 
GANGSTER

© 2012 M Jones

ISBN  978-1-926959-18-4

Smashwords Edition

Edited by A.M. Harte

Cover art design: MCM

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Dear Mr. Hitchcock and Mr. Price —

My mother introduced us.

What happens in these pages is most definitely her fault.

# Flapper

"Forgive me, Father. It's an imposition on you, I know, but I don't know where else to turn. She's completely out of control."

"I'm no child," the young woman in her twenties reminded her father. But he kept his grip tight on her arm, her silken pearls dangling near her waist as she struggled to break free.

The chapel was bathed in shades of dreary grey, and the three people were the sole occupants in the gloom. The priest shifted from foot to foot, unsure of how to proceed. This wasn't the right course of action for a parent to be taking, especially when the wayward child in question was long past the age of discipline. The sudden arrival of domestic unrest had ruined his plans for the evening, and he hated having these unexpected surprises. It should be expected, but he hadn't learned to give up trying to understand the motivations of these creatures. Though on the surface every detail seemed so important to them, their constant, ethical dilemmas forever proved to be nothing more than an annoying whine in his consciousness.

"You act like a spoiled brat, so that's what you are. A tiny, childish little trollop. I should never have listened to your mother. A good whipping from a belt never hurt no one in their lives."

"Not one from you," she sneered. "Like you ever had the strength to lay a hand on anyone. You and your wheezing and your soft little bones."

This parent, for instance, had long known the troubles his overgrown child caused, and yet here he was, asking the help of a near stranger to guide her in the proper way, as he saw it, that her existence should be conducted. Where the priest came from, there was no need to ask these questions. One followed a path that was clearly set out and any deviation from it would be swiftly dealt with.

Her father coughed shakily into his fist, his watery eyes fixed in a plea on the robed man before him. "I'm at my wit's end, Father," he admitted. "It's true, I'm not a strong man. Never saw a healthy day since I was born. My lungs, they aren't working properly, and my blood is thin. But I've done my best by my family, and I have a good job, not the best job, but one that keeps us comfortable." He took a kerchief out of his pocket and, trembling, wiped his nose with it before shoving it back into its usual place, deep in the worn lining of his suit jacket. "I don't understand how this happened."

The priest nodded in what he hoped was an adequate approximation of sage understanding. "We cannot chose our burdens."

"No, we can't. And we've got plenty, my Martha and I. What with my bad lungs and watery blood and... and this." He fixed a glare on the lazy posture of his ignorant daughter, who had finally broken free of his grip to sink into a nearby pew. "It doesn't do us well to have her like this, not at all. Martha has a terrible heart, and this one has no qualms over breaking it day after day. She's a wayward girl, obsessed with parties and the devil's drink. We may not have much, but I assure you she comes from a good, God-fearing home. My Martha and I, we've given her the world, little that we could offer of it." His voice shook as he looked at her. " This is how she repays us, by tramping around like some common whore!"

"I wouldn't say I was 'common'," she replied, arching the thin, drawn line of her brow.

Her father took his kerchief out again, wiping the sweat from his neck, his laboured breathing bobbing his Adam's apple in a choked, uneven rhythm. "You've been a right disappointment, Clara."

"I've been a disappointment?" she spat, incredulous. Her eyes, dark green and heavily ringed in kohl, studied him in ferocious apathy. He fought the urge to step back, a sure sign that he had already lost ground. He should be tough in her presence, if only for the benefit of her long suffering father. "Priest," she said, her ruby red lips licking along the edge of the title. "You're no priest. No white collar, no crosses, no bells, books, or candles to hold the devil at bay. Fancy people calling you father, Father." Her dark rimmed eyes narrowed. "I know you never had one."

"She's full of the drink," her father sputtered through his handkerchief.

"Please, I'm sober enough to know when there's a lying dog standing in front of me." She played with her pearls, her lips capturing a trio of them and staining them before she clenched them carefully between her teeth. Her voice was childishly muffled as she spoke. "He's just some crazy imposter, Daddy. You musn't believe a word he says."

Her sickly father clasped his hands over his soiled kerchief, his voice weak and trembling as severely as his shoulders. "I am a man of faith. You'll cast this evil out of her, in one way or another." He pulled the priest to one side, his breath expelled in foul gasps as he whispered. "She was always a bit wild, a bit difficult, even as a young child. She.... There were things she did that were very, very wrong, but one doesn't think nothing of them. An unkindness to a neighbour's child who was younger than her. A cruel thing done to a dog. I can't speak of it, you have to understand. I promised my poor wife. Her heart would give out that I even suggested...."

"Daddy, are you waiting here all night or are you going to go home and get your rest?" She rose from her seat and staggered over to them, her long arms reaching out to rest heavily on her father's weak shoulders. "Go home, Daddy," her moist, painted lips said, their sultry shape oddly demure as they delivered the promise of care. "I'll be fine here, you know that."

He continued to wipe at his sweating neck with the kerchief. "Yes, yes I do. This is a good choice, my dear. The good Lord will prevail, you know this."

"Sure, Daddy," she said, and left an imprint of her painted lips on his cheek. She patted his shoulder. "Go home to Mummy. Make sure she takes her medicine."

"I will," he said, smiling and nodding at her in feeble, weak hope. "You are a good girl, Clara, under all that painted rot." He nodded at the priest. "You listen to what the Father has to say. He'll steer you right."

With that he left, his wheezing breaths following him into the alley, a thin layer of steam rising from the manhole near the entrance of the chapel. It obscured him in smoky mist. The priest blinked twice and the thin, shaky outline of the girl's father was gone. Outside, the loud revelry of partygoers rose up from the underground depths of a nearby speakeasy, the one she had been turned out of. A brown bottle smashed against a wet brick wall. Laughter, cruel and contagious, echoed after it, followed by running footsteps, choked pursuit and fists meeting bone.

He turned on her, his black robes skirting his ankles. "You have put me at a great disadvantage by coming here."

"What choice did I have? Daddy saw the light on in the chapel and dragged me in here. It's your fault." She placed a white pearl between her teeth and gently chewed it as he paced before her. She kept it hovering against her ivory grin, her long, painted nails edged around its circumference. "The party's only just started, too. You should come by. The folks in there will get a hell of a shock seeing you being a man of the cloth."

"I chose this guise for a reason," he tersely reminded her. "It affords me anonymity."

She scoffed. "Not by much. You were a murdered bastard not two weeks ago, and frankly, death looked better on you." Her dark eyes focused on him, giving him the eerie feeling she was peeling his borrowed skin back, revealing the viscous jelly creature he was beneath the near atrophied sinews and flesh. "You don't look right." She let her pearls fall to her waist. "You look kind of sick. It's not catching is it? Not some alien disease that'll wipe out humanity or some rot like that? Disgusting. Ugh, it gives me the shivers."

"Hardly." He wiped his borrowed brow with the long sleeve of his religious garb. "I'm in need of sustenance. Minerals. A handful of sand could take care of me for an extended period of time."

"Hungry," she smiled, and it was a predatory sneer, one he had grown to dislike immensely. "But not for proper food. You're a real squeaky wheel, needing a good oiling. Don't worry, just hold on a little longer. You'll get what you need, I promise."

He bristled at this, his liquid, inner body shifting beneath his human disguise, the pain of the movement making him wince. "You tell me lies."

"I never."

"One right after the other. I've never known a creature to be so fast and loose with the truth. I can't trust anything you say. When you say you have what I need, I know it means you're dangling an empty promise."

"Does this look like an empty promise?" she asked, and pulled a small, familiar can out of her purse.

He hated the way just the shape of the object made him feel. A creeping, longing pulse ricocheted throughout his being, making the dried husk of his borrowed skin chip and flake as it rubbed painfully against the black robe. He shouldn't take it, for nothing was offered by Clara without a serious price to pay for it later. But he was tired, and it had been two weeks already. This body was drying out. He couldn't bear to suffer more than he had to.

He snatched the square metal can from her grasp and quickly tucked it away beneath his robe. He would enjoy it later. In peace.

"You're welcome," she said, shrugging.

He ignored her, and instead turned his attention to the small street-level window that allowed a good view of the establishment next door. A plaintive wailing from a trumpet meted out a death march to the swooning crowd, glittering dresses and polished pearls swaying to its funereal rhythm. Langley, the trumpeter, was in a strange mood this evening. The priest rested his head against the cold glass of the window, taking in the slow, miserable notes. There was nothing like this where he came from. None of this spontaneous sadness that invaded places of joy.

He couldn't quite articulate the feeling it gave him, his chin resting on the cold glass, Langley's horn full of slain souls. He closed his eyes, allowing himself to be lost in its ethereal hypnosis, the long, harrowing notes dragging him back to his home. His life had been like that plaintive wailing. Time had meant nothing, no clocks ticking, no minutes counted in meagre seconds. Just an endless stream of sad, misty tones of ghosted moments.

"I didn't even have that much to drink," Clara said, ruining his reverie. She sprawled out onto the pew nearest him and rested her head on an open Bible, using it like a pillow. It was unlikely that any of the words her cheek lay pressed upon would seep through her skull to mingle with her soul. "Langley broke up with his latest catch. Caught him doing the local parish–not you, of course. Listen to those whining notes. Like no one ever had their heart broke but him. Like somehow the rest of us idiots are immune." She pulled her pearls back to her teeth, the click of their white circumference echoing into the dark shadows of the chapel. "Still, poor Langley. He'll have to blow his own horn for a while now."

Another brown bottle flew out of an opened door and into the alley. It exploded against the brick wall opposite, the layered shrapnel of revelry piled high against the cracked concrete street. "They'll be shutting it down," he said. "It's getting too obvious."

"As if the coppers haven't been paid off," she sneered. "I have to wonder if the place isn't full of them. Every truncheon on the block is in there having their fill of the devil's transfusion. I ought to be in there myself, but sadly I find myself here, bored. With you."

Her face was pale in the near darkness of the chapel, her dark but glistening eyes giving her the appearance of a ghost. She was a living spectre who smiled at his discomfort, pearls dancing against her midriff as she shifted where she sat. Her manner was one of unease, an overplayed act wrapped tight in a persona that was luminescent.

In his mind she wasn't made of the usual terrestrial materials. There was little about her that appeared human. Surely she was constructed from cold, damp marble rather than frail skin and bones. There was nothing soft about her. He knew she could be a monster, pieced together in harrowing extremes.

When he'd first met her, he'd had the impression that if he'd passed his touch across her neck, the fingers he'd borrowed would suffer upon her icy skin, a frostbite burn searing him if he touched her shoulder of chilled stone.

"It's still in full swing," she said, nodding towards the partially opened window. Langley had given up his plaintive cry, the horn placed in its sacred place behind the bar, where none dare touch its polished brass sadness. A staccato drum rhythm now reigned over the party goers, who whooped and hollered in time to the hammering beat.

"I've heard rumours," she promised, her voice creeping towards him in the damp confines of the cloister. She bit down on her finger, her eyes brimming with the excitement of bloodlust. "There's a stranger in their midst."

She'd caught his interest. He tried to keep the eager hope out of his voice, but it was to no avail. "What kind of stranger?"

"An odd one out. Like you."

"Take me there."

"Not so fast." She draped herself over the pew, the silk feathers of her gown falling to the left, revealing the pale, polished gleam of her bare shoulder. "It's just a rumour, that's all. No hard, cold facts, those things you like best. But still," she gave him a half hearted shrug, "you haven't exactly been successful lately, have you? I'd say you need all the rumours you can get."

Could it be true? He held his breath, deep in the soft well of his borrowed form's belly. He'd been trapped here for what felt like a single moment that refused to yield and yet he knew this was an illusion. His former life of stretched minutes and infinite hours compressing and elongating at will was as far from him as the dawn of creation was to her linear moment.

She understood this, in her own ignorant way. He'd explained it once, the gleam of her knife glinting against her eye as it measured out the seconds of her acts of murder. Minutes meant hours and hours meant years. The soft waning of a heartbeat as the blood seeped out of a body was the closest she would ever come to understanding timelessness.

"Are you sure this time?" he couldn't resist asking.

"I told you, I'm not sure of anything. Don't you ever listen?" She curled her legs underneath her, now perched on the pew like a contented cat. "I could use a drink."

"No," he insisted. He wrung his alien hands, the fingers cramping from the movement, his feet pacing before the partially open window. The party began winding back up into a frenzy that would end in various acts of violence. "It's not worth the risk."

"I don't know what you're worried about. Sure, I joked about it, but you don't look like him any more, you've gone and shifted his face around with your swimming in there. You'd have to squint sideways and upside down to see him, and everyone in there is blind drunk by now anyway. Just go in and have one."

"I'll go in, but I'm taking nothing."

"You can't go in there and not drink," she told him. "It's not just rude, they'll look at you and think you're there to convert them to sobriety. It's past midnight. No one knows what that word means."

"I don't understand why you people imbibe what you aren't permitted to," he said.

"Oh?" she questioned him, her pencilled on brow highly raised. "And what about that tin box with its black goop, hrm? Are you so much a prohibitionist over that?"

"It's not the same."

"I've seen the way you act after a few gulps. It's like you're under the shade of a poppy."

"I'm not under its influence."

"Give it back, then. Have a fistful of dust instead, since that suits you."

He hesitated, the square shape of the can against his side a comfort he didn't want to release. Her hand was outstretched, a cruel smirk marring her otherwise attractive face. Angry, he took the can out from its hiding place and returned it to her. Victory was his.

Or so he thought. She only shook her head and placed the small can of motor oil back in her bag, that infuriating smirk all the more pronounced. She stood up and smoothed out her dress. "I don't know about you, but I'm thinking I've had enough soul saving for one evening. I'm heading back in. I'll meet you at the table near the back. You know the one."

A sense of panic rose within him, for he knew what was going to happen the minute she left the dark chapel for the even darker tidings across the street. "You can't," he tried to warn her, but she was already on her feet, pearls dangling at her waist, a fresh application of lipstick being expertly painted on her pert, puckered lips.

"I don't know what you're so worried about," she said, her tiny hand-held mirror held aloft as she painted on the thick line of burgundy crimson across her lips. She pressed them together, smearing the shade into an even deeper hue. "You've been in there before. They know you by now, you won't be hassled."

"That's the problem," he said. "I don't want to be known. I want only to do what I'm supposed to be doing: taking care of my target and leaving." He was annoyed, and he stood to his full height, as best he could within the tight flesh, and painfully pushed his shoulders back. This was a posture of pride, he'd learned. It was uncomfortable and daunting to his own skin.

"I'm not going on a fool's errand," he said, resolute. "You have tricked me too many times, Clara, and I won't allow it again."

She snapped her lipstick compact shut and put it into her beaded purse. She kept her back to him, her neck gracefully bowed as she rummaged through the contents of her purse. She gave a relieved sigh when she found what she was looking for.

A chill coursed through him. He knew the cold instrument she'd laid her equally frozen hands upon. He closed his eyes. Though his people couldn't dream, he wondered if it were possible after being here all this time, if he could somehow force her out of his present. How he longed to bury her in an unvisited past.

"The regular table," she reminded him. "Right by the rear of the stage. I'll give Langley's trumpet a kiss for you."

# Speakeasy

Alcohol is not a substance he understands. His home has no such concoction, and the very idea of willingly taking a liquid that would make a person act moronically, impeding his or her memory, was ridiculous. It compromised his respect for human intelligence. Take this man at the bar, for example. His eyes were bloodshot, his clothes dirty, his tie askew, his face haggard with several days' worth of stubble. He was a shining example of human achievement in this brightly lit basement, the sparkle of his cuff links belying his social status. A wealthy man, by all accounts, except for the fact that he had to come here every night and lick the last remnants of alcohol from the bar as his cheek lay stuck to it. The drunkard was not alone in his quest, for several of his cronies had joined him, a drooling, half-lidded mass of unkempt bodies and time wasters.

For a race encapsulated in the linear lines of minutes and hours, this purposeful waste of limited life was sickening to witness.

He turned away, his inner liquid form uncomfortably pinched as he surveyed the bar. He caught the red glimmer of a familiar shade and inwardly cringed as he met her gaze and her dark smile across the room, where she was sitting behind the revelry on the dance floor. He pushed through the crowd, the dry skin of his host leaving thick flakes across wayward wisps of feathers, sweating bared shoulders and the backs of black silk suits. He was jostled and turned by the dancing crowd, most of whom could barely manage a slow waltz let alone an energetic fox-trot. They staggered like formless mannequins on the dance floor, jerky, unfamiliar movements forced upon limbs that refused to co-operate.

He could relate.

A shoulder met his and nearly sent him toppling. A rib jabbed into his jellied stomach, making him retch in pain.

"Watch it, jackass."

"I'm sorry, but you bumped into me."

"Then what are you saying sorry for?"

He knew what was happening. This burly, unpleasant creature was indigeneous to the area, a regular drunk who prowled the bar every other night. The man's massive bulk blocked his view of Clara, who was concentrating hard on lighting her cigarette and ignoring the altercation about to occur.

Though this was a linear world, there were clear patterns that could be discerned, and it was often easy to determine the outcome of a set of variables. A man bumps into another. He is inebriated. He is of low moral character. He has a girlfriend draped and bored on his arm, her pink lips twisted in a tired grimace. He yells expletives, he clenches his fists. Someone in the crowd reminds him that he is starting a fight with a priest. The man doesn't care. He only feels the dull ache of his shoulder and the disapproving glare of a drunk woman whom he doesn't even like very much, but with whose company he is constantly stuck.

The fist comes first, before the kicks and the swearing monologue that accompanies violence.

He ducked as it shot out and with one fell swoop grabbed the man's arm and twisted it behind his back. There was a satisfying crack, and a squeal of terror from the man's now not-so-bored girlfriend.

The man collapsed to the floor. Just a few feet away, Clara continued to study the ashes at the end of her cigarette, uncaring of the drama unfolding before her. The crowd rushed to the fallen man's aid, cowering from the holy judgement of a thirsty priest. He slid into the seat Clara had reserved for him, and she offered the can of motor oil as a tantalizing temptation.

"Go on," she insisted. "No one here is going to care."

But she was wrong, for all eyes were on him now, some of them friends of the man who had wanted so desperately to have just one night that didn't end in bored sighs and rolled eyes. Their hands were clenched in fists they tightened and released, tiny dark eyes piercing into the dark corner where he and Clara were tucked away.

She tapped her ashes into the empty shot glass before her, and blew out a long plume of smoke. It snaked above her head in an uneven halo. "Have a drink. I know you want it."

"I don't," he insisted, though his body craved the sustenance she was so blithely providing. He bent low, his brow creased as he spoke in a worried whisper. "I think I may have caused a scene."

The man with the broken arm was encircled by four strong men who gathered him up, carrying him fireman-style up the narrow stairs. They bumped his busted arm, the bone snagging against the railing. His scream of pain stopped the band playing for an entire minute before they resumed their usual ragtime plonking.

"You worry too much," she said, smacking her lips and taking a long sip of her gin and tonic. "Stuff likes this goes on here all the time, you know that."

"They're all staring at me."

"You're a tough-as-nails priest and you aren't drinking. That's all they're worried about. They figure you're bringing around the coppers." She took another long sip before putting down her drink. It was hot and damp in the basement, and a thick layer of condensation lined her glass. She smoothed it over with the pad of her thumb before grabbing the can of motor oil and concealing it beneath the table.

"Just a shot," she promised, and she looked up and around, shifty-eyed enough to send the signal that what she was giving him was more potent that mere vodka or whiskey. She poured it, thick and black, into a concealed shot glass and then placed it quickly onto the surface of the table. "Knock it back," she said, pushing it towards him. "You can thank me later."

All eyes in the dank basement were on him, even those of the soaked souls at the bar who were expert drinkers. He hesitated, his dry, rough fingers touching the rim of the shot glass. Unable to resist any longer, he snatched it up and downed it in one shot, the thick black tar sliding down his throat like the congealed blood of his borrowed body. He closed his eyes, sickened by the unpalatable bitterness. But the feeling was quickly replaced by a cooling, gentle sensation, one not unlike standing under a waterfall after wading in hot, sizzling lava.

The sages of the bar nodded and offered him a toast by tapping on their empty glasses for a refill. All eyes turned away from him, for he had now revealed himself as nothing more than yet another thirsty member of God's chosen flock. There was no judgement. Jesus himself loved a bottle of wine or two. Word on the street was He also had a nasty temper.

"You've dragged me in here, and I see no evidence of my target," he chided Clara, who fidgeted where she sat, her pearls meeting her teeth in their usual click-clack-click, keeping time with the jazz drum of the band.

"I know where, but I can't tell you yet." She let her pearls drop and finished her cigarette, tossing its smouldering ashes into the ashtray in the middle of the table. She sipped delicately at her drink. "If you want to finish your mission, you have to do something for me first."

He didn't like the sound of this. He'd been caught in this trap too many times before. Always, always, with the empty promises and half-truths. But she was the only connection he had, and he clung to it, hoping that somehow the pattern of her linear life would draw him to his target and he could complete his work and finally, without further delay, be allowed to go home.

"It's nothing big. Just the usual."

His liquid self cringed. Sensing his worry, she secretively poured him another shot of motor oil and handed it to him. He downed it, and then another with practised ease. "I told you before. No more favours."

"I guess my information isn't worth going home for."

"You're lying. I can feel it deep in the fourth marrow of my host's rib. A stabbing pain that chafes against his skin." The effect of the motor oil was making him dizzy, but his host's dessicated flesh gradually faded into its usual grey-pink hue, his appearance less sickly, but still foreign. "There is no room for favours. Either you tell my what I need to know, or I am leaving you here."

She clacked a white pearl against her top teeth. "It's a damn shame you won't help me. I know I've been a little, well, prone to exaggeration at times, but I've never steered you wrong. Your mission always has been top priority."

He doubted this, but he listened nonetheless.

"What you need to understand is that sometimes, to get my information, certain obstacles need to be removed." She gave him a blood red smile, lipstick staining her white teeth and the circular pearl she had tapped against them. She waved over a passing waiter, who rested a gin and tonic in front of her. The waiter tried to take away the oiled shot glass, but she held her hand over it. When they were alone she turned back to him. "Just one. That's all, I promise."

He didn't want to acquiesce, but there was such surety in her manner, and his superiors were perversely silent. He had no other course but to follow her lead. "It's risky," he said, looking over his shoulder with nervous glances. The cronies of the bar nodded at him. "I've already made an impact here."

"People only see what they want to," she said. "You could slice him in half on that crowded dance floor, hell you could go onstage and do it right in front of the band. Some people might turn away, others might gawk. None would turn you in. This is a blind man's home, in case you haven't noticed. Lost souls clamouring their way to the bottom of every bottle."

"That's not how it is for you. You're rarely drunk."

"I find my pleasures in other ways," she said, and downed her waiting gin and tonic in one single gulp.

He sighed, not wanting to be a party to this, but as she was his only connection, choice was seriously limited. He glanced at the dancing crowd, the low ceiling hugging them in tight in the near darkness. The glittering chandelier affixed to the ceiling was missing several of its glass tears, its asymmetry a reflection of the general sense of shadow and decay within the confined space. It was much like his chapel, he realized, only packed solid with souls that kept a firm grip on their sins.

He scratched at his collar, the motor oil doing little to ease the way the seams of the black robe chafed his host's skin. A purgatory in cloth. He was doubtful of this alien religious sect, with its promises of a life that never ends, its belief that a non-linear existence was heaven. His own non-linear life was no paradise. What was strange was how this alien race could harbour a consciousness of such a state, and yet blanket it in ignorant, positive terms.

"I'm not talking about the usual method," she assured him. "This guy's a real sleazeball, a real crazy loony, if you know what I'm getting at. He's not a good person, not like my Daddy. Not like me." She sat back in her chair. "He owes me a connection that he didn't deliver."

"I can sympathize," he said, tired of her excuses. "Why should I help you when you give me nothing but the same? Perhaps it's you who should be worried, I might make you suffer the same fate as those who disappoint you."

She stiffened. She cast an unforgiving glare on him that stopped his black, liquid heart cold. "You will never say such a thing to me again," she ordered. Long fingernails scraped dangerously over the surface of the table between them, ending in curled claws. "We're on similar missions, you and I, but you don't want to admit it." Her eyes sparkled with violent glee, murder intent in her iris. "Believe me or not, but never, ever, threaten me again. You know as well as I do that I have no qualms against getting rid of any obstacle in my path–and that includes alien freaks in priest robes."

She relaxed, enjoying his discomfort. She poured him another shot, and he took it gratefully, the tremor in his host's hand betraying his fear. "I didn't mean to be unkind," he said, only to inwardly frown.

That wasn't the right sentiment, he thought.

Kindness. Such an unwelcome word.

"His name is Frankie. He's one of Georgio's fences," she told him. "He told me he had connections in Hollywood, and he was going to get me a part in one of those moving pictures. Said there was a script made for me. He told me the director has it all set up, all I have to do is show up and I'm the lead. Don't even need an audition."

He nodded, taking in her words carefully.

She let out a tired sigh. "You don't know what moving pictures are, do you?"

"No," he admitted.

"No Clara Bow, no Louise Brooks where you come from, huh? Shame. The world hasn't been the same since we all got addicted to sitting in the dark." She gave him a bored shrug of her marble white shoulder. "Think of it like this: a play performed by actors, only they aren't actors. They're shadows, with bits of grey and white scenery in between."

"You want to become a shadow of yourself?" he asked, confused.

"I'm going to be in pictures," she said, ignoring him. Her mouth was a thin, tight line of burgundy. "Frankie thinks he got one over on me, but he's going to pay for this."

"It seems a simple enough lie, one you've fallen for before. Isn't this how your other friend and I met?"

