The streets looked to be lacquered in white, from where she stood. The streets were also wet, the drains gurgling and gulping sewage and sludge and the meandering leftovers from the day; its season, its rubbish, lost things and those beyond lost, now unknown.

Her suede boots hit the ground as quietly as she could, hair in high ponytail, nape creased as she rolled her head back slowly to view the sky.

There was gossip, there were wanted signs, there were lies and there were truthes.

There was the blues, there was jazz, there was rockabilly, there was le danse de mardi gras. Echoes of simpler times, when she sang.

Now, she ran.

The world turned, dizzy and dismal in its colour, where light fell in grays. And then she would pass a building and stare past a roof edge to see the brilliant, wheeling night sky, littered in stars. All dead, took so long for their shine to reach us..

Viki. The girl-woman she ran into, nightly event, who scented her out, who spoke strange things she did not understand. Though now, little by little, words became sentences and sentences became sense. Raw, sparkling. The clawed, spikes of amethyst at the back of their green, mottled shell.

"Viki", she gasped.

She knew when I was pregnant, before I did.. She knew what I wore was a lie.. She knew that something was to happen, and even she could not stop it herself...

I should have stayed, I should have watched. Why did I run away?



Paused, boots rattling the grate at her heels, she closed her eyes and listened to the angle of time, the audible hum as the world moved, the buzz as increments of knowledge beckoned her out of her indecision. Her fear.

She moved quickly up the street, moving as if it would speed up the fragmented prose of Viki, to spin her out, shake her, and guide.

The streets were slick, oilslick red with neon making all seem like goop, flowing and oozing from the gutter, grates in the road spurting smoke. The sky looked to be cracked. Indecisive. Between black and ribbons of jet purple, and then towards a sultry mauve.

She sat nestled between crates just off an alleyway, smoking and watching the small crowds that left one of the smaller, underground theatres on Nevada Boulevarde. The aching light spilled onto her boots and she smiled, staring at the colours. The strain of glare against the shadow. Such a beautiful town in these little, lost moments.

Standing, she stretched her back, leaning to the side as she raised an arm and unknotted some cords and kinks with a balled fist. The moon was distant, funny white planet, and the ghosts were out. Walking and groping and clinging and screaming, and some were singing, gaps in the curtains, the blink of an eye. Lerida paused and smirked, looking to her left, hair in her face, a shine in her heart. Things spoke to those who listened.