by Sean May
I reach into the cabin of the car and grab the wad of cash that was resting in Danny’s lap. He grabs at me, but I just push his hands away with his gun as I pull the bills away from him. I go to the other side of the car, open the door and pick up the paper bag. I toss a few of the smaller bills onto the passenger side seat.
“Oh, Danny, by the way...another thing you should learn is to never give your gun to anyone...and for fuck’s sake never trust a guy like me.” I smile again.
I walk away into the night, the bag in my hand and the cash weighing my pockets down. When the police find Danny, which shouldn’t be long after the shots fired reports pinpoint him, they’d be able to close the case down quickly and laugh at the smallness of the heist this stupid punk pulled in.
The credit cards in the wallets and purses will last me a few days until they’re all canceled, then I’ll coast along on the cash for a while. I’m not sure if the people in that diner knew they’d be footing the bill for me to go on vacation in Europe, but, hey, everybody’s gotta learn a lesson.
High Art
1
Michelle crept across the bare wood floor of her apartment. Below her, Williamsburg thumped incessantly, but it hadn’t stopped thumping for years and it wasn't going to stop any time soon. The bare wooden boards felt uneven beneath her feet, making her already shaky steps shakier.
She swore she heard something, and not something like another drunken partier stumbling into his apartment while trying to fight the urge to puke all over the floor of his four thousand dollar a month loft. This was something worse, something more sinister, something coming for her. The dim light in her living room didn’t do much good. Being on the fifth floor meant that she was far up enough to where the yellow glow of the streetlights didn’t constantly batter every window in the apartment. It was something she’d paid a premium for, and now it was working against her. Right now, stalking across the floor in a tank top and shorts that she always felt were a little slutty looking but were nonetheless comfortable, she felt vulnerable, exposed in every way. She wasn’t sure what the sound was that had woke her up from a deeper sleep than she was used to. She only half heard it, or maybe she heard nothing at all.
Never in her three years of living in her apartment had she cursed the two thousand square feet that she had all to herself, but now that expansiveness, in what would have been chopped up to house eight or nine people in a less exclusive neighborhood in a less exclusive building, was her bane. Every corner she turned, everything she had laid carelessly in the sprawl of her apartment was now just something else to go bump, something else for someone to hide behind. She shook more with every step, but then she looked over at the door to see something that would comfort her. It was a fire axe, glinting bright red against the dim brick wall. Michelle had used it as a prop in a photo shoot she did a few weeks ago, but it was anything but a prop. It had a fiberglass handle and a steel blade that the owner of the hardware store had gone on for what seemed to be hours. At the time, she just wanted it because it looked cool and would project the image of what she wanted in the photo shoot: brutal objects existing in everyday life. The potential of violence and pure force contained in the axe had enticed her, so it wasn't a question why she had to buy it. At this point she really wished she’d kept the gun that she used for the shoot, too, but she had to give that back to her friend, a friend who had a less than realistic explanation for how he legally obtained the it.
Michelle grabbed the fire axe and felt the heft of it immediately. It made her feel good, it made her feel safe. If something, if someone was in her apartment, she’d be able to defend herself against it. She let the axe hang low in her arms, but kept it at the ready to unleash at any second.
She moved across her living room and approached the door to her studio. From underneath the door, she saw light spilling out in a harsh triangle. She was pretty sure she had turned off the studio lights when she was done taking pictures for the night, but it wouldn’t have been the first time she had, in a flurry of artistic passion and a need to put the raw pictures into Photoshop, left the lights on. If she had left the lights on, maybe it was just a bulb bursting, as they were prone to doing if left on for more than a few hours. Still, though, she was almost completely sure she hadn’t left the lights on tonight. Slinging the axe against her right shoulder, Michelle pushed the door to the studio open.
When her eyes got adjusted to the blinding brightness of the studio lights, she made out a dark form standing in the middle of her white studio space, a backdrop curved at the corners to give the illusion of infinity, of spacelessness.