Her harsh features softened at the mention of her old flame's name. "Mikey and I had a thing, and it was grand while it lasted. But that's the trouble, see. People always disappoint." She drank the rest of her drink and motioned to the bartender to bring her another. "Me and Mikey weren't exactly on the best of terms when you met up with us."

He thought back on that night, on the spilling of blood, on the pleas for mercy and the cold, glinting stab of steel digging through pliant flesh and into resisting muscle.

"No, you weren't," he said.

"It's like this," she explained. "I always expect more from people than they are willing to give. Sometimes, I get a little over the top angry about it. Like with Mikey that night. He was supposed to get me a diamond ring and all he brought me was this dull old ruby. Hell, any whore can have a ruby. I wanted a diamond. That's just not the way you treat the one you call your girl. That's casting her aside, telling her she's worth nothing more than second best." She shook her head. "That's over with. Ancient history. Frankie's the one on my mind now, and he's the one I'm concentrating on. He'll be at the end of the bar at one o'clock, and I want you to tell him he has to come outside, that I'm waiting for him to take me for a ride in his new motor car. He'll think we're going somewhere romantic, like the Clifford Motel. He'll fall for it. He's a dumb jerk like the rest of them were."

"I don't know," he said, still uncertain. Shifty eyes at the bar kept passing over him, hidden in glances given to attractive girls dancing past. He could feel the old soaks keeping him in their sight's periphery. "I broke a stranger's arm. This Frankie is going to be on his guard."

"Do what I told you," she ordered him, and got up from their table. "I got everything waiting. All you have to do is play look-out. Easiest damn job in the world."

She walked unevenly towards the front of the bar, her steps forced as she made her way through the dancing crowd to find the set of stairs that led to the alley outside.

* * *

The pavement shone with the thin glimmer of moisture that had collected in pools beneath the black walls lining the alley. He was well sated, but he didn't care. He needed his sustenance. With a shake of his wrist, the bottle of motor oil slid into his hand and he took a long, refreshing drink from it, far more than the tiny shot glass amounts with which Clara had taunted him. The crude black substance crept into every crevice of his mind, muddying it, his surroundings shuffled into uneven pieces. Along the slick back of fossil fuel he rode into familiar territory, where images of time filtered into his consciousness, some crystal clear, others murky.

There was a ghostly hand chiseled from cold marble. A glint of a knife. Wounded eyes pleaded with him, begging him to make her stop. Her victim, shocked as they always were at her betrayal.

Her victim stared wide-eyed at him, a familiar name sliding from blood-soaked lips. With a final sigh the last syllable of it died with him.

"Frankie."

The name pulled him out of his motorized dreams, echoing across the vast horizon of his timeless consciousness. Frankie. He had pulled that man, that one Clara had pointed out, into the alley with nothing more than a promise of a shot of whiskey. Frankie. Why had the man stared at him like that, and called him by his own name?

Within the darkness, the glittering pools of water captured the flickering gaslight that hovered over them, sending out ripples of broken light. He tried to focus properly as a new, but familiar, shimmer walked towards him. He shook his wrist, the motor oil leaking out of a hole in his palm and staining his sleeve. A curse spilled from him, the language alien on his numbed tongue.

She grabbed his wrist, her ghost's flesh injecting frostbite.

"I told you to wait."

She snatched his motor oil, and he could feel his soul clamouring towards it, his host's tongue dry with fear as she held it aloft.

"No more of this," she said. She took off the cap. He shook his head. She nodded hers.

He turned away as Clara poured it out, black and thick upon the puddles of the alley, the ripples eddying outward and staining the soles of his shoes.

"I warned you about this stuff," she said, shaking her head as she kicked the now empty can across the alley. It landed with a dull thud against something soft and wet. "This is going to be a problem, isn't it? I hope you can find the wagon, my friend. You aren't tagging along with me unless you're riding that hay ride."

He didn't want her condemnation, he wanted answers.

"He called me Frankie."

"Of course he would," she answered, and snapped her dripping switchblade shut.

# Lies

He gripped the edges of the chipped porcelain sink with shaking hands. He didn't often take stock of his feelings, especially since he couldn't be sure if they were really his own, or some leftover infection from the flesh he had been forced to inhabit. But it was perhaps not so different a house, not with the way the blood sat stagnant, congealing in his host, his own liquid heart beating just above his forehead as he settled his bulk in behind the human ribs. The longer he stayed within this skin, the more he melted into it, and there was nothing worse, no punishment so severe, as to remain in this uncomfortable position. He was cramped and corporeal, enduring a life measured out in haphazard sequences of minutes, hours and seconds. The only relief was how this physical discomfort didn't remain in the memory long. His home existence had no such amnesia; its residents retained every moment within their minds. Entire universes lived within their memories, birthed and destroyed. Memories tripped along forever, coursing through them like this blood coursed through this creature's veins.

Memories were not permanent in this world. They became muted. Fictional. He'd been here too long and had allowed himself to fall victim to its linear influence. It seemed so long ago that he'd arrived, but perhaps it wasn't.

He couldn't remember his name.

He had an understanding that he hadn't always been anonymous, that at some point in his life there was a point of referral. A series of syllables that were alien on the human tongue. With his stained, bloodied hands on either side of the sink, he stared at the image in the cloudy cracked mirror and gained no clue as to his identity.

Frankie. Maybe that's who this was, and now himself.

No, he had a different purpose, a far more complex mission than the proper utterance of his name.

It was the oil doing this. He had to stop.

He washed away the blood on his hands with cold, rust-tainted water. The blood stained deep beneath his fingernails and he couldn't remove it no matter how much he scrubbed with the filthy rag he used for this exact purpose. The evidence of Clara's past betrayals was still embedded in the grey fibres. He reached for the bar of lye and it slipped out from between his fingers, flakes of dark burgundy staining the cracked sink like bits of dried paint. He turned on the tap full force, washing the evidence down the drain. He worked hard on his fingernails, digging beneath each one with care. He snapped one off of his index finger and cursed over the way it gushed black ooze. All that effort for nothing.

He stared at the horrible bend of his nail and the oily mess that dripped out over the pad of his finger. Brackish slime dropped into the grey sink, a tiny piece of his essence mingling with his host's former bloodstream. He ran the injury under the dirty, cold water and wrapped it tightly with the cloth he'd been using to wash up. He dripped soapy remnants of dark grey as he left the sink and headed for what served as his dining room.

It wasn't an uncomfortable place, this tiny room above the chapel, even if all signs pointed to it being an abandoned post. A single room comprised of one table, a chair, a sink in the corner and a cot beneath a barren light bulb. A cross was the sole decoration above the lumpy bed, and it absorbed the light from the bulb, the shadows playing on it and making it far more ornate than its simplicity suggested. He wasn't sure what had happened to the original rector. In truth, he hadn't thought on it. He'd been told, "Put these on. You can live upstairs," and that was how things had come to be as they were. The voice he heard in his memory was Clara's, not his superiors. They wouldn't know, even in their all-encompassing knowledge, how to navigate this world.

He felt nauseous as memory picked at the slimy grey matter that was his host's brain. He could hear her voice, telling him with all her cheerful intonations: "It's no problem. I know he won't be back. You've got nothing to worry about, you can hide out here easy."

Lies, lies, and yet he always felt compelled to believe her.

Unlike him, she had a name. Clara. Similar to clarity. How strange it was that her label was the opposite of what she was, for every word and nuance was masked in her deceitful web, a taunting melody that he couldn't help but listen to. She'd lied. Her Frankie was not a friend who needed to be taught a lesson. What had that unfortunate soul called her before she had ended his teasing with the glint of steel smeared with moonlight? A moll. A whoring, silly moll.

He'd broken her heart, she told him later, that man she called Frankie who wasn't Frankie. He'd broken her heart and she had to make sure she broke his in return. She'd shrugged her pale, white shoulder as she skipped off into the darkness of the alley, promising to visit him tomorrow. "It's just how things are around here," she assured him. "It's tit for tat. That's how it all works."

She'd sauntered off into the late hour, purse swinging, pearls dangling. She'd nothing to fear from the blackness that surrounded her. She was a part of it, a spectre that revelled in shadows, lighting up with pleasure the darker everything around her became.

He shook his head, uncomfortable. Surely he had been imagining things, a direct result of throwing back a near half gallon of oil. Memories remained frustratingly vague.

He should work harder to temper himself, to ease off the oil and minimize its negative effects. Saying no to it was becoming increasingly difficult. Soon he would be like the cronies at the basement speakeasy next door, his head bobbing up and down over a glass of black liquid, his mouth drooling over the beautiful, smooth escape it provided from the minutes and hours.

He collapsed into the creaky wooden seat at the small table and felt a sharp pain ride up his side as a broken rib pierced him. His host was an uncomfortable place of residence, and it wouldn't be long before he would require a new one. He could have borrowed Clara's latest conquest, but she had been too busy placing her marks on him, her usual x's and o's carefully carved above the lids of his eyes, blinding his corpse.

It was a curious habit, and she herself had no proper explanation for it. Like many things since his arrival, he had learned to accept what didn't make sense. He shifted inside of his present body, careful to avoid the splintered rib and the piece of spine that jutted inward towards the kidney. He bumped into the spleen and a sudden gurgle rose from it, rising up his chest and into his throat. A long, thin trickle of black seeped out from the corner of his mouth. He wiped it away with the back of his hand with irritated impatience.

He was definitely drinking too much.

He cast a glance back at the filthy sink and felt an inward groan rise within him. He would have to clean it up properly, give it an ample scrubbing to hide all traces of himself. Clara had been wise to teach him this. First, however, he had an itch to scratch, and though he was loathe to admit it, he needed this sustenance, because without it he couldn't bear to face her and the vile world she lived in again. How else could he confront her, without its thick taste welling in pools around his host's tongue?

He pulled his priest's robe over his head, revealing the pair of well cut trousers and tank top he wore beneath. The fresh can of motor oil he'd purchased was tucked against his suspenders and he released it onto the table, the tin brightly coloured in vibrant red and orange, full of the promise of being the best for one's capital investment–the motor car. He hesitated for a moment, only to decide that it would be better to finish it off here and now, to finally end it and say this was the very last one he would ever imbibe. There was a pink teacup on the far corner of the table, its contents long since dried up, a brown sludge staining the bottom. He grabbed it, and with an eagerness that filled him with shame, he unscrewed the can of motor oil and poured it into the teacup until it was near to overflowing.

He brought it in front of him and stared into it as though divining the future. That's what humans did, he knew, because Clara occasionally visited the elderly woman who lived in the apartment two stories up from the speakeasy, seeking out answers to questions that couldn't be asked.

"She's wise," Clara insisted. "She's got the sight, if you know what I mean."

He didn't. In his world, the future was part of the present, and there was no need for googly eyed old women with pinched expressions and a foul, mothball aroma that pervaded every wrinkled crevice of her body.

Besides, there was no wisdom for him, only watery tea and old Sousa's sad shake of her head that could mean any number of emotions. Annoyance at his being there. Anger at being roused at a late hour to take a few pennies from a sparkling flapper. A creaking, ancient body torn from her bed only to divine that his future was boring and not worth telling.

From his experience, the latter was usually the case. Every visit, Sousa would swallow a wet cough and pull out a cup of tea, patiently filling it for Clara. She'd drink from it greedily, burning the roof of her mouth. With quiet determination, Sousa would then feign reading the signs on the bottom of the cup while Clara listened in rapt concentration. 'A new man,' the old crone would slyly hint. "One to replace the old one."

He could envision Clara, pale in the red tinted light of the old woman's kitchen, a colour deftly fashioned from the red kerchief draped over her lamp.

"Did you hear that?" Clara would say to him, her voice edged in whispered wonder. "Isn't she amazing?"

"She can tell you what you already know."

"She's amazing. Don't listen to him, Sousa. He's a drip. No fun at all. Just like the tap–drip, drip, drip. How boring!"

Through the thin walls of his room, he could hear the plaintive cries of Langley's trumpet, the practice notes full of his usual melancholy. He hadn't yet touched his teacup full of motor oil, and he was still in the throes of indecision over whether or not he should drink it and be done with it, or if he should wait a while, maybe until mid-afternoon or even later into the evening. A peculiar sense of timing had brewed between himself and Clara. He had grown to understand that it was during these times of day that he would most need the medicinal comfort of slick black oil pouring over his insides.

Langley's trumpet wept in the background as he caught a glimpse of his face reflected on the inky black surface of the cup. He looked ill, by human standards. As well he should. She had tortured him yet again with her empty promises and he had fallen for them, a ruse he should have known to recognize by now. How she managed to convince him of her lies, he wasn't entirely sure. He wondered if there was scientific merit to the idea that a woman could cast a spell upon a man's reason. Langley's trumpet seemed to think so, though perhaps the trumpeter's situation was more complex than most.

Still, Langley's trumpet didn't have to wash up the blood. It didn't taunt him with promises so it could glean terrible favours. When Langley cried, his trumpet lamented along with him. Not so Clara, who would laugh at pain, and giggle at disgusted wincing.

A new man, who had broken her heart, so she'd cut out his. There was always a new one. The glint of metal and x's and o's and bucket upon bucket of blood.

The more he thought about the night before, the more the motor oil tempted him.

He'd wasted enough time trying to understand her reasoning. They'd been companions in blood for what felt like a millennia. She called it two weeks, a fourteen day stretch, a fraction of time to her understanding, but so much more to his own. He'd never experienced what it was like to live minute by minute, counting out each second that crawled past, unused, wasted. Such an alien concept, this measuring of time; it was difficult for him to navigate. He searched his damaged memory, and he knew he had been there, in the alley, the night before. An imperfect mixture of recollection assailed him. He had snippets instead of whole pieces of what had transpired. The motor oil did this: it dulled his perceptions and put him back into that non-linear plane of reasoning he properly understood.

Someone, perhaps Clara's person of interest–her beau if that's what he was–had called him Frankie and looked on him as though he'd seen a ghost.

Langley's trumpet sang deep and slow in profound agreement. He rubbed his chin in thought, the fingertips of his host as dry as scales. There was no need for a mothball scented diviner to figure out his past; the trumpet knew it well enough. What had happened was something awful, and vile, and it was so much better to drink a sip of oil and forget most of it beneath its muddying haze.

He was about to take a sip, a big one, when the telephone rang.

It rang and rang and rang.

He placed his teacup back down carefully, slopping some of the motor oil onto the matching saucer. The telephone always made him nervous. He wiped dry, flaking palms onto the tops of his thighs and forced his breath to resume its more natural, human pattern. How did one answer this thing again? Receiver, ear, depress lever, dial a number.

What number?

He rose from his seat and walked into the kitchen, where the telephone was bolted to the wall. He picked up the receiver and, with a hesitant greeting that refused to hold any conviction, said, "H-Hello?"

"Did you have to let it ring a million times? Honestly, it's not going to bite you." She sighed on the other end, and in the distance he could hear Clara's father, roaring and coughing in tandem as he tried desperately to bring his wayward daughter back into his iron control. "I have good news for you, if you're willing to listen."

"Your father sounds angry," he said.

"He should be, since he's kicking me out of the house and all."

"That will be a problem for you."

"Says who? I've got plenty of digs to sleep in, and I don't need to do much of that as it is. Besides," she became sultry as she spoke to him, " I got an iron clad plan and you're a part of it."

"I don't think I want to be."

"Too late. You're in."

There was crackling static on the line, and he could hear her sigh in between another conversation invading their own. "We have to talk private. Sousa has to hear what I have to say, I'm going to need her special insight before we leave."

He was taken aback by this. "Leave? I don't understand. There is nowhere to go."

"You think I'm not helping you, but I am, in every little thing I do. One day you'll get it, you'll see. You'll say, 'My, but that Clara was something special, the way she understood how this was going to happen, and it did, just like she said. I'm so glad I listened to her, even if she did steer me wrong once in a while–No fault of her own, no, none at all."

"I don't believe you," he said, but he already doubted himself.

"I got my bags all packed and I'm ready to blow this joint. Daddy is being a real pain. He was so upset when I showed up at five this morning, furious that I'd let the sun come up. I told him, if that were in my power, that ball of fire would be hurtling towards Earth instead of just sitting there, being a bore and taking up all the attention from all the other planets. Apparently, a girl like me shouldn't be alone at such an ungodly hour. I didn't know there were different levels of morality according to the hours of the day. Did you?"

He thought how her acts of misconduct coincided with certain parts of the day when he imbibed more motor oil than was safe to any body, alien or human.

"No, I didn't."

"Well, now you know."

"I am educated."

There was a slam of a door, and a protracted, furious bout of cursing levelled off by a final lung-crushing gasp that wheezed and tortured itself in and out of damaged lungs. "Whore," her father struggled to squeeze from the last breath he drew in.

She ignored him. Behind her, her father slowly suffocated in his own despair, staggering against furniture and knocking over vases. He guessed this is what was happening in the background, the struggle crashing through the earpiece of his telephone. The scuffle abruptly stopped, leaving an eerie silence in place of chaotic fury. Clara took a deep breath before continuing, her voice forced into cheerfulness.

"I will meet you at Sousa's in about an hour. I have some unfinished business to attend to here. But you better believe me, this is a big one, a real juicy tidbit you can't leave behind. You're coming with me, because there's no choice, and Sousa will agree with me, you'll see."

"Going with you?"

"One hour. Toodles."

She hung up, leaving him to contemplate dead air. On the table, in its pretty pink teacup, was his black pool of motor oil promising a sweet escape. It didn't matter how early the hour was this time. He pounced upon it like a hawk on an injured rabbit and drank every last drop in one satisfying, anxiety-free gulp.

# Travel

The mothballs made him gag; he coughed up a black murky chunk of partially-digested motor oil onto the carpeted hallway outside of Sousa's apartment. Clara cast him an evil glare, but Sousa, who immediately opened her door, didn't seem to mind being roused from her bed. A thick line of red lipstick covered her wrinkled lips, and her yawn was large enough to consume them. A heavily manicured hand met her mouth as she lazily hid her exhaustion, and with a gesture that suggested tired inevitability, she waved them into the cramped confines of her upper floor apartment.

Hot water screamed from a teapot on the stove. Sousa waddled over to it, bare feet dirty on an equally dirty plank floor. The pungent smell of boiled cabbage permeated every crevice, as well as an indefinable spice that hovered somewhere between cinnamon and red peppers. He wanted to open a window and continue listening to Langley's depressed morning solo, but the windows here were nailed shut with thick layers of dirty white paint. The only music Sousa listened to was the screaming lilt of a teapot that died into a limp weeping as she pulled it off the stove and began her ritual.

Clara sat at the crowded kitchen table, its surface strewn with bits of string, bobbins, chunks of lace, bowls and multicoloured material cannibalized from pieces of old clothing.

"This is so exciting," Clara said, her eyes dancing in glee. She pulled out her compact and gave her ruby red lips a good study. "It's all going to be top drawer, I just know it!"

"Your father," he began, but waited until Sousa was out of earshot in her living room before whispering to Clara, "He didn't sound well on the telephone."

She snapped her compact shut with practised impatience. "He never does."

"Where's your mother? I didn't hear her."

"She's around."

"I thought she was ill."

"She still is. She always will be. Daddy, too."

That was as far as the conversation went, for Sousa entered the kitchen, a tin of dried leaves in her grip. She filled a heavy pot with water and set it to boil on her stove before stirring the black tea leaves into the pot. She grumbled as she poured the thin tea into the delicate cups she used for divining a person's future. With strong, steady arms and hands that would have intimidated a bricklayer, she placed the cups on a tray and brought them over to where Clara was seated. Sousa did not offer candy or cakes to go with her tea, for it was a special brew, one full of promise and bitterness that always sat ill on the back of the throat. Clara grabbed her cup, and Sousa placed a firm, meaty paw over Clara's pale knuckles, halting her.

"You wait. Is not good to be so rushing." Sousa tsked as Clara took the cup the minute her hand was released. "Always with the rushing. Rushing into death, you not even think twice about it."

"It's better than lying around here, waiting for something exciting to happen," Clara whined. She sipped her tea, though it was clearly a struggle not to gulp it in order to get her fortune faster. "All I ever do is go to stupid parties full of stupid people. It's about time something real happened, something I can really gnash my teeth on. I've got a plan, so Sousa, you have to tell me how well it's all going to work out because everything — and I mean everything — is riding on it."

Sousa shrugged. "I just say what tea says."

"It has to be more than that," Clara insisted. "I need details, I need names and dates and roads and addresses and...." She gulped back the last of her tea, wincing as it burned her throat. She thrust the teacup at Sousa. "There. Go on. Read me."

Sousa refused to take the cup. She sighed as she sank her large, round frame into the chair opposite them, its legs creaking under her bulky weight. "Rushing, rushing," she muttered. He shuddered involuntarily as she cast a black rimmed eye on him, her pencilled in brow raised high on her forehead like a check mark. "You," she said, as though meeting him for the first time. Her eyes became black slits. "You are so boring. So dull and stupid. You make me tired looking at you."

"You always say this," he reminded her.

"Why is this true? No one is so painfully slow, but you, your life, it is not just open and plain, it is like legal insurance form. Boring, dull like the dishwater. This is strange, this. It's like you have no future at all, and no past to investigate. Bah! Why bother you, to waste my tea? You leave me nothing but dead leaves."

She groaned and ran her vast, wide palm across one of her several chins, a bead of sweat captured in its centre. Clara pushed her teacup towards her, and she flicked a wayward piece of dried tea off of the side of the cup, and pushed it along the inside of her index fingernail. Sousa's divining was an intensely physical process, her shoulders hunching, her garish lips smacking and always that big hand swiping across the bottom of her frog-like face, with thick, burgundy nails scraping along the fat folds of her cheek.

"There is a journey..." she began.

Clara whooped as though she'd been told she'd won a contest. "I knew it! I knew I was on the right track!"

"You are too rushing," Sousa said, frowning over the cup. She cast Clara a withering look that tried to take the confidence out of her joy. "There is trouble coming on this trip. It is very far, through many lands you will go...."

"California," Clara blurted out, and he took the news as though she brutally stabbed him. His head whipped towards her, his mouth open in shock. She cast him a wild, happy grin, a sentiment of happiness that he clearly didn't share. "We're leaving right after this. Right after Sousa gives me her blessing."

"I don't understand." He frowned, trying to piece together the fragments of lies and truths she had told him since they had first met. "You said my target was still here, in Chicago."

"Well, now he isn't. Now he's in California, and you are coming with me, because there's no other way to find him, is there?" She rolled her eyes at his lingering shock. "Look, I know you think I steered you wrong last night, but fact is, I was talking to a copper who had a few too many just before I went out to meet you both. He said he saw a person matching your target's description getting on the train bound for Los Angeles not four hours before the party. I do my homework, I do. You don't have to look at me like that, I'm not fibbing."

She turned her attention back to Sousa. "Keep reading. That leaf, that one right there near the bottom, what does it mean? It's captured my eye, and I have to know, it's got to mean something important, right?"

Curious, he also stared into the cup, but all he could decipher was that it was cracked and dirty, with a hideous pale blue flowered pattern adorning it. The handle was splintered, and he could see how it pinched Clara's fingers when she used it.

Sousa shrugged, taking the cup from her. "It is the death. The one I tell you of earlier."

Clara frowned. "What do you mean?"

Sousa gave her a watery glare. "I don't repeat."

"I don't understand. I'm going on a trip, a long one, to California. I'm going to get my name known in Hollywood and get into the moving pictures, like I've planned. My friend here is coming along for the ride and he makes a fine enough companion, so there's no need for all this talk of doom and gloom and death. How rude, Sousa. I thought better of you than this."

"You think nothing at all of me or anyone," Sousa firmly shot back. She got up from her creaky chair with a series of groans and tossed the chipped teacup into the sink. "I tell you your future. You can go now and let an old woman get her rest."

Clara was furious. She clenched her fists, her thin knuckles turning bone white. In his mind, he could hear the click of the blade, his memory not failing now, not with that ever present flash of steel threatening the moment. He could see the blade shining in her consciousness, a glint in her green eyes that promised to cure her disappointment. "

You harpy!" she shouted at Sousa. "You fat, ugly old harpy!"

He was worried, because despite her appearance and her strange ways, he did have what could be interpreted as a fondness for Sousa. True, it was more about knowing a familiar body in a world that was always fluctuating and changing, a vista of unfamiliarity from one moment to the next. He needn't have been concerned, however, for Sousa was used to these kinds of tantrums from selfish customers, and she knew what to say to ease their shallow consciences.

"But there is a man," Sousa said, smiling with sneaky mirth. "A very handsome man. He is a beacon of light in a place of darkness. But beware, lest he steal away more than your heart!"

"A very handsome man," Clara repeated, and her fury instantly morphed into joyful giggling. "Oh, did you hear that? We can head out without a care now, Sousa has cinched it. We're going to California!"

"No," he said. "I'm not."

He waited for the fury she had visited upon Sousa, but she remained cheerful, blissfully oblivious to his concerns. "I've already packed. You should have heard the way Daddy hollered at me, but it's no matter. The parties around here are boring, and there's more to this world that some stupid jerk with a gun in his hand and nothing in his pocket. I want to go where the real men are, the ones who know how to recognize beauty in a woman. I want to take a snap at Hollywood, shouldn't be a big deal. I got a name, a good contact, and I know it's real because the one who gave it to me had nothing left to lose for telling me."

She snatched at her pearls and brought one of them dangerously close to her ruby lips. "Let's go, the usual way, through Route 66. It's a long road that goes on forever. You'll probably like that."

"No," he said, an edge of desperation rising in his voice.

"Don't be a fusspot."

"You lie to me. Over and over...."

"You believe me, so get over it."

His frustration bubbled within him, and he clenched his host's fists, the strength in them enough to snap the neck of a strong man. "I have already wasted enough time with you."

