Mira sniffed the spirit. It smelled like fire. She put the glass to her lips, let it roll to her tongue. The tiniest swallow. “Whoo,” she said, lowering the glass. “What’s it made from?” She licked her lips madly, breathed with a wide opened mouth.
Doc drained his glass, poured another. “Stuff.”
Mira raised her glass to her lips. The second sip was easier.
Doc said, “Tell me about you.”
“Nothing to tell.” Her eyes so gentle.
“Sure there is. We all got stories or lies. Live near?”
“Not too far off. With my mom.”
“She still have her shadow?”
“Had it stolen.”
“My mother was the same, and I do not miss that taste.”
“Taste?”
“They’re all the same,” said Doc. “Mine liked rabbit shadows.”
“Mine likes birds.”
“Hell that’s not so bad. At least they’re in the right direction. Up in the sky, their shadows falling on the ground. The ground critters—squirrels, rabbits, possums, rats—you have to catch them. I thought of the machine on account of her. It turned out different than I figured. She was dead by the time I had it built. She probably wouldn’t have liked it anyhow. These people,” he pointed to the folks about, “human shade is what they’re all about.”
“You get sick of being around them? All the unruliness.” Men were shoving men. At the pool table, a woman with black eyes lined up a shot.
“Not really. Sometimes I miss arguments. Most everyone here just agrees with me.” Doc poured Mira more moonshine. He motioned across to the bartender to come around, and he trotted over, smelling like bleach. “Monroe told you about a room earlier?”
“Yes, sir.”
“It belongs to her,” Doc pointed to Mira.
“Sure thing,” the bartender said. He fished a key from his pocket and handed it to her.
Doc filled and drained his glass again. He passed the bottle and the glass to the bartender. “Well,” Doc said. “I’ll now retire.”
“Wait,” Mira said, “there’s no way to fix what they got? Your mom? Mine?”
Doc looked at his feet. “It is a thing I puzzle over still. If my mom was alive, I could take her apart. I could hang each of her arms from my machine. Each of her legs. Those I could get the shadow back for. But even if I did, if I took them off the machine, put them back on her body, even if the shock of all that cutting and reattaching didn’t kill her, the way surgery can, I don’t think her shadow would come back. It’s something in the mind or soul. Used to, they called it turning the sun to darkness. But I don’t know if that’s how it works. My father thought if we just thought about shadows the right way, the riddle of it would become clear to us. I’ve thought about them every way I could.”
Mira sipped her moonshine again.
“You don’t have to pretend you like it.”
“I’m coming around to it, I think.”
“People do,” said Doc.
Mira was moonshine loose, fuddled. The noise of the inn happened around them.
Doc waved goodbye.
Mira nursed her glass and watched the insanity unfold.
Murk so Dark
It was night when Murk showed up at the inn. He had a lost expression on his face, a sort of spooked, empty grin. Mira was half loopy. Her hair hung across her eyes. She waved at him. “Murk,” she hollered. She stood, grabbed his arm, dragged him to a seat near the pool table. “This guy can’t play piano for shit.” Broken notes fluttered about. “Where’ve you been?”
“I can’t really hear.”
Mira hollered, “Where’ve you been?”
Murk pointed to the door he just came through.
“You’re like, so fucked up,” Mira said. Her head muddy with moonshine, her eyes sort of trundling, but she could make out his super darkness. “You okay?”
Murk’s black eyes like giant nothings in his head, moved over Mira entirely. From her toes to her eyes. He licked at his lips. The music bounced and jangled. The smell of strangers getting sloppy. “Maybe.”
The music stopped and the one-eyed midget came waddling over from the pianola. “Any requests?” he asked, his voice quasi-maniacal.
“I can barely remember my name,” Murk said.
“Wait,” said Mira, “ooh,” she kind of clapped her hands, “know any Doors?”
