Or the conversation would turn to more serious things, like Nicco’s plan to win the tournament and escape to New York.   He felt like he could trust Buck. But trusting feelings was a top killer in the hood, one of those natural causes of death and dismemberment. He felt like he could trust Buck, but thank God, he hadn’t told him how close he was to winning, how close he was to leaving. Like they said online, what they don’t know won’t hurt them, which could be true. But what they said around here was more real than true, what they don’t know won’t hurt you. He walked by that saying. He walked by all the rules of the hood, even as he came closer to breaking them by breaking free. Walking, running and gunning by the rules of the hood was really what made him a great Samurai in the metaverse. The hood codes were like the samurai scrolls and the more he read them, stage by conquered stage, those scrolls reminded him of the rules of the streets. And as he walked those streets home as fluidly as a young shark in dark waters, he gasped involuntarily at the thought of leaving them, not the first time he’d felt this reflex, but the first time he really faced it.   “Am I trickin’ myself thinkin’ I was meant for anything more than the hood...” he voiced between pants of breath, his legs not missing a step. And when the thoughts of his friend caught up with, he repeated them to himself.   “You know you black right? Like every other nigga round here....”   He laughed at himself after hearing it, something Buck would do. His gaze narrowed with the possibility of not leaving... a strange comfort in knowing that he couldn’t fail if he didn’t try to. His place was secure in the clique. He tried to recall the freestyle from the party—the love they had shown him in the basement—and thought about bringing up that stream on his phone when his foot fell lower than the street—pothole. “Damn.”   Gravity yanked him stumbling forward, his hand spreading to push the street. As the tar rushed up, strangely, his face lifted.   This what you get for doubting, Nicco. He wasn’t the superstitious type, but he was falling, the gritty tar rushing to meet him with the punching force of the ground and everything behind it. His open hand landed first, the angles of little rocks forcing his skin. His elbow bent, a one-handed push-up failing…. He turned his approaching face to the side, the ground an expanding black canvas, and posed his body in time to strike a side profile.  There he lay, an elevating pulse beating his shoulder at the ground, that throbbing pain held in the palm of his hand. The sky was looking down, the dark vision of those stars corrupted in the lower city lights. The sight felt as disturbing as the grit embedded in his hand and he shook his head, thinking that a fitting proverb could not come scrolling from a heaven like that, not the way it did in the metaverse. The sky was super-clear there... but still... he waited and watched for a several disappointing seconds, that pulsation slowing in his hand.   He wasn’t superstitious. But if he didn’t know better it was like there was something he was supposed to see in this moment, like this was where he was meant to be by force. But he did know better. And since he was meant to be here by force, only by greater force was he meant to be free.   “Get out these streets, son. Die if you have to...” he recited himself from a place higher than the streetlights that looked down on him—a deeper voice from within that same place. And he laughed with himself, brushing his clothes loosely as he stood with a smile so fulfilling, it lifted his eyes into squints. Those Japanese proverbs had nothing on these streets.  ******************************************************************************   He moved slowly at first, making sure the key would go in precisely and then turn smoothly as he did the knob. The door opened enough for him to breeze through and shut with a muffled sound on purpose, by the time he finished the spin, his foot was out front again. He slipped through the foyer with a pattering and, looking ahead, had closed in on the first four stairs without hearing himself.   “Nicco!” she snagged him with her voice at the nape of his neck.   He stopped and turned halfway to look. The wall next to him went away and stopped at the corner. There was only the off-white of that foyer, a perspective that saw Martin Luther King Jr down there, the Martin of a hundred prints from the swap meet who hung from a nail over his head. It was a picture of a man that would fit better in different house.   Nicco watched for a moment, that space between a tense Martin and himself going undisturbed....    “Yeees?” he called out, his voice groping around that corner. But she did nothing to bother the air, that static of silence settling at his ears but then, the shriller sound of a white man said something—words pronounced the way they was supposed to be.    “Gunplay is again the order of the day, and the evening, it seems, as two men were found with fatal wounds to the head from close range, this time in the South-end area, a neighborhood known more for its stick-up culture and car-jackings, though the motivation for this double homicide does not appear to be murder, as things of value were left on scene. Police say that the suspects....”    He turned away, stepping to the fifth stair, that news clip triggering a nauseating nostalgia. It was always the same old story.    She probably ain’t left that couch all day, he thought over the sound of the television, sittin’ there bouncing an uncovered thigh crossed over the other....  “Yea, that’s right,” she agreed out loud, “ya’ll niggas better get ya’ll shit together before ya’ll wind up like these motherfuckas on the news.”   He imagined her craning her neck over her shoulder, that premonition of hers following him up the stairs. He left it behind, a hand over his forehead as he went into his bedroom. He couldn’t let it get in his head, not when he was about to take the last step.   In the bathroom he splashed water on his face and didn’t bother to dry it. He let it run down and imagined what it felt like to let it all out—to cry. Searching, he moved from the right side of the mirror into the middle, that long, vertical crack parting his face as he did, the one side rising higher. He moved that shifting reflection side to side, the water droplets on his skin rolling large across the middle. He had asked his aunt about fixing this mirror. When she told him do it yourself, he started to. He’d gone and got the right sized mirror from the Arabs at flea market. He had carried it up the stairs and then, those walking reflections stopped with the bathroom ceiling. There it lay still, square in the corner. He never got around to putting it up for some strange reason. And that strange reason was that he felt, deep down, that this broken one was really a better reflection of himself, a more interesting one, at least. His larger left eye blinked as he wiped the fake tears in frustration.   He looked up at the note, careful not to touch it with his wet, trembling fingers, he drew back from himself. He turned and went into the other room where the metaverse connected, killing the light and shutting the door behind him.     CHAPTER 7    The purge will be as they have imagined it. It will be ever before their eyes. As the entertainment they have so come to love, they shall see it, while not all at once. Evening by evening they go to sleep slightly more bound than the previous sunset—a great step backwards but yet, a small step forward, so they not distress... until all at once with a groggy dawning, they see it is the end.   She half-closed the cover of his journal, the side of her face over her shoulder in the same motion. It was impossible that Vlad could surprise her reading. He was out of the country. She had dropped him off at the airport herself... rather the professional chauffer slash killer had. She had gone along for the ride, as usual. This driver was a good one though, a regular as balanced as a Swiss army knife in hand, as they all were—everything from bottle openers to sharp cutting tools, depending on what a lady needed. This time she had told driver to bring her straight back to the condo. No shopping sprees for things that caught her eye but never fit in the closet.  Whatever the noise she’d thought she heard behind her back... it wasn’t Vlad, and it wouldn’t dare be the faceless driver, no matter how he watched her ass instead of their surroundings in the mall, it wouldn’t dare be him down here in the sublevel of the condo. She breathed again, satisfied when the silence reiterated the single heartbeat in her ears. She reopened the pages, her eyes now closer.  The first sweep will fell millions of them, like dominoes, though that spread will falter along the gaps between social spaces. Some will stand their ground, to be sure. And this is to be expected even, so long as they stand their own grounds and not that of their fellows, the world will eventually fall around them as well. It is at this point of all their loss and despair that we will step in to fill the gaps. Towering over life itself, we shall stand in the way of sharp annihilation. The ones with a firm grasp on both realities, we will be the only bridge from mass genocide to a secure future.   Oh! What will governments and men be willing to pay for such a secure future! There we will be rich to the level that our money is no good! A level where at our mere word, our will is worked into fulfillment....”  She paused, the nail of her pointer finger scraping softly at her bottom lip. She had heard Vlad speak something about environmental and biological attacks before, but it was never something he had the financial or technological backing to accomplish, not beyond a communities local water or food supplies. But now... the way he spoke so confidently in this journal…. He was fully convinced, his mind made up that this plan was in motion. But where would he have gotten the resources to pull off something that would, in his words “bring the governments and men of the world to heel?”   Her face turned upwards in pondering, her fingers massaging at her eyelids.... It was there, in that darkness, that the next words emanated from the page as an impression in her short memory—a drifting of negative print in the dark. She had captured it with her eyes open, but only now envisioned what she had really seen.    Caught Sasha speaking with American....   In a heartbeat her fingers swiped from her tired eyelids down to the black-and-white page, that trembling handwriting of Vlad under the earthen-tones of her nail polish....   Caught Sasha speaking with American Sobaka....  If her eyes deceived her still, her fingers touched along that page in agreement.    ...We confirmed he is negr in the city of Chicago. I do not believe she knows more of him than codename on internet. He is Black Scarfaced. I have compiled file of his true identity. He is gamer, a teenager. I believe there is nothing to worry about, like others that I have seen her chatting online. This one I have strange feeling about however. I cannot explain. I will keep track on this one yes, as it may become convenient to cancel him.   I smashed Sasha’s computer. I will know if she takes money for another. It is too dangerous for her communicating on internet, especially with American. She assure me she has no interest and will stop. But she do special thing this time to convince me more than her word, when always she says it is too painful for her to take it there? I did not ask why she was motivated to this extreme this time. I have not known her to deceive me, but I do not trust my feeling. We are too close to mission for her to fuck it.  “Up,” she finished that incomplete thought, “I believe the saying is ‘fuck it up,’ Vladimir.”   She closed the journal, a sound of finality that lasted barely the moments it took to rewind a few phrases of short-term memory, and she reopened that cover to confirm it—I have compiled file....   She couldn’t place from where the butterflies came, they flourished with the blood through her veins from the warming pit of her stomach, or from somewhere deeper. It was reading the fact that Vlad had a file. She took the words in, an excited anticipation that pumped through her heart because she knew what it meant. She knew where to look.   