The pearl spun in her fingers and she clicked it against her front teeth, the grin she gave him insufferable. "You don't remember how good I've been to you. All those days when you lay weeping on the chapel floor, sure that you weren't able to survive. That first day, you thought I was going to step over your corpse, but oh, no, stupid me. I helped you."

She tossed her pearls into her lap. "Fat lot of good that's done me. You're an ungrateful fiend, you are. After all I've done for you, and now you just sit there, moping, saying how you don't want to go on the most amazing trip you could ever experience. All because of your stupid target, and your mission. Well, fat luck on you getting what you want without me. You know I'm the one with the connections. I told you, that copper saw your prize getting on that train. It's California here we come, for you and for me."

He glanced over at Sousa who had no interest in their cryptic conversation, her duty completed. The only involvement that remained was her patiently waiting for them to leave. The silent request was understood by Clara, who reached into her purse and paid Sousa her usual sum of fifteen cents for the reading. "I got us a car, a real beauty. You're going to like it."

"I don't care about such things," he said.

He wanted to lash out, and it took all his willpower not to grasp her neck between his forefinger and thumb and neatly snap it. Let Sousa see it, let his superiors see how far he had fallen since they had dumped him here, with barely a warning as to the perils of this miserable, confusing place.

She picked up her small handbag and held it close to her as she sidled past him and opened the apartment door. "Thanks bunches, Sousa," she cheerfully called behind her. Sousa didn't answer, but spit into her sink. When they were finally in the apartment corridor, Sousa slammed the door shut behind them both and bolted the door with three locks.

"I don't get why you're being so difficult," Clara said, rolling her eyes with exaggerated drama. "It's not like you're doing anything, and besides, with what happened last night, you need to get as far away from Chicago as possible."

He stopped short. The crumbling, dark, musty smelling hallway took on a new, sinister dimension as he pondered her words. "I did nothing last night," he reminded her. "That was all you."

"So you think." She swung her arms from side to side as she walked, a cheerful spring to her step that was in vast contrast to his blackened mood. "You were so wasted on motor oil you've forgotten a bit of your history. My, that stuff hits you hard, makes you all weird. Shame though, really. You're a lot more interesting when you drink up. If you weren't such a liability, I'd say drink the stuff until you burst. We got more in common when you're loosened up."

He pressed against the rib cage, feeling the sharp splinters dig into his pliant essence. "You're lying. I'm nothing like you."

"I don't always lie," she assured him. "Come on, why would I lie about something like that? It's my favourite kind of night, one that ends properly, with me winning by morning, and you made that happen. I remember it well, the way you dragged the body to the back of that car, and how easy it was for you to jimmy the trunk. Kind of obvious, I thought, but who am I to argue?"

"It was you," he insisted, the splintered rib digging deep into his essence, bruising him. "You were the murderer. I do no such things."

"Funny how they all say that. I guess I would, too, it's at least worth a shot not going to the gallows, am I right? Do they still hang people here? Isn't that hysterical, I don't rightly know."

She laughed at the irony, her pearls dancing against her midriff as she made her way down the back stairs, the crumbling walls leaving bits of cement on her palms as she steadied herself. "I know, I shouldn't be so cruel to you about your motor oil problem, especially seeing how I'm a real boozer myself these days. I think I'm still drunk!"

"I have only one target." He clenched his host's teeth as he seethed in pain, the ribs now joined by a bruised kidney. "I am meant to find, destroy, and return. That is my goal. Not making you 'happy', not going to California to make it in moving pictures. Target. To be reached. Nothing more."

"Well aren't you the most many layered person I've ever met," she said, dryly. "I don't care about your mission, Mr One-Dimensional. What I want, despite this little tantrum of yours, is exactly the same as what you want. A resolution to a problem. Your problem is the need to destroy someone, and I can certainly sympathize. But I'm on a building mission, one for myself. I'm dragging my sorry ass life out of this muck and getting rich and famous like I'm supposed to be. If you stand in the way of that, my own mission, well I guess I'll just have to call you one more silly obstacle I'm going to have to get rid of so I can keep moving."

"You can't threaten me."

"I did. I liked doing it. I think I might do it again sometime." She swung her purse in a wide arc beside her as they walked out of a side door and into a brightly lit alley. He was always visiting alleyways with her, he thought. Like a stray cat rummaging through garbage.

She walked out of the cramped space and into the bright morning sunshine, her arms outstretched towards its warmth in worship. "It's like this every day in California. Not a cloud anywhere, not even in your soul."

"You're sure of that?"

"Always doubting me and calling me a liar. Does that car look like a lie?"

A streamlined white convertible gleamed in the sunlight. Her now dead former love clearly had enjoyed being seen, especially with this white beacon among a sea of blacktops on the busy Chicago streets. This was a vehicle that hugged the open road in glamorous style. Unless it rained, in which case one would simply have to suffer a drowning. He didn't need Sousa to know that.

"How long will it take us?" he asked, resigned to the plan. She was right, of course: he had nothing to wait for here, even if she was lying. His target could be anywhere, and he had to trust that somehow his superiors were right in the method they had chosen.

He moved away from the splintered rib and the bruised kidney and filled his borrowed lungs with the gasoline taint of a windy Chicago summer morn.

"Look at this!" she exclaimed, and pulled out a ridiculous looking leather riding hat out of the back seat. She put it on and it hugged her skull close, her large eyes suddenly huge without her shock of bobbed hair as a distraction. The hat had wide goggles buckled tightly on top. She looked ready for flight rather than a simple car ride across the country.

He sank behind the steering wheel, the angle puncturing his borrowed spleen. He was sure it had sprung a leak since last night. He would need to patch it later, and hopefully before the internal leaking became so severe he had to pop a hole in his host's side and release it, like a gory black spout.

He made a face as he placed his hands on the steering wheel. "What is that terrible odour?"

"Frankie," she said, shrugging. She pulled out her compact and dabbed her nose with powder. "Like I said, it was your idea. Poor guy, it's a bit harsh. I wouldn't have done it, but you insisted. It's a scorcher of a summer morning. He's a real ripe banana in that trunk."

# Celebrities

The body in the trunk wasn't his most pressing problem. He didn't want to leave his Chicago post. He'd been placed in this particular geographical region for a reason, he was sure of it, and besides, it was unlikely she was telling the truth. He'd never seen her talk to an officer before, and the likelihood of his target being on some nebulous train heading to an equally indefinable city or town in California took on all the honesty of a drunken soak bragging of his sobriety. Her fortune secured by the wisely vague Sousa and her tea leaves, Clara was oblivious to his discomfort. Just as the bobbing heads at the bar of the underground speakeasy kept loving tabs on their drinks, so Clara did with her lies.

Still, it was difficult to discount her completely, for he had long learned that her ridiculous claims often came out of bits and pieces of a larger truth, one morphed into a sturdy lie with a puzzle piece of honesty woven within. Thus, her conversation with the policeman had obviously never happened, but some random drunk may have provided her with some clue, such as his target getting on a train to an unknown destination.

Earth consisted of more than this dirty, windy city, a simple fact he had to remember. Though her travels would take them to the other side of the continent, it was not be out of the realm of possibility that his target would be somewhere along that route, especially if they followed the train.

It was a gamble, and one highly unlikely to earn him a win. There were hundreds of miles of possibilities to cover, in all directions, and they were journeying to only one. He knew he was grasping at a choice, any choice, for his target was long gone from the vicinity, hidden so deeply even his superiors had no idea how he should proceed. Clara sat beside him in the motor car, her dark red lips pressed tight together as she checked their hue in the side mirror. He didn't trust her, but there was a nagging urge to follow her instruction, and while the evidence of her past lies told him the journey was foolish, his instincts screamed at him to do as she said.

He scratched under his chin, the texture a thin veneer that scraped angrily against his host's nails. Angry red welts stung his neck, and when he checked his nails, a layer of human skin lay embedded in them like fish scales.

"I'm sure it's the motor oil," she said, shrugging, not all concerned by the strange new symptom his host's body exhibited. "You can't fill up your guts with that stuff, it's not made for human beings. If you were this motor car, maybe, and even then you might do something bad to the engine. But we don't have pistons and pulleys, you know. In case you haven't noticed, we're mostly water, and if you know any chemistry at all you know that water and oil don't mix." She eyed him critically. "You shouldn't be wearing those priest robes any more. You'll attract too much attention."

He brought the motor car into gear and began the slow pace onto the main road. She was curled up in the passenger seat, her back pressed against the door, knees drawn up to her chin in what seemed to be an uncomfortable pose. "Don't be so mopey," she said, pouting. "Getting rid of him will be easy."

"You are too confident," he warned.

She snorted, her pearls brought to her teeth. She clacked them against her grin, ivory on greyish white. "Of course we need to be careful where we dump him. Don't worry, once we're out of the city and heading south, there's lots of empty lots and abandoned farms along the way. Frankie told me so himself. If those aren't available, I got a place in mind for him, one that he'd appreciate." She sighed, as though tired. "I guess he wasn't so bad, as far as lunkheads like him go. He did buy me these pearls back in March. They ain't glass, neither, they're the real thing."

Her Frankie, now overripe in the trunk of the car, his eyes neatly x'd and o'd, had nothing further to add to the conversation. Her victim had plenty of experience in the extermination department himself, what with being a rum runner's debt collector. It was a strange collection of friendships that ended all too easily in murder. A bill unpaid. A bad word put in by Frankie's boss. Everyone was a target, eventually.

Perhaps he wasn't as alien to this world as he thought.

"Why did we need to kill him?" he had to ask.

"The usual," she said, shrugging. She rested her head against the soft cushion of the passenger seat, her pearls dangling carelessly in her grip. Her foot tapped out a rhythm, some silly jazz tune that was all fluff and squeals, with none of Langley's morose soliloquy. "They think I'm stupid, is what the problem is. They think when I ask something of them, it means they can get whatever they want, whenever they want, in return. But the truth is, I know they're all morons, not worth a damn. They'd murder their own sisters if it meant they got ahead further in their stupid pecking order game. See, I got ambitions, and you don't get anywhere without knocking a few heads off now and again."

She batted her large, dark eyes in mock innocence. "I got peepers made for Hollywood, and a mouth fit to eat Valentino. I got a contact out of Frankie, a director who's looking for a girl like me to put in his moving pictures. Got an address and everything."

"So why kill him?" he repeated. He turned left, the road strangely quiet at this early hour, devoid of anyone save a few derelict souls who had no home to hide in.

"I'm so sick of paying the price for what little I get," she replied harshly. "Stop asking stupid questions and keep driving. I'm doing you a favour, and you'd be smart not to forget that. You get what you want, and I get mine, and that's all that matters. Got it?"

"Moving pictures," he muttered.

"You don't even know what they are," she complained. Just as quickly her mood changed, her face glowing with happiness in the bright morning sunlight. "It's flashes of shadows in the dark. I bet it's just like your home, full of flashing light and grey bits of people and places. Yes, that's what moving pictures are. What life was like for you, over there, in that place you come from."

He gripped the steering wheel tight, not wanting to look at her. His chin burned from where he'd scratched it, the red welts now weeping parts of himself.

"No," he said. "It's not like that at all."

* * *

She drew long on her cigarette, white, slender fingers curled around the ivory holder. She held the smoke in, as though swallowing it, before releasing it out into the open air, where the smoke spun behind her, dissipating instantly into the country morning. It had taken several hours to get out of Chicago, and there was a mutual relief to be coursing across an open stretch of highway with nothing for company save the rustle of thick trees, their leaves gossiping as the car sped past.

Flies buzzed in the back seat, hitching a ride. They settled on the back of his head, threatening to take a bite. Every now and then he would swat at them, and wonder why not a one would go near Clara.

"It's unbearable, this heat," he said to her.

"Of course it is, it's summer all over. Bright skies and sunshine all the way." She gave him a twisted grin. "You just wait until we hit the worst of it. Consider yourself lucky, it'll be a while before we catch up to desert country. According to the map, we've only just hit Missouri." She yawned and flicked ashes over her shoulder onto the sandy road beside her. "I know, it's kind of strange, taking this long, crazy trip. Don't worry, it ain't all a straight line, there's someone in Kansas I'm set to visit. Don't you be moping, Hollywood isn't going to disappear if we get there a week or two late."

She took a pensive drag of her cigarette, red lips kissing smoke.

"Hollywood. Sounds like candy on the tongue to me. Or maybe not, maybe it's a nasty weed, when you think about it. 'Damn garden is infested with hollywood'. It's kind of like that. Instead of people putting it out of their minds as just idle nothing, it grows and grows and takes over everything."

A stream of wind caught her bobbed hair, strewing it across her pale face. "You know what I think? I think we're all just going to be shadows someday. Little bits of grey in the dark. That's what we are."

"You're going to Hollywood to prove this?"

She was quiet for a long moment, her slender ghost's fingers tucked neatly beneath her chin, her dark hair an unruly halo around her harshly symmetrical face. The dark pull of the desert beckoned from its western horizon, telling them to hurry; its sands were still too far away and it longed to desiccate them with its suffocating welcome. She straightened her index finger, her lips slightly parted. A fiercely manicured nail tapped at her incisor.

"I think a lot about their eyes," she admitted. She narrowed her own as she stared down the rows of trees that lined the highway, their whispers hushed, judgemental. "It's the one thing I'm not sure of, when we get to Hollywood, that is. In those moving pictures, the eyes, always so big and exaggerated. It's easier, see. Sometimes, when I get out my switchblade, it's like every eye I stare into reflects back this piercing light. Like a piece of mirror, tossing out the sun."

She spread her hand wide and touched the air spinning past the passenger side of the car, fingers making x and o motions. "Strange, isn't it? Hunh. I've picked up some weird habits these days."

He didn't like this mood she was in. He hated it when she talked this way, her mood lost in her horrors as though they were soft dreams comprised of childish happiness. For her, perhaps this was true. This proclivity for humanity to bask in their vices as though they were wistful dreams disturbed him, and made him feel alienated, a misshapen piece that drifted into their simplistic puzzle.

The bar stool cronies at the speakeasy weren't so different, their bobbing heads assuring all who dared to ask after their families that all was well, that they knew how to be good husbands and fathers. Lies, he learned, told to an empty bottle. The slack fist of a drunk would tighten when he wasn't at that counter. A black eye for a wife. A slap for a hungry child.

There were those who fought against these things, but they were weak-minded and feeble in protest, blaming the product instead of the lack of human accountability.

The more moral, the deeper the sin. Scratching the surface of self-professed good people, proud of their perfection, revealed darker secrets better left unsaid. There was always in the human heart a thirsty need to deflect blame and spotlight one's own inflated, false virtue. Bragging mouths to hide the gnawed on skeletons in every closet. "I'm not so bad as that one," a twisted, painted mouth would say. "I might fool around, sure, but her, she's a real whore."

Clara, and her severe, permanent judgement. Sliced x's and o's painted in slashes of red on white.

Sitting beside him, her hand caressing air, Clara could never be so further from him in ethics, despite being a fellow hunter. He was a hired hand, sent to destroy one specific being whom he couldn't properly find and she... she killed indiscriminately, her switchblade slicing into any pliant flesh that happened to disappoint her. He was sent to kill for a reason. For her it was sport. It was an incongruity of purpose he found difficult to reconcile.

"If we keep this pace up, we might get into Springfield by late afternoon," she said, hopeful. "Keep on through, and we'll be in St. Louis, Missouri, and then on into the night until we find the Merama Caverns in Stanton. That was where they say Jesse James himself used to hide out when he was on the run from the law. How's that for a lark?"

She tossed the remains of her cigarette onto the road. "Dropping him off in there, so he can sit and chat with old Jesse's ghost and be told how he wasn't such a big shot after all, now that's justice. Jesse robbed banks, made himself a legend, a damned American outlaw saint, that's what he did. "

She gestured to the back seat, as though the corpse in the trunk was an invisible passenger. Which, in truth, he was. "What great thing did this dumb and dead lunkhead do? He never took any initiative, not like our Jesse James. This lunkhead just took orders, and he even got those wrong. Last I heard, he was going to get the axe anyway, seeing as how he lost Georgio's last liquor shipment to some New York copper. There was a price on his head. I did him a favour knocking him off early."

She pressed her lips together, evening her lipstick. "Imagine, thinking he was going to get a quick get up with me in the back seat of this car. I mean, just look, it's not like there's room, it would be real uncomfortable. Top down on a chilly, wet night. That ain't a way to be a gentleman. I bet Jesse James would give him a tongue lashing for acting that trash with a top drawer kind of girl like me."

He doubted it, but he kept his opinion to himself, concentrating instead on the long stretch of highway that was set to cross the entire of the country. Despite his misgivings, he was glad to be on the open road, using the motor car to slip past time zones, a feeling of disconnect pulling him out of this world and making him feel more at home.

The smeared rush of landscape beside him reminded him of the way his world intersected with time and space, the constant movement giving him a sense of comfort. He liked the way he could stare at this kaleidoscopic vista, its colours and shapes muting Clara's constant chatter. But he couldn't block her out entirely, and snippets would catch his ear over the loud hum of the motor, her red mouth eager and snappy as she gorged on her own words.

"Valentino ought to get ready. I've got plans for him."

"They say he's with that whore Pola Negri, but I know better, he's got more class than that. But naw, I shouldn't say that about her. She's got style in spades. I'm just jealous, is all. Look at me, all green-eyed already and I haven't even seen a script yet."

"Louise Brooks. Now there's a class flapper, a real top drawer gal. I can't wait to meet her. We'll be fast friends her and I, I know it."

"The gal's got real class. I have to say it. I bet she has one, tucked in her pocket, or under her skirt. There, in her garter, to be whipped out at first notice. A nice and shiny one, not all rusted up from overuse like mine. She can afford a fresh one after every kill."

"I bet Louise Brooks has a whole cigar box of switchblades. I can relate. I'd have one myself if I could afford it."

He frowned over this, the hypnotizing bliss of the highway upset by her delusional rambling. "Louise Brooks has never been accused of murder," he reminded her. "No headlines crying 'Hollywood Starlet Laughs Over Mutilated Corpse'. "

She scoffed. "Goes to show what you know."

The air was hot as it cascaded over them. The motor car engine sputtered and coughed, longing for lubrication. His arms ached from gripping the steering wheel, his neck stiff. The taste of oil welled thick in the back of his throat, and he swallowed back a gurgling cough.

"I know well enough when someone is being foolish," he said. He gripped the steering wheel tight, concentrating on the highway before him, and refusing to meet her furious glare. "Louise Brooks is nothing more than a moving picture actress. She is not tearing across America with a cigar box full of switchblades, slicing down gangsters. There has been no murders to speak of in her vicinity, there are no trails of corpses, no witnesses, no complex scheming of bank robberies gone bad or rum runners who can't stock their boss's inventory. She is, as you've said before, nothing more than a flicker of grey and white in the dark, and all the more dark than light."

He turned his head towards her, annoyed by her pouting. Her arms were crossed tight over her chest, dark eyes full of malice. "You are not used to telling the truth to anyone, not even yourself. I may not be as knowledgeable as you in the ways of human interaction, but I have observed through the perusal of your newspapers that actors and actresses, due to their notoriety thanks to their art, are not usually in the habit of wanton, indiscriminate killing sprees."

"Like I said, goes to show what you know."

"Page one, yesterday's headline: 'First All Talking Pic Starts'. Not a word about your Miss Brooks' murderous rampage."

"Not a word," she agreed, nodding her head sagely. "Not one word about our ripe boy Frankie, neither. No coppers knocked on my door. No questions asked, no newspaper asked for my quote." She raised her head high, her chin jutting out in fierce pride. "So what does that tell you? If a simple girl like me can get away with it, what makes you think Louise Brooks doesn't have notch after notch of dead men counted on her pearls?"

She slouched further into her seat, victorious against his silence. "You don't know about my world, so you can't be making assumptions. This is how it is on our green neck of the universe. People kill each other, and no one pays a mind."

He wasn't sure about this. He'd read in their papers that murderers were jailed to pay for such crimes. But then, they were executed as well. Murdered murderers.

Perhaps it was as Clara had suggested, just another excuse to do what was reprehensible and call it a moral victory.

Perhaps she was lying.

As usual, he could never be sure.

# Cemetery

A thoughtful cow nudged his shin, her nose leaving thick smears of mucous on his trousers. He had finally changed out of the priest robes and into a suit jacket and matching pants, with a heavily starched white shirt itching the human skin beneath it. Clara, in her pushy wisdom, had thought of everything, including this current get-up. The means by which she'd obtained the get-up were better left unsaid, save for the fact that bloodstains didn't show on black material. The suit wasn't tailored to him well: the arms were slightly too long, and the hem of the pants uneven. A blind seamstress had put him together in this new form, he thought. Zigzag stitches and lines that refused to run perfectly parallel along the seams matched his own imperfect fit.

Clara leaned against the shovel he had used to dig the shallow grave, her pearls scraping along the wooden handle, the silk rustle of her dress trailing in cow muck. With her city party clothes she looked as out of place here as he felt, a lone statue of happy modernity against the oppressive, suffering hard work that surrounded them. "I'm already tired of the country," she complained. She rested her chin on the handle of the shovel, her red lips pouting. "I need to go to a party. Take me to one."

"I doubt there are any here," he said, snatching the shovel from her. He nodded to the decrepit farm in the distance, its roof full of holes, the house the farmer and his family lived in not faring much better. "The people here don't have much money, from what I can see. Is everyone outside of your city this poor?"

"Chicago was never my city," she said. She folded her arms across her chest, her willowy form a thin profile against the stark, dry stalks of corn that stretched out in a separate field behind her. "I'm not an in-the-middle kind of girl. I like New York or Los Angeles. One coast to another." She opened her cigarette case, but the rustle of a torn curtain in the farmer's house stopped her. She discreetly tucked the opal case into her handbag, her bottom lip bitten in frustration.

"Nosey Parker," she muttered.

"We are burying a man on their property," he reminded her.

"They got twenty bucks for the privilege. That's no small change; they'll be living large on that for quite a while around here." She pointed to the house, with half its rickety windows boarded up with thin pieces of flat, worn wood. "Like you said, these aren't city folks. They're just scraping by. These people are so poor they can't afford a proper toilet. Something so basic as that and it's beyond their means. Weird, isn't it, when you think about it. Here they are, living free in the wide wilderness, feeding a nation, you'd think it would give them an edge. But only city folk are rich. This family can't afford to give us a cup of coffee, let alone a free meal."

He bristled. "We're hiding a body on their property. I imagine they feel they have given us hospitality enough."

She braced her back, her graceful neck stretched long towards the setting sun behind them as she yawned. "I don't know. I'm hungry, myself."

He evened out the earth he had turned with the shovel and surveyed the hole he had dug. It should fit the corpse laying in wait in the trunk. Flies buzzed thick along the hood of the car, their fat sated bodies longing to procreate. The human body disintegrated quickly beneath the soil, Clara had assured him. Frankie would be nothing but bones within a week, and less than that within a year once the wild animals started digging bits and pieces of him up. Rib bones for coyotes. The cows walking over his soft grave would pulverize his bones into clay shards. She knew about these things, had experience.

"I thought you wanted to take him to the caverns," he said.

She held her arms outstretched, her silk dress capturing the twilight breeze. "I changed my mind."

He glanced back at the rickety house. A torn curtain fluttered again, and was still. "These people are witnesses."

"They saw nothing."

"They have eyes...."

"I told you. They saw nothing."

But there was doubt in her expression, and a shiver of fear coursed through him at the thought of what could happen should the weight of her switchblade find her palm. He should never have said anything.

He kept the shovel tight in his grip, its end dripping a foul mixture of cow manure and mud. He headed for the back of the motor car, where the trunk was already partially open. Flies, thick as a black blanket, feasted in a frenzied infestation. He swung an arm through them and they collected in clumps around his head, biting into his scalp, believing him to be more of their vile buffet. He pulled the trunk open and released a new, thick cloud of bluebottles, their thirsty, fat bodies blindly bumping into the corners of his mouth and eyes.

"I'm not sure how I'm going to get him out in one piece," he admitted. He poked at the body experimentally with the tip of the spade. A gash suddenly opened up in the former Frankie-Who-Wasn't-Frankie's side, vile black ooze seeping out of it. "He's pretty much liquid."

She swore and placed her hands on her hips as she stormed over to the car, shoes miraculously avoiding every cowpat and puddle. "You should have been more careful. If you'd wrapped him up in a rug, like I told you at the time, there wouldn't be this problem. We'll never get the stink of him out now," she complained. She gestured to the spade. "Look, there's no use waiting for a solution when you've got one in your hand already. Just shovel what you can of him out. We'll have to use lye on the rest. They got an outhouse about a quarter mile up there, past the house. That tells me they have plenty of lye to go around."

Reluctantly, he sank the spade into the thick goo that was once a human being, sheets of skin sliding off as he brought the pools of body out. He tossed the remains into the grave where they landed with a wet plop.

He felt sick doing this, not out of moral reprehension — that had long since been silenced in Clara's company — but because of the eerie similarity to his own physical body. Within his host's frame he slid behind broken ribs and injured kidneys, his own liquid form keeping the battered human body solid. As he shovelled into the squelching bits of the man she had called Frankie, he could feel a sympathetic jutting in his own protoplasmic ooze.

The skin on his upper arm rippled as he inwardly shivered.

He tossed the shovel at her feet and she stepped back, avoiding its rancid splash. "I can't do this, it's too revolting. The body I'm using is retching, and if it keeps it up, I'm going to end up spilling out of its nose."

She scoffed, hands still on her hips. "You can't believe that I'm going to dig in and pop him in that hole like he's pig slop? This dress is imported China silk!"

"Murder is often a messy business," he reminded her. He leaned against the open trunk of the car, where the millions of flies had returned to feast. "You told me so yourself."

Cursing, she kicked the spade back at him and then turned her back, to storm off in the direction of the outhouse. "Finish what you can, damn you, I'm getting the lye!"