“Do I know any Doors?” said the midget. “That’s my fucking band. I know ‘Light my Fire’ and I know ‘Love Me Two Times.’”
“Play ’em both,” said Mira.
“Fuckin A,” said the midget, and he went back to the pianola and started banging away, lowing the lyrics.
“You know that it would be untrue . . .”
Mira and Murk listened a bit. Murk kind of chewing nothing, drumming the fingers of one hand on a knee. Mira bobbed her head. Murk cleared his throat. “This sucks,” said Murk.
“I told you, he can’t play for shit.”
Murk clicked his tongue. “It’s not that. The whole thing sucks. The words. The music. Every single part of it sucks.”
Murk reached down for Mira’s empty glass. “I’ll be right back,” he said, and Mira listened to the music as Murk went up to the bar. She looked around at everyone. Tried to guess at what they were. Like, beyond people. How did they get along? What did they do to occupy their time? That seemed the strangest task of a life—all the slow moments between the good and bad things. But then she thought, What was she? Mira—finder of wild shade, scrambler of eggs. Murk was a shadow addict. Bale a domer, or ex-domer. A dishwasher. A pointer of guns. Haver of a Mohawk, now. Mira, she thought, cutter of hair. And around this time Murk showed up with two full glasses and a pair of scissors. “You’re a fucking mind reader, Murk!”
“What?”
Mira reached for the glass, the scissors.
Murk handed her the glass but kept the scissors. “I can do it,” he said.
“I owe you,” said Mira.
“Owe me something else.” Murk began to blindly cut locks from his head, and they dropped on his lap and on the floor around him, but everyone who noticed his doing the task seemed to treat it like some normal, anytime thing.
Mira drank and Murk hacked his hair, and the midget started the second song and Mira asked, “Like this one better?”
“Fuh-uh,” said Murk. “And now you can’t say I got your hair anymore.” He took a few more hacks at it before leaning back into his seat, sipping at his moonshine.
“Nope,” said Mira, “now you got butchered-ass hair. Like that Unlucky Clover.”
“Shit,” said Murk, “start that and I’ll make you my creature.”
“Gross.”
“We got a room,” said Murk. “You could be my creature.” He weirded up his face. “Creature,” he said. “Creature.”
“Fuck that,” said Mira, and then they were both kind of laughing.
But some darkness fluttered in Murk. A quandary developed. Some equation he would’ve normally terminated travelled toward a bad solution. “Why haven’t we ever though?” Murk asked. “I’ve known you a long time.”
Mira considered it. “Creatured?”
“No,” said Murk. “But, like, normal.”
“Dunno. Just never been like that.”
“Let’s make it like that then.” He had a garbage expression in his eyes. “We could go to the room and fuck.”
“What? No way. You’re not being you.”
“C’mon.”
“Let’s talk about something else. I’m serious.” Her eyes found the pool table. “If Bale was here, you guys could play pool. I bet you’d beat him.”
Murk puffed up a bit. Shadow stretching his eyes. “Do you fuck Bale?” he asked. “Is that what the deal is?”
“Oh, my Go
d, Murk. What the fuck? Be you.”
“This is me,” he said, “this is how much shadow I should always have.” His words seemed to come from another dimension, and the noise gained the attention of the room.
The pianola player ceased to play. From behind the bar, the bartender emerged. He came to them, propped his hip against the pool table, picked up a cue. “He bothering you ma’am?”
“The fuck do you care?” asked Murk.
The bartender seemed tired. “Normally, sir, I wouldn’t, but I’ve got orders to make sure she’s not disturbed. Might I suggest . . .”
“I don’t take suggestions.”
“What about orders?” the bartender said. The customers of the place seemed to amass behind him in support. “Because we can make it an order, if we need to.”
Murk grunted, gandered at the crowd. “Fuck it.” His head bloomed then a bit. Swelled up with anger. Thinned out and enlarged.