Vladimir was not so old as he was old-fashioned, a strength, according to himself and those who always agreed to his face. Living or dead he trusted nothing but used everything to his advantage, person, place or thing. Outside of a cellphone, technology seemed the only thing that he ducked more than fists, knives or bullets. And he had seen it all from every angle. In that vein, he preferred that any and all technology point away from himself. So when it came to his personal files he kept the most intimate ones in places that could not be hacked, not without fists, knives and guns, the old-fashioned way.   She scooted her bottom a little in the chair, that curve rotating upwards as she stretched for the face of a cabinet drawer. It was one of many on that wall, but fell as a flap when she pulled the handle. Why bother to lock that false front with a key when there was a tumbler lock to face behind it? Anyways, the person that found herself here to discover this file and live to remember, one of several secrets locked-away in this study vault, was a person that was meant to see it. This was that place that could not be hacked from an outside server.  She was that person that knew much of his secrets, the delicate touch that it took and how far to move the dials. Much came forth with time and patience. Much came forth with the talking diary of his sleep. 07-07-07, an omen everlasting. It told of the day and the age when he came home from school excited. It told of the day and the age at which his father’s throat was opened wide in front of his eyes like the pez dispenser, one of spewing reds, that fell cracked at his foot. It was the last day that he cried over death, the end of feeling excited about life.       With a click she slid the drawer from the wall and skipped over the tabs, the dark flash of her fingernails pausing. Predictably, the one that she wanted was up front.   “My dear Vladimir....” She shook her head in a mock disappointment that slowed to a stop as she opened the manilla file.   There were sheets of dates and locations noted, times when surveillance had been taken on the child, online and in the real world. Her nails scraped further, digging deeper into that file, into that life…. Family, living and deceased... the father... the sprawling aliases of associates... gang affiliations? Her eyes came up from the papers questioning.... This kid who spoke so harmlessly online? For goodness’ sake, his favorite color is paisley panties. She smirked, looking down again.   There were deep, generational affiliations with a local drug cartel, one Westend Clique, known for its consistent, ruthless delivery in a barrio where, according to police reports, Ruthless made stops like the mailman.   She skimmed the pages, the top corner of the next held slightly higher with promise until, with full-color revelation, she uncovered the photographs. There were several, one just as interesting as the next, they drew her in like the motion pictures of her own childhood imaginations. The rappers and the stars before her eyes, those dark Americans—dare she say the black word. They projected gangster cool around the world... especially around the Ukrainian slums, where the dirt on their poor faces was, by default, blackface at the end of the day. Moved by some peculiar but incontestable comradery such as it felt, she had listened and watched the videos, coming to understand their slang in part but more than that, coming to know the deeper emotions that drove if with that small but growing part of her soul which spoke fluent humanity. Replaying those times in her mind, it was a dance with an unabashed self. And she swayed in the chair. It was a time when she found that voice to speak with confidence and smile through the dirt on her face. “Damn, Sasha girl, was it all that?” she asked herself openly, the question more than the unspoken answer. Her hands never left those images on the table. The one that she looked at now was already looking at her, his eyes fixed unabashedly into the camera that captured this still picture of him, the serious expression of a young man hacked from his own monitor.   Off-white walls came together in the backdrop and in the center, the poster of a black samurai hung, an action shot so animated that it appeared to move in the still-shot, his wild afro breaking the monotony of the off-white surroundings, his large microphone wielded forward as a three-dimensional sword. Beneath the samurai, the form of a bed played hide-and-seek beneath a thin comforter, its edge peeking from loose clothes strewn stylishly here and there... ready to wear on the go, she thought, his bedroom.   The young man was the figurehead of all that went on behind him. The crown of his short, black curls and his shoulders rose prominent in a white T-shirt, a live centerpiece whose arms went down as those of an elite gamer. He looked at her as if sensing her eye at that particular point in time, a pause when he looks up from the game, perhaps, maybe even one of those occasions when he is writing to The Rose That Grows. He looked young but his eyes were serene, the kind of deep hazel reached only through experience and wisdom. Why? Was the question, she asked herself as much as the young man in the picture. “Why so much experience at so young an age?” Nicco Myles, she closed the name inside her eyelids and held it there for a moment, thinking about what she would do. If she wrote him again he might be killed. Judging from the reports of the neighborhood where he lived, he might be killed anyway. But if that were to happen any time soon, especially in the fashion attributable to Vlad’s kind, it would leave her with the impression that it had something to do with a Russian cyclical killer and his hip-switching bitch in sophisticated dresses. How she did feel the part. Though it would be a thrill worth playing, the moral thing would be to not have to ask over his dead body. This one did not deserve to be a game pawned by her after she played it. She had to let it go.      She felt her breasts lower with an exhalation, that shiver down her spine trembling them ever slightly. Her suspicions were true. He was just an adolescent. She had suspected as much by the name, that it was not something invented just to throw people off. She had been right about so many things, some so dismissive that she had not given them much thought beyond the back of her mind. She closed the file with a slap on that unflinching, black face.  What did she care about the identity of some foreign boy? She had scarcely realized the questions were there until this moment, those images of the boy held unseen behind the manila cover. Looking at it from Vladimir’s point of view, it all took on a perspective that she had underestimated—blind spots, Sasha, always consider what is not in front of you.   “Control yourself, woman. For you can more than I.”  She listened to the man who was not there, the chimes of her vocal cords articulating a Russian accent thick as her brown winter shawl.      The fact that Vlad had been cloaking her online was the least surprising thing. That was something she could understand, even respect. Cloaking her meant not a lack of trust on his part, because in this life nothing was personal. Not even in the midst of fucking her ass, those wasted pains she had gone through to distract his suspicions. She had done it without thinking though—instinctively, but why? She wondered. He too questioned her motives even after that, and was right to do so. He was arguably the greatest international talent on the black market for a reason.   She touched at an itch that waxed inside her upper thigh, her thoughts going back over some things that made more sense now in hindsight. It explained why she was having to close her laptop unexpectedly lately, that inquisitive nature of his seeming to show up from over her shoulder whenever she went to the chat rooms. He seemed to show up just in time for her to change the page—something like shopping or flowering—by the time his kind, green eyes were there to look. It always ended innocently enough, a kiss and a question at her neck.    What are you up to, Sasha?   She could hear him asking, and after a dismissive glance over the shoulder, she answered….   “What are you up to, Vladimir?”   She grasped the journal again and turned back the page, her dark pupils shifting to his earlier notes from that meeting.    … The purge will be as they have imagined it. It will be ever before their eyes….   They were lives after all, not dollars—the millions… the billions he had spoken of, all human lives.   She covered her mouth, her lips wanting to mime those thoughts from the page, only to feel them groping behind her fingers, moving to express her own thoughts.   “A nuclear missile?” she whispered too low to hear.   What would kill so many people? First a nuclear explosion and then the ensuing fallout... no. He did not say that they would die suddenly—explosively, but like dominoes they would fall. They would die being bound, as the days linked one to another, to a death that drug them to the depths of captivity over time... a time of gravitas counterbalanced with apocalypse, when they will extort the governments of the world—that was it! Her lips poised with amazement.   Biological weapons… a bacteria? a virus!  She may have said it aloud, enough to alert herself, and looked all around, (the only doorway still there behind her). She shut the journal carefully. That imagined creaking of the leather alarmed in her mind, that whine of Vladimir’s boasting. To bring the men of the world to their knees, a doubling of the billions. She covered her face.   She had to ask how much money would be involved, a dismissive thought that doubled back to be considered. Vlad charged one hundred thousand dollars a head for his work, when he did the contractual thing. One hundred thousand dollars, and that was for faceless heads. Heads of state or other prominent ones raised the stakes. Millions… billions of heads would roll, and the loose calculation boggled her mind. He must be giving them some kind of bulk discount, she thought, and almost laughed, her gaze instantly serious again. Even at a rough dollar-per-head it was almost too much to fathom.    Before she knew it she had spent more time dwelling on the money side, something that obliged her to come back to the morality of it, whether she ready to or not. She had never agreed with everything that Vlad did, especially not the way that he kept her on the outside, letting her in only on the things that were useful to him. Come to think of it, she didn’t believe most things that he did, though she would never let him know it. In this case, with the stakes so high, he would undoubtedly affirm that business was business. This was not personal. She knew better though. She knew how he felt… that in order to make the world a better place, some people—a lot of people, sometimes—had to die.   Shaking her head from the moral angle, she returned the journal to the place that only he knew of, and left the vault faster than she could explain. In her heart she had felt that Vlad was approaching something great. She sensed the drama building in his demeanor, the shorter phrases with which explained things lately, even things unrelated to his mission, his turning away with an eye that retreated as did his touch lately. It was evident, the gravity of a pressing event and she felt it as real as whatever held her to the floor beneath her feet. That ominous static of a coming storm was upon her, that overcast of intuition she had hoped would un-eclipse the horizon within. But now she had seen the writing for herself, seen it with the mind above her heart. And nodding in acceptance or in sorrow, she did so with the insight that stared her in the face. Could she be a part of this? Could she not? Moving away from the reinforced threshold, she felt that door to the vault when it sealed an entire space behind her, always a feeling of being freed and of being shut out at the same time. Looking forward to the winding staircase of gold railing and marble, she never felt more married to the man than she did now.         CHAPTER 8    “Congratulations! Black Scarface Samurai. You have conquered the last challenge! Midgard is now yours to control at the rank of shogun. Your overall tournament ranking is 3....”   On the sidewalk, by the walking traffic of people and sound, Nicco smiled absently with the memory, so much so that Raymond, the dope fiend, was smiling back at him, that deep scar warping like a half-moon down the man’s face. Nicco’s smile faded with a twitch, his eyes returning serious from that happy place. He pushed Raymond to an arm’s length, his fist holding a small baggy. “Take that shit Raymond and get on.”   