"I needn't do a thing," he shouted. "He's sliding out of the trunk and onto the back wheels."

He poked the spade back in the trunk, and drew up a collection of fabric and bones. He rested the shovel onto the stinking remains and stepped away from the motor car, turning his back on the whole affair. She was already a swinging speck of grey silk on the horizon. The torn curtains flitted from one side to the other, the occupants never visible though the movement of the curtains betrayed them. They were an elderly couple, Clara had told him. They made a passable living on the side using victims of Clara and perhaps Georgio's enterprises as fertilizer. The murdered put food on their table.

He contemplated the gooey remains in the hole. Who was this man? The victim had no real name, for he'd already learned that it was he himself who was Frankie, not the other label she had given his host. He was Frankie. This organic mess in the shallow puddle at his feet was, according to Clara, also Frankie. Two people divided into separate entities.

He'd heard of such things: humans called them twins, and surely this was the clearest implication, that this slimy mess was another extension of his host's self. Clara had never said otherwise, and little else made sense.. He was familiar enough with the phenomenon.

He thought of his true form as he looked at the gooey mess in the trunk, realizing their physical appearance was now one and the same. But this was no twin. He had never shared this Frankie's experiences, and he couldn't tap into that portion of his mind that held the measure of his memories. His host, who was probably this man's brother, had been shot in the back of the head, the bullet lodged deep somewhere in the centre, the hole it created still open but hidden neatly with a few tufts of hair. He reached behind his head, testing the tell-tale depression with his fingertips. It caused a strange ache in his gut, not quite unpleasant but not quite nice, either.

Perhaps he was complicating the issue, and there was no conspiracy of human twins, their cellular splitting a ruse meant to shove him off the true path. Clara could not be trusted. The reality of what had happened was far more simplistic and linear, a straight line of one lie leading into another. This unknown man was yet another anonymous fellow countryman who had the misfortune to cross Clara's path. He'd paid the usual, fatal price.

He'd known her for what was in their time a short period of two weeks, and in that time span alone he knew of half a dozen such corpses left in various basements and hideaways in Chicago, slowing rotting away in back alleys and under the floorboards of several underground speakeasies.

No, this former person in the trunk had not splintered from his present host as he had first suspected, he was now sure of it. Whoever the man had been, he'd had information for Clara about her own targets in Hollywood, an annoying segue that she refused to let go. He'd never seen one of these moving pictures she kept harping on about, and had no real wish to. To see a lifetime reflected in shadows and light held no grip on his consciousness. Where he was from, the past, the present and the future constantly melded into each other, in patterns complex and strange. To see a performance that started from one linear point and ended at another, with entire decades skipped over, seemed a childish omission. He would never be able to make sense of it.

He waved away another wall of hungry bluebottles, the shovel still stuck inside the liquefied torso of their victim.

Take that Valentino actor Clara kept harping about, he thought. She'd never met him, and yet her mind created a reality where they would meet, they would have a future and it culminated into the crescendo of a kiss and a burning, exploding blast of light that took them both into eternity. She took no account of this trip, of the twist of her switchblade into random people, or of the very fact she and this Valentino had never met. In her heart, the future had already happened, but unlike his own world, it was unlikely it ever would. The stories they told in his universe were epics comprised of actual events, not guesses, not this foolish thing called hope.

Hope. Every day he longed for her to give him something he could actually use, where he could hunt his target down and destroy the chaos that had ruined his once understandable life. He was infected with human hope. He pressed his palm against the back of his host's head, the bullet hole sucking slightly underneath the pad of his thumb. How wonderful, to slip away from here, to go back home where the future had already happened and the past could be rewoven.

He glanced at the primordial ooze dripping out of the trunk of the car and onto the wheels, a foul-smelling human sludge he would never be able to fully eradicate from his senses. The sun was setting over the half mile stretch of dried crops. Aggressive black crows pecked at the earth, their pointed beaks searching for hidden scraps of meat.

Clara was taking an awfully long time. Surely it wasn't so difficult to locate the lye, especially when she was certain of where the owners of the farm kept it.

He focused his gaze onto the outhouse, searching for her willowy form against the darkening horizon. No fluttering hems of silk met his sight, and he frowned, wondering where she had gone. For all her flighty tendencies, Clara was a determined spirit, and she would never leave a job half-finished. He looked on the melted human in the trunk of the motor car, an uneasy sense of foreboding burning in his gut.

The curtains at the farmhouse window remained still.

Surely he was wrong: she wouldn't take such an insane risk, not when these people worked for others with far more deadly connections than Clara's own. After all, hadn't she bragged to him as they'd driven through the city of Joplin how easy it was to get a person to keep their mouth shut these days? A well placed greenback settled any score and any moral quandary. These people had to eat, and other bad people had to die. Seemed a fair arrangement to her and to this farmhouse family. A ready-made graveyard set for corn husk markers, and the occasional bovine mourner.

Darkness began creeping onto the farm, the dusk morphing into an inky black that was difficult to navigate. He trudged towards the dilapidated house, his guts screaming at him to reassess this situation, to take a step back and remember who he was expecting to act responsibly. She was quick and temperamental, prone to unexpected actions. He had to keep in mind that the navigation to his target in California had to rely on his constant, vigilant monitoring of her behaviour.

Cow patties squelched beneath his shoes, and he shook off the larger clumps as he slowly made his way to the house, his gait as lumbering and slow as the undead. By the time he reached the front porch, he lay exhausted inside of his host, clinging to the left of the broken ribs, his own slimy essence parched from the effort. He hoped these people had a pitcher of cold water somewhere within, for it was still a hot evening, with only the occasional breeze offering any relief. He blindly searched for the rickety steps that led up to the broken porch, its floor full of holes and splintered chunks of wood. A derelict swing lay motionless on its hinges, the chains fixing it to the roof of the porch nearly rusted through. If he dared to take a seat, the entire swing would collapse into dust, and he would fall with it, right through the rotted plank flooring and onto the cold, miserable muck beneath it.

The door didn't look much better. Dozens of coats of paint, each a different colour, lay peeling and thickly layered on the wood. When he knocked, flakes of blue and pale green rained onto his hand. The paint alone was what held the fibres of the wood together. He got no answer, and though it was considered rude, he turned the handle, surprised by its give. They'd left their door unlocked. Unheard of.

"Clara?" he called into the gloom as the creaky door shut behind him. "Did you find the lye?" He stepped further into the cluttered foyer, disturbed by the eerie silence. "We're wasting time here. I thought you wanted to be back on the road by nightfall. We're behind schedule and we've hardly started." He felt his way forward, the cameo outlines of family portraits bearing down on him from the cracked walls, wallpaper weeping away from its seams to curl in ugly yellow clumps away from the ceiling. This elderly couple, as Clara had described, needed a good handyman to help them out. He supposed that was impossible, considering how they earned their keep.

"Clara?" he called again into the grey gloom.

He bumped into a chair leading into the hallway, and cursed over how it had nearly made him trip. He shook his essence evenly across the injured knee as he walked down the damp hallway, dour pictures of ancestors bearing down him, their murky shadows making him nervous. He wasn't quite sure how to describe it but the house felt wrong. There was something important missing here, and it wasn't just the need of someone to come in once in a while and do necessary repairs. There was a profound feeling in the house of a sad absence. Like an abandoned storage room, full of broken junk and torn boxes and not a sign of human life.

The hallway led directly into the kitchen. That was where he found her, the lamp in the kitchen brightly lit, the sink filling up with running water. Behind her, at the breakfast table, were the elderly man and woman, their heavily decomposed bodies suggesting they had been paused over their breakfast for quite some time. As they were nearly skeletons, he guessed years.

On the table before them sat mutual cups of coffee, now dried to a thick paste of black and two plates cleared of all but a few streaks of fossilized catsup. The newspaper was folded neatly on the table beside the slumped skeletal form of the farmer, his lower mandible sitting in his lap. He checked the date. 1924.

"They've been having breakfast for ages," she shrugged.

Two years to be exact, he wanted to say.

She poured herself a glass of water and smiled over its refreshing relief. She stared out the kitchen window above the sink, her dark eyes soaking in the blackened horizon.

"They didn't need to die," he said. "You paid them."

She openly scoffed and tossed her glass into the sink. "Get a grip. No one keeps their mouth shut better than the dead."

# Grabby

According to humans, yesterday happened only once. It was a fixed place in time and space that was pushed out of existence the second the present showed up. The future outright denies it ever happened, and lives in shades of sparkling, happy pink, like the flesh of a newborn.

Humans were wrong in this assumption, he knew, especially with evidence of yesterday laying in a soupy puddle in the trunk of the car and in the earth, and these two desiccated souls slumped at their breakfast table. Yesterday creeps into the present in a slow decay, poisoning the minutes and hours with deliberate enmity. It pushes its blood-soaked hands through the rosy hue of tomorrow and smears it with clotted chunks of reality. Yesterday is bitter and cruel, and it will not deny its own influence.

Clara felt no guilt over having lied to him again, and this time over such a trivial notion. That these people were long dead wasn't of any concern to him, after all he hadn't committed the deed. But the strange secrecy she held concerning them nagged at his consciousness. He scratched the small indentation at the back of his head and gave Clara a quizzical frown.

She rolled her eyes and pulled a cigarette out of her jewelled handbag, then tossed her purse onto the dusty kitchen counter. She placed the cigarette between her thickly painted lips and fished out a matchstick, which she struck against a burner on the stove, bringing it and her cigarette to flaming life. "I thought I saw someone moving around in here, and I knew that couldn't be true. So, I had to come in, and yes, I found and dealt with a little problem."

He didn't like the businesslike tone she took in these situations, especially when it meant there was yet another corpse he would have to lug around to whatever location she deemed necessary. He glanced at the two silent occupants in the tiny kitchen. A spiral of ants circled their empty plates.

"I don't see much movement here," he said.

"It's not like I'm some monster or something," she sneered, and he had to wonder why she would say such a thing when the thought hadn't crossed his mind. "It's a logistics problem, see. This is a great place to hide my little problems when they crop up. Those two old cronies kept poking their big noses in my business and I couldn't have that. They kept upping the price, saying they were going to call the coppers and all kinds of other crazy rot. I couldn't let them get away with that, you understand me."

"I'm not sure I do," he admitted. "You said you paid them."

"You really are dim." She sucked back on her cigarette, plumes of smoke snaking above her head in a Medusa halo. "Are your ears plugged up with potatoes or something? I told you, I saw someone moving around in here, and I knew darn well it wasn't going to be those two." She pointed her cigarette towards the two corpses, the ashes from its tip drifting onto the plank floor. "No witnesses. That's the way I like it."

He sighed, unhappy with this new burden. "So now we have four corpses instead of one."

"Don't be stupid." She tossed the remainder of her cigarette into the open flame of the stove's gas burner. With one graceful reach she pulled the worn curtains at the window over the open flame. The dry cotton instantly went alight, its weak red checker board pattern smouldering into ashen fireflies. Some gathered against the far wall, searing the dried, peeled yellow wallpaper. "It won't take long to get rid of this place. Shame, though. It was a good, quiet spot to come to once in a while."

As the kitchen quickly caught alight, the fire from the curtains tearing across the walls and searing the cupboards, she motioned for him to follow her onto the back pantry. "I've never met this one before. He's probably some hobo, looking for shelter and not one too fussy about the company he has to keep. Imagine, sleeping on a floor when there's a perfectly good bed upstairs. They have a nice bedroom here, real nice four poster bed, too. Comfy pillows, starched white linen, she kept the place real clean, I'll give the snoopy old Gran that one. Of course, everyone out in these parts is like that, all work, work, work for nothing but a scrap of potato out of the earth."

The heat from the kitchen began spreading into the foyer. Behind them, in the now deafening roar of the fire, glass containers shattered and licks of flame roared across the wooden floors, curling up the dried twigs of bone and claiming them for charcoal. Smoke gathered in thick billows that crawled across the roof of the pantry.

"He was just some bum, like I said. But he had the mouth of a sailor, so I'm guessing he's some leftover from the war." She brought him into the pantry, where her latest victim had met his fate. "Look at that patch on his shoulder, there. Looks like an old bullet wound to me. Probably some foreigner, coming here to America to make a fortune. Poor bastard. He should have gone to a big city. That's where all the money is."

"Perhaps that's where he was heading."

She bit her bottom lip, contemplating this newest corn field acquisition at her feet. "He went down quiet, I'll give him that. If you ask me, stayed in this house to gather up the courage to off himself. Why else would he have no trouble with those two back in the kitchen? It's not like they were lively company."

He could feel the heat from the burning house scorching the back of his neck. He stepped further into the pantry, nearly tripping over the dead hobo in his path. Clara squatted beside her victim, the glint of her switchblade catching the reflection of flames in the background. With diligent purpose she made her usual mark on his eyelids. Beneath the brow, and over the eyes. One 'x'. A swipe of her blade across the other eye. One 'o'.

"Did the farmers have these as well?" He was curious of this need of hers to mark her murderous territory. He hadn't checked the corpses in the kitchen thoroughly enough to see. There would have been notches on the bone around the eyes. Slices which connected would make an identical pattern to the one she just created.

"He'll flare up with the house," she said, not answering him. She wiped her bloodied switchblade on the lapel of the hobo's frayed coat and folded it shut. With pale hands illuminated by red fire, she carefully put it back into her small purse.

It was like a surgical instrument to her, he thought. A tool she had become an expert at wielding.

"You forgot the lye." He stepped out of the pantry and into the cool night air, a vast contrast to the burning inferno now consuming the entirety of the ramshackle farmhouse. She followed close behind, a new cigarette already dangling from her bottom lip. "He's still in the trunk of the car. The stink of your friend is unbearable."

"Never mind him," she said. She marched ahead, the silken, uneven hem of her dress trailing over the field's muck. She cursed as she pulled her skirt higher, revealing a scandalous view of her knees. "That car was great for a lark, but it's damned impractical. It's not like we can drive it in the rain, what with the top down all the time. A car for fair weather, just like him. Nah, don't worry about it, I got something better in the works, just follow along with little me. I know there's a good set of wheels just on the other side of that barn. That one, there, up on the right. A good sturdy Chevrolet, perfect for long journeys and quick getaways. Just what we need."

Behind them, the house exploded into a brilliant fireball of flames, illuminating their path. It seemed odd that she was so familiar with this place, her steps in tune with every rock and twisted piece of metal that cropped up before them, her tiny, dancing feet neatly stepping over all obstacles. "You've been here often," he said.

"I'd say." She held out her arms, and spun around, the silver silk of her dress following her in wisps. She was like a tendril of smoke that had escaped from the fiery chaos behind them. "You could say I grew up here."

He glanced back at the house. A crackling snap echoed across the farm and the blackened beams of the roof collapsed inward, leaving only the shell of the house behind. "You knew those people."

"Pops and Gran. But you've probably guessed that already."

"No." He frowned, trying to piece together what she was saying to him. "They were your family, but you didn't live with them?"

"Generations move out and start their own lives," she said, shrugging. She cast him a curious glance. "Isn't that how it is with your people? Don't you have a family that you sprang from? Oh I forgot, you were just a weed." She giggled into her palm, dark eyes full of malicious mirth. "Someone threw seeds on the ground, and now here you are. A dandelion mess, that's you."

"That's not how it happens." He followed her into the barn, the light from the burning house behind them significantly dimmed. "We'll have to burn that motor car we came in. We can't leave any evidence."

She journeyed further into the barn, heading for a large, grey mass of tarp. "I hadn't thought of that, but it's a good plan. Coppers might think it's weird that there's lye in the trunk of an abandoned car, so it's a good thing I didn't find any. After this we should head into Baxter and gas this baby up, and while we're there we might as well look and see if there's anyone having a party we can go to. " She jostled her hips and swung her pearls, her hands in front of her in a mock Charleston stomp. "I ought to have to waited before we hit the road, we could have had a proper smash up before we swung onto Route 66. I could have got Sousa to get more details, make her use her cards, too, because they're more accurate...." The pearls she swung hung back at her hips, save for one row, which she brought to her teeth to lightly tap an incisor. "'Course, you don't get it when I talk about learning the future. For you, every damned thing is about the present."

"Now it is."

"That's not true. I've seen you when you're crawled in a can of motor oil, slicking up that body's insides. Your eyes get all misty and your face gets strange. It flickers back and forth, like it's moving really fast through something, through a camera lens, all stop, move, stop. It's like you're slightly out of sync with the world. All shadows with some of the frames of your film missing."

She grabbed the corner of the tarp and gave it a gentle tug. It slid off of the motor car with ease, landing in folds of grey at its side. It was an impressive vehicle, one of sturdy black steel and glass, the passenger and driver's seat covered in a case of steel and windows. Clara leaned against the hood of the car, her face reflected back in the shining dark green finish.

"It's a Chevrolet Coach," she informed him. "I'm going to do the driving in this one for a while. I couldn't believe it when I saw it, Gran and Pops wasting money on a car like this, not when they had that old wagon out back and it still did them just fine. Refused to let me take this one out, told me it was 'unladylike'. They were so old-fashioned. Some people can't stand the rush of progress."

She kicked the tarp out of the way and opened the driver's door. The engine clattered and hummed when she turned the ignition. She turned on the headlights, bathing him in their glow. "You just going to stand there?" she asked, her red mouth smiling. "If you don't move, I'll run you down."

"I thought they were paid." He stood rigid in front of the glaring headlights, his concern put into the spotlight. "You told me you paid them so they would look away."

"You said that already, or are you getting forgetful with all that motor oil swilling up your brains. You think this sort of business isn't common?" She rolled her eyes as she opened the passenger seat door and beckoned for him to join her. "Just because they were my Gran and Pops doesn't mean they were nice people. If anything, you should understand that they have to be the opposite. I didn't spring from some flower garden like you did, I had my mother's well-used womb."

He reluctantly moved out of the brightness of the headlights and made his way to the passenger side, his eyes riveted on Clara as she spoke. There was a new darkness welling within her at this confession, one that had little glee attached to her crimes. "I know my Daddy went on to you about how he and Mummy were 'God fearing' people. It's all rot. Truth is, Mummy abandoned Gran and Pops the first chance she got, and it was through getting pregnant with me. Daddy had to marry her, see. That's what's done, people make mistakes and they have to live with them for the rest of their lives."

She pressed the gas with a delicate, bare foot and gently eased the new motor car out of the barn, the wheels squelching dangerously, threatening to stick in the soft mud. "Gran and Pops took me in over the summer months. I guess that was nice for them. But Gran liked her drink and Pops, he had grabby hands. It was no picnic for me here, I'll tell you that."

He studied her intently, her bottom lip bit deep as the car lurched over cow patties and the mounds of unknown numbers of former associates. "What do you mean by grabby hands?"

She was silent a long moment, her focus intent on the car they had abandoned, its headlights still on, its trunk still open, exposing the organic mess within. "It was weird, the way things happened. It didn't stop until I turned twelve and started changing, like girls and boys do at that age. He lost interest, just like that. No more of his... I mean, when you think about it, why would it be then, at that point in my life, that it would stop? You'd think it should be the opposite, a young girl becoming a woman and all that rot, that's when a man's supposed to find her interesting." She eyed him sideways, her hands tight on the steering wheel. "I left my riding hat in that car. I ought to get out and pick it up."

She left the motor purring as she got out of the coach, the uncovered car in front of her a stylish mess of muck, rendered human remains and foul deeds committed in its back seat. Her steps were careful as she leaned over its edge and picked her riding cap out from where it had fallen underneath the steering wheel. The skirt of her dress was hiked up well above the backs of her knees, revealing the wide black band of her stockings and the garters holding them up. She straightened, the riding cap held in a bunched knot in her grip. "We have to set this on fire," she shouted to him. "There's a can of gas in the trunk of the coach."

"But we might need it for fuel on the road." A full tank didn't last very long, he knew, and even though gas was plentiful it wasn't always easy to find a filling station when one was out in the country. He'd checked the map, there were many miles between Kansas and California, and there was little hope that they would make it on only a couple of gallons.

"Baxter Springs is full of gas stations. We'll fill the coach up and get two more gallons besides. You worry too much. Besides, we can pick up your precious motor oil while we're there, too. Maybe even get word from a local if there's any action going on in town, because there always is, you just have to find it. You do that by asking the right questions and getting the right answers. I'm an expert at that, no question there."

She gave him a wide grin, her teeth the colour of her pearls. "I want to be the one to light it up. You spread the gas over it, and make sure it's good and even, we don't want any coppers coming along thinking this was some amateur crook. Burned out car and burned out house–they'll figure it was a robbery gone bad. One mobster bastard killing another here at the car and setting it alight, and then the farmers in the house witness it. He kills them and sets the house on fire, trying to hide his crime, but instead he gets stuck in the house, he's overcome by smoke and passes out. The idiot burns up with it. Death by misadventure, that's what they'll call it. They're busy enough in Chicago, they won't care if it looks like two goodfellas offed each other."

He wasn't sure if this would be an adequate explanation, but this detail didn't seem to matter. It was unlikely the authorities would care to know anything about the inhabitants, or even if they would investigate the wreckage. Her Gran and Pops had been dead for two years and not a soul seemed to mind their strange, upright grave, not even the hobo who had wandered into their morbid midst. A gutted car and a destroyed house had little to do with the outside world. As always, terrible things continued to happen here in secret.

He drenched the car in gasoline and then went back to the coach before she tossed a lit matchstick onto it. It burst in a furious explosion of gas and oil, only to simmer into a thick, smouldering cloud of black ash and white hot flames. They sat in the coach for a few minutes, watching the white leather seats turn black. Without a word, she pressed the gas with her tiny, bare foot and turned the steering wheel, bringing the coach back onto the open road. They had places to go and there was no point looking back over his shoulder to see how visible the fiery carnage still was.

But he couldn't help himself, and he cast a glance in the side mirror, seeking out the evidence of what they had done in its small reflective circle. A tiny fleck of orange was all he could see. Clara had obliterated her past, leaving only the future to guide them.

# Roadblock

"As usual, you're making a big deal out of nothing. Just drink your motor oil and keep your trap shut for a while, you're giving me a headache."

He stewed in the passenger seat, his head swimming with black thoughts that slipped and eddied their way through his host's rib cage and down into the well of his gurgling stomach. He'd gone through half a can and he wasn't about to let up. It was the only thing that silenced her prattle about her impending Hollywood life and the rich tapestry of glamour that awaited her at the Hollywood Hotel. He had no clue what these accomplishments represented, their promise a hollow, incomplete notion of pride that refused to touch reality. He twisted uncomfortably in his seat, resting his head at an odd angle against the passenger window.

"Stop fidgeting." She scowled over her cigarette case, her hands off the steering wheel as she rummaged through her tiny handbag, searching for her box of matches. "It must have fallen under the seat," she muttered. She tore a cigarette out of the case and shoved it roughly into her mouth. The Chevrolet Coach steered itself into the opposing lane, and a Ford hit its horn, the wheels screeching as it braced for impact. She grabbed the steering wheel with an audible curse and swung the coach back into its appropriate lane. Vicious swearing hailed over them as the Ford sped off in the opposite direction.

"Jackass," she said. Her cigarette dangled against her bottom lip. "Look, we don't need to have a head-on collision with a passing truck next time, so just reach under the seat and find my matches. Red case, big fat crow in the centre."

"Something's wrong," he said. He braced himself against the passenger door, his borrowed stomach making horrible squelching noises. A sense of panic overtook him as the feeling bubbled up into a painful stab from a broken rib that cut into his own essence. "I'm not well. I'm not well! Pull the car over!"

"Just roll down the window."

"No, damn you, I need to get out, I need to stretch, I need—" He gulped a resurgence back, the oil slick as it seeped out of the sides of his mouth.

"Damn you," she said through gritted teeth. She turned the steering wheel hard, nearly toppling the car over as she pulled onto the side of the road. She turned off the ignition and gave him a solid glare. "Maybe you should just get out of this car and forget about California! It's not like you care about my dreams!"

He opened the door and, with relieved release, spewed the overabundance of motor oil that had pooled in his system. The black goop was an oily mirror beneath him, and he stared into it for a long time, his body hanging half in, half out of the coach, his stomach seriously reconsidering whether or not it wanted to stay in this toxic cesspit in human form. He looked like a corpse, which in fact he was. The face was a worn grey hue, the ugly scrapes under his chin now black welts that refused to heal. Oil trickled out the side of his mouth and slid down into the puddle, a mixture of saliva and stomach acids tainting it. He swallowed it back, and wiped the oil from his mouth with the back of his hand before sinking back into the passenger seat.

He rested his head against the window, the cool surface a welcoming balm. He closed his eyes.

"I'm sorry."

Clara seethed in the seat beside him, her hands white-knuckled on the steering wheel. "You are disgusting. Absolutely disgusting. Puking by the road like that, like some dirty bar-hopping freak. I didn't buy you that can of oil, you took it from the farmhouse, didn't you? You took it out of the barn when I got this car, you sneaked it away under that ugly suit jacket of yours... What else did you take?"

"It was in the back seat," he said, and brandished the now empty can of motor oil with childish glee. "No thieving involved."

"You did thieve it," she admonished. "You stole it, right out from under me."

He sighed and slumped further in his seat, trying his best to enjoy the continued effects of the motor oil on his wounded, forced-to-be-linear soul. "You stole a whole farm to hide your murdered bodies in. So what if I have a sip too many of your black ooze, it's not like I'm working hard to grow it illegally, like you are."

Clara raised her hand to slap him, but he stopped her with a quick grab of her wrist. She glared at him with her dark, malicious eyes and pulled her arm away, the pale skin pinched red by his grip.