“Michelle!” The voice accompanied the form, it was shrill and shook Michelle’s already addled nerves. “I hope you don’t mind, I had some stuff to shoot…”
When Michelle was finally able to see beyond blobby shapes, she saw a familiar face standing before her. Blonde, perky, and nauseating in every way to Michelle, especially right now, was Claren.
Fucking Claren.
Claren, whose real name was Karen and who had played with being called Cara but had deemed that too blasé, so she settled on Claren, which Michelle had told her was a stupid name from the first second she started using it, but that hadn’t stopped her from continuing to use it for the past two years. That kind of thing was what Michelle hated about Claren. She tried too hard to be unique, to stand out in the crowd, and to Michelle it all just came off as reaching.
“What the hell are you doing in my apartment?”
"What the fuck do you have that axe for?"
"My place, my questions. What are you doing here?"
“I already told you, I needed to shoot some stuff.”
She hadn't told Michelle that she was coming in to use her studio, because if she had, Michelle would have told her that she absolutely couldn't. “How’d you get in here?”
Claren laughed directly at Michelle and screwed a lens onto her camera. It was one of Michelle’s lenses, a Canon that had set her back $1500. The way Claren fumbled with it made her tighten her grip on the axe. Claren dropped the lens cap on the ground and just left it there. “You think I didn’t remember that little trick with your window and the fire escape?”
Michelle gritted her teeth. The window next to the fire escape in her apartment was busted since the day she moved in. Michelle had used it for her friends, her real friends, so that they could come in and her apartment with ease. Claren, on the other hand, wasn’t one of those friends but seemed to think she had the same privileges as them.
“Get out, right now. I didn’t invite you here, and, it’s way too fucking late for me to put up a fight with you about this, so just go.”
“Oh, come on, Michelle, stop being such a cunt about it. I’ll be out in an hour.” Claren turned away from Michelle and went over to the control panel for the lighting. She adjusted the lights down a little bit, and when she spun around to turn back toward the studio, Michelle heard a sharp metallic crack. She looked down to see the lens Claren had put onto her camera bouncing off of an oak table. “Oh, fuck, my camera.” Claren said, hoisting it up and taking a look at it. The camera, a cheap $400 Fuji, was still fine, but the same couldn’t be said about Michelle’s lens. The body was bent in the middle and the lens itself was shattered.
Michelle seethed and felt like she was going to break her knuckles she was holding the axe so tightly. “Claren, go, right fucking now. That lens—”
“Whatever Michelle, you’re rich, why do you care about a little lens? Daddy will just buy a new one with his hotel money, won't he? Real artists, like me, we don’t really have too much of an attachment to material things. God damn, you look mad.” Claren lifted up her camera, now without the broken lens, and pointed it at Michelle. “You know, I think this would make a kick-ass shoot. You kinda have that horror film look to you, sexy scary kind of thing. Here, lift the axe above your head, like you’re coming for me.”
Looking at Claren pointing her camera at her, treating all of this as just another
part of the performance art piece that was Claren’s life, Michelle lifted the axe above her head and felt the potential in her. She thought about the pictures she’d been taking for the set, commenting on the potential violence in everything, and she realized she’d just figured out the perfect shocking centerpiece for the set.
With Claren snapping pictures one after another, Michelle brought the axe down, first into Claren’s shoulder. The axe sailed through Claren’s wispy frame and knocked her against the wall, blood spraying onto the perfect whiteness of her studio wall. Claren stopped talking after the third time the axe came down on her. She died holding her camera.
Covered in blood from head to toe, Michelle dropped the axe at Claren’s pale and lifeless feet. She went over to her table and picked up her own camera, then attached the broken lens to the body. She started snapping pictures of Claren’s corpse through the fractured lens. Close-ups, wide angles and perspectives that Michelle would have thought to be too pretentious in most situations, but they worked with the subject matter. Frenzied, Michelle must have taken two hundred pictures of the body, more than she had ever taken of any subject. She finished up with a macro shot of Claren’s eye, now lifeless and grey, with a single drop of blood hanging on the end of one of her perfectly prepared lashes.