He let go of the baggie and jabbed the air, fist-bumping the man away as he looked around. But Raymond stood there for a moment, considering the fist quickly, but looked to Nicco as if unsure again. “Keep yo twenty dollars, Raymond. Spend it on keeping that other side of your face closed.” Nicco sniffed, an uplifting motion of his head. Raymond shuffled away with a nod.  “Yo man what the fuck was that?”   Buck came from the alleyway zipping his pants, his eyes demanding attention.    “Yo I didn’t see that motherfucka pay you bro.” he clarified, his tone imploring as to which action to take.   “He already paid.” Nicco said flatly, an answer of no action. Buck turned that imploring look towards the corner. Already, there was no sign of the dope fiend.   “It’s all downstream from me bro.” Nicco answered before Buck could turn back and ask.   “What?”   Buck asked, caught off-guard by another unexpected question. Nicco answered for himself. “I mean it’s not that important bro. None of this is, the drugs, the money, the rep… that bitch Nina y’all stayed behind to smash after the party….”   Buck wiped his face with frustration, which Nicco ignored.   “…It don’t matter anymore. It’s all downstream... as in behind me. What’s important is what I do from this point—up front.”  Buck seemed to dismiss a thousand questions in succession, that rattling of his head stopping between disbelief and suspicion. “...What you got up now nigga?” he asked distractedly, pulling a baggie from his pocket and slapping it in a customer’s hand the way friends greet. He dismissed the fiend with a mean look at the crumpled money before turning back.   “So what you mean by this down-stream shit you talkin’ bout... you mean you done won that game, or something? Nigga? Is that what you mean?”   He slid a step back onto his rear foot, his hands still but restless at his waistline. It was the stance he took when he was ready to be sucker punched, or hit with something crazy.  Nicco stared with a certain distance between them, holding back the expression from his own body language, the excitement especially. After Lex said what he had said at the party, he felt that he couldn’t tell anybody—that in four weeks and an hour he wouldn’t be here!  He was going to nationals! He blinked instead, those natural dimples invisible at his cheeks. He had to draw the line, the line that had Buck on his side once upon a time, a time before Raymond’s face was slit open with a slow zipper… a time before the other night when Lex asked about the metaverse? Yea, now that line was drawn so close that it traced the edges of his own Pumas in front and behind.  Before a smile could break Nicco took a step back himself, a playful approach that imitated the way Buck was standing.    “Damn bro you serious. It ain’t shit with the game. Just tired of shit, you know. A nigga gettin’ weird, right?”   With a lunge he flung a left jab, swiping at that suspicious look and Buck swerved it—stubbornly, as if holding fast to the point at hand. But then following that jab Nicco slid into crouched position, moving Buck’s eyes to the side where a body punch was now being leveraged.   “Alright nigga,” Buck dropped the discussion with a block—a down-flinging down of his sleeves, “you wanna see these hands huh?”   There were a few customers that approached but they kept their distance, as the two young men danced opposite each other in the sudden match, their hands, left and right, swiping quick between the changing expressions serious and playful. A young couple, suburban-ish looking in a grey BMW sedan, stalled patiently at the curb, the man pulling his closed, white hand back inside the car as the show carried on. A regular stood back from mid-stride, changing a gangly forward motion to one of idling. His long leg flexed with the constant walking energy as he leaned against the brick wall. Traffic passed by in the street without braking, the scene apparently as unmoving as any of the trees that swayed along the boulevard.   ******************************************************************************   Chauncey didn’t look like the type to hold things in, even when the topic was heavy and despite the swelling of his chest, the way his voice went too deep to project at times. He had to push his point across.   “Blow that shit out bro.” he said, relaxing his chest as a stream of smoke slowed from his lips into the space between himself and Lex. Standing across from Chauncey, the man didn’t move as much, those flashy hand gestures of his were subdued to a scratching at the side of his face and the openings of the fingers.   “I’m sayin’, Chauncey, Nicco cool and all, you know. And you know how I followed Terrance...” He placed a tight fist over his heart, his bald head gleaming in a mock bow. “T was my nigga. But I don’t know if Nicco built for this Chauncey. I mean, dude all into games and shit, all on the internet talkin’ crazy. I heard he be talkin’ like tryin’ to say shit in Russian and shit...” His eyes opened large to share the disbelief. “Chauncey,” he leaned closer in face, that same distance between himself and the leader of Westend, “I heard the nigga was talkin’ about leavin’ the hood bro, goin’ to New York or some shit….” His face leaned back on his neck, leaving the words to linger in the thoughtful silence.   The looping curls of Chauncey's head were accentuated in the swirling smoke, that dark, greyish cloud lifting as the leader took another toke of the cigarillo. He was clearly holding something in now, the sparkle of his eyes wincing dark with the thoughts. Lex waited patiently, as if already understanding, whatever the answer would be.   “What you think we should do Lex?” Chauncey answered suddenly—coolly, that eye closest to the blunt winking as he puffed again. If Lex fidgeted excitedly on the inside, it showed only in the way that his posture held fast and still, a tall, black statue draped in his peach terrycloth jogging suit. His eyes bulged partially in his head before he caught them, fixing that look of innocence on the leader.   “Look,” the statue was touching an open hand now over where a heart would be in its chest, “I got love for Nicco, Chauncey. I’m not saying we should violate him or nothin’ like that....” Lex stalled. Chauncey watched. “...Yea, I ain’t sayin’ that. What I’m sayin’ is we should keep an eye on the lil’ nigga. Put him to the test. Make em’ show what side of the street he on.” His burnished and jeweled hand extended out, flat over that vision of the street and Chauncey looked at it, those icy reflections glimmering over the black surface. The gleam in Lex’s eyes flared to match that recognition from the leader.   “Okay Lex,” Chauncey said, interested after seeing it in the way Lex put it, “I got somethin’ for him.” He said with a tone of finally, leaning back in the large chair. That was the end of a conversation, the lifting of a weight on the inside of those curls. With a stare slanting upwards and beyond he let it go, a torrent of smoke elongating like a braid from his lips, that twisted stream slowing into a plume that lingered even higher.   Chauncey looked at it then, oddly enough, as if that expanding haze could be read from a lasting, second glance... as did Lex, though more dismissively. He called his own attention to the leader again, that timeless gaze of Chauncey that returned with a darker, reiterated brown.   Lex stood in that gaze, a welcome party of one.   “Chauncey, you did what you had to bro, the right thing. Terrance was slippin’. Everybody and Stevie Wonder momma could see it, especially our enemies. You kept the clique together.” Lex’s fists met, the rings touching with a click. “Look bro, that past is dead as—”   Chauncey did look and Lex quickly showed the brighter side of his hand.   “You know what I mean Chauncey. You lookin’ ahead like a leader supposed to... a leader have to. Nicco still a shorty out here. Bring em’ up right if you think you owe em’ that much. The best way to look out for him is to keep em’ in line bro, make em strong. You know how the streets do.”   Chauncey shook his head in the negative, to say no or to say it was just a shame.   “Yeah Lex. The streets don’t care. Not by choice though, cuz it's not on the streets to care. It's on us, lex, we that run them streets. It’s on us to give a fuck.”   Lex couldn’t disagree, but still, he nodded stiffly. Chauncey ignored that show unspoken dissent like just another thing filing in the back of his mind.   “I know Nicco been skimmin’ from the bundles, Lex. You don’t gotta tell me...” he laughed, a serious statement. “For real though, I took it as a positive. The fact that he wasn’t makin a dent in the bag meant he was smart, a sign that he was growin’ with the hunger he would need to take the fast lane in the clique one day...” he pulled the hilt of a knife from the deep of his jean jacket, a smooth, pearl handle that winked with a few precious stones. He looked at them, turning the thing to dazzle and then, with a flick of his wrist a switch-blade flashed, locking into place. He began to pick his nails, a careful turning blade of light reflecting with his cool expression. “I know how Terrance felt about Nicco bein’ around this shit. It was somethin’ he had words with me over more than once. But like you said, He ain’t here now.” He retracted the blade and put it back in his pocket. “It’s on us to look out for Neek… our way.”   Chauncey stood and walked to the blinds of the window. Approaching from the edge, he pulled a single blade downwards, that solitary grate, invisible from the street, showed the visible world outside that four-story, brick building. Through that thin, makeshift eyelet, the whole world was a ghetto restless, vehicles from four wheels to two legs going everywhere and back, a crisscrossing of joys and pains holdin’ it all together at the foot of that greater Chicago skyline unmoved in the distance. The glitter of that water-globe rounded in the shade of Chauncey’s eye. Behind the leader, Lex took a timely step away before that next sentence sounded.   “I got somethin’ for em’.”   ******************************************************************************  He didn’t touch the game for two weeks, thinking he ran the risk of being shocked back to a different reality if he did, maybe there was a reality where there wasn’t only two weeks left for him to leave this place for good. Not leave for good in terms of time, but leave for good in terms of that eternal struggle between good and evil.   His pops would be proud. And though neither one of them could shed tears of joy, he could feel a certain cleansing starting to trickle on the inside at least, something he had never felt, not even in those stranger moments of DeJa'Vu. No, he didn’t touch the game, for this reason and for others. It sat where it was as did he, across the bedroom next to a solitary backpack. He would sling it over his shoulder when the time came and he went with a new future—money, a change of underwear and a jogging suit along with a stolen laptop. The last thing that he would take with him would be those words in longhand of his father.   He would get the note photocopied and the original laminated at some place in New York. He had plenty of time. And he smiled. For now, sadly, he left that note hanging from that broken mirror, the way he had gotten used to it, the way his aunt was used to it. A new line was drawn, and he was going to stick to it.   “Anybody who is anybody will hear you're gone when they hear you say it in your own voice from Verizon over the horizon,” he said consolingly, still looking at the dormant computer. And he felt the shocking impulse to shed a tear then—a thought or a feeling, it was a reminder of something lost in the deeps of his 14 years—lost, or never had. He could just as easily not call anybody from New York, and the tears would be just as hard pressed as the ones he felt on the inside.   He could see it now; niggas shrugging at the question—what happened to lil Nicco? Y’all remember lil’ Nicco right? Fearing the worst, whatever it would be, he could see his aunt is ranting at a few dispassionate dudes as they watch her through low lashes, puffing on blunts, until even she lowers her tired arms to take-in that blunt and drink for herself, her cheeks still wet but only part-ways into the next song... into the next sleeves of the arms that reach out to comfort her... caress her backside... her eyes closing again, she’s feeling better already.     It made him want to cry in that room by himself—want to. He picked up a drawing he had done of The Black Scarface Samurai, that long, sorrowful scar as unforgettable as the reality of his own past. Holding that worn paper, he wanted to cry but instead, the sketchy face looked up at him stubborn and dryly... not a single, undulating drop to coat the scarring down there.   “I see we don’t always get what we want, do we Black Face?”   Nicco waited for an answer from that stoic alter ego. The black face trembled.      It was his aunt coming, the rush of her slippers up the stairs a quick syncing of sliding and surefootedness. He twisted at the torso, letting the backpack down by the side of the bed as her voice pushed through the door.   “Nicco!” she called just ahead of the door. It barged inward with a single knock and there she was, a lot of what she had to say already obvious in the doorframe. Seeing him in an instant, she brought that pushing hand back down and re-robed the loose half of a breast that flew almost open with the door. She seemed satisfied to lay eyes on him, the exhalation obvious through her fluffy, pink robe as he sat there absently on the bed... until his silence came off as concealment.   Hellooo... she started with that melodramatic look before opening her mouth.   “Nicco you got to tell me what the fuck is goin’ on.”   He shrugged.   “Now don’t start that. You know what I’m talkin’ about. You all quiet around here,” her pink fingernail and eyeballs traced the air, “smilin’ for no damn reason and don’t wanna tell nobody why...” she looked, frustrated again with his concealment. “I know you nigga,” the nail that traced the air pointed at him. “You can’t get shit past me. I used to wipe yo lil’ ass. You forget....”   Nicco sat on the bed unmoved, his shoulders fully relaxed from that shrug he had just given her. He simply watched through lowered lashes.    Her logic obviously failing, Aunt Belinda shrugged herself. She gathered together that loose bust of her robe and sat down on the bed next to her nephew. He looked surprised enough to stay that way throughout the talk.   The one hand at her lap pulling down that wide V of her robe into a tight, curving slit and keeping it there, the other lay softly on his knee, the only pressure being that which came natural with a hard life.   “Look, nephew,” she started, her voice softer than the walls of the house had ever reverberated. And when his eyes grew larger than he could help, hers seemed to gloss over with the understanding… she just had to say it, to spite the instinct to not feel vulnerable. As her lips almost trembled, her eyes went completely uncovered before his, focusing on what she had to say rather than the utter fascination that seized him where he sat. His posture was straighter than any room in the house had framed.   “I got some things to say Nicco…. And don’t interrupt me til’ I finish...” she started to go tough again, an instinct that faltered as her finger lowered from that statuesque frame of a young man before her—his eyes suddenly hard and demanding nothing less than she finish. Seeing him that way, her head bowed a little, that blond of her crown surprisingly softer than anything synthetic.    “Two things, Nicco...” her lips were almost out of sight. “I had a dream. You was gone and nobody knew what happened. I went crazy.” She looked him in the eye. “I want you to know I went crazy. I know I act that way—crazy—and it’s who I am Nicco. But I’m also somebody beneath it all. Her lower fingers relaxed, the V opening a little. She spanked the hands hard on her thighs in a show of frustration. “Damnit I might not be able to change, Nicco. But you can. Your daddy was a good man. I mean, he was a street nigga, don’t get it twisted. But he was a good man in here...” she touched that soft brown between the lines of drooping pink. Her eyes followed his closely. “He wanted more for you Nicco. I gotta say that. We always thought that nigga was crazy, and he was. But he was crazy like a fox sometimes, now that I think back.” She bit her bottom lip a little, her eyes rolling up into the past before coming back with a snap. “You the spittin’ image of em’ Nicco. But you that face that he could never show to the world, because he went too deep.” She touched the smooth side of Nicco’s face, a few fingertips trailing down to his chin. “When you go too deep in these streets you don’t come back to the surface Nicco. You stay buried in the tar, so many layers of tar that all you see in the mirror is black.” her hand gripped down at his knee and he twitched, straightening more on the inside while keeping his eyes still on her. “Maybe I was wrong.” she was saying. “Whatever it is that you feel you need to do in that metaverse baby... maybe you supposed to just do it.... Is that it? Nicco? Is that’s what going on with you?” She leaned in to where the fragrance dabbed on her neck was visible as an oily spot in his eyes, her eyes knowing and sincere... rediscovering him in the closer look. “I see that nigga Terrance in you Nicco, but coming closer to the surface, every day, I see more of that man Terrance in you....” That man in her eyes, she looked glazed over with nostalgia. “And when you talk, sometimes I swear I hear his voice right here in my ear again.” With a tapping of her pointer finger there, she closed her eyes unashamedly, waiting—reaching for that man, as the two listened together for a moment.... Nicco watched her closer, quietly overwhelmed by what was supposed to happen now. Gropingly, he spoke, the only thing that came to him.    “Get out these streets, son…” he recalled those bloodstained words with an authority of his own. “…die if you have to.”   Her eyes and arms flew open, her robe following as she groped to stand from the squeaking bed. In her mind she seemed struck by the voice she heard, an attack of conscious that blindsided her, catching her there in the room with her nephew. She looked ashamed among other things, her lips stuck open as if there were a halo hovering where he sat. She seemed suddenly unsure what to do with herself there, her look, her open robe, pink panties and no bra to match! She gathered it together with a clawing and turned away, leaving that awkward feeling between them to be discussed later, or to go unspoken. The door closed and her slippers skipped dutifully down the stairs.   Behind on the other side, that sound of her scooting away, Nicco felt his own exhalation, the standing heartbeat through his body starting to slow down....  He looked over at the backpack and noticed that image of Black Scarface looking up from the floor, his head shaking in shame with his own.   “Yeah man, I know,” he admitted to himself. “But we drew the line for a reason. Now I know we gotta get the fuck up outta here bro, before these streets swallow us... whole as the Watersands of Okinawa.”   *****************************************************************************    Everything was like it never happened. His aunt had gone back to talking shit with a vengeance, as if to say sorry for what happened... or for what didn’t. He continued to pay, whichever it was. 900 dollars now, three times what it cost to live under a roof where the windy city itself checked in on em’ from time to time and the roaches made special cameos in the bathroom.   He did his best he to make sure everything was like it never happened, with his aunty and everybody else, even making an extra run that Westend needed and telling Chauncey....  “It’s on the house big bro. You’ve always looked out for a nigga.”   Looking at him though, people seemed extra suspicious, something not necessarily out of the ordinary, since that ominous feeling was always present between the storms. The hood was like a big recycling storm of drive-bys, group fights and babymakin’ in the downtime, those future somebodies to live and die another day... a whirl-winding change of faces to weather the generational storming. It felt like that now, the way Chauncey didn’t look as he placed the bundle in the backpack. The big man had gone over by the window after that, peering away through a slit in the blinds.     “You good family?” he asked directly, his back a crisscrossing of stitches in the jean jacket, as if asking people outside the window. Nicco wondered if the leader’s eyes were reflecting on him from the glass.    “I’m good big bro.” he answered, as if those reflecting eyes were looking, his posture held as sincere as his words.   Chauncey turned to face him that way, the blades of the blinds snapping shut behind his head.  “I just wanna make sure you good, Neek.” he said with the same quickness, his face the light-brown glow of concern... that fast concern that Chicago dudes showed on demand... the only kind they could afford to show. After a few blinks and you’ll miss it moment of sincerity, Chauncey shrugged. He pulled a cigar from his pocket and sliced off the end with a pearl-handled knife. He made a snapping gesture with his left hand and something there glinted. He looked at Nicco, seeing the young man still in the same place, as he waved that cigar in his right fingers over the small flame that danced from his left.    “Thanks for makin’ this run lil’ bro. You always treated me like family. Because I am, Nicco—family, that is. I want you to remember that.” he jabbed the fuming cigar at his listener, a languid plume following that hand-speak. He puffed decidedly on that cigar with a thought, or maybe a question, a longer puff than Nicco had seen him take and then, he held it in the same breath, his cheeks puffing his eyes into slits of scrutiny. The oil of his curls glistened like a shifty halo in front of the daylit blinds... a halo he dumped backwards as he blew upwards with a sigh. He seemed to shrug then too, on the inside, that motion of his forearm bringing the cigar back to center of his body. His jean jacket appeared freshly dry cleaned and pressed behind the streams of smoke. He followed those streams with a gaze that drifted as quickly, apparently seeing something with which he couldn’t argue anymore.   “I have a confession, Nicco.” his eyes came back to stay. “It’s about your pops. You know I was the last one to see him alive right? the only one from Westend to make it out of that club that night. You was still just a bundle of nut that your momma held-in for dear life....”   Chauncey looked more sincere than Nicco had ever seen him.  “When them niggas from Southend hit us even the quickest to run didn’t make it. You know I got hit and your pops... your pops next to me... all he wanted was to get his words to you. Even though he only imagined your face somethin’ like his own....” Chauncey looked at Nicco as if back in the club with Terrance standing there instead, and he shook his head. “Unreal man, Terrance had no idea he spit out his own image. All he wanted as he lay there bleedin’ out. Some of his organs was pulled out like ribbons next to him, Nicco.... And all he could think about was to get his dyin’ words to you, the words that would live on.” His eyes opened wider. “That’s why I gave you the note Nicco, not to make you weak but to make you stronger. For you to see.” He got up and walked in semi-circles. “You see those bloody prints from your old man right? The bible say a doubleminded man is divided in whatever he put his mind to... it say that somewhere. And your pops got it in his mind at some point to leave the streets. But see the streets is like a rollercoaster Nicco, they can take you high and low, but the ride is so fast you never wanna just break away. That’s hella-more dangerous than ridin’ it out til the end. You see, when your pops took his mind off the street, his heart went with it—went soft, talkin’ bout takin’ some of the clique’s money to build shelters and shit… drug treatment and shit? I didn’t make no sense even as a front. It was the wrong kinda front. Visionary shit with the clique's money?” Chauncey sounded mad all over again, stopping his pacing to push his point across to that spittin image of Terrance Myles.   “That’s what got your old man killed Nicco, takin’ his eye off the streets to look into things that ain’t for niggas like us. It got em’ killed and I be damned if the same crazy ideas get you killed.”  