"I told you the reason for that. I couldn't leave loose ends." Her unlit cigarette dangled dangerously close to the edge of her mouth, and she rescued it with a quick pucker that left red stains over its end. She grabbed the case of matches she must have found underneath his seat, and with shaking hands shook one of them out, slashing it across the flint surface on the side. The flame sputtered to life and she contemplated it for a moment before lighting the end of her cigarette, the flame expertly sucked in. She shook its remains loose, and tossed the spent matchstick into the dusty ditch beside them.

"It's different for me," he tried to explain, but she turned away, leaning out the car window, smoke billowing onto the road she was in a hurry to get back to. "You have to understand, I don't have the same freedom you do. I have a reason for my efforts, and when someone is to be killed it's due to the strict guidelines I have to follow."

"Ordained killer, huh?" She took another drag of her cigarette, her eyes still flashing with the fire she had left behind the night before. "I got guidelines too. My own. I make them up as I go along, but there's rules I make myself follow. Like killing bastards who wrong me, that's one. I'm not into slicing up innocent people, I got good reasons for taking out the people I do. You think you're so much better than me." She flicked her ashes out the window, her lips tight as she spoke. "You know nothing."

"I know that hobo did nothing to wrong you." He pulled a kerchief out of his pocket and dabbed at the dots of oil that had spilled onto his starched white shirt. They smeared across his chest, ruining the material. "The facts speak louder than your muttered excuses, Clara. You kill whoever is in your way, not because they are 'bad' or representative of some societal wrong. They are merely barriers you encountered in your own life, and you selfishly remove them, thinking they won't be needed."

She let out a hissing stream of smoke at this, her cigarette spent. "They never are."

"I wonder." He tested the strange gashes beneath his chin with his fingertips, with a vague understanding that he would need to fix this, and soon. "All along this road there have been signs pointing us in the right direction towards my target and your delirious Hollywood fantasy. There are 'road closed' signs and signs signalling gas stations up ahead. What should happen, I wonder, if I decided to remove all of them because they were in my way as I was driving down this road. Why shouldn't I go past that 'Do Not Enter' barricade and splinter it apart?"

He cast a weary look at her over his shoulder. "Because that barrier stopped me from driving over a cliff. Or are you so fond of such steep precipices?"

She finished her cigarette and tossed the small remainder out the window. It rolled, a tiny ember quickly dying out. "I'm not sloppy, if that's what you think. I plan these things, even though they look like I'm being rash."

"It's not about being sloppy."

"Says you." She tapped her well-manicured nails on the steering wheel, fingers itching to dig out her switchblade and teach him exactly what she meant. He leaned back in his seat, wondering if he even wanted to bother fighting her.

"I got plenty of men out there, and they like paying attention to me. I don't need to keep you around, you know. I should dump you off on the side of the highway, in some dark place, and be done with you once and for all. Ungrateful bastard, that's what you are. You should be thankful I at least understand you."

"You understand nothing."

"Ungrateful bastard!"

She was shouting now, her fury at the fore. Her face turned a vicious purple colour as she screamed at him, every vein in her neck pulsing with angry life. "You think I don't know what I'm doing?" she screeched, her voice a high pitched crescendo that rocked the inside of the coach.

He shrank away, wondering if he had time enough to open the door and escape before the glint of her switchblade knife came out of whatever hiding place she kept it. He touched his fingers to his throat, hoping when she did finally slash him that the destruction of his host would be quick enough for his essence to flee it.

"I take care of my business, and I get plenty, sure, but I take care of it! All on my own! Do you think it's easy, hanging with that crowd? Do you think they wouldn't think twice of getting rid of some mushy moll if she got too cocky? You got to be tough in this world, it's all kill or be killed, I've told you that before. This is how this world works, you moron!" She turned on the ignition, the engine rattling into strong, purposeful life. Fists of steel pounded each other, forcing pressure. She closed her eyes as she listened to the sound of the coach's heart, her feverish breath evening out into a regular pattern.

"You can't be judging me the way you do," she said, and her voice was sad now, instead of angry. "I'm like you more than you know. Sure, I had parents, I had a family, but they were rotten at the core. They turned me into what I am. I don't need to hang around with you, and you don't have to hang around me. We can go our separate ways, if it's come to that."

She looked over at him, and there were tears in her eyes, a glassy sheen that cut into his gut more than her switchblade ever could. "But we're friends, see. And friends don't abandon each other like that. They lift each other up when no one else will. They cheer on your dreams." Her eyes narrowed slightly, and through her fragile appearance he could discern the faintest glimmer of her usual, malicious self. "You gonna do that for me, friend? You gonna keep cheering me on?"

He wasn't sure how she wanted him to answer. "I'll cheer you on when it's necessary, Clara."

She smiled, so he must have given her what she wanted. It was becoming increasingly difficult to navigate her odd moods, which—when coupled with her murderous rampages—took on a frenzied, scattered emotional highway that twisted his essence into knots.

"This is all nothing, don't you mind me. We're just in need of a good time. You and me, we have to blow off some steam, have us a party." She frowned as he scratched at the welts under his chin, the black lines deep rivets. "Trouble is, you don't look so good these days. I keep telling you that motor oil is real bad for you."

Clara picked up her pearls and tapped one of the white spheres against her front tooth. It was already stained with lipstick, its hue long since dyed pink. "I'm thinking it might be a good idea for you to get a new model to drive. We've gone through two motor cars already, I'd say you're due for a good trade up."

He wasn't comfortable with how that was going to happen, but he'd noticed the increasing wear on his host's body and there was little he could do to stop it from breaking apart further. Besides, it was a pain to keep himself from bumping into those broken ribs, and the damaged spleen kept leaking.

"I'll trust your judgement as to who." He shifted in his seat, his host's dried skin rough against the suit's fabric. "We could have used that hobo. We shouldn't have burned him."

"No way, he was too old and full of God knows what kind of diseases. Guys like that are rife with the syphilis or worse. You deserve better." She gave him a warm, genuine smile. "We'll get you something really nice. Something that fits that suit proper."

* * *

They drove for two hours, but there were slim pickings among the humans that had gathered here. They were hard looking, starving folk, living day to day under the looming shadow of the ever growing highway, a string of gas stations lined up in hyper competition. One promised free donuts, another free sample cans of Brylcream. Clara picked a random station, and a tow-headed young boy with red hair and freckles bounced up to the car, his gap toothed smile infectious.

"Fine mornin' it is, Ma'am," he said. He nervously wiped his hands on the front of his overalls. "Fill 'er up?"

"By all means," Clara said pleasantly, her smile full of movie star radiance.

The young boy blushed and took a rag out of his side pocket. "We'll wash your windshield and all, too. This car sure is a beauty, you ought to keep 'er shining."

He diligently got to work, bringing the dark green finish into sparkling relief. Clara rolled her eyes and turned her attention on her companion, who twitched as she brought her fingers dancing along the underside of his mutilated chin. His dozing so rudely disturbed, he shifted to the right, his chin tucked tight against his neck. When he spoke, his voice had all the grit of fresh sandpaper. "It's getting worse. I think the throat is damaged now."

"How about that one?" She pointed out the windshield to the young boy wiping down the sides of the motor car, suds staining his overalls.

"He's just a child, I couldn't possibly fit."

"He's not just a child, he's about sixteen. He's a dim little bastard, that's all. I'm not fond of him myself, but he's got healthy skin and he doesn't look like he's about to keel over from being half starved and worked to death like the rest of the people around here. Besides, you don't keep his appearance, you always morph into what you're usually made of after a while." She grabbed her handbag, giving the area around them a good scope. "If I get him behind that gas pump over there, I can make quick work of him. You just come in and take over when the timing is right, like the last time."

"Why can't we find a gathering? Surely people drink in this part of your world, there has to be a basement somewhere." He watched the boy cleaning the windshield, an insanely stupid grin on his face over the joy of hard work for little pay in the sweltering Kansas summer heat. "It was easier in Chicago, there was always someone appropriate. Perhaps there is a minister here, or another priest. I like them, they have roomy bodies and fairly healthy muscles."

"Unlike in Chicago, a priest or a minister would be missed. This kid will be, too. Folks around here aren't as expendable as they are in the big cities." Clara snatched up her jewelled handbag and opened the driver's side door. "Keep the engine running, just in case. Quick getaways are always appreciated."

"We can always wait," he shouted to her, but his voice was a strained whisper that died in his decayed, blackened throat.

She cast him a pleasant smile over her shoulder as she bounded away from the car and towards the boy, who now had his back to her. With a swift, fluid motion that was well practised, she grabbed the hammer he'd rested on the top of the gas pump, and with two good whacks to the back of his neck, she snapped his spine and ruptured an artery at the base of his brain, killing him instantly.

He leaped out of the passenger side, half hunched, his voice coming out in the gurgling, riverside whispers that were his original language. The body he wore finally split down the middle and he fell out of it, the rotted skin sliding off of his true form in patches, blackened by the overuse of motor oil. Clara stared as he slithered towards the newly deceased boy, a thick, glossy sheen to her gaze as though she were drugged. It was embarrassing, being caught in his true form like this, but there was little he could do about that now. He couldn't tell her to turn away, for he had no mouth to articulate his wishes.

He entered through the ear and slid his way in, the fit snug but not as oppressive as his original host's had become. As he stretched inside, the boy's skin and bones elongated, his face morphing into an entirely different shape, one that Clara was by now far more familiar with. Buttons popped on the overalls. Seams split along the backside, revealing red polka dot underwear.

He stood before her, his usual self, now healed of his past discomfort.

She tapped a pearl on her front tooth. "You look weird with that red hair. It doesn't fit your complexion."

He unravelled the torn fibres of the jean overalls. He tested the back of his head with his palm, and was satisfied there wasn't too deep an indentation. Just a small, circular depression that fit the pad of his thumb perfectly.

His old form lay in a disintegrating puddle off the side of the gas pump. His tattered, starched white shirt sizzled beneath it.

"I need a new suit."

# Pearls

"You're only moral when it suits you."

Accurate though it was, he was annoyed by her observation. The new skin was a welcome balm to his tortured form, and he spread out his arms across the passenger seat, his head resting comfortably on a knitted cushion Clara's late Gran had left in the motor car. Outside his open window, the clinging dust of the road sprang up to meet him, bathing his face in a cool, gritty mist. They were finally in Oklahoma, and it was his hope that there would be no more detours on their trip. Clara's eagerness to be in California had finally infected him; he felt a strange longing to be walking the sandy shores of a warm, brilliant blue beach.

"We'll gas up in Luther, and then we'll turn right onto Calmut Road. Off that is Hydro, and we follow the next street along in a straight line all the way through." She tapped her fingers on the steering wheel, humming a tune that went in time with the rattling heartbeat of the Chevrolet's engine. "When we get to Foss, there's someone there I'd like to visit."

His good mood was instantly quashed. She eyed him in her side mirror and turned around, her grin wide enough to eat him. "Don't go fussing already, Mr Almighty. She might be a little town, but I know where there's a party to be had and plenty of quality thirst quenchers. So sit back and relax, because I got my dancing feet on. I bet these little country hicks ain't never seen a proper fox-trot in their lives."

Her good mood didn't convince him. He could feel a growing tension in his new body, a feeling with which he had plenty of experience. He wasn't keen to know how her proposed night of revelry would be accomplished. He didn't need to be Madame Sousa to know that Clara's switchblade would find yet another victim before the sun came up the next morning.

"I'm tired." He wiped his palm over his face, the gritty bits of dirt the road had splashed on him sanding away the remaining freckles. "How long before we get into Foss?"

"This afternoon sometime, I think. I don't know, I don't keep track of it, really. I just drive and eventually I'll get there. Maybe tomorrow. Or the next day. Yeah, that sounds right." She tapped her fingers on the steering wheel, her voice barely audible as she sang, 'Golly, jeepers, where'd you get those weepers...'

The roomy passenger seat was no longer cool, its comfort destroyed by her shaking, bare shoulders and the tap-tapping of her fingernails on the leather steering wheel, her knees bopping to an internal tune. "You've driven this way before," he realized. "Just how far have you gone on this route?"

She continued tapping her fingers on the steering wheel, humming her irritating, out of tune song.

"Clara. Answer me."

"I've done it a few times," she admitted, quickly. She gripped the steering wheel, steeling herself for the inevitable argument. "Okay, okay, I've made the trip five times already, so I know roughly how long it's all going to take and no, I didn't get to Hollywood in the way you might think. I always got held up in Nevada and never managed to get any further than Glenrio, which is a real depressing sort of place. I was always with one of the boys, and they always got stupid just outside of Texola. They'd roll a salesman and get caught by the coppers, and then I'd get sent home with a note of warning to my folks. Don't look at me like that, I didn't lie to you. The whole 'did you make this trip before' conversation never got brought up, did it? So put away the sour puss and relax. We're not stopping in Texola. We're going straight through as best we can to California, that's a pinkie promise, that is."

Promises. She was full of those. He sighed and sank back further into his seat, nearly melting into the discomfort of scorching leather. The wind from the road curled in the air above his head, just out of reach. A rock hit the back passenger door, hard enough to scratch the dark green finish. At least his new suit was comfortable. Clara had been kind enough to go into a charity shop in Quapaw and picked up a proper three piece suit fit for summer travel. Though the jacket was a queer beige colour, it was a much better fit than the old one that had slipped off with his used up skin and bones.

Shame they had to kill the kid, but really, what choice did he have? He couldn't slide around the country looking like this world's most monstrous slug. Besides, it wasn't as if this world wasn't used to people randomly disappearing. Taking a life came easy to humans.

He'd learned this the first day he and Clara had met. He had hit the earth like a splash of water onto a slick stone, his body a pool of unformed sludge that ached to find substance. Without the watery atmosphere he was used to, there was no structure for him to cling to. He rolled and sploshed along the dark alleyway, gaining cuts and scrapes from the broken bottles and debris that lined his path. He wasn't sure where he was supposed to go; all he had were his orders to take out his target and get back home. How he was to accomplish these things he still didn't know. But he would follow them as best he could. That was his job.

He'd picked up the vibrations of an argument, and not knowing what else to do, he'd slid towards the sounds, one distinctively high pitched, the other deeper, menacing. He couldn't determine words quite yet, despite his training, but he could pick out a certain urgency to the exchange that was charged with danger.

Curling his mud-shaped body into waves, he edged ever closer, determined to find a proper host to reside with while he formulated his plan. As he closed in, he felt a single, massive wave of sound shoot through the air and then... Nothing. His non-body poked at the ground around him, seeping fingers that hoped to find solidity.

The human form lay in front of him, and through careful investigation he managed to squeeze his way into the body's mouth, his true form melding and reforming into the prescribed shape his superiors had trained him to use.

He remembered standing up, his host's hand reaching to the back of his neck, fingers testing the fresh hole in the back of the skull with question. There was an audible gasp behind him, and he turned around to see a young woman, the barrel of the gun in her hand still smoking. Her look of shock quickly changed into angered business, and she pointed the weapon at his chest, and pressed her finger lightly on the trigger.

"I'm not what you think." He held his hands over his heart, a vain attempt to protect it from the possibly fatal pierce of a bullet. If he didn't fix this now, if he died before he managed to take one breath on this miserable, dangerous planet, his target would escape and his memory would be wiped, a terrible punishment he would have to live with forever.

Where he came from, forever was a tangible place. It never forgave.

"I'm not who you think. I'm not from here."

The bullet ripped through a kidney, its ricochet breaking ribs which in turn nicked his host's spleen. Having not yet calibrated his sense of balance, he stumbled backwards, arms flailing madly as he didn't quite know what to do with them. His eyes rolled independently of each other as he tried to focus on the creature trying to kill his host for the second time. She wasn't afraid. Her large eyes were full of malice, her hands steady as she pointed her weapon at him and moved the barrel with an audible click.

"You got the same face," she said, cautious.

That didn't seem possible. With his muscles flexed and his gut held in tight, he had twisted his way into the fallen human's gaping mouth, his oily body melding perfectly beneath the tough layer of human skin, the bones slightly rearranged to accommodate him, the body morphed to his desired shape so that he became a new human, one different from its original host.

She seemed uncertain, then, but her hand was still steady with the gun, her cold gaze an icy welcome.

"If you're the devil, I'm your biggest competition." She cocked her head to one side, the gun trained expertly on him at all times. "You must be a devil. Makes sense, they like priests from what I've heard. Don't care much for them myself, but then, why would I? I'm too much like you. Hells, I'm guessing they got a whole betting pool on me in that lake of fire, don't they? So what, are you one of Lucifer's boys, then, sent up here to take me down to the pit? Because if you are, I'll cut you up faster than your boss can find you. You'll be sorry then, left up here in bitty pieces scattered all over and nowhere to go, not even a Hell to call home."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

The gun was raised higher, her finger itching on the trigger. "I don't like these things," she admitted, gesturing to the gun in her hand. "I have a little switchblade, for me that usually gets the job done. Still, I've never had to deal with a devil like this before, so I'm guessing I should have a gun on my side. "

Part of him seeped out of the priest's nose and he sniffed himself back in, his throat swallowing him into the new shape. "I'm here for someone, but it isn't you. "

"What a relief."

"They are targeted for assassination. It is my duty to find this person and destroy them."

"Do you know where they are?"

"No."

"Do you know what they look like?"

"No."

"Do you have a weapon to kill them with?"

He paused, thinking.

"No."

"No weapon? What a lunkhead. What are you going to do, order them to die?" She whistled lowly. "You sure are one heck of a hallucination. You seem pretty solid, and you got this weird, lost look about you like you can't quite get a grip on what kind of moving picture you're in. It's all blobs and shadows, no actors, no scenery, nothing. You got fake sounding lines and they haven't been written down." She bit her bottom lip in thought. "You sure you weren't sent by Hell to kill me?"

"Absolutely not," he insisted. "I was sent here for a very specific target."

"And it's not me."

She frowned, and he copied the action. This seemed to satisfy her, and she lowered the gun, replacing it instead with an open hand in greeting. He took her pale hand in his, the cold touch of her skin leeching out all sense of warmth within him. "Like I said. One heck of a hallucination. Not really so bad, I got worse things swilling about in my mind most nights. Welcome to Earth, stranger."

His tongue felt dry. It was a horrible sensation, a coarse, flaking texture in his host's mouth that he could feel with every swallow.

"You look thirsty," she said. She cocked her head to one side, and slid her gun into her tiny handbag before walking over to him and sliding the crook of her arm into his. She squeezed it too tight, and he winced at the pain. "We're friends now. Got that? Your eyes are still flecked black in spots, but you don't look half bad. You make him look better than he did when he was alive, and he was a looker. A real Valentino, if you get my drift."

Her dark eyes flashed with mischief as she grinned and glanced over her shoulder into the depths of the alleyway. "Come with me, I know a place down the road that's full of music and good times. We'll get you a proper drink there. You're a lucky guy, finding an open-minded girl like me. Most others would just turn tail and scream. Not me. I don't mind teaching the devil a trick or two." She rested her head on his shoulder, an intimacy that made him bristle and try to shake her off. "Oh, now, that's no way to treat a new friend. "

"I'm sorry."

"Well, you know what that means...."

His mouth was so dry. He needed something, anything, to take this awful, painful dryness away. He could feel the tips of his true form dehydrate beneath the ill-fitting skin. He could taste the flakes of his own body, and he gagged on the very thought. "I don't understand," he said, trying to convey his discomfort.

"You're in my debt," she cheerfully informed him. "I did you a favour. Now you owe me."

She pulled him along, deeper into the alley, and he felt sick and dry and disoriented, for surely his superiors were going to give him more instructions, they weren't going to just dump him here and forget about his mission. Surely that wasn't the intention.

"Come on, don't be a lug," she said, giggling on his arm. Her skin smelled like spent yeast, and her dark eyes were bloodshot. "That music, can you hear it? It's Langley's horn, bringing the place alive. We got to get there quick, that music's catchy and I've got an itch in my toes that needs tapping." She hummed along with the music, her head bopping in time to the rhythm. "So, you got to kill someone who isn't me. What the devil for?"

He paused, shifting to a slightly less uncomfortable spot within the human's body. A broken rib pierced his side. "They are going to commit terrible crimes."

She openly laughed. "Seems so silly, don't you think? Going after someone like that on nothing but a maybe. You gotta let them do the crime first, go ahead and get that crime out of the way. Should be easy to find after that. Front page news, and all, go whole hog."

He tried to break free, but her grip was tight on his arm. "You don't understand. The goal is to avoid the crimes altogether."

She laughed again, her mirth cruel as it echoed down the dark alleyway. "Silly devil," she said, her lips pouted in cocky assurance. "What's the fun in that?"

* * *

"Wake up, wake up... shit..."

He felt a nasty shove on his shoulder and blearily looked up to see Clara's panicked face looking down at him as she leaned over the driver's seat. Her bony hand pushed his shoulder again, and he groaned at her persistence.

"You got to sit up and act normal." She tossed him her handbag. "Put that under the seat and hide it real good. Is my lipstick even?"

He checked. The red gash seemed symmetrical enough, so he nodded.

"I don't look like a whore, do I?" She checked her side mirror in a panic, her fingers tousling her short hair. She snatched up a sweater that was underneath the seat beside her, and despite the Hades hot summer heat, she slid it over her bare shoulders and buttoned it up to her neck. "There. Ought to fool them enough, right? They won't be taking me aside for soliciting if I look like I'm a church-going widow looking for a new husband." She checked her lipstick again and decided against the harsh red shade she'd used. "Come on, quick, snatch me up a kerchief, I can't be letting them see me like this, all tarted up like I'm ready for the boardwalk!"

He yawned and slowly reached into his back pocket, pulling out the kerchief which she grabbed out of his outstretched hand. She rubbed at her mouth, smearing the lipstick and tainting her chin and lower cheeks a rosy pink hue. "Can't be out and wearing lipstick in a place like this, they won't think it's right. And you, you just keep your trap shut. You're my brother, got it? My dumb, stupid lunkhead brother who is supposed to be teaching me how to drive, but he's too lazy and too annoying to be of any use."

He sat up in his seat, curious as to why she was nervous. He'd never witnessed this state in her before, not when she was slicing down her latest victim, nor when she was meeting aliens in back alleys. She was on hyper alert, her eyes quickly darting up and down the road and along the sides as though convinced a gathering of mobsters were set to jump out of the bushes, tommy guns at the ready, a torrent of bullets tearing through the side of the car and into their soft, pliant flesh.

"What is it?" he asked.

She kept her hands firm on the wheel, her lips in a tight, pale pink line.

"Coppers," she said. "They've gone and barricaded the road."

A sick feeling welled inside of him. He nudged his way around the inside of the body, ripples of fear cascading across the surface of his arm's skin. "This is bad?"

"Very bad," she said. "If this is about the burning farmhouse...." She didn't finish her thought. A young policeman guided their car to a special parking area on the other side of the road. He looked bored and overheated as he flagged them over. Clara pulled out the ignition, bringing the engine's clattering, rattling heart to a full stop.

"I won't go to jail," she whispered. "They ain't hanging me, not yet, no way, no how." Clara's eyes slid towards him, her fingers pointing to where she'd asked him to hide her handbag. "My switchblade," she whispered.

"Don't be foolish," he said. "You don't even know what this is about."

"It's about that fire. I'm sure of it."

"You can't be."

"You don't know anything about coppers! Give me my switchblade!"

There was a loud rap on her windshield and they both nearly jumped out of their skin. Clara's mouth was a tiny 'o', while her companion sniffed back in the black ooze of his essence that nearly dripped out of his nose. The man staring in at them was large and oppressive, his mouth a wide flap of judgement on his bulldog face. His star-shaped badge glinted in the sunlight, making Clara wince.

"Afternoon, folks," the Sheriff announced. "What's all this about a switchblade?"

# Sheriff

His name was Sheriff Rudolph Borgen, and he was a very busy man. He could tell this from the way the sheriff twitched as he spoke, his shoulders shifting as though he had a million burdens he desperately needed to shake off. The wide brim of his hat hung low over his eyes, which darted over every detail of the Chevrolet, inside and out. He chewed on a piece of black tobacco and spit it out towards the rear of the vehicle, hands on hips, his shoulders hunched as they worked out the kinks in his thick bulldog neck. "You folks from the city? Up north, I figure."

"Chicago," Clara said cheerfully. She batted her eyes and gave him her sweetest smile, all teeth and pink, innocent lips. "We got folks in Texas we're set to visit." Her innocence faltered slightly as she watched him inspecting her switchblade, an inner darkness welling within her at this mishandling of her most sacred object. "You gonna need that much longer? It's my good luck charm, like I said. My brother, Frankie, he gave it to me when I was just little. He said it would help me cut through the bad times, that's what you said, wasn't it Frankie?"

He sat up blearily in his seat, his eyes heavy, his body sleepy. The tiredness was unexpected, and he had to wonder if this new body he'd acquired had some illness he wasn't aware of. "Sure."

"My, my, falling asleep that easy, you can see now why I don't let him at the wheel. Got a real case of the dropsy, my brother does. Don't mind him, he's just a lunkhead." She turned her head and glared out the windshield, hiding her brewing inner darkness. "That switchblade was real special when he gave it to me, at least to a little girl looking up to her big brother. I guess everyone seems real wise when you're only five."

Sheriff Borgen smiled and tipped his hat to her. "Seems we got things in common, Ma'am. Lunkhead brothers have been my speciality." He leaned his elbow on the roof of the Chevrolet, his lips upturned as though he were a dog scouting out a scent. He tapped the edge of the switchblade in a gentle rhythm on the roof. "Not much family resemblance, though. Not one hair of symmetry, no sir."

She continued on with her sweet smiling, though to the trained eye the strain of it was cracking her. "That happens, sometimes."

Sheriff Borgen scratched his arm, lips still upturned in that sniffing pose. "Guess you might be right. I don't have much to compare to, myself, seeing how my brother is a twin and all. Must be a bit of prejudiced thinking on my part, believing family is all offshoots of the same person. Least that's how I figure it. When you look in a mirror all your life, you keep expecting to find similarities where there ain't supposed to be none." He frowned as he glanced into the interior of the car. "I got to say, though, you do look mighty familiar. You must come through these parts often."