“Do you take suggestions?” the bartender asked Mira. “You could retire to your room. Top of the stairs, second door on your left.”
Mira made to go, to retreat from Murk’s grossness. “Will you be okay?”
“Fuck do you care?”
She stood, passed through the peculiar crowd, climbed the stairs. She looked back down. All the black eyes peered at her with madness. All the pale faces and dicey figures. The dusty room, a sort of forgotten and bad feeling to it.
Murk yelled up at her. “Bet you wish you’d left me in that fucking tree, huh?”
Mira didn’t know what to think.
She turned and made her way into the room.
It was lit with a ghostly electric light. Blue shadows seemed to hover on all things. The bed sagged in the middle, felt soft, revolted her. The blankets were pilly and the pillows hard. She stared at the ceiling, a sort of grisly nervousness on her skin.
Below, Murk guzzled moonshine and half-danced to the bad music and draped his arms over strangers’ shoulders and spun with them across the floor. They were toasting and whooping and careening and making merry, and a lady with bad teeth pressed her face to his face, the lids of her eyes painted purple with makeup. They became inseparable in the revelry, fastened to each other with some lust-fashioned adhesive. She didn’t strike his fancy in any way beyond his body being desirous, and they kissed often with heaved-open mouths, kneading their tongues into one another’s tongues, a sort of mucking of orifices.
If she had a name, Murk never learned it. And the crowd about them blurred into noise and dropped free of them and they were ascending the stairs.
They dribbled into disarray. The yelping of their carnalities dictating endeavors.
Inside a room, filled with raucous caterwauling from the saloon below, Murk explored the flubbed body of his partner, her blemished skin and skeletal protrusions, the reek of neglect, sour stench of vicious years.
Tussling into the corruption of it, Murk grabbed at her skull, lifted away a mottled hairpiece he hadn’t recognized was false, and the blonde wiglet flopped in his fist as she tore open his shirt and licked her way down his belly, and his black eyes were at the ceiling then, and his ears filled with explosions.
Bits were lost.
Now he is on top of her, the mattress swaying.
Standing then, she on the bed.
Bent over.
Spread somewhat.
Night shattering like cymbals. Percussion and cacophony.
All this time, in these actions, a sort of to and fro.
Intermittently, making eye contact. Anger maybe? A pinch of violence?
Who was she even?
For that matter, who was he?
The fake blonde hair clutched in his fist like a hammer.
Sometimes bad decisions keep lasting forever.
Razor Blade
Joe Clover came conscious in the night. He tossed quickly, batted his face with his palms. Had something been on him? His head ached. His body felt poisonous.
He sat up, his legs crossed. His eyes seemed lost in the dark, but incrementally shapes became clear. The toilet, for instance. Its metallic bowl glinting what light there was. The odor of urine was permanent but seemed advanced now, so Clover stood up and flushed, sat back on the ground as the thing filled with fresh water.
It was then he saw the mouse. It came scampering across the floor, and his eyes followed the path of it. An entertainment of sorts. He’d gotten used to them. Roaches too. Before, he’d see a bug and get squeamish, fill with anger and hew the thing down with his heel. But now, so long lonely in his state of capture, he welcomed any creature that might chance to share his cell.
It bounded along but paused at some object. It ran a circle around the thing. Clover couldn’t tell what it was. He neared it, and the mouse tarried off. Clover stopped. Slowed. He wanted the mouse to stay. In all honesty, he wished to touch it. Gently. Perhaps the back of his finger across the top of its head, and, if he was lucky, maybe the little mouse would lean into his touch, stay on there in that place with him to offer some kind of company.
But, it was not to be. The closer he got, the further the mouse moved. However, the thing. That it had run a circle round. On the floor like a jewel. It glistened.
Clover didn’t believe it. A razor? He fist-rubbed his eyes.
