It hasn't been the same since the seer child was taken. I was not directly involved but I promised to help her and I didn't. I can't quite say why it is that this event has killed me more than the rest. I suppose I feel for the child. I feel for anyone who has been where I have. Thrown into darkness.

I was kidnapped when I was fifteen. It was during my first week, of course, on the wide open road, dizzy with the dust in my hair, and, I imagined, the desert stars, laying out for all hours with my then copper hair falling off the bonnet behind me as my best friend and I tanned on the rusted rent a jeep. We did it for four days, stopping off the side in the nowhere, letting our hair and t shirts down to brown our Russian skins in the tides of sand. It was so hot out there it wasn't all vanity. But we'd caught the attention of some roughers, as my aunt used to call then, the ones that cruise the coast of barbed wire and forgotten everythings out there in the nothingness, and found themselves two young things. Bettie said she felt watched and I ignored her. I felt the same, but I kind of liked it.

The first time we knew something was up, well and truly, was when we pulled into the gas station. Cash was on the radio and the last words I heard were white horse, before a crashing sound came hurtling into my ears and Bettie was gunning the engine and hollaring at me to come outside and hurry up with the blue ice drinks in hand. And I did. To a tall man getting into the car, our car, behind our wheel, shoving my friend into the seat. I dropped the drinks and screamed and screamed. And then there was another loud thunder of a sound and next I knew my mouth was filled with cloth and I couldn't move at all.



I don't like to write about what happened, because compared to Bettie, it was a forgiveness. Bettie was strung up in the woods with a rope for a necklace where I was given a few new curse words and a sense of the unholy, but a way to run. His name was Lolo. He was Mexican. The youngest of the bunch. Took pity. Asked me for a kiss and said he'd let me go. So at dawn the next day he did. He gave me a warm can of beer, all he had in that shack, and sent me on my way. Bettie, dear dear Bettie, she was no more. There was just the wide open road and beer that tasted like urine in my mouth and the sun never hurt my eyes more than that morning.

I guess Viki's being taken was a haunting for me. Brought it all back. I hadn't saved Bettie and I hadn't helped Domikai like I said I would. If he even cared. If it even mattered.

But it does to me, to this day. All of it. I miss the captain, the killer and the carpenter. I miss the simple afternoons for Stitch and I. I miss pretending to forget our troubles to reimagine a more delicious existence together. I hope for better days. That they know I loved them all.

The days of fooling around with boys and love-notes and lyrics have left me, and I them. I ran through the maddening heat of the desert, I ran and ran from the cold of my birth town until I found the hothouse for my soul. And I bloomed. And I drank strangers tears. And I sang for all that was lost. Including my soul.

Violence was beautiful. Shattered glass. Screeching chairs along wooden floors. When the smoke of indignation fell and I was he and I, back to face, back to back, face to face, clawing and clambering and clinging but never quite meeting.

I suppose that's how all relationships end. When one of you isn't prepared to turn around or forgive or forget, or simply, not even to be there at all. When one keeps trying and beats their palms raw against the door. Who hasn't been on both sides. Affairs are wonderfully bleak things. The melancholy is my addiction. The fever of the fight that keeps me anxious and nail-bitten for days.

I have ivy-climbed lust posts. I have pulled all the starving vanity out of my head to be only an echo. Just a song sang by every man I ever loved and who loved me. The world is fat and wet and close and I want it all. It's why I am still alone.

I spend the nights on the streets, dressed up with nowhere to go, except down memory lane, again and again, searching for someone I know in a town it feels I have never been to. I still look for Valcroix in the men I kiss. In the women that close their hands around my breasts and say "I will" but they aren't and they won't and can't ever be. I don't see Mish. Nor the seer, is she dead, if she alive? And Kai, her lover, my fighter. And the man who lay me down and asked what it was like to finally have death between my legs, who stayed the next morning. Men never stay for a stripper, but he did. That's because he was dead to the world. Lived perptual night time, like me. The sun doesn't shine anymore. Not here. Not with this heart.

And Rohin, with that smile that stabs and cuts me right open. She, like the rest....Gone.

I will go out again tonight and take someone else home. Bury a bit more dignity under the bed with the money I take. And the desire. I could live off both. Cash and c*m are my heaven.