"Not really," he began, and Clara shot him a silencing glare. He shrank back beneath it, and did his best to give the Sheriff as warm a smile back as he could muster. "Not this time of year."

"I see." Sheriff Borgen turned his attention back on Clara, who was smouldering in the driver's seat. He twirled the switchblade in his grip, bits of red grit flaking off of it and onto his palm. "Now myself, I like to travel in the spring, when it's not too hot. Summer heat beating down like this, especially in Texas, it's enough to fry a person's soul to a crisp."

Clara batted her eyelashes and demurely unbuttoned and re-buttoned the top of her sweater. "Yes, well, it is difficult at times, but the car gives us a good breeze when we're on the open road. Frankie and I take turns driving, because it is ever such a long way from Chicago, but our Gran, she don't wait on no one." She bit her bottom lip, her eyes flickering to her companion beside her. "I am a bit curious, though. Just why are you stopping motor cars like this? You worried someone's going to have engine trouble?"

Sheriff Borgen chuckled. He straightened up, the switchblade still in his grip as he adjusted the waistband of his beige uniform trousers. "Well, Ma'am, it's like this... There was a terrible fire happened a ways back, and we're checking on folks, seeing if they witnessed anything out of the ordinary on their travels. Was a real blazer, that one, took out a farmhouse and a motor car, too."

"That's terrible!" Clara gasped. She held her hand at her open, shocked mouth. "Don't tell me someone was hurt...."

"None got out alive, which is a shame," Borgen said, sadly. "Three people, all told. A real tragedy."

"Gosh," Clara breathed. She kept her hand at her mouth, as though holding her horror at the very notion in. "Did you hear that, Frankie? Three people. What a terrible, terrible shame."

"'Course, it weren't the fire that did them in," Sheriff Borgen added, stopping Clara's heart cold. He leaned his hip against the side of the Chevrolet, the switchblade swung between his fingers in an endless, circular loop. "There's been this problem that's been happening on that farm as of late. We been suspecting the old folks were in with some of the gangs in Chicago, and we'd been keeping an eye on them now and then, just to check out the rumour mill. Trouble was, couldn't get a proper warrant, not with the judge in this town being so keen on the taste of wine. Not that I'm saying he's a criminal, mind. He says he's dry, preaches it good enough. Though, one might have to wonder what kind of unfermented berry makes his breath smell like it does." He hid his eyes beneath the brim of his hat. "Now, you didn't hear that tidbit from me."

"I'm deaf in this ear," Clara assured.

"Word on the Chicago streets has it that the farmlands were used as a bit of a cemetery for a goodfella or two. Got some suspicions myself that there's some truth to that."

She giggled. "Oh, you're a kidder!" she tittered. "Chicago mob men working out of this little hole in the world, I mean, truly you can see how ridiculous that is."

"Them corpses, and we will find them, make no mistake, they got something special about them that's been bugging a few of my pals up north for a while now." He traced the outline of her car window with the edge of the rusted, stained switchblade. "Seems every victim's got a strange calling card carved into their face. Mostly on the eyes. One 'x' and one 'o'. When I see that scraped into the bones, I know it's got Chicago written all over it." His bulldog pout twisted into a wide, shark-like smile.

"But now, what am I doing, worrying a pretty little thing like you?" He handed her the switchblade, which she took with a slightly trembling hand. "You would have told me by now if you'd seen anything. Guess you must have just missed the show, and a good thing, too." He tipped his wide brimmed hat at her, and gave her a toothy grin. He had a gold incisor that glinted in the morning sun. "Have a good trip. You watch yourselves, now."

"I always do," she said as she turned on the ignition, the motor clattering into life.

Sheriff Borgen stepped aside as the Chevrolet found the road again, its wheels kicking up dust and debris, the ensuing cloud a thick, opaque shield against further scrutiny. The Sheriff was a thin, willowy line within the cloud of dirt, long arms extended, his hands on hips, the profile of his hat facing them. His long shadow seemed to study them in question.

"We almost didn't make it," he observed.

"You shut your mouth." Clara gripped the steering wheel, her knuckles white, her teeth gnashing in a silent scream. "You shut it good and tight."

* * *

The silence in the motor car was vicious, tainted as it was with Clara's ever brooding anxiety over the police barricade. He couldn't understand why she would feel this way when it was clear that they weren't suspects, for Sheriff Borgen would never have given her back her switchblade, nor would he have wished them well on their continued journey. It wasn't as if he could traverse state lines and follow them, Clara had said so, and she knew the law in regards to herself. Thus, Clara's fear was unreasonable.

Besides, she was grossly exaggerating the crime's importance, for hadn't she made it clear, time and again, that human life was worthless, outright expendable? Sure, she might get caught and the state would murder her in turn. Fearing what was expected seemed a foolish waste of energy. He sighed and rested his head on the knit pillow, its musty contents made all the more pungent by the acrid summer afternoon heat.

"We'll be arriving in Foss soon," Clara said. Her head was rigid as she drove, her hands cemented to the steering wheel in the manner of a department store mannequin. "I need to blow off some steam. There had better be somewhere for a girl to water her whistle."

Blowing off steam. He knew well this coded language that hid its acts of violence beneath harmless words. Never did a night end with only her drunken steps to lead him off of his prescribed path—if she got her way they would be harbouring yet another corpse passenger before the night was through. Another stinking, human mess he would be forced to deal with. He thought of the liquefied remains of the man she had falsely named Frankie and a thick well of oil slid upwards in his host's throat. He gagged and swallowed the slimy lump back with effort, its slick bitterness burning the oesophagus.

"We should wait," he said, choosing his words especially carefully. "That discussion you had with that law officer, it's clearly upset you. If you're worried your acts have been detected, there's no point getting into another situation where you they can easily find you out."

A farmhouse windmill creaked in the distance, its gothic, circular reach looming ever closer as they trundled down the long stretch of road, not another motor car in sight. The heat was baking him from the inside out, and he fanned himself with the map she'd purchased back in Chicago, its paper accordion folds doing nothing more than slightly dissipating the humid air.

"You shouldn't have killed that man." He folded up the map and tucked it into the side pocket of his jacket. The knitted pillow lay discarded on the floor of the motor car, its musty aroma wafting up in miserable drafts. This evil old Gran had thought of a stranger's comfort, once, he thought. She'd knitted this ugly pillow with care and had had the foresight to know that eventually a tired soul would be riding in the passenger seat. It would be her creation that would provide them with comfort.

Not so, now, with the leftover stale scent of decay lingering over it, the very same rot that had captured Gran's body and made it one with this mouldy knitted remnant of her life.

Clara had said they were bad people. But her Gran had thought of someone else when she'd made that ugly green and brown knit pillow, a balm to some unknown soul she had yet to meet. Perhaps that was why the hobo had found their farmhouse: that pillow had been meant for him, to rest his tired head on instead of the filth of the earth. Bad people, from what he understood, didn't care about the comfort of others. They were headstrong and careless, too full of themselves to think of any person beyond their fiercely narrow scope.

By this definition, Clara herself was a bad person.

She also told lies.

"I'm not sure why it was so necessary to kill him," he reiterated. "He was just a drifter. He probably never even saw us."

"He saw us, I'm sure of it, and what's done is done. It's not like I can raise the dead, I can't slip into their skin and remold them into whatever shape I want them to be." She bit her bottom lip, her eyes narrowed in furious tension. "It don't matter, anyhow. The coppers figure it's just another mob hit, and you heard him back there, it wasn't like they were anyone's favourite neighbours. I told you, they got money for turning their farm into a rum-runner's graveyard."

"They were dead for two years." He kept his voice even, his eyes following the perfectly even stitching of the knitted pillow at his feet. "You forget that I've seen your work. You're rather prolific."

"Think what nonsense you like," she curtly replied. "It's not me that copper was looking at."

He was confused by this, and he sat up in the back seat, shoulders rigid, his back awkwardly straight. The strong muscles in this host sometimes went against him, squeezing him to the left of a healthy pink lung.

"He never spoke more than two words to me."

"Fat chance them thinking I'm some killer," she giggled. "They aren't looking for some innocent little thing like me, not this sweater wearing, no lipstick, buttoned up like Victoria herself spinster sweetheart like me. I can hear what's going on in their minds, as clear as a radio broadcast. 'This one couldn't hurt a fly. My, but she's so sweet, so innocent. Kind of vulnerable, too. Poor girl, she needs protecting from brutes like him'. " She glanced at him, narrowed eyes brimming with black and green malice. "That's what they think you are. The brute. Come to corrupt sweet innocent little me. They'll be looking for you, all right, lunkhead you who has no history of speak of, who doesn't even have a real name."

"You're wrong." He rolled down his window, the acrid summer air sucking all oxygen out of his host's healthy, pink lungs. "Gran and Pops were your relatives. You are the strongest connection."

"You're just a nasty man who led me astray," she snapped back. "Don't question my intelligence. Why do you think I even brought you along on this ride? Because when something bad happens around me, it bounces off and right away it sticks to you. You make a good cover, friend."

The windmill creaked beneath the scant breeze that captured it as they passed, rocking it back and forth on its circumference, never quite making a full rotation. The massive gears groaned beneath the lumbering greeting the structure gave them, its stretched shadow long and cloying as it travelled along the length of the car, obscuring them in its shadow.

"You are reckless and unfocused, Clara. You've lied to me too many times. There is no trust between us." He kicked the knitted pillow under her seat. "When the police come for you, I won't stop them."

He felt no regrets. It was what had to be done. She was a serious liability, regardless of her self-assured confidence. She had already admitted how easy it would be for her to pin all the blame onto him, to make him suffer for her own horrible crimes. Death and murder were common for her, and she would never understand that these things were so alien to his understanding that he had to twist his mind into odd, uncomfortable angles in order to comprehend them. "I'm here for one specific reason," he reminded her yet again. "I can't journey with you if you're going to keep on killing random strangers. There is no purpose to this, no reason. You claim to be the same as me, but it's all lies. Clara, if the police hang me or you, it doesn't matter. I will survive that end. I don't believe it will be the same for you."

She turned her head away from the road, her dark eyes flashing as they pierced into him. The motor car swerved back and forth on the road, her hands carelessly loose on the steering wheel. "So what are you saying?"

He cleared his throat. Motor oil bubbled up and then settled. "I'm saying our relationship is not a good one."

"This has to be the stupidest break-up I've ever had to endure." She continued glaring at him, the motor car swerving at dangerous angles all over the road, its back wheels tempting the ditch to claim them. "Look, friend, what happens in this world happens and there's no going back and rewriting what parts you didn't like."

She picked up speed. A pebble broke free from beneath a back wheel and made a crack in the rear windshield.

"No matter what crap you think, you're stuck on this road with me. I'll get you where you need to be, because I'm that kind of person. Then I'm dumping you, and you're on your own. I'm that kind of person, too."

She slowly turned back to the steering wheel, her hands getting a steadier grip, the motor car brought out of its frenzied zig-zag scampering. It was tamed now, the wheels in alignment, the road straight ahead of them, her attention riveted to the long, long road that would take them to where they both needed to be.

"It's not so bad," she said, softly. "We'll have some good times along the way, and how can anything go wrong when we have California to look forward to. You ought to get your job done, that will make you happy, and I'll get my spot in moving pictures. We all get something in the end, that's how it's supposed to be. Just stick with me. You'll be fine. I promise."

He wasn't so sure. "You can't see the future," he reminded her.

"You can't, neither," she said. "Not anymore."

# Diner

She was hungry, and the diner they found in Foss was eager to eat up two odd but ravenous customers. Flapjacks and fried potatoes with chopped onions lay thick on their plates, with a set of runny, sunny side up eggs staring cheerfully up at them. The coffee was opaque, not unlike his usual tippling of motor oil. Clara picked at her meal with her fork, small dents poked in the side of her flapjacks.

"You're supposed to add syrup."

"I hate sweet things."

The inside of the diner was spotlessly clean and efficient, nothing like the usual hovels they frequented. This was in contrast to the outside windows which bore a dusty sheen thanks to the blowing sands that crept over the small town, blanketing it in an overcoat of beige. The tables within were made of chrome and glass, with leather chairs made of matching chrome piping. The counter was not unlike the speakeasy bar back in Chicago, only this time there were no old soaks holding it up, no cheeks plastered in booze and drool attached to its cracked, filthy surface. Here, the dining was family friendly: an ice cream sundae topped with cherries, a good hearty sandwich to get one's day going. They served hot coffee and tea for those less addicted to the warm hug of spirits. He dug his fork into his flapjack and experimented a taste of it.

He raised a brow in surprise. "This is astoundingly good. Why have we never eaten like this before?"

She sipped her coffee carefully, her flapjacks untouched. "Because grease isn't my idea of a proper meal." She made a face and set the cup down, then picked up a piece of bland toast and begrudgingly nibbled on it. "I've taken you to some wonderful places, I don't know what you're on about. Wining and dining with me is no cheap affair, and with my connections you got the best chefs in all of Chicago cooking your meals. This lumpy, greasy bit of crap right here? It's not worth wiping a floor with."

"As I recall, food was not the focus in those establishments."

"Fair enough, but what they did serve was hardly pig slop."

She was overly loud, and the waitress behind the main counter eyed them both in suspicion, her gum clacking against her back molars as she chewed. Flies travelled in through the open diner door and settled on the otherwise spotless arrangement of cakes, cookies, sandwiches and metal urns full of freshly percolated coffee. Clara swatted one away with the back of her hand, her expression of disgust never changing. "I show you real food and real culture and you're just like all the rest. Give you a greasy spoon and a fork and you're set for life."

"It's not like that," he tried to explain. "The food here is just so much more... rustic."

"Rusty, you mean." She watched him critically as he drowned his home fries in catchup. "How can you even eat that?"

"I told you, it's quite good."

"That's not what I mean. The body you're using isn't alive, how can it even digest that stuff? How can you even taste it?"

He paused over his plate, pensive. Runny eggs slipped against the edges of the golden brown flapjacks, a dot of butter slowly melting on its velvety surface. "I'm not sure," he admitted. "Perhaps because this body was so fresh and there was such little internal damage. The other one had all kinds of issues. Broken spine, leaking spleen. This one is fully intact." He took another forkful. "You haven't touched a thing."

"I'm not hungry."

"Impossible. If you can go this long without sustenance, you are more alien than I."

She sighed, her fork poised over her plate in grave reluctance. "I got to keep an eye on my figure. They say the harsh truth of the camera puts on a few pounds, and there's no way I'm going to lose a role just because I have a bit of flesh on me."

"I thought it was about talent." He speared some home fries and swirled them in the thick remnants of syrup, picking up bits of the runny egg on its edges. "If you can lie well—an expert skill you already possess—I should think you will have no problem finding a role no matter whether you eat a meal once in a while or not."

Her fork poked at the egg and broke it open. She took a slimy globule of it and swallowed it down with effort. "Better?"

"Your body will thank me."

"It's cursing a storm, actually. Ugh, this coffee is vile."

They were nearly alone in the diner, with a couple of patrons dotting the diner's horizon. Clara pointed to a balding man sitting directly across from them, the bald patch on his scalp shining like a polished penny. He was an older gentleman, dressed highly formally and eating nothing more than a coffee and a muffin. "That's the mayor of this dinky set-to-die town. I can spot those goody-good political poseurs a mile away."

He wolfed down another flapjack, his brow raised in question. "He doesn't look to me to be acting some performance, if what you mean by poseur is correct. He's having a simple coffee in a diner in his community. There is nothing disingenuous about that."

"That's where you're wrong." She gulped another grimacing mouthful of coffee and tore into her toast. A predator forced to make do. "He's mayor and that means he's got a perfectly nice house somewhere in this hick town, and he's got a nice paycheck that he can round out his other money with. He's got a maid, who makes a far better breakfast than this one for him every morning, so why is he here? It's not because he's hungry, it's because he needs to be seen." The waitress journeyed out from where she had been hiding behind the kitchen door, a fresh pot of coffee in her hand.

"You just watch. There's charm getting turned on."

The waitress was a woman in her fifties, her grey hair tied tightly in a bun. Her movements were busy and precise, her smile strained as she poured a steaming cup of coffee for the balding man at her counter.

"Morning, Charlie," she said cheerfully. "Lovely day."

Charlie's slumped posture instantly changed: his shoulders pushed back, his head level and straight. A wide grin spread across his face, lots of healthy looking teeth and a squinting wink. "Fine day it is, yes a very fine day. You're looking lovely today, Stella. You've done something different with your hair."

Stella smiled and blushed. "Oh, no, it's the same as always."

"No, it's different somehow. Maybe I'm just seeing some of that inner radiance of yours. It's shining right through."

"Now, Charlie, you don't have to be flattering me."

"I'm not flattering, just stating a fact." He paused over his coffee cup. "So, any word yet from George over what's going on with future developments?"

Stella visibly stiffened "I don't know what he does. You know better than I."

"Maybe. Maybe." He took two more sips of his coffee and then abandoned it, leaving her a healthy tip for the trouble. "You tell him to swing by my office sometime today. I'd like to have a chat with him."

Stella the waitress watched him leave, her brow creased in profound worry. Clara tapped at her ivory teeth with a well manicured nail, her usual pearls tucked away neatly in a small jewellery suitcase she'd bought when they'd first arrived in Foss. "There's something here," she said, honing in on the discomfort with all the skill of a hawk finding a wounded rabbit. "Unrest in paradise."

"This is hardly a paradise, it's just a small town, like any other, from what I've witnessed so far." He tested the coffee and had to agree with Clara. It was awful. "How long before we're back on the road?"

"In about an hour," she said, distracted as she watched Stella escape back into the diner's kitchen, the older woman's eyes glassy with tears. "Or longer."

She tapped her front tooth with her nail, her coffee held aloft as if in competition with her habit. He knew, buried beneath her compact and the paint she used on her lips, the switchblade lay heavy, its red encrusted handle itching for use. After their experience at the roadblock, she had shed the demure sweater and the bland appearance of normalcy, and now she sported ruby red lips, heavily kohl rimmed eyes and brows pencilled on in long, even lines.

She set her coffee mug down, the thick muck unpalatable. "The people here are useless," she said, making a sweeping motion with her pale, white hand. "I could cut every single one of them down and it wouldn't mean nothing."

The flapjacks sat ill in his gut. At the bottom of her jewelled purse, the switchblade longed to slice through the air, to connect with others in criss-crosses and circles.

"You shouldn't be so judgemental," he warned.

"I can judge as much as I like." She pressed her lips tight together, smearing the rusty red across the upper half of her teeth. She pointed at the lone elderly gentleman sitting in the corner of the diner, his hat pulled low over his face, obscuring it from view. "See that one? He doesn't even want us to know he's here, he's so ashamed of this place."

"Shame has nothing to do with wanting to be alone." He turned around in his seat, a feeling of unexpected bravado filling him as he set to prove her wrong.

"Hello! You there... Come and join us." He held his horrible cup of coffee aloft. "We'll get you a cup."

The elderly man shifted where he sat and raised his head slightly, showing only the lower half of his face. His mouth was pale, his jaw covered in a thin sheen of grey fuzz beneath the myriad wrinkles that comprised his face. "Ain't no use giving a man coffee that tastes like shit. Ain't manners, kind sir. Ain't manners at all."

Still, this didn't stop him from rising from his seat like a slow moving eel and walking over to them, his head kept bent, the hat shading his cataract dimmed eyes beneath its white brim. He scraped the chair along the wooden planks of the floor as he settled in, his elbows neatly tucked onto the side of their table. "Still, it's a mighty fine, kind thing for a stranger to invite another stranger to his place of repast. And here you are, nearly finished your breakfast and all, and yet you want to keep the company of a man like me."

"What kind of man would that be?" Clara astutely observed.

The old man chuckled. "A hungry one," he said. He glanced behind him, ensuring they were alone before he said more, Stella's bent figure still thankfully in the kitchen. He leaned low, his teeth rotted stumps behind his shrivelled lips. "She's real stingy these days, that Stella. Always saying I has to pay up front and I don't get a lick of nothing, not one crumb, no sir. The cook, old Gacy, now he's a gent that knows how to be generous, but not Stella. She'd stiff her own mother a last life saving drink, she would, if her mammy couldn't afford the nickel." He pulled Clara's untouched plate towards him and began nibbling off of it. "Shame to put this to waste."

The elderly stranger became bolder with Clara's unspoken offering, his jaw working hard over the stale toast. "What's going on with the mayor?" Clara asked, her expression bored. "He seems real interested in George, whoever he is."

The old man grunted an affirmative. "Charlie's a right crook, through and through. You know how it is... Here's Stella, working her guts out in this place, while her husband spends his days at home taking in the profits. He don't lay a finger on this diner he doesn't, but then, Stella does have her mean streak, as I've told you. She don't give anyone a free lunch and she likes to keep a tight rein on this here business."

He dabbed at the corner of his mouth with a napkin, crumbs raining down on Clara's plate. "Back in '02, this place was situated a few miles left of here, and then the flash flood came, wiped the place out. They rebuilt in this location, but it were never the same. We're smack in the middle of Clinton and Elk City, and both those towns keep taking in our trade. Nobody sticks around in Foss if they can help it, we're barely a speck on the map as it is. Word has it when they build the highway proper they'll bypass this town altogether, and that's when it's going to the graveyard, and there'll be nothing but ghosts left here." He dared to take a sip of Clara's coffee and put it back down with a grimace to match their own.

"George pays Charlie to keep this place open. Word has it Charlie wants to sell the land and get some coin while the real estate is still worth a bit of something. George leases the land, and Charlie figures he's the primary owner." The old man shrugged and flicked a dirty nail over the pieces of syrupy flapjacks. "He should just haul out and take the money he's offered, our old George should. But Stella, she's too stubborn, too much full of herself. Don't let that hangdog face fool you, she's the reason our George can't make a go of things and find himself some peace. She's clawing onto this place with all her worth, and she's never going to let go."

Clara yawned. "So she's a bitch. Big deal. He can just leave her."

Stella re-emerged from the back kitchen, her bent posture now replaced with stoic determination. Clara eyed her carefully, not one hard, stiff movement missed from her intense scrutiny. The elderly man sighed, and slid his chair away from their table noisily. "Guess I'd better be going before her majesty tells me to stop harassing the customers. That's what she calls simple conversation, our Stella."

He hobbled out of his chair, his back bent at a twisted angle that was painful to look upon. Clara watched as he left, her red fingernail tapping her lipstick stained red tooth, her mood pensive. The entrance to the diner chimed as he slammed the door behind him, his crooked form walking an equally crooked path home.

"This place sucks," Clara said. "See, what did I tell you? I'm right."

It took every effort to hold onto his patience. "You can't just kill people when you've already got law enforcement looking for you. I know murder and death is a commonplace thing among you people, but I have a goal to reach and I can't obtain it if I'm forced to hang from a tree."

"They don't use trees, they use scaffolds." She frowned, thinking. "Of course, that's assuming you're in a place that's big enough to bother building one. Maybe they do still use trees around here."

She narrowed her eyes as she watched the ever busy, miserable Stella wipe down a table, the scent of lemons wafting over them in vengeful cleanliness. "I wonder what tree they use. It would have to be a big one, with long, sturdy branches, or at least one thick enough and tall enough to withstand the weight of a big man. They bop up and down when they hang, you know. Like puppets on loose bits of string, they bounce, bounce, and then just like that... Nothing."

The flapjacks were definitely sitting ill in him now. Perhaps she was right about not eating them, especially since he hadn't touched food when he was wearing that other host. Then again, it could have been his own gut screaming out for a good dose of motor oil to calm his nerves, to make this transition from one town to another and Clara's murderous intentions all that easier to swallow.

He clutched at his stomach, unsure of how best to proceed. He could escape now, tell her that he was going outside for some fresh air, and with a long stride he'd be in the Chevrolet, tearing down the long street without her, heading in a beeline to California and the hope of finding his target. But instinctively he knew that this was the wrong tactic, that regardless of his own misgivings he had to follow the path she had laid out for him. His superiors had put her in his way for a reason, and he had to trust that they were right in their judgement, for they knew all, and saw all, the history of the past and the future laid out in clear, parallel lines towards every possibility.

He was not an expert in these things. He was no navigator; that took hundreds of years of study and skill and he had neither. His job was simple, in many ways the same as the various men who wandered through Clara's life. Their job was taking out problems for their angry bosses, be they people who didn't pay what was owed, or fellow gangsters who had outlasted their usefulness. They had rules they followed, even if Clara didn't agree that this was so. There was a definite pecking order, a line of command where one man listened to another and all events transpired downward, ending in bloodshed and death.

He followed these rules himself, his orders to take out that one specific problem and to return home, though how he was to do any of this was forever muted. Perhaps it was the same for these men Clara danced with, her switchblade teasing through the edge of her purse as she swung her hips in an energetic fox-trot. They had orders. They had tasks to fulfill.

Clara listened to no one. She had only her own twisted heart to guide her, and it was as wrong and painful as the winding spine of the elderly stranger's back, her life as sour as Stella's outward appearance.

Clara watched Stella as she wiped down another table, one that was already clean. She had obsessions herself, it seemed.

"She's like me," Clara observed. She tapped her incisor with her pinkie nail. "I think I like her."

# Georgio

He downed another large gulp of motor oil, its slick, black promise sliding through his host's innards, globules slipping across the injured arteries of the heart. His host's hands were shaking as he held the tin can, furtive glances stolen over his shoulder to ensure there were no witnesses to his gorging. He placed it back on the shelf where he'd found it, bending low to peep through the knot in the wood wall of the shack. Clara was on the front porch of George and Stella's house, her smile sickly sweet, her hands outstretched in flirting glee at her sides. She giggled at something George said, then clasped her hands together as though excited over a happy prospect. George touched her hair and she shook her head, but still remained close, teasing him with the blatant hint that she was open to his suggestions, no matter how lewd they might be.