He pressed the pad of his thumb against it firmly and it stuck to his skin, and he lifted his hand and the thing just stayed pressed there. He turned it in the light. A twinkle ran down the blade, dimmed where the thing was nicked. He gripped, raked the implement across the thumbnail of his other hand and flecks of the nail shaved toward the ground.
Joy filled him.
He looked toward the sky.
“Thank you,” he said to whatever.
Then, taking the blade, he ran the sharp edge up his arm, passing it through the thick veins of his wrist, and bands of blood slipped down toward his fingers, dripped in beads to the dirty ground. He traded the blade to his now weakened grip, the sticky blood flooding across the thing as he made at the other arm, hacking less precisely, but still rendering damage, he let open his other wrist, gushing indignation. His life spilling out of him. His freedom on its way.
Doc Rages
He woke early as with all days and called for his mug of coffee to drink as he dressed. Servants attended him always. They stood in wait, watched over his possessions, guarded his holdings in the night. Coffee, for instance, was a luxury most couldn’t afford. Indeed, even the brew Doc got was a thin strain of the stuff. More hot water than anything else, maybe the smell of beans coming across in the steam, but only faintly. His stores of it were under lock and key. Ancient cans reclaimed from refuse piles and abandonments, brought to him by patrons who knew Doc was a man of fine tastes.
Once ready, he stepped into the streets, still except for his motions and the doings of a few folks under his employ. He prided himself on being an early riser, liked to take to the dawn-lit streets with gusto.
He moved briskly toward his machine, the morning almost glowing, and he tossed back the canvas covers to inspect aspects of the device. Chiefly, he was concerned with appendages. He studied them for signs of struggle, decay. If they seemed chafed or ashy, he wiped them with lotion. If their bandages had gone soggy, he’d wind away the spent gauze and replace that with fresh. He hummed softly as he did this, a dignity in his laboring.
Once certain that all things were in order, Doc would take to a stool, cross his arms and sit satisfied.
But this morning an off stillness plagued him.
He had some disquieting premonition, and around this time he heard his name called.
“Doc,” his name came again.
It was Monroe and he was agitated, running toward Doc from the doorway of the jail.
“Doc, Doc,” he hollered again. “You gotta come see.”
Doc was rarely yelled for, so he k
new a notable thing had occurred. He pitched what was left of his coffee and stood, made his way to Monroe who had paused in his proceeding and was now merely waving at Doc to come.
He and Monroe entered the jail.
On the ground, Joe Clover lay dead—the odd smell of new death and the queer stillness of a freshly departed soul haunted the jail.
“What the hell happened?” Doc asked, but Monroe said nothing. “Wasn’t a guard on duty?”
“All night.”
“Who the fuck? Which-a one?”
“Bones.”
Doc yanked the keys from the wall and snatched open the cell, the cage door clanging against the concrete wall. He jumped inside and dropped to his knees near the body. “Call Bones,” said Doc, and he clenched his jaw and his fists and waited sternly for his failed guardsman.
Bones held his hat when he showed, twitching like a kicked dog.
Doc barked up at him. “Care to explain?”
Bones’s eyes filled with awe. “I have no idea.”
“You watched the door?”
“All night.”
“No coming or going?”
“Not at all.”
Doc found the razor sunk in Clover’s spilled blood, and fished it out, held it in his fingers. “How’d he get this?”
“I haven’t the foggiest,” said Bones.
Doc wiped blood on his pants. “That girl,” he said. “Her friend.”
“Maybe tossed it to him? When y’all came in?” Monroe said.
“Couldn’t have,” said Doc. “I’d’ve seen it done. Shit,” he said. He pocketed the blade and stepped to the sink and cleaned his hands proper. “But let’s fucking find ’em.”
The three moved from the jail and prowled toward the inn. There seemed a rage in all their eyes. The purpose which drove them was palpable.
Into the inn they strode, a general and his conscripts. Doc took a look at the fatigue and disarray set in on the establishment, “Would it kill you to clean a bit?” he screamed.
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