Michelle put the camera down on the table and pulled out the memory card. She turned the lights in the studio off and closed the door. She had to get these pictures, these pieces of perfect art into the computer as soon as possible.
She printed off her favorites on her the finest paper she had, each of the finished prints measuring four feet wide by six feet tall, almost life size. In the pictures where Claren's face was obvious, she took out a razor and scratched it out. Doing this streaked blood all across the prints, which Michelle thought looked amazing. With the murder scene pictures finished, Michelle went to bed, leaving Claren's body. She knew that she’d have to deal with the body in the morning, but that was for tomorrow.
2
"I just love the way you created that fractured effect" A gaunt, bald man in a grey tux that fit like a second skin said, looking at Michelle's most brutal print, a close-up of Claren's mangled shoulder "and the makeup effects you used on the model, it's just so visceral."
"Thank you," Michelle said, dressed in a glittery black dress that clung to her in all the right places "I just really wanted to show violence up close...you know how Hollywood wants to sugarcoat it and make it seem clean and fun. But this...this is real."
"Well, as real as it gets with a model and makeup." The bald man bit down on a massive barbecue shrimp. Michelle at first didn't know what he meant, but then she remembered the illusion she had to keep up.
"Oh of course, but smoke and mirrors can go far..."
Mercifully, a woman came up to the bald man and grabbed his arm, whispering something to him and giving Michelle an avenue to get out of the conversation.
Michelle already had a gallery show scheduled for three days after that fateful night with Claren, but even her agent told her that she was being given a show more out of pity than demand for her actual talent. A couple of years ago she'd made a huge splash in the art world with a series of self portraits of herself completely nude in an array of public locations. One of the pictures, taken at the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, made the blogosphere erupt into a fury, about half of people praising her for her bold work and the other half calling for her head. But all of it was press, and all of it was attention, attention that caused her gallery show in Soho, funded by her father's fortune, to be a massive success, netting Michelle four million dollars in one night, the Blue Mosque photo bringing in a quarter of a million alone.
But Michelle hadn't been able to recreate the success of those pictures, and her profits from her subsequent shows became smaller and smaller, to the point that this show was supposed to be Michelle's swan song, a final kiss-off before the New York City art world said goodbye to her forever. With the pictures she was going to present, they probably would have been right, she'd lost it, whatever it was, and she was done. Armed with these pictures, though, she was poised to take the art world by storm again. And if that took murdering a braindead hipster bimbo, then that's what she had to do.
With all of the praise being showered onto her, Michelle forgot about Claren's rotting body, still sitting in her second bathtub. She'd poured pounds and pounds of baking soda onto the corpse to keep the stench down, but it would only work for so long. Tonight, she'd have to deal with the body, and put all of this behind her.
"Dear god, Michelle!" A voice, undoubtedly British, shook Michelle from her fixation on Claren's body. She turned around to see Jo Medford, her black hair cropped closely to her skull, her bone structure and makeup making her look like an alien, like usual. "This, all of your stuff, it's so fucking amazing, innit?"
"Thanks Jo...I'm glad you like it." Michelle was being honest about that. Jo Medford was quite possibly the biggest player in the NYC arts scene. When she rose someone up above the fray and gave them her seal of approval, they were deified, untouchable. If Jo ended up buying one of her photos, she'd have it made.
Before Michelle had a chance to talk to Jo any more, she had disappeared into the crowd that seemed to be getting bigger by the minute. That didn't stop Michelle's head from buzzing, the possibilities rolling around in her head.