He hated the way she pretended to be happy. He knew the danger of this kind of mirth.

George and Stella's house was as ramshackle as the storage shed he hid in, a portion of the roof caved in, with a dilapidated porch rotting away at Clara's feet. As he wiped the last remnants of motor oil from his cheek, he stepped back from his vantage point, unwilling to see the carnage he knew Clara was about to inflict. She'd been searching for release since the fire, the switchblade heavy and willing in her tiny beaded purse, her fingers dancing along the blade as it sliced through the air, through unwilling, stiff flesh.

Her victims had little time to scream, let alone protest their own murder. With stunned expressions they fell quickly, blood seeping out of them in a steady stream, a low, sickening gurgling signifying the last breath of life. That's how it had been in Chicago, and one didn't mess with a system that worked.

He pushed the shed door open with a low creak, and peeked out across the expanse of dried grass and sandy mud, not a drop of moisture anywhere to quench the thirsty earth. He heard Clara giggle, and to his surprise there was a low, answering chuckle.

George was still alive.

"I got that diner for a song, I did. I won't sell it for one, Stella's right as rain about that."

"I can't argue with a sound-minded woman like her."

"No, you're right on that. You can't."

Their conversation drifted over him as he approached, Clara's innocent facade slipping just a little as he sidled up close, his palms smoothing down the wrinkles in his ill-fitting suit jacket.

"I see you've made a friend," he said.

"This here's George," Clara began.

"I gathered."

Clara gave George a shy smile and another one of her trademark falsely innocent giggles. "Don't mind my brother, Frankie, here. He's always looking out for me, even when there ain't no worry at all."

George smiled back at him. He was a fairly stocky man, though well proportioned, his head slightly balding and his nose too wide to make his face properly handsome. His fingers were fat sausages, and they wiped the few beads of sweat from his brow, smearing the dust that had settled on his skin into a smooth grey paste. He held his sweaty palm out in greeting and flashed a grin comprised of wide, yellow even teeth. "Mighty fine to make your acquaintance."

His grip felt hot and clammy, and he flinched instinctively at George's ugly touch.

"Frankie, hunh?" George said. "I knew a guy named Frankie from out Chicago way. I know a lot of those boys. Clara and I here, we were just catching up on some of the old gang. She was saying Mikey ain't been seen around." He cocked his head to one side. "You know anything about that?"

His host's heart didn't beat. It only filtered the motor oil as it slid into his system, muddying up his sense of time and thought processes. George seemed shrink and grown in his vision, a watery man whose rivulets ran long into Chicago, deep into damp basements and silenced speakeasies. He closed his eyes, dizzy, and when he opened them again it was as if they had never left Chicago, that Clara was still dancing her fox-trot with her man Mikey. His body was intact, and from the look of him he had never been a priest. Just another shady employee on Georgio's payroll.

Georgio.

George.

He coughed into his fist, an ugly ball of slime staining his hand and spilling over it in a thick black fossil stream. Chicago played through his mind in a series of flickers and shadows against the dark.

Fox-trot. Mikey. Priests. Murder. Georgey-porgy, Georgian, Georgio.

The dance sped up as Langley's trumpet screamed out its epithet, his lamentations frantic as they poured out of his soul, black as the oil that lay thick at his feet, dribbling in thick consciousness from his chin. Fires burned and Sheriff Borgen grinned, and before he could utter one word of protest, he was out of Kansas and was trapped in Foss, on a worn out porch, with a murdering moll.

"I'd have thought you would have lived in a nicer house," he said to George, genuinely puzzled. "There's certainly enough money coming in. Your booze basements are always full."

The rum runner known as Georgio in their Chicago circles stared at him, aghast. He imagined this was a difficult expression for a seasoned criminal like Georgio, who was so used to keeping everything hidden. If he had doubts about Clara's truthfulness in how humanity worked, it was cured in this instance. Life really was this expendable. George, who himself had ordered the end of many a handsome, ambitious upstart, was not immune.

"You are Frankie... I had my doubts at first, but..." he began. Then, angry, "I told you never to show your face to me, you bastard, never to come near..."

George shook his head, staring at him. He backed away, as though terrified. "Jesus, what's going on with you? You got to be some kind of sick. That black shit. My God, Frankie... What's wrong with you?"

He was puzzled by this recognition, his own liquid heart beating slightly faster as he grasped the fact that this human, this George also known as Georgio, also known as the vicious rum runner familiar with the carrion crow field in Kansas–George knew this face his guest was wearing, and he had given it a disturbing, familiar name.

"How do you know me?" he had to ask.

George frowned, not understanding.

"How do you know me?" he repeated. "I've never met you before."

"The hell, Frankie... I thought you were in California. I don't get it, you said you were on a job, that it was tricky business. All that dough at stake... Jesus, why are you here?"

The black oil oozed out of his stomach, seeping out of the corners of his mouth. He dabbed at a damp spot leaking from his nose. A slimy, partially solid chunk of black oil dribbled out. He smeared it across his cheek with the back of his hand. "Frankie," he repeated, ignoring the look of stark horror planted firm on George's face.

This mystery had to be solved. He didn't like these puzzles, the little snippets of information this world liked to throw at him, pushing his mission off balance. If he had been home, it would have been another possibility, another seeping wave of the future that would pass over him, unnoticed.

"Who do you think I am?"

He didn't get a chance to find out. She had a cat's stealth.

Clara was expert, her blade quick. George clutched at his throat, the wound gushing clots of blood that were not dissimilar to his own black oiled leavings. George gurgled for a few moments as he slumped to the ground, his eyes wide with a mixture of shock and terror. These were intense emotions for a simple, business minded man like George.

Mortality crept into his pockets, his profits overshadowed by the blatant confusion felt by the powerful as death strips their importance away. He would be nothing soon, a lump of rotting meat that time would discard. George's wide eyes rolled back in his head while his life blood spilled out of the massive gash she'd cut through his neck. He made a small squealing sound, one common on a farmstead like this.

She watched, impassive, as George morphed from a grimacing, vibrant being into an inanimate object.

He waited until George stopped twitching before he turned on her, annoyed. "That was not necessary."

"Like hell it wasn't." She spat on the ground, and used George's stained sleeve to wipe her knife clean before putting it away neatly in her beaded purse. She twirled a tendril of her hair, and let out a long, deliberate sigh. "I'm going in. I don't know about you, but I could use a good shower. Hot water and rose scented soap. A girl has to have some luxuries. I'm getting real tired of all this dust and dirt."

George still lay on his front porch, a gory mess visible to anyone who passed by on the main road. "I'm not sure about that being a good idea. There could have been witnesses." He glanced over his shoulder, every breeze that tugged a branch into creaking motion making his liquid heart pump. "We can't just leave him here, like this. What about his wife, Stella?"

Clara was already deep inside the house. Her steps bounded up the stairs, heading for the relief of a warm shower that would cleanse her of all her sins. It was always that easy for her. Terrible acts were only surface deep, easy to scour off with a thin layer of rose scented soap and a rough drying with a clean towel.

On the porch, the remains of George glistened in the early afternoon sun, his eyes clouded over into the cataract opacity of the dead. The open gash on his neck was a feast for flies. They crawled along its thick periphery, inside of his opened throat and out of it, a warm nursery for their white, wiggling infants.

He scanned the horizon, searching for another soul who would shout in righteous indignation at what had happened here. There was a sturdy tree near the roadside, two of its lower branches thick enough to hold two swaying slabs of strange fruit. He would wither out here, in the heat, the liquid essence that was his form drying up under the scorching judgement. He would never find another host in time. His mission would be a failure.

He could hear the water running through the ancient pipes in the house, and he pushed the creaking screen door in as he went inside. Unlike the outward appearance, George and Stella's home was decked out in expensive furniture, every surface cluttered with pricey finery and rare bric-a-brac. There was not an antique to be seen in this modern home, with works of deco art displayed prominently above the fireplace, the wooden drawers and cupboards plainly designed with stark geometric shapes. It was impossible to know who had the keener eye for art, Stella or George, but what was evident was the lurking sense that these were people used to getting things and keeping them. No surface dared to remain bare, not when a teacup or an ornate hairbrush or a delicate piece of carved ivory could cover it.

The sitting room was an overbearing space crammed so full of functional design the pieces no longer had any purpose. There was nowhere to sit, not with the piles of magazines laying on embroidered chairs and stacks of framed artwork blocking access into the open room. There were no old remnants of a past life here, only the constant, obsessive deluge of a new one that had taken over their house in a relentless flood of things. A warehouse jammed full of empty accomplishment.

Clara sang as she took her shower, and he carefully made his way up the stairs, every step a hazard as he avoided bits of pottery, mink stoles, purses, suits, shoes, typewriters, stacks of paper. By the time he'd reached the upper floor, he had to squeeze against the wall to gain access to the bathing room, where Clara was busy washing off the last of George. "I don't understand this," he shouted through the closed door. "How can they live like this? It's like being crammed into a tightly bound maze."

The water stopped, and Clara continued to hum. "I had to shove a bunch of stuff out the door, but it's all top drawer quality, every last bit of it. I guess Georgie was doing well this year. I know those dresses of Stella's are all the newest fashions, not a thing older than two seasons." She opened the bathing room door, her hair hidden beneath a tightly wound towel turban, her body immodestly poured into a short, silken dressing gown sporting large orange poppies. "She's got good taste, though, I'll give her that. Plus, she's almost my size. I can take a few of these and they'll fit me just fine."

"So now you are a thief as well as a murderer."

"Can't see how that matters, considering the kind of person George was. You think every little thing here doesn't have a big glob of blood all over it? I know you aren't that stupid." She darted back into the bathing room, and fussed over her hair, fingers deftly puffing up several stray tresses and putting them carefully into place. "I'm going to have to do something about this mop before we get to California. Maybe I should ask Stella if there's a good hairdresser here in town." She glanced over her shoulder at him. "You could use a trim up yourself. Maybe they could do something about that ginger hair you're sporting. It's so wrong for your skin, you look all kinds of sick, even with a healthier fit, like you said."

A pile of expensive junk had been shoved into the corner of the bathing room, near the washing up sink she draped over. She balanced herself on its edge with her hip, her knee bending to give her leverage as she reapplied her lipstick and viciously smeared her lips together. "I think I'm getting a tan," she complained. She picked up Stella's stick of kohl and began applying it expertly to her large, selfish gaze. "Remind me to rummage around for a big brimmed hat. I can't be showing up in Hollywood looking like I'm some know-nothing farm girl. They want a bit more sophistication than that."

He backed away from the bathing room, the hallway window catching his eye. "If actresses are as loose with the knife as you are, I doubt very much that it matters if you are from the city or the country. Unless you are referring to your murdering experience, which I can confidently assert you are expert at this point." He inched his way down the hall, back pressed against the wainscoting as glanced out the cluttered window, the shutters broken with a tattered lace curtain littering the windowsill. He watched as a truck trundled past on the road, a pair of squealing pigs pacing in its open trunk.

"This is a lovely dress, I have to say. My, my, Stella, you know how to pick the threads."

"We need to leave," he said to her, a feeling a panic welling inside of him. "A truck just went by. The driver–he could have seen something."

She paused, the silken pink flowered summer dress held up to her shoulders as she tested its length, her chin holding it in place. She draped the skirt across her thigh, approximating its fit. "Perfect, really. Won't even need a hem." She caught his eye and groaned at his continued worry, the dress draped across her arm. Orange poppies clashed with cheerful pink. "He didn't stop, so he saw nothing. If people aren't looking for carnage, they don't find it." She held the dress back up to her chin. "I'm not so sure about that lacy bit at the cleavage, though. A bit of the old Victoria creeping in, I think."

He glared at her, a familiar feeling of anger replacing his original panic. Outside, the branches creaked angrily against the hot, violent breeze. A storm was brewing, a pushing, stabbing finger that would rip across this farm and most of the houses in Foss, flattening them. He'd heard of such things, the newspapers in this region were full of them. Pictures of whirling fingers of storms that plucked life from the earth in godlike fury.

Even the very atmosphere of this planet was prone to murder. Still, he couldn't feel too much sympathy for people standing in the way of carnage. Foss had already suffered a flood that had destroyed it. He couldn't understand why they would have bothered to rebuild.

He stared out the window, reflective. On the porch, dried tumbleweeds rolled over George's corpse. Seeds planted themselves in the crowded avenue of his gashed neck. A carrion crow let out a victorious cry as it circled and dived onto the deck. A black beak pecked deep inside of George's shocked, open mouth.

"He called me Frankie."

The bathing room door gently closed behind her. There was the sound of rustling silk as she pieced herself together in a stolen dress, the dressing gown bunched tight into a ball to bring with her.

"Did you hear me? He called me Frankie. He knew me. He looked at me like he recognized me."

The bathing room door opened, and Clara walked out into the cluttered hallway, a woman transformed. The pink dress played upon the now chestnut hue of her skin, making her appear healthy and innocent, a ruse if ever he had seen one. She was still affixing a pearl earring as she approached him, no doubt one of Stella's, along with the matching set of pearls that hung in various lengths from her neck. "Don't you just love them?" she said, holding up a strand and giggling. "Look at that pretty pink hue. Have you ever seen such a thing?"

"You didn't answer my question."

A familiar wave of ice washed over her at his insistence, and she turned away, the pearls dropping to the hollow at the base of her neck. "You look like a lot of people. It's nothing."

"But he called me by name."

"It doesn't matter."

"I think it does."

She glanced out the window he had been looking out of earlier, her head raised high to get a good vantage point. "We need to leave." She moved her gaze from the window and onto him, her icy demeanour giving him shivers. "You're right. That road is too close."

# Hunger

She fretted over her handbag, her switchblade wrapped delicately in a clean handkerchief she'd stolen from George's house.

"What a mess," she complained. "All this dust and heat is going to ruin my make up. A girl has to have an ample supply these days, she can't leave her house with a naked face, that just won't do."

In response to her own panic, she reapplied her lipstick, her pocket mirror balanced precariously against the steering wheel as she tried to manoeuvre her paint and the car at the same time. She veered dangerously to the left, only to make a shocking turn to the right that left her companion sprawled in the back seat.

"I don't know why you always have to sit back there," she complained. She smeared her lips and tossed her lipstick and compact mirror onto the seat beside her. "I had a shower, after all. I smell rather pretty now."

"I don't care what you smell like."

"You're being a real pain. A lunkhead, that's you." She glanced back, her usual icy gaze now replaced with a sneering playfulness. "That was a busy morning. I think we need to get some lunch."

A cold feeling washed over him. He could boil his liquid self to death beneath the relentless summer sun and it would never make him warm, not when she was in his presence. "You can't go back there."

"Why not? It's a diner, and we got a long way ahead of us on the road." She grinned, her fingers tapping to a silent tune only she knew. "I'll get a big piece of pie, I will. You can have another cup of coffee, seeing as you didn't have any trouble drinking that swill down."

"It'll look strange, us going back to eat again. It's only been a couple of hours."

"Business is business. They're so desperate for hungry people with money it wouldn't matter if we left on the half hour and kept marching back in to drink soda floats all day long, Stella would oblige without question. If we wanted a meal for free, well, then we'd be noticed. Stella ain't the kind to give something for free, I've already figured that out."

He rested his head on the stale crocheted pillow her grandmother had made an eon ago, his palm smoothing the dull aching pressure brewing inside of his host's skull. It was a tight fit in there for his liquid body. The motor oil he'd had sat ill in this host, its black sludge creeping through the partially full veins in throbbing pulses.

"Doesn't it bother you?"

"What?"

"That you are getting food from a woman whose husband you just killed. I should think there is some kind of social impropriety to such an act."

"Why should my hunger factor into it? Dead is dead and I need a sandwich."

She rummaged in her beaded purse for change, the nickels and dimes rattling against her stained switchblade. "Besides, it wasn't like he was a good husband. When he travelled to Chicago, I know he had a bunch of girls draped on his arm wherever he went, and they weren't his cousins, and he's had no children to speak of, so they weren't his snappily dressed daughters. While hard working Stella here kept slaving away holding onto her one little dream, that rat bastard was fox-trotting his way into every copper's pocket and every Chicago whore's bed. Lord knows how many diseases he's brought home to her. I hope she really is as sour and bitter as they say, that might stave off the syphilis."

"I'm glad you find this amusing." He crossed his arms and stubbornly remained in the back seat as she parked the car in the exact spot they had occupied earlier, the roaring engine groaning loudly as it came to a full stop. "This is madness."

"I don't know what you think I'm going to do." She batted her eyelashes innocently and he fought the urge to gag.

"You know damn well."

Her lips pursed in coquettish mischief. "Do tell."

"You're going to do something terrible. Some unspeakable act of evil, and I will feel sick, and whoever finds it will feign surprise." He rolled his eyes at her continued curtsying. "You can't be trusted."

"I do love this dress," she said, ignoring his observation. She parked the car in the lot, slamming the driver's door behind her as she skipped off to the entrance of the diner. "I'll snag you a sandwich too," she shouted.

"Don't bother," he shouted back, but she was already in the diner, her entrance a loud chorus of jangling bells that hung across the swinging door. He tried to get a good view inside, but the windows were above car level, and all he could discern with any clarity were the rounded tops of a few heads, and female faces obscured by cloche hats. Across the ceiling, the polished chrome of Stella's pricey decor gleamed in welcome to the appreciative customer who would visit.

He got out of the motor car and stretched his host's body, his back creaking from the effort. He'd been sure this host would have lasted longer, but it was already starting to show signs of wear and tear, the custom fit comfortable, but the chemistry within the body clearly incompatible with his own. The freckles dotting the epidermis had turned a darker grey, the reddish complexion that had been the youth's sign of good health was now a sallow, pasty mauve. Perhaps the other host had been more accustomed to daily abuses and thus hadn't reacted quite as strongly as this one to his imbibing of motor oil.

A fly buzzed near his ear, and landed on the top of his head. It crawled into the dull reddish forest of his hair, searching for an open space to lay her eggs. He scratched at his scalp, tearing a small hole with his nail. The fly buzzed around his fingers in excited agony as he pulled an entire chunk of scalp away, the red hair trapping the fly within it in a thin, strong cage.

Perhaps he was judging her too harshly. Georgio, or George as he was known here, was hardly a kind soul. As a rum-runner he'd had plenty of bodies strewn behind his success, and it was unlikely that his wife Stella was ignorant of this.

The two female customers he saw in the diner were now leaving, their cloche hats hiding all but their delicate lips. They spoke in nasal Maine accents, teeth chewing on words as if they were tobacco. But these weren't loose women, not molls like his companion. They talked of family and children and the annoying habits of their husbands. They were on safari here in the south, visiting relatives they had no strong connection to.

"Hey, you there," one of them shouted to him. A blast of sunlight hid her face as he tried to discern the features beneath the low brim of her hat. "You don't look well. Are you all right?"

Her friend pinched her shoulder. "Shirley," she whispered harshly. "Let's just go."

"But he doesn't look right...."

"That's what I mean, let's just go."

They piled into a covered automobile, the worried friend Shirley looking over her shoulder at him, her bottom lip bit in concern.

He wasn't sure what to make of these flashes of kindness that occasionally drifted his way. He'd seen it in Clara's father as well, that same look of sickened concern. It was as though these humans had some hidden knowledge over how to avert an inevitable disaster, but they were helpless to implement it. Such a cruel omission, he thought. They had rendered compassion useless.

Not that this should have surprised him, for after all, it was so easy for them to kill in so many ways, not just the physical. A stab through the heart came in many guises. Sometimes it was the slow torment of bitter words that cut into the soul and ruined what was otherwise another person's happy existence. Other times it was a complete lack of acknowledgement, a pervasive, ongoing neglect that withered the soul away.

If Clara used a more direct approach to killing someone, who was he to object to that honest exchange?

He rested his chin on the roof of the Chevrolet, keeping a keen eye on the diner. There was no discernible movement from his vantage point, the diner having suddenly taken on an abandoned, neglected aura since the exit of the two women from Maine. He narrowed his eyes and tried to look past the polished chrome's refractions of light on the ceiling, the clocks that told perfect time hanging in triangular perfection on the wall behind the counter. There was no movement within, no suggestion that humanity coursed through here on a daily basis. Time had arrested at this exact moment, a frozen capsule of ennui and hope.

She had been wearing Stella's dress, he remembered. A pink and white flowered affair that complemented her appearance. Blood purified by white. A bleached hue of the living.

She'd been in there a good twelve minutes now. She was taking too long.

Dust rose and fell around the Chevrolet, the green tinted surface stained in dull, sepia tones. The front windshield had a crack in the corner near the passenger side, an injury from a speeding pebble. He traced the crack with his fingertip, wondering how much further it would spider out as they made their way to California. At some point it would become a hazard, shattering out if they hit a large enough bump in the road. He'd read about this phenomenon somewhere. He didn't know much about these things, so maybe it would stay the same and hold together. He couldn't be sure.

The diner was eerily quiet, and it was with concentrated effort that he refused to inspect if his suspicions were correct. In the back seat, under the mouldy crocheted pillow, a square can of motor oil lay in waiting. The host he now resided in released the oil too quickly and cleanly from its system, and though he'd been well sated earlier, his mind was now painfully clear. Without it, the fluidity of his ethics pinched him, right and wrong becoming tiny hematoma that blistered blue and black along his soul.

The truth was, with this body he inhabited, that he had stolen, there was no real difference between himself and Clara. He was going to need a new host by the time they reached Texola and he doubted very much it would be acquired by strictly natural means.

He had no room to judge.

She was right: it wasn't his business what she believed. She had her own mission to accomplish. He was allowing his feelings to get in the way of his reason, which was always a danger in these situations. Where he came from, murder was wrong, but there was no oral law concerning what to do in the event of one's imminent demise. The will to live was the same everywhere; one had an existence and one wanted to continue on with it.

A freckle faced simpleton knocked dead with a wrench was simply a survival tool that skirted the periphery of natural law. He had a specific mission to accomplish and some collateral damage along the way was inevitable. His survival was important for the mission, and yes, it was a bloody business, but there was no other choice. His superiors would understand.

He hoped they would. They had to.

Clara swung her purse against her swaying hip as the diner entrance slammed shut behind her, the jingling bell nearly toppling from its fixed place at the top of the door. She was eating one half of a sandwich loosely wrapped in a napkin, her mouth dotted with crumbs as she spoke to him. "We should drive straight through, right into Texas. I say we don't stop until we hit Armarillo. Or we could make a quick pit stop in Shamrock and stay at the Reynold's Hotel."

She took another bite of her sandwich, contemplative. She dabbed at the corners of her mouth with her thumb, indelicately brushing off crumbs. "I know that place well, actually. The owner owes me a few favours, I could get us a good deal." She gave him a warm, friendly smile, of the kind that sent her usual chill through his liquid self. "Sound like a good idea to you? The place really is top drawer, you know. All marble and fancy tiles, not too cheap, but not too expensive, neither. You and me, we can hole up in a room and no one would ask any questions. That's how it is there, see."

She placed her half eaten sandwich on the hood of the Chevrolet and rummaged in her purse. She took out another sandwich wrapped in wax paper, the end of it partially squished. "Here," she said, handing it to him. "Since you like the food there so much you can have one for the road."

He weighed the sandwich in his hand, studying the folds of the wax paper that covered it. Ham and rye, by the look of it through the murky white paper. Clara paced and finished her own sandwich, her eyes constantly darting to the busy road beside them, her manner fidgety as though she were ready to take off in a run at first opportunity.

He unwrapped his sandwich and took a bite. It was dry, not a hint of mustard. "Is there a problem?" he asked.

She still had on Stella's wide brimmed hat, which was doing little to prevent the continued onslaught of the afternoon sun on her already tanned arms. "No problems at all."

"You look nervous."

"I'm wondering about that mayor."

"What are you thinking?"

"That he's a loose end that needs tying." She wiped imaginary crumbs from her skirt. "I think we should swing by his swanky house, have a little peep into his windows and see if he's alone."

A dried tumbleweed drifted past the abandoned diner, all hope of life within it effectively vanquished. He took another bite of his sandwich, its dry texture alien on his slimy tongue. Granules of bread stuck in his throat, and he longed for a quick drab of motor oil to help ease it down. "We can't."

A sudden breeze tried to lift her hat away, to steal it along its current. She snatched the brim, holding it firmly in place, her face obscured in much the way the cloche ladies of Maine had been hidden from view. "I do what I want, and I want to tie up a loose end."

"We've overstayed our welcome here. We're leaving." He opened the passenger door, tossing the uneaten portion of his sandwich onto the ground. "That's not fit even for me to eat. I've only just started eating your food and I know that one was made wrong." He sat sideways in the passenger seat, the door ajar, his feet braced on the dusty earth at his feet. The sun shone behind her, casting her in a cameo shadow. "Were you trying to poison me?"

"What? Don't be ridiculous."

But he had to wonder. There was a strange, dry sensation on the edges of his tongue, a gritty texture that had nothing to do with dry bread. "There's a funny taste to it, similar to magnesium. Is that a sulphur chaser? Could it be belladonna, or the dreaded strychnine?"

"I'm not poisoning you."

He eyed her with profound suspicion. "Was I a test run for that mayor? You think it's so easy to get rid of me, and yet here I remain, thwarting your one act of murder that comes with concentrated effort." He swung his legs back into the Chevrolet and let out a long sigh as he settled comfortably into the passenger seat. "Leave the mayor alone. He's a politician. You said so yourself, he lives on insincerity. No one will believe a word he says."

She kicked at the dirt, thinking. "But he's been here, he's seen us. He'll run off to the papers and tell them what he knows, and I can't have that."