He looked at that blood descendant before him like one with a mind divided between ages, unaware, for that moment, of what showed through his present face. He seemed to snap himself out of it now with a start, but an ongoing expression. “Terrance was my brother Neek. So I had love for you like a little brother before you was born. Since he been gone, you was like the son that I never had….” Nicco was silent while Chauncey all but stretched forth both hands across the room, a motion that barely straightened the creases in his jean jacket before the cigar went back to his lips for a moment…. “I guess what I’m really tryin’ to say is that we all we got. Nobody crosses the line with our family, Neek, nobody. I don’t give a fuck what side they on. Whatever you got goin’ on lil’ bro, I want you to know we got you. We support you one hundred. But we gotta trust each other whatever it is….” He paused. “You know what I’m sayin’?” Nicco stood in the same place, the same posture except for the slow shrugging of his shoulders on demand. “I ain’t got nothin’ goin’ on big bro. Just scoo and shit.” Hey eyes held innocently when Chauncey looked frustrated. The leader wiped his face with a steady hand, an expression of near indifference unmasked as he thumped ashes into a tray on the table. “Okay then Nicco,” He began before looking up again, “Do the clique like that, in a good way. Be safe with the bundle son.” As flat as his look of resignation, the leader’s tone sounded that much more sincere, his eyes already re-clouding behind the grayish haze. He was standing, turning his way back over to the blinds. Nicco turned to leave, opening the door to place one foot on the outside.  “Nicco...” the leader called, stopping the teen in his tracks. The leader’s voice, so close to that glass, reverberated with treble. “Come by here for the team Monday. I got somethin’ for you.”    “Okay Big Bro.”    Outside, Nicco couldn’t remember if he had said some kind of goodbye, if he had walked or flown from the room. Whatever he had done, he was past the gunmen in the hallway without so much as a word, those normal nods and fist bumps missing when one passes unexpectedly fast.   There was a knot in his stomach, a knot that grew with the throbbing pulse in his head. Why in the fuck did Chauncey want him at The Monday?   “Fuck!” he said, and looked back again, hoping he was far enough away from the dudes at the front stoop…. Seeing that he was, he said it again. “Fuuuck!” He hit the end of the block and turned right, heading for that scooter chained to a fence near the alley.   He had never been to a Monday before, and never wanted to be. The Monday meetings were for the inside players, the ones who made key moves for the clique. They was the niggas with a voice, like Big Lex, the ones who spoke to Chauncey’s vote of one. They moved with bigger bundles, and they pulled triggers when it counted. He swerved on the scooter, a car zooming past with a blaring horn as he bounced back to the right of the street. His eyes were big enough to see it all in motion—that panorama of the streets, houses and people rounding away on the tints of hazel, his eyes big enough to see the future. He could feel it, the eminence as real as his pulse racing, that feeling of something as familiar as streets that were taking him to the drop at these very seconds. This was the first time he made a free trip, but this was the way that he always came. And he knew it like the back of his hand on the trembling handlebar.   “They want me to put in work,” he said, the throbbing in his head overloading with more thoughts. He swayed on the scooter, scraping a parked car then veering from those sirens. Alarmed himself, he lifted a hand to his pounding temple, leaving the other shuddering alone on the handlebar... a shuddering shot down through the front tire.   “Fuck! They want me to kill somebody I know it!”    The scooter wobbled, shaking his head in violent acknowledgement of those thoughts.... They were thoughts of brains and spattering blood that throbbed at his temples....  As he raced downhill, his eyes closing for a moment, desperate for the wind on his face, something to wipe away the stress inside his head, that last hand slipped from the handlebar. It was down when he realized it, the wheels soaring over the dashing, black tar. It was just before that front wheel would jam to the side, sending him to defy gravity and pain. He tried to bring the other hand down, his vision returning from where imagination had taken him, a place where he swore that saw himself killing somebody....   It was that daydream that really happened, the one that he forgot the instant his eyes opened.... Fuck.   It was gone again. His eyes open with the wind on his face, his clothes flapping like gray flags until the front tire Jammed to the side, turning his head in time for him see it with a side-eye. He shot forward against the face of gravity, that mean face of down-scrolling tar and rock, a green scooter following his lead through the air. Both were suspended enough for him to see how he was going to fall, to think it through, and come to grips with this reality.   ******************************************************************************  Back up the street, two of the men from the spot were out near the corner, the sirens of a car alarm calling for attention. Each with a right hand gripped out of sight, one peered around the corner—down the hill towards the sound—while the other looked around in general. Seeing nothing to move them into further investigation, the two returned to talking at the front of the four-story brick.     CHAPTER 9   “No, Vlad, we must talk now.”   She held to his wrist when he turned to walk away, her arm stretching up as his angled downward behind him. That pleading in her voice—that patience—rose predictably to the demand that she was really making.   “We never talk. You will not tell me about what you are doing. What are you planning.”   Having pulled his hand free, he took several larger steps away. He stopped at the top of the down-winding staircase, as if to retreat in the study vault but then, with a hard glance over his back at her, he changed course for the kitchen. With that same pause she followed, her smaller but quicker steps bringing them eye up to twitching eye.  His back nudged to the counter, he checked the knife rack behind him, looking back in concern of those sharps that trembled in the sheaths of wood. She was a step closer when he finished, standing there in front of him. With a shirtless Vladmir cornered, her demands cloaked themselves in tones of pleading again, her face lowering.   “I am pleading you now, my love, what are you up to? You ask me always. I am asking you now....”  The knives rattled again, the rack tipping behind his back. He wanted to look but she ignored it, pressing a hand to his bare chest now.   “I can feel that something big that is happening here, love.”  When he persisted with his breathing, her head angled, a slightly different approach in her eye. “Think of it logically, Vlad. Ask yourself with me, if something happens to Vladimir, God forbid, who will he trust to run the business? To take care of Sasha? Not to mention the children they pray to have some day close?”   His logic kicking in, apparently, his legs straightened, bringing his form to tower over her even more. With that, he turned and left the kitchen. He paced into the main room, the crème du earthen tones a calm backdrop to the hardness of his thoughtful expression. She caught up with him there, her silky robe slowing gracefully down over the rounding of her naked buttocks.   It was as if he could see her there behind him as she wanted him to, that focus in her eyes a projection of intensity.   “You know I am right Vlad.” her voice was relentlessly humble in his ear. His back to her, his deeper voice came from where she could not see.  “You know what kind of man I am. Do I need to remind you? I am the kind of man who happened to be in the brothel where you were to be sold. There is certain kind of man to be found in den worse than thieves, Sasha. The places I have been... you do not get to such places by accident. But it is accident which happens every day of my life....”   With that, he turned to face her, her expression satisfied at finding his eyes but then, retreating from something a darker green.   “Yes, Sasha, I am the kind of man who follows the accident path. It is a path that brings one to his own tragedy, in the end. I do not want this street for you, Sasha.”   She moved strands of the raven veil from her eye, her pupils growing at the sincerity of his words as he continued.   “It was against my nature to save you then. When I offered all that I could liquidate. When that failed, and I saw that young girl, her future sealed because of lack of money, I sinned worse against my nature. I was ready to die, which is easier for men afflicted as I, but I did the more difficult thing, I cared enough to kill. Not for money nor mission, but for you. I could not utter it then, not to myself. But I can say it now. It was because I wanted to live. In that moment, watching you there to be saved, I felt the curious spark to live, my own childish tantrum about what I felt I was losing again, those emotions for life. Losing again, in that moment, was more terrifying than a thousand deaths. So out of instinct, I sinned against myself. Against all the rules of the industry and my own iron fist, I killed for you, a child who was a stranger but whose face I recognized as well as one in the mirror. It was the same expression I felt when losing my own father, the expression of a child that loses all care for life. All my sins will catch me one day Sasha, or they will be washed away in blood. I do not want you there when they do.”   He turned from her again, starting to walk away. She stopped him in his tracks.   “That is all downstream Vlad.” she said sharply, turning his head with a shock. She reiterated then, as the corner of his eye continued in her direction.   “It is all water under the bridge love....”   He was stepping towards her.   “I know that man that you are, Vlad” she reassured that look of his. That hard determination was coming closer, quickening her words with the thought. “I know that man, he is upfront, but he is mysteri—”  That thought of hers ended with a sound of choking, the sound of his hand at her neck and gripping. He pulled her closer, the emerald of his eyes looking to penetrate the darkness of her own. Seeing only glints of what he searched for, he pushed her face back to a strong arm’s length, holding tight to that pulse of her throat. Her soft hands cupped that vice that throbbed beneath her uplifted chin, her caress of calmness stroking the opposite effect. The vice grew harder, pressing a gag from her vocal cords as his other hand reached downward. With her jawline craned upwards, her eyes rolling down towards the unseen, she felt it as he unbuckled his pants, a hasty fidgeting shared through the fingers around her neck and she breathed heavier, a strange cry of relief, for a moment, as her focus recentered with this familiar turn. She would play the role. Her eyes refocused on his with a welcoming familiarity, but he met them with disapproval. Completely naked, he retightened his grip, the balls of her feet lighter on the floor as the lovers pulled closer to each other, brown eyes shimmering—green eyes hardening. “What do you mean it is downstream, Sasha? Where do you get to know this saying?” he asked, the suspicion in his voice as naked as his body against her. That grip, holding the blood up in her face, was harder than what he did during sex, giving her ideas on the spur of the moment. She needed to say something to help him release, coax him through this familiar moment, and bring him to a place of satisfaction. The olive of her skin was tainted dark from the deep veins of crimson that grew upwards from her neck. Her mouth held open in gaping silence, that flushed look of pleading was all that she could express. “Sorry,” he said with a calm realization. He relaxed that hand just as casually from her neck, as if remembering where he had left it. In a show of downplaying her gasps, he slapped playfully on the side of her face, a clapping sound to offset her choking. He stayed there as she caught her breath, his head slighting curiously over that disheveled and low-hanging raven. She looked up at him as soon as she could. With that hand cupping large but more relaxed against her jaw, she showed enough confusion to convince them both. “It is American saying Vlad, very popular….” His posture stayed hard and unconvinced, his eyes mockingly sympathetic. “Oh Vlad,” she exclaimed, realizing what it could be that he suspected. “It is American saying, yes, like water under a bridge... but I have known since little girl I swear. I have not been online speaking with Americans since you broke the computer….” She choked the last, an unflinching look that she shared with him, relaxing that hard gaze of his. “Saying it is downstream is same as saying it is water under the bridge—” His eyes retreated before she could finish, another decision he took as his hand drew from the side of her face. He had started to turn away, that large shoulder barging between them but then, he was swinging back to face her. His eyes looked sideways over a scowl, that open hand of his following through with a rush of air. It all seemed in slow motion and yet, she had barely time to duck. His eye so measured against her own, open in amazement, seemed to see right through her head as it lowered. It was his thousand-yard stare aimed into the distance between himself and the top of her skull. Her eyes downcast, she had seen that aim before when he focused on problems that were in his way, from the past to his future. She was never before on the receiving end of that aim, that pressure on top of her as his hand cupped the air, teasing those clutches of her hair into rising strands. She was still ducking from that corner of his eye when the palm stuck her scalp in passing, those loose strands billowing past in the wake. Fast-forwarding, her Persian vase exploded in real time behind her, shards of that precious glass raining into reality—5000 euros, it had cost her. “You bitch!” he said. Again, nothing too above or beyond some of their intimate sessions, more of a terrifying rehearsal than purely terrifying. Here we go again, was the thought, a crazy one right into the moment she felt his fist clenching the thick of her hair, bowing her head to the side as the gleaming strands of black thread through his white-knuckled fist. The scalp beneath ratcheted up with that gripping vice, bringing her to the balls of her feet again. Her eyes closed in concentration. It was strange for him to do these things, if he meant to terrify her, things that he knew to excite her at other times. And from deep behind that veil she began to question... to suspect.... This was something different, exciting in a way she hadn’t experienced when that arc of her scalp drug towards the balcony door, her feet skipping to keep up, a tinkling of broken glass beneath them. “Please Vlad love…” she questioned, her toes flexing from the weight of that vase crushed under her foot. The balcony door was open, looming larger as the curtains billowed outwards. “Please Vlad,” she cried more weakly, the strength of pleading her only means to resist, “Where are you taking to me love?” her eyes rounded large, searching up for that face of his. It was a fateful expression that she glimpsed, a determined look, his jawline chiseled forward under the ceiling. “Shhh….” He cut her off, a command that she obeyed. Her heart raced with strange fright, each giant step a terrifying recollection of who it was that pulled her by the head, a few of those stubborn strands peeling uprooted. She wanted to plead again, whisper a sound of trickling drops on her cheeks, let him feel this terrifying feeling of real tears. He was really taking her there! She wanted to tell him—needed to share with him! “Shhh,” he reiterated, as if hearing before she could say it, already knowing better what was good for her. “Shhhut up, bitch.” The strength of his resolve shot chills down her spine, more than what trembled her breasts when she uncovered that truth in his journal, when she had stolen into his thoughts. Her lips sealed with a bitter tear between them then. If she did not deserve what was about to happen, she was about to get it. An outer wind flung that sheer robe from her, a cape from her stumbling frame and with the same incessant rush, lavished the partings of her naked body with a steady exhalation through the doorway, that open throat onto the balcony spewing out under nightfall. It was a scene where his legs tensed and swung with forward motion, the sinewy features of his whole frame highlighting through the shadowy gusts. The temperature had dropped, she noticed, the welcome-kissings of a darker, cooler air, a chilling but electrifying charge against which her skin arose in pouting. Like the quivering before a strike of lightning, her eyes closed with acceptance, her throat a swallowing of helplessness. She let that cold air kiss and caress on a level deeper than it had. It was a strange freedom to feel that snatch between skips—head-bound for that far edge. “Vlad?” she pleaded in defiance of his order, hardening his determination to be sure. Her tears were now being wiped outrightly by the higher, corner winds. “Shhh,” he reminded, softer in her ear now, turning her with a sudden twist of confusion as they reached the edge. He stood there at the naked underbelly of stratus clouds, his eyes gazing away, hair snapping in the gusts that barely swayed his frame. A lone falcon shrieked past at a strong stone’s throw, a streaming visual that led his gaze out and over the quilting of city into the horizon. He looked at the serenity of it all for a moment, the flickering veins of life far below like stirring homage to the glitter-strewn heavens above them all. He lifted his attention there, his eyes completely closed. A gust of wind embraced his thoughts just then, the dirty-blond of his head caressed colorless under the night. His chest heaved relentless—drawing the breaths of courage that he needed from the heights… or taking those breaths of encouragement for himself. The hand that clenched her hair let go. The other shoved the back of her neck, her soft toes scraping the cement as she fell forward.... Holding on until the last, she noticed that far horizon was barely aglow beneath a glittering shade… that infinite canopy from above rotating downward. Her eyes too fell, a browsing of scenery blocked by the waist-high parapet as her head fell. It was all that stood between the naked two and that soaring fall of unfathomable stories. She felt herself suspended, held there by a greater power, her breasts roughing atop the gritty, concrete wall. His hand pressed at the back of her head, her face held extended from the edge of the roof. It was a look of utter amazement. He was going to push her from behind. The anchor of her thighs parting at the short wall, his iron fist gripping her at the nape like a whimpering puppy-dog…. Her slender body was a tug-of-war, his hand-in-hand with the pull of gravity beyond the roofline. She teetered there between the two, the concrete edge of life and death buffering the smooth of her breasts with its rigid parapet… a place of questioning on which side was life to be found. She opened her eyes with a certain acceptance then, with a searching that rounded large—dazzled in those instants with that homage to the heavens far below. It was the electric replications of glittery starlight, those distant city lights that, were they to rise closer, would bring their illuminated billboards, their speeding headlights to the toasting of lifted champagne glasses, all things that sparkle along the elevating streets. She was ready to fall for it all, had been ready since she was a child that dreamed of a better place. She had made it from her little village after all, recalling that city skyline as unreachable as the horizon itself. In the space of a heartbeat, a realization as vast as all she that could see now, she acknowledged the man who had brought her to this place—this elusive horizon. “Thank you, my dear Vladimir.” With that, the acceptance in her voice, the grip at the back of her neck loosened just enough, his hand riding up to clench the thick of her hair and her expression lifted, her teary cheeks facing that outer horizon. The sun was all but down. “Say nothing Sasha.” His voice was hot, leaning forward enough just to reach her ear. The hand that held her hair moved with stroking motions, the rhythm of what his other did between his legs as he held her bent over the fall, her butt cheeks brushing like parting lips across his muscular thighs. From the broad of her hips down to the widening of her feet—a slipping of pebbles for delicate balance—was his to hold. The instant his hand loosed her scalp was to grasp a tighter grip before she fell. “You think I will kill you? I saw it in your eyes. I hear it in your voice. I smell it in your pores….” She said nothing. His voice was grave with excitement, enough purpose for both of them out where the wind kept the secrets that barely past her ears. “I cannot take chance of you dying, Sasha. I cannot risk you knowing certain things....” His voice stalled, distracted with breathing as he stroked himself to a harder point behind her.... Her eyes, large and searching as a mare’s, looked for him. Her curiosity stimulated, her focus redirected from beyond the edge, she felt herself there in body with him again, hanging on his every word and action now…. All she could do was wait—trust by helplessness. This scene, as did the many between them, would end as he commanded it. Finding herself here was a role she understood, a role she played masterfully. She arced her body up from the waist, parting from that downward pull of unfathomable stories. Her buttocks suddenly pressing back he rushed a little, his hips flexing as he headed through that parting of new moisture. In her mind it was the warmth of him slipping into where the cold air had not come between them. His words followed in her ear—slowly, at first, a pacing of what he had to get across to her. “I cannot take chance of talking to you inside. You say too much, Sasha....” he paused with a backward thrust, a feeling of his not releasing too much too soon, before he reset, coming back with deeper expressions. “I love you, Sasha, more than feeling. This why I do not tell you. This is why I bring you here, just between us and the wind where there is no chance of listening....” A vast breeze passed the two in long, howling agreement where their bodies protruded as one highlight from a straight edge, those downcast silhouettes of them tiny and breathless against a canopy of Milky-way... the arm of Orion reaching across the night behind them. He leaned daringly close to her, shifting the balance. His face was cool with moisture as they teetered perfectly together. “Listen to me,” he demanded. And her bare foot slipped with a sound of gravel when he thrust closer—deeper, moving her buttocks with a clap... catching her further off-guard with the rebounding of a rhythm she had never felt from him. She felt herself as high as the darkening night with him now, holding on until he finished giving all he had for her to know. She could feel it was coming, the way his words rushed to get it out. She wanted to know—needed to know before falling... or him losing control... whichever came first. “I got this,” he panted, his voice rising to a strange pitch of prematurity, where he almost lost it. He seemed to struggle behind her for a slower, unspoken number of strokes, before clarifying, his deeper, Russian drawl returning. “I mean I have everything under control... you will look in study vault... drawer top left... lock combination is same day they kill my father... look there Sasha, Look there Saturday, 23 hundred hours... I take you with me...” His thrusting, moving out of control, pushed her further over the edge, her hand slipping off the parapet. Her right breast spread on top of that concrete with a grimace. Her hair in his hand, twisted tight as a raven bungee, stopped her descent with a jerk, her hands extended as if in free-flight from the roofline, while his full length throbbed in her behind. It was a familiar feeling, as she recovered her palms onto the concrete, two to three strokes to go, a preeminence that stoked inside her when his words came in sputters at the side of her head, her eyes closed in acceptance. “Oh Sasha! This mission is biggest I ever….” Her ears held open until the end. His words fell short, filling her with all the understanding—all she needed to know for the time. With a grimace she twisted that arch in her back carefully—a seesawing from the roofline—reaching around for his support as he leaned backwards. He slapped her wrist with his open hand, a clasp stronger than the other hand that hoisted her up by the hair. Her scalp tightening with the lift, her forehead and eyes stretching with realization, she smiled with that likeness of herself. It had never felt so good. She had gotten what she wanted and then some. With his gaze careful if not apologetic at the back of her head, that expression of hers pulled upward to safety. Held facing away, it revealed that afterglow of sly satisfaction. ****************************************************************************** As the night was young, she spent some time sweeping the broken pieces of her precious vase. The trickles of dark red that smeared the floor were a mingling of hers and his, the man she loved beyond reason.