When she saw Jo go over to the close-up of Claren's eye and talk to the gallery attendant, who then flipped over the sign to "sold", she lost it. This was her moment, she had arrived, and there was no going back to the sad state of affairs of her life of three days ago. Overcome with excitement, Michelle slipped out of the back door of the gallery, not caring what happened to the other pictures. They could all burn as far as she was concerned. She hopped into a cab and tried to contain herself as she made her way back to Williamsburg.
Back in her apartment, Michelle popped the cork on a bottle of Veuve Clicquot and drank down about a quarter of the bottle in one gulp. Her life was going to change from this point forward. She was going to be relevant, a fresh voice, everything she wanted to be. Everything her father had shelled out hundreds of thousands of dollars for her to become. Overnight, the shockwave of Jo's purchase would ripple through NYC, then to LA, Paris, London, Tokyo and beyond. The storage unit in Bushwick full of hundreds of unsold prints would quickly become a goldmine, with everyone wanting to snatch up a piece of Michelle's star as she rose. It wasn't even about the money at this point, since she wasn't worried about making rent even while her prints weren't selling for a dime, it was about the notoriety. It was about the world knowing that Michelle was dominant, here to stay, and that nobody should even think about fucking with her.
Michelle's phone started lighting up and buzzing every couple of seconds with texts from her slew of friends, all more or less heaping congratulations onto her. The news was traveling now, and the agent that had planned on dropping Michelle from her contract after this show would now be begging to keep her around, willing to do anything for her.
Michelle opened the door to her bathroom and took another huge gulp of the champagne. Claren was still there, her pink lip gloss sitting in stark contrast to her now gray skin. Her eyes had clouded over, and her already bony body was now looking skeletal.
"I guess I should thank you, Claren. I wouldn't have been able to do any of this without you." Michelle said. Claren didn't respond. Michelle crouched down to the edge of the bathtub to get a close look at her unwitting model. She drank more of the Clicquot, half of the bottle now disappeared in the past few minutes. "I always thought you were such a little bitch, coming around and leeching off of everyone, trying to hang out with the cool kids so that you could be part of someone's little entourage." Michelle pulled off her shoes and threw them across the bedroom, now sitting down on the tile floor right next to Claren. "Well, surprise, you got your wish!" Michelle laughed to herself and once again drank more champagne, something that was now punctuating every sentence. "I'll be sure to send your pa
rents some money from what I make tonight. It's the least I could do. It'll be anonymous, of course, but it'll let me sleep at night, you know?" Another sip. "Fuck, you probably know a hell of a lot about sleep now, don't you Claren? Seems like it's all you do." Michelle stood up and put her face close to Claren's, not feeling the normal warmth someone would feel when they were this close. "Real shame I'm gonna have to get rid of you, my little moneymaker." With the champagne surging though her brain and causing all of her inhibitions to fall to the side, she turned her head and kissed Claren on the cheek, her lips feeling like they were rubbing against clay. But, in a way, Michelle loved it, the feeling of how terrible it was, what she just did. She fell back against the wall of the bathroom, cackling uncontrollably and draining the bottle the rest of the way.
"Well, bitch..." Michelle's vision swimming "time to get you out of here. I'm gonna have guests tomorrow and you're not going to be a tasteful centerpiece..." Michelle got her bearings and hooked her arm underneath Claren's intact shoulder. This was going to be tough to do with as buzzed as Michelle was, but she had to get it done. She dragged Claren across her living room. All of the blood had drained out of Claren long ago, so Michelle didn't have to worry about living a bloody trail across her living room. She propped Claren up against the wall and opened her front door. She looked up and down the hall to see if the guy across the hall was lurking somewhere, but his lights were all off, giving Michelle the all clear. She saw the trash chute on the far wall, and she saw her salvation, her absolution from all of this with Claren. The chutes lead down to a massive dumpster that was emptied every morning at seven, and it was two in the morning already at this point, giving very little chance that Claren's body would be found before it got to the landfill, where she would probably be chalked up as yet another hooker or junkie that got chopped up and dumped, something that happened at least once a week.