"He saw nothing," he reminded her. "He was too busy needling Stella over the diner and George's involvement. His real dealings are with George, and chances are he won't mind having his partner snuffed out. He can be the one to clutter up his house full of expensive garbage."

She raised a brow, its perfectly pencilled arch pushing into her bangs. "So you think he'll be happy to be the new head honcho connection in Chicago?" She bit her bottom lip, hips swaying softly in the breeze, her fingers tapping a strand of pearls on the hood of the car. "Maybe you're right," she said, and shrugged. "He is a kind of a throwaway nobody. We can always accuse him of being drunk, we can put empty rum bottles under his porch as proof of his lush and criminal behaviour."

"There won't be any need to discredit him because he won't say a word," he reminded her sagely. "He's a rum-runner, just like George was, and last I checked such practises were highly illegal all over the country, not just by state. So, I'm guessing, even if he is the one who finds George's body, he'll be the one to turn tail and run, with all the town's savings in his pocket."

He rested his head on the mouldy pillow as Clara finally got into the driver's seat, her stolen white gloves gripped hard on the wheel. "Chances are, he's long gone with George's money already. Soon enough we'll be hearing of him in Chicago, an unfortunate corpse with his feet sunk in concrete. Tell me, can't anyone in this world of yours simply enjoy their riches? Why is it so important to acquire these things, especially when so many others in the community need his help? It's not like all that junk in George's house was useful. There's so much waste."

"So, they're all bolsheviks where you come from, then." She pulled a slender cigarette out of her case and lit it before turning the key in the ignition, the motor rattling away half-heartededly. "We'll have to find another car soon," she said. She gave him a sidelong glance, her ruby red lips twisted in disgust. "You need a new host. This last one just plain looks weird on you, not to mention you smell bad, and you look like you should be fertilizing grass, not hanging with the likes of me."

They sped off, away from the diner, the force of the wind from the motor car forcing a tumbleweed off the road and into a ditch. He tried to close his eyes and get a small amount of rest. He hated closing his eyes these days. All he could see was red.

# Crash

A dusty road is unforgiving. It steals your comfort, and the heat beats down from above, a relentless sunshine that scorches all sense of time and reason, reducing the mind to one solitary thought: Thirst. To quench thirst. To stop being thirsty. To drown oneself rather than feel this unbearable dehydration ever again. Inside of his host, he could feel the rubbery texture of his suffering body, the freckles now darkened to black blotches on the surface of his host's skin, his own essence thickened in an unhealthy reduction.

"You are one heck of a mess," Clara said, taking her eyes off the road to glance at him over her shoulder. "It's been a real quiet stretch of road along here. I don't know where we're going to find you a proper house to live in. Not a soul, not even a bum hitching a ride."

She fanned herself with the map, the gentle breeze it provided a teasing comfort. "I sure could use a tall glass of lemonade right now. That's the only thing that beats this kind of heat. That tart sweetness, it lingers on the tongue, gets all the saliva jumping. That's why it quenches your thirst, see. It's a whole chemical process, one that works better than water."

He groaned and closed his eyes, his head heavy on her grandmother's crocheted pillow. "Water. It would do me good."

"Never mind water, you need a whole new hotel complete with swimming pool and basement bar." She shook her head, her hands tight on the steering wheel. "You look like you've been dragged through hellfire. Maybe a good dose of the holy water would cure you of what ails you." She bit her bottom lip, fingers tapping along the rim of the steering wheel in haphazard, jazz jittering. "I know what it is you need me to do, but you should have gone and told me back in Foss, where there were plenty of human sacks that you could fill. I had that mayor all lined up, but oh no, he wasn't good enough for the likes of you. You're real stupid, you know that? That was a winning ticket of flesh you threw away."

He kept his eyes closed, the heaviness in his head a swirling mass of black motor oil that refused to metabolize. There was comfort in the numbness it provided, but there was also the danger of his host collapsing, the skin rendering and leaving him free to seep out of the large wounds to lay in a jellied, immovable mess on the floor of the Chevrolet. He ran his hand over his dry mouth, flakes of skin peeling off onto his palm. "I need water."

"What we need is a good party." Clara tapped her fingers along the steering wheel, the rhythm now steady, formulaic. "My feet have been itching for a fox-trot since Kansas. This little dust bowl has to have something. It's been slim pickings the further west we go, and I'm starting to wonder if the whole of California's going to be nothing but some big, depressing shoreline instead of the blast of life I know it has to be." She grinned, red lips peeled back over her even, large ivory teeth. "But that's just me being pessimistic. Really, how crazy is that? Hollywood not being a place built on a girl's dreams, did you ever...?"

His groaning annoyed her and she let out an impatient sigh. "The point is, we can't go moaning over what we don't know. You should have let me kill that mayor and you should have got yourself a brand new leather sack, a real tailored fit. But oh no, Mr I'm Taking The High Road — you had to go and demand we hit the road before the Sheriff hunted us down. I don't know what you were so worried about. If you meant Borgen, we were already way out of his jurisdiction and out of his concern. We could have slaughtered the whole town in front of him and, unable to cross the state line, he couldn't have done a thing to stop us."

"Stop you, you mean," he corrected. "I have no interest in killing off a whole town."

She shrugged, the issue unimportant. "You wouldn't be able to stop me any easier than he could." She shook her head, her arm reaching down to shove his shoulder. "You've been sleeping like the dead lately. There's something real wrong with you. I don't get it, that body should have lasted you longer."

"It didn't."

"I get that, lunkhead, but I can't figure as to why. The last one did you good for well over a week, and that one had plenty of wear and tear before you got to it, believe me." She glanced back at the road, her hand steering carelessly, the wheels of the Chevrolet kicking up thick clouds of dust that partially obscured their view of the road. "It's that damned motor oil, that's what it is. You're soaked in it. Light a match and your flame would never go out."

He opened his eyess. He lifted his head painfully up from the mouldy pillow, a palm under his chin holding it up. "You wouldn't."

She narrowed her black rimmed eyes, her arm draped over the back of her driver's seat as she leaned over, making sure he knew the threat was real. "Like a hurricane lamp. That's what you'd be. I'll dance naked around your corpse and carve x's and o's into your ashes when the flames are done with you."

"You're an evil creature."

"You don't know what evil means."

"I'm getting a good education."

"Lunkhead. I'm no different than anyone else. There's no hellfire waiting for me."

"I don't know what hellfire is."

She threw her head back and let out a loud laugh. "It's the big bang, all over again!"

Bright lights. Sun glinting off steel.

Arms.

A face.

A mouth... No, two mouths. Opened wide.

Terror.

That's exactly how these things happen.

The universe rolled over three times before it finally settled down.

Destruction lay in pieces of mangled steel all around them, heavy bales of smoke issuing forth from both mangled motor cars. Clara was already on her feet, staggering towards the other automobile, a farmer's truck to be precise. There was a deep gash on the back of her leg that bled out in a thin stream into the belly of her heel. The inside of the farmer's truck was engulfed in flames.

Hellfire, he thought. It was burning the last remnants of the poor farmer's jaw to cinders. A mercury filling in the farmer's molar sizzled and popped as it melted.

She wiped at her chin with the back of her hand, drawing away blood from a tiny cut. The farmer remained in the driver's seat, his mouth in a silent, charred scream as the flames licked over his body with hungry fury. She turned back to where he was waiting at the side of the road, the Chevrolet crumpled into pieces beside and in front of him. She placed her hands on her hips, surveying the scene.

"Well, that beats all."

He glanced up at her from the side of the road where he was sitting, her body strangely unaffected by the horrible scene. "You have hardly a scratch on you."

"I do," she said, and pointed at the tiny cut on her chin.

He gestured to the ragged chunk of flesh that was all that was left of his right arm. "Of course. How unobservant of me. You missed that gash on your leg."

"This is all your fault." She checked her heel and tutted over the injury. With great effort, she helped him stand, an action that caused a considerable amount of discomfort, especially when he nearly slipped out of the torn apart limb. "All I really wanted was to keep going, and you had to go and tempt fate."

"How so?"

"You can't talk of the devil without him coming around." She snatched her purse up from where it had fallen near the rolling steering wheel, now beheaded from its usual spot at the motor car's dashboard. She rummaged inside of it, pulling out her cigarette tin and a match. Her hands were rock steady as she lit herself some smouldering comfort. "We'll have to walk for a while. It's getting to be dusk, and we have to find some place to hole up until morning. You're not leaking too much, not now anyway. We'll tie that up and pretend you're just another soldier home with a war wound. We'll need to find a place to wash up, though. It's not like we just walked right off the front lines."

She shook out a handkerchief from her handbag and dabbed at the ragged stump of his arm before tying it on tightly.

"If it's an old war wound, it shouldn't be bleeding," he reminded her.

Her concern was minimal. "We'll be walking in the dark soon, no one will notice. Damn, but it's a hot night, a girl could use a cold drink, a tall lemonade, or even a special iced tea, the kind without a lick of iced tea in it. Don't be looking so glum, we have to get away from this scene, there's no need for having coppers around over a silly little car wreck." She marched ahead of him, heedless of his injury and discomfort. She stomped her foot, furious at his lethargy. "Come on, we have to get away from here, quick and quicker!"

He limped as fast as he could, the sloshing of his body inside his sorely injured host putting him off balance. "I don't know why you are berating me. I wasn't the one who crashed the stupid motor car. And just how are we going to get to California now? I have a real fear my legs will fall off well before then, probably somewhere along Texola."

"Shamrock," she reminded him. "That's where the Reynold's Hotel is. You're going to make it there, because I want to be there. The manager owes me a favour and he's going to deliver." She stopped short, waiting for him and his dragging feet to catch up. "Oh come on, I've seen corpses move faster than you!"

She paused, her head cocked to one side. A puzzled expression overtook her otherwise stone cold face, her sharp features softening as they recognized the tune dancing along the sparks that still lit the air around them. "That there's a party," she whispered to herself, her dark eyes lit up with inward glee. She ran back to him, grabbed his one good arm and dragged him forward. "You hear that? It's singing. There's a party going on all right, and we're inviting ourselves!"

"I can't go in there like this."

"Don't be stupid. You came home from the war with a few things lost, is all. As for the mess of us, well, we're just poor folks, as far as they'll know. Poor folks like us live close to dirt."

She pulled him onto a wooded path, the darkness sliding over them in an opaque thickness that was not unlike his favourite drink. She pulled him onward, heedless of the way the twigs and debris of the path dug into his exposed areas of flesh, cutting lines of seeping black.

"Langley played this on his trumpet. Oh, does that ever take me back! Listen, you can hear Langley's heart breaking in those higher notes, a fool and his heart, both exploded. He's really good, whoever is on that stage. Listen to the way that horn weeps and wails!"

Night began to fall, a gentle, dark blanket that rode upon the notes, settling to Earth and tucking the sun into slumber. He paused to rest against the thick trunk of an old oak, its branches teeming above him in black fingers, ready to clutch at him and pluck what limbs he had left apart. Langley's trumpet, or rather the ghost of it, echoed across the forest floor, a creeping sadness that sank everything it touched into a moonlit blue hue.

"I've missed that sound," he admitted, surprised. "It's the only thing of this world I can say I truly understand."

"I don't want to be hearing your gums flap-flapping right now, not when my toes are tap-tapping." She skipped ahead of him, feet deftly avoiding tangled roots and wayward rocks. "I'm betting that little hellhole is well watered. Full of spirits and darkies, I'd say. That's the way it is down here, down south. People segregate, only to come back together in strange ways. The booze hound sorority."

The further they walked in, the more the area became swampy and murky, the muck giving off a vile stench not unlike the innards of his unfortunate host. "I'm not so certain we should be going here." There was something in Langley's ghost, the lament of the trumpet, that was off its usual rhythm. There was a discord in the notes. A wayward anarchy that hadn't resided there before.

"They would have come running if they heard that crash." She pulled her lipstick out of her handbag, but it was too dark for her to properly apply it. She shoved her tools back into her handbag with a loud curse. "I'd say it's kind of strange, having a party in the middle of the week, in the middle of a swamp, but these southern types do things differently, I guess." She was careful to keep the hem of her stolen dress well out of the muck, her white knees shining like beacons in the forest darkness.

"I don't know why it's so important for you to go to a party. There's no gangsters there. Only lonely farmers and xenophobic locals."

"Goes to show what you know," she said, her hips swinging, her handbag in a pendulum arc behind her as she walked. "I know lots of folks down this way. Where there's a good amount of drink, there's a good amount of music, dancing and all round good fellas. I'm going to nab me one and get him to buy me a drink. Some good old boy who wants to make sure America doesn't die of thirst."

"The road is cut off. There's debris everywhere." He hobbled up close to her, anger welling within him at her blatant disregard for the precarious nature of their situation. "We are going to be hung from the nearest tree all because you heard a familiar song. That man in the truck, he must have been a local. Smashing into him and leaving like that, without saying anything... These people won't easily forgive this."

"Pretty presumptuous of you, I have to say. How would you know how these people would react?" she snapped back. "You've never been in the south, you don't know anything."

"I haven't. But I remember a few of those former lovers of yours, and one was a large man, with sausage hands. He was a Texan, as I recall. He didn't live long, thank goodness, you took care of that, but he was around long enough to get his meaty hand around my throat. He crushed the larynx of my host, it was quite difficult to readjust it. That old friend of yours told me, flat out: 'This is what Southern boys do when you piss them off'. I've done my best not to do so again."

She had nothing to say, mesmerized as she was by the horn and its energetic lamentation. He followed her with a familiar feeling of impending doom, one which would result in a new host and a slew of other wasted human bodies, each with neatly carved x's and o's on their eyes. One open. One closed.

He shifted in his host and caught himself before he slid out of the poorly bandaged arm socket, his essence sloshing back into his host with phlegm solidity. He wouldn't be able to take many more steps, and she was heedless of his injuries and his decrepit state, which quickly rendered him helpless. She would gladly watch him wither away, he thought. She would poke his jelly consistency with a stick and move on without another thought.

How easy it would be, to remain so cold and unthinking of others. Perhaps the stress of reaching his target would not tug at his soul the way it did on a minute by minute basis, every linear measure of time full to bursting with worry. He could be wrong about California, and this whole journey was a mistake. It was a thought that curled black around his inner heart and guts, squeezing them into painful shapes.

Now, here they were, on her usual mission. Clara's handbag swung in time to her happy steps, her pearls glinting against the thin streams of moonlight that made it to the forest floor. He held back, not wanting to be too close to her, to show any kind of association. There was a good chance she would find someone in that party not worthy of life, and he was in no mood to watch her work.

Music swelled with vibrancy as they made their way closer to the small, ramshackle structure at the end of the overgrown path. He could hear clapping and shouting, a joyful gathering that was in stark contrast to the shadow of poverty that cloaked the shack like a suffocating blanket. As they approached, he could discern the shape of life's debris propped up against the outside walls as though still retaining value. A broken wheel from an ancient horse cart lay abandoned on its side. Broken bottles and pieces of worn furniture lay gathered in a pile near the woodshed, an axe buried deep into the side of the shed's wall. Meagre possessions, now discarded, were nothing more than fuel for when lean times came, and from the spare offerings it was clear that times were barren indeed.

He had been in alleys before, in areas ripe with speakeasy basements and coppers on the payroll. But this was a different setting, even if it did possess the same kind of music that had drifted into his parish hideaway in Chicago. Here, the music had a separate meaning, one that was clearly polarized from the big city's decadence and wealth.

He oozed into his host's throat. "I don't think we should go here," he tried to warn her.

They were on the front steps of the shed. She ignored him and tore open the front door. It dangled on one hinge, flapping like a whore's fan in the humid, unforgiving stillness.

The congregation turned as one, fixing their eyes on her.

"The DEVIL," the white-suited man at the pulpit proclaimed, "has MANY GUISES!"

# Dervish

The congregation was mostly white southern American, with a few misplaced blacks skirting the periphery. Clara remained at the entrance, a dull glow emanating from behind her thanks to the reflection of the moon on the thick mist that crawled across the earth. She tucked her foot neatly behind her slender calf, scratched the clotted cut on her leg before swaggering to the back row. She emptied a tiny crate of dirty mason jars onto the floor, and then used it as an uncomfortable, splintered chair while she listened in. He hung back at the door, his corpse-like appearance no match for the white gloved perfection of the women and the slicked back hair of even the most burly farmer. Some of them glanced Clara's way, fanning themselves with slim hymn books, their gossiping whispers travelling across the floor of the shack.

It housed no more than thirty people, but there were close to fifty crammed within the tiny space. It was standing room only for most of those present, save for the infirm and women with small children, of which there was a high number. Destitution often bred more of itself, he'd learned. The seat Clara had improvised had gone through many uses, from an old milk carton that had seen better days, to a pen for a small hen and finally a house for broken mason jars. Nothing went to waste here. She plucked the feathers out of the splintered wood and contemplated their brown fluffiness.

"Soft and downy," she said, wistful. "I bet she tasted good."

At the pulpit, the preacher was clearly vexed that the attention of his flock had been so rudely diverted. He was of the charismatic types, prone to expensive-looking three piece suits and arms that stretched wide, a shining gold tooth proclaiming the victory of Heaven, if only people would dig deep into their pockets and give, give, give to the Lord. The same kind of preacher existed in Chicago, only they were sneakier in their workings in the windy city, their purpose more subtle as they slipped into dirty speakeasies, one hand on the Bible, the other in their pockets.

"Temperance is the will of the righteous," they would proclaim, and then, with their flock's money, they would slap a bill onto the surface of the bar and push it forward. "But the Lord loves a sinner as much as He loves good wine. Give us two bottles. One has to keep the pulpit well oiled."

He wondered if they knew each other, these travelling preachers. The one he remembered had droopy eyes and a sweaty palm that left greasy imprints on his tall glasses of scotch on the rocks. This present specimen was considerably more fit, his chest a wide expanse of muscle and well-developed sinew, his arms strong as he held them out in a mock embrace of his congregation.

"The DEVIL," the preacher continued, "is a mighty LIAR. He can't tell the truth when it's obvious, even when blue is blue and red is red, he will muddy up them colours, he will make them purple with his lying rage. The devil is a MIXER. He mixes people up, he grabs their truths and twists them, grinding them up, offering them back like they were SCRIPTURE. But don't make a meal of his rancid bread. His LIES crawl into the BELLY of the SOUL. They FERMENT and PUTREFY!"

Clara turned her head and eyed him at the door. She beckoned him from her perch on the splintered milk crate for him to come in, the road map folded into a fan that did little to ease the stifling heat in the shack. "Come sit here," she insisted, but he held back, respectfully remaining outdoors where it was cooler and the threat of being mistaken for the risen dead was minimal. He slid across the outside of the shack and settled in a spot behind where she was seated, a knot in the wood giving him a full view. Clara spotted him through it, and playfully fanned him through it with the folded map. She moved her crate further back, so she could talk to him.

"When we get to Shamrock I'll have something special for you," she promised, her voice a low whisper through the slats of the shack wall. "There's a lead I've been following concerning my contact in Hollywood, and it's got connections to your target. Georgio let a few things slip when I had that little chat with him on his porch. It's a sure thing, your goal is where my goal is."

He frowned, unsure of what she was saying. He leaned against the shack, his thick, oily black blood smearing the planks in gory globs. "How can that be? Our targets are not the same, they don't communicate with one another."

"Goes to show what you know." She bit her bottom lip, the string of pearls hanging from her neck pinched between her forefinger and thumb. "Everyone wants to be seen. You should go to more of those movie flicks, you'd be surprised at how caught up you get. I bet you would get that need, too. The need to be seen. I bet you'd like standing up in front of people, talking and bragging about how there's no linear time where you're from. Like Heaven, only insanely boring. Nothing good, nothing bad, just one long, never-ending day of neutral."

His voice felt thick as it spilled through the space in the wooden slat. "My target doesn't want to be an actor. You're confusing that entity's goal with your own."

"I'm not confusing nothing," she said, resolute. She tapped a pearl on her tooth, the clacking irritating the fat woman with four children sitting to the left of her. "Where you go, I go, and everything comes together. That's how it's been, right from the beginning. I got your plan in sight as much as my own, and now they are woven together, all in a neat little package. " Her eyes danced with dark mirth. "It's going to be beautiful in California. The beaches are so warm you can singe your toes in the sand if you aren't careful."

"I'll be very careful," he assured.

He braced his stump against the outside wall. Black ooze seeped between the dry wooden slats.

She swivelled around on the crate, the pearl clasped in her fingers tap-tapping on her front tooth, all attention suddenly riveted on the preacher. He was handsome enough, if a little on the red side, a sure sign of a man who enjoyed his liquor, and lots of it. Clara leaned towards the ugly woman with the four children, ignoring the curious glares the woman gave her. "He talks an awful lot about the devil," Clara said. "One would think he knows him personally."

"You don't go talking like that about Preacher Joe!" The woman heaved a crying infant onto her breast, the cotton flowered print of her dress pulled tight by the effort. She had thick jowls and a large mole on her left cheek that had sprouted four hairs. One for every child. "He's saving our souls, don't you forget that. God Himself talks through him. Preacher Joe knows when the end is coming, he's gonna line our path with gold and lead us up into Paradise before this awful world buries us in its cracked soil."

Clara glanced at Preacher Joe, who was as red as a cherry in a whiskey and water. She let her pearls drop, her hand held up to stifle a yawn. The infuriated woman beside her muttered 'Heathen' and packed up her children, the baby lost inside of her cleavage. She shuffled them all off to the crowded opposite corner of the shack.

Clara looked on her abandonment with bemusement. "Seems I know how to clear a pew."

"People are easily offended here," he observed.

"Regardless of what they say, people always are." She scraped her crate closer to where his ear was pressed, the black ooze now a thick puddle at the base of the wooden slats. The heel of her shoe dug into it. "When someone tells you 'I'm never angry' or 'I'm not one to judge', facts are they are exactly both of those things. They say things like that to make you feel at ease and let down your defences, so when you have a moment of weakness they can fire off a fist at you, or dismiss you as unworthy. It's all about power and screwing the next guy over. Never trust a man who says he's honest, never believe a man who says 'I never judge'. These things are on their minds when they claim to not care about them. A truly trustworthy man wouldn't have to convince you, and a non-judgemental man wouldn't feel the need to stake claim to moral integrity. It's on their minds, all these good things they can't do, that's why they have to tell you all about it."

He winced at the way her heel dug into his essence. "That's an insufferably confusing ethos. It suggests people don't understand themselves."

"That's because they don't."

The ugly woman cast a glare at Clara before turning her face with its mole and four hairs back in rapt adoration of Preacher Joe, who was now lighting the tips of his fingers on fire, an old magic trick done with alcohol that any twelve year old knew how to do.

"See," Clara said, nodding at the woman and giving her a big smile. "She's a good follower of Preacher Joe, here. She's all tolerance and light, not a judgemental bone in her body."

He rested his head against the dry, creaking wood, the outside wall so fragile in construction it could blow over with too loud a whisper. "We should leave."

"Let me just hear the rest of this guy's bullfrog. With all that Heaven and Hell talk I'm thinking this one can really croak out a sermon."

Preacher Joe stood away from his makeshift pulpit, which was made up of haphazard bricks and a large hand-carved cross bolted into the centre, a gift from some talented parishioner. Large vines intertwined over its surface and in the centre were the crude figures of a nude man and woman, their nakedness in stark, disturbing detail. They were not young, and the carver had given them tortured, diseased faces, full of pockmarks. The eyes were misshapen, their limbs elongated and alien, with spidery branched fingers reaching up not to heaven, but to the slender snake that wound its way all around the cross. They seemed to be in worship of it, the woman holding up a round object, two large bites taken out of it, a used offering to their slithering god.

"The DEVIL knows well how to LIE."

"Amen!" a burly man in the back row shouted. There was a wave of murmured agreement.

"The minions of the DEVIL. They are his key keepers!"

"They are!" the mole faced woman proclaimed.

"They burrow into the SOUL and ROT it from within with the DEVIL'S LIES."

"Hallelujah!"

Clara turned to him again, her voice an impassive whisper. "We need a new vehicle to get us into Shamrock."

He ignored her, his attention riveted by Preacher Joe and his graceful movements at the pulpit, his arms swaying upward to an invisible source of power that seemed to be filling him with its supernatural grace. Or so he claimed in his exclamations, the congregation cheering him on, begging for the end to come nigh and take them all with him into the land of honey and riches.

Where he came from was no Heaven, and yet the people here were convinced that a non-linear life was an easy one, where there would no longer be any worries of right and wrong, of an act not yet committed influencing a past that never happened. They strove to become a part of the complex without having a clue how to understand it.

But he knew. The people here sought an end to life and death, to wander into the miasma of decades that pass by them in shadowy waves, all possibilities happening at once. Such simple people as these couldn't envision the real truth. For them to realize that Heaven was just as hard and incongruous as this world would break every tired spirit in that destitute shack.

Only Preacher Joe would remain standing, his arms wide, his lips curled back over a winning smile that beckoned all to know the glory he alone had found. "The DEVIL'S LIES are the worst kind of lies, because in every heart that listens his words sound like TRUTH!"

His outstretched arms shook violently, the clean, three piece tailored suit he wore wrinkled into thick lines as his back twitched and tore at odd angles, pulling him into an otherworldly trance that only he could fight off with success. His eyes bulged and rolled white, his head jerked back and then side to side, the movement so fast it was difficult to see his features. He frothed at the mouth, his tongue purple as he tried to spit out the demon that had so viciously begun its attack.

His head shook ever faster, until his face was nothing more than a smudged blur, a blank slate upon which no human features existed.

Clara let the pearls in her mouth drop. Her eyes were wide when she looked back over her shoulder, willing him to come into the shack with the other worshippers