It’s time for The Bachelor, a show where a bunch of drunk twenty-somethings act like we’re in a post apocalyptic world where this is their only chance at finding true love. It’s worth noting Big Brother has a higher success rate of couples staying together than this (shit) show. Pudding: I can’t believe you woke me up for THIS. We start off with the ubiquitous shot of Zach taking a shower (WHY?!) click for me First up is a group date where the ladies meet Latto. She tells the women that “bad bitch energy” is as much about confidence as it is about physical appearance. She has the women dance to show off their confidence. Brooklyn complains that “literally there are professional dancers here, and I’ve got rhythm from Oklahoma.” Then Latto announces more women will be joining the date; it’s three women from prior seasons, Victoria, Tahzjuan and Courtney. I don’t remember which seasons they were on. They are bad bitches who will be judging this seasons contestants. First the women walk down a catwalk. Zach stands at the end of the catwalk nodding and smiling and not knowing what to do with his hands. It’s painful and awkward. Then the women share stories about a time when they were a bad bitch and none of them involve scraping their sharpened claws down the face of the patriarchy, so Pudding, the original bad bitch and duchess of murder, is not impressed. Pudding: Amateurs. During the cocktail party, Brianna admits to Zach that she doesn’t feel confident regarding her place in the McMansion or with him. During the After the Rose special for last season’s Bachelorette they introduced five women from this season’s show. The audience picked Brianna to get the first impression rose, and she reflects that it didn’t come from Zach and she doesn’t know where she stands with him. Then they make out. IDEK you guys. Click for me So then Zach is talking to Cat, and Tahzjuan (the bad bitch from season 23) interrupts them to talk to Zach. Pudding: Interrupting a conversation makes her a bad bitch? What rot. Tahzjuan asks to join the show because she likes Zach’s energy. Pudding: Not his face, his “energy.” The other women aren’t thrilled. Then Tahzjuan tells them that watching them on stage was painful. …but, like, it was. Then Zach tells them he’s not inviting her to join the group. SO WHAT WAS THE POINT OF ANY OF THIS? DID THEY JUST HAVE 15 MINUTES TO FILL? Tahzjuan gets weepy and says, “Bad bitches don’t cry.” Then we get the closed captioning for a producer in the background saying, “Sometimes bad bitches cry. It’s okay.” This show is just …yeah. Click for the show The date rose goes to Katherine. So then we cut back to the McMansion the next morning where some of the women are sitting by the pool talking. “I feel like Zach, right away, will know if you want to use tongue or not,” Jess says “Wait, like, I did not know that tongue was not something that was used in every kiss,” Katherine replies. It must be real weird when she kisses her dog. ANYWAY. It’s Christina’s turn for a one-on-one date. On the car ride they bond over… I am not making this up…their mutual love for the band Nickelback. They go for a helicopter ride (I swear to God every season has a helicopter/horse budget. I’m waiting for the episode where the horse pilots the helicopter). Then they go to Zach’s family home where they are celebrating his mom’s birthday with a barbeque. One of his cousins loudly asks, “Should we tell her about his rash?” Give THAT guy a show! During the dinner they aren’t allowed to eat, Christina tells him that she’s the mom of a five-year-old girl. Zach acts like Christina is the only human being to have reproduced. He tells the camera he doesn’t know if he’s ready to be a dad. He tells her that he feels like they have a connection, but he’s not sure he’s ready for kids yet. He starts to tear up and we think he’s going to send her home, but then he gives her the rose. Side note, they keep advertising the Senior Bachelor and that they’re looking for casting. Pudding is, technically, a senior. Pudding: I will end you, bitch. Then it’s time for the second group date. It’s basically a cocktail hour. Gabi, who looks a lot like Kendall Jenner, worries that she hasn’t talked to him yet. Pudding: Based on how this is season is going, I would count that as a blessing. I mean, look at this guy. So then Gabi does get to talk to him and asks if she can call him “Zachy-poo.” Click for me The whole conversation seems to be a lot of verbal vomit on her part, although that could be the editing. The date rose goes to Jess. Gabi feels more insecure and walks away crying. She says she didn’t get any validation from him. Then, the next night during the pre-Dreaded Rose Ceremony cocktail hour, Gabi and Zach share a peanut butter cup Lady and the Tramp style and then kiss, so I guess it’s ok? Then Brianna confronts Christina because on night one Christina joked that she hated Brianna for having the first rose. Christina apologizes. So then Brianna starts to tell Zach about it and he basically shuts her down saying he trusts her to handle it. LOL. Then Zach tells her she has a lot of walls up. To be fair, everything we’ve seen of her this episode has been her complaining about not fitting in. Later Zach sends home Cat, Kimberly and Victoria. What do you think of this season so far? View the full article

It was close to midnight in Manhattan and they were still waiting in the van. Ford, short and wiry, was behind the wheel, while Neuland—bulkier and a foot taller—slouched in his seat trying to keep his head from hitting the ceiling of the van. They were dressed all in black and had black balaclavas on their faces so that the only things visible were their eyes—and someone would have to look carefully to see them. They’d been parked at the edge of the alley since twilight and both men had long since grown bored. Still they waited, their rifles propped against their legs. Their employer—Mr. Garrick—hadn’t given them a description of their target, just the bare outline of what was supposed to happen and how they were supposed to stop it. It was annoying. They didn’t work that way normally, but Garrick promised to pay them double their normal fee, so they went along with his nonsense. “Do you think that’s them?” said Neuland. A few yards ahead of them in the alley, a well-dressed man and a haggard woman appeared to be negotiating some kind of deal. Ford watched through what resembled a pair of binoculars, but the tubes were carved from a yew tree and the lenses were the shaved corneas from the eyes of thirteen hanged men. “It’s not them,” said Ford. “From the look of them, the girl’s got pills or party potions and the guy’s a tourist who doesn’t know how to haggle. Besides, they’re both dodos.” Dodo was what Ford occasionally—and many others routinely—called the undead. It bothered Neuland, who was also undead. “Please don’t use that word. It’s demeaning,” Neuland said. “And it makes you sound like a hick.” “Sorry.” “We prefer Marcheur.” “You’re right. I’m tired and didn’t think.” “It’s all right.” “No. It was rude and I’m sorry.” “You can’t help how you were raised.” “But you’re my partner and I should be more considerate.” “Apology accepted,” said Neuland. “Now, are we going to shoot either of those two or not?” “No. The deal is supposed to be someone alive selling something to a Marcheur. That lets these two off the hook.” “Maybe. Let’s keep an eye on them. One of them could still be involved.” The van felt cramped after all this time, and they’d finished the coffee hours ago. Ford wanted a smoke, but didn’t dare light up where the cherry-red end of the cigarette could be spotted. So, they waited in silence. The dealer and the tourist finished their business, and the tourist went into the rear of a bodega while the woman remained in the alley. She checked her watch several times. “You’re right,” said Ford. “She’s part of the deal.” “Nervous?” “Impatient. I mean, look at her twitch. It won’t be long now.” “I hope you’re right.” They sat quietly for a few minutes before Ford said, “Really, man, I’m sorry about the dodo thing.” “I told you it’s all right.” “Thank you.” “You’re welcome, and also, you should look out the window. This might be it.” Ford sat up as a young woman approached the Marcheur. The woman was in a purple velvet dress and had straight black hair that hung down to her waist. He scanned the two women through his special binoculars. “You’re right,” he said. “The one in the velvet dress is alive. But I don’t like it.” “Me neither. Garrick didn’t say the target was a woman. Just dressed in velvet, right?” “That’s right.” Neuland shook his head. “I don’t shoot women.” Ford looked at him. “We’ve both shot women.” “Really evil ones. Like Elsbeth Bathory evil. Not some little thing in a party dress.” “Let’s keep watching. Maybe she’s the right kind for shooting.” For the first time, the nature of the assignment weighed down on Neuland. He didn’t like the situation one bit, but he knew that if this was indeed their target, he’d have to take the shot. It was his job to kill the living. Ford killed the dead. Neuland said, “Please tell me they’re plotting something nefarious.” “Shit,” said Ford. “Shit.” “What?” He didn’t like the tone of Ford’s voice. “There’s something else. The party dress?” “Yes?” “She’s pregnant.” Neuland reached out and took the binoculars. The haggard undead woman’s aura was a grayish purple while the young woman’s was a bright purple. “What the hell is this?” said Neuland. “If she’s selling her kid, I sure as hell will shoot her.” “Yeah, Sir Galahad? And kill the kid too? I’m going to keep watching. I want to know exactly what’s going on.” Neuland was mad now. He knew his distaste for shooting women was hypocritical since they were every bit as capable of evil as men. Worse, not wanting to shoot a mother was the rankest kind of sentimentality. He didn’t like having strong emotional responses to these situations. Strong emotions were for the living, like Ford. He could fly into a rage at a moment’s notice and it accomplished nothing. The undead were supposed to be above such things, but here he was. Fretting about some stranger selling what, rationally, was hers to sell. Another moment passed and Ford said, “A necklace.” “Not the kid?” “Not the kid.” “What kind of necklace?” “Expensive looking. Earrings too. Some bracelets. All gold. All nice-looking stuff.” “Let me see,” said Neuland, and Ford handed him the binoculars. He was right, the undead woman was examining a pile of jewelry in a decorated wooden box that the young woman held out. Neuland handed the binoculars back to Ford and said, “You know what this means.” “Of course.” “It might cost us our fee.” “There’s no helping that.” “I guess not.” Ford started the van and they drove to Mr. Garrick’s office, where they’d arranged to meet after the hit. They let themselves into the building with a key Garrick had given them and rode the elevator to the penthouse level of the old office building. Neuland was out of the elevator first and didn’t bother knocking on Garrick’s office door before going in. Garrick, sixtyish and in a sharply tailored suit, looked up in surprise. He smiled at the men. “That was quick,” he said. “You boys are every bit as efficient as they say.” The two men came in and Neuland stood very close to Garrick’s desk so he could loom over the man. They’d left their rifles in the van. “Efficient,” said Neuland. “That’s because we can read a scene and know what’s happening, even from a distance.” “It’s what keeps me alive and my partner in one piece,” said Ford. “We read the scene tonight, Mr. Garrick.” “And we didn’t like it.” Garrick scowled at the men. “What’s it your business to like or not like a particular killing? I hired you to do a job. Did you do it or not?” “No,” said Ford. “You see, the target was pregnant.” “What difference does that make?” said Garrick. “She was selling her personal jewelry,” said Ford. “It was in a silly little box. Something cheap and gaudy. The kind someone young like her would love.” “And?” said Garrick. “It was very expensive jewelry,” said Neuland. “Much too expensive for her, considering the quality of her dress. The jewelry might have been hers, but she didn’t buy it.” “They were a gift,” said Ford. “From you,” said Neuland. Garrick sat back in his big leather office chair. “What the hell are you talking about? I hired you as killers, not psychics.” “There’s nothing psychic about it,” said Ford. “It’s like we said, about being able to read a scene. You see, a young woman selling jewelry like that—jewelry she couldn’t possibly afford—can only mean one thing.” “And what’s that?” said Garrick snidely. “That she’s using her rich lover’s gifts to her to finance an escape,” said Ford. “From the lover,” said Neuland. “You hired us to kill her because you got her pregnant, and that’s an inconvenience. She was smart enough to know that something was up and was buying a ticket out of town.” Garrick slammed his hands on his desk and stood up. “Don’t get high and mighty with me, boys. You’re murderers. Not priests. And you don’t get a cent until the bitch is dead.” Ford and Neuland looked at each other. “I think you should explain it to him,” said Ford. “Obviously,” said Neuland as he took a Sig Sauer P220 pistol from his jacket and emptied the entire clip of .45 rounds into Garrick’s body. The man slammed to the floor, his blood splashing onto the desk and the curtains and the window behind him. The moment his partner was finished, Ford began going through the drawers in Garrick’s desk looking for money. Neuland went through Garrick’s pockets. “Anything?” said Ford. Neuland shook his head. “Two thousand in cash in his wallet, but that’s it.” “Damn. Well, let’s take it and go. We need to leave town.” “Not yet,” said Neuland. “I don’t think we’re done. Garrick is the kind of guy to have an insurance policy.” Ford stopped. “You’re probably right.” “We’ll know soon.” A minute passed before Garrick’s corpse began to twitch. His limbs convulsed and his eyes fluttered open and shut. His shoulders spasmed and his teeth chattered as if he was cold. Then he stopped, grabbed his desk chair, and dragged himself to his feet. Erect, he looked at Ford and Neuland and said, “You’re both dead men.” “No. I’m the dead one,” said Neuland. “And I kill the dead,” said Ford, pulling his own pistol. He shot Garrick between the eyes with one of his special cold iron bullets and the man fell back to the floor. The killers left, knowing he wouldn’t get up again. “So, where are we going?” said Neuland. “We can’t stay in New York.” “Europe?” “I don’t like flying and I hate ships even more.” “We could drive to Montreal. Bigsby is always offering us jobs,” said Ford. “Too cold. My joints get stiff.” Ford said, “Right. So where?” Neuland thought for a moment. “West. As far west as we can go.” “Like cowboys.” “Sure. Like cowboys.” “Goddamn Garrick,” said Ford. “Lousy dodo,” said Neuland. Ford looked at him. Neuland laughed, then so did Ford. He said, “I’ll get us train tickets.” From THE PALE HOUSE DEVIL by Richard Kadrey, forthcoming from Titan Books on October 3. Copyright ©2023 by Richard Kadrey. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Titan Books. View the full article

Assignment 4: Selecting Genres and Finding Two Comparables Genre: Womens Fiction, Historical Fiction, Feminism, LBGTQ+ Lessons in Chemistry, by Bonnie Garmus In this book, the main character is an anomaly for her time, a chemist in a man’s domain. Set in the 1950’s, the mainstream jobs for women were clear cut: teacher, nurse, secretary, but NOT chemist! The main character, Elizabeth Zott, fights with grit and determination to bring her feminist views to the public via her cooking show that combines chemistry with art of cooking. There is tension in the sexist encounters with her male peers, humor (her dog narrates come of the action) and an antagonist you clearly want to cheer on. Compared to my stories: My women’s stories are set in time frames starting in the early 1900’s to present day. Although the context within which each woman struggles is different, struggles remain. Some of my women are much like Elizabeth Zott – bright, determined and up against cultures and mores that attempt to block their way. Some of my women’s struggles are completely self-induced. Some of my antagonists the reader will want to cheer on and some will be more difficult to cheer on. They’re complicated women with sound motives that may seem nefarious to some. A Manual for Cleaning Women, Collected Stories by Lucia Berlin, Foreward by Lydia Davis, Edited by Stephen Emerson This gritty collection of Berlin’s stories, published posthumously, tell tales of hard-living women. Many of them are semi-autobiographical, as Berlin suffered from alcoholism and fought that demon all her life. Her clear, unvarnished prose is the clear asset in her stories with just enough humor and wit to keep the reader from descending into a black hole. Kirkus Reviews states “…she might have had a higher profile if her subject matter had been less gloomy.” Advice - I’ll take it! Compared to my stories: The women in my stories are mostly blue-color women, only one being college-educated. There are struggles with alcoholism and drug addiction, an inability to live an authentic life because of religious beliefs and homophobia and a woman’s most ineffective coping mechanism: denial. I want to keep the prose clean and necessary to advance the story, but vary the voice to allow an omnipresent 3rd person to inject humor, wit and outrageousness into what might otherwise be a depressing tale.

For most of my life, I took quiet to mean a kind of shortcoming. I had heard it used too many times as a description of how others saw me. But then I realized that in the work of writers I love deeply are many kinds of quiets—those of catharsis, of subversiveness, of gaping loss or simple, sensual joy. I came to think of quiet not as an adjective or verb or noun, but as a kind of technique. The books I chose for the syllabus below expand how we think about black expression, intimacy, interiority, and agency; about black quietude. I began with the work of Kevin Quashie, whose voice, like a tuning fork, set a tone for my reading of other books. For the nonfiction books on this list, I looked for thinkers who are deeply attentive to the everyday. For fiction and poetry, I selected writers who allow us to glimpse more clearly our own selfhoods via the unknowability of others. In all cases, these are books that are richer for asking us to listen more deeply. We might return from each one dazzled, dazed even, but always with renewed, sharpened perception. Kevin Quashie, The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture Elizabeth Alexander, The Black Interior Toni Morrison, Sula Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha Natasha Brown, Assembly Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes Margo Jefferson, Constructing a Nervous System Robin Coste Lewis, To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness Lucille Clifton, Generations Dionne Brand, The Blue Clerk Grace Nichols, Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Woman and Other Poems M. NourbeSe Philip, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks Kathleen Collins, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God Victoria Adukwei Bulley is a poet, a writer, and an artist. She is an alumna of the Barbican Young Poets and recipient of an Eric Gregory Award. Quiet, her debut poetry collection, is a finalist for the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Rathbones/Folio award. It will be published by Alfred A. Knopf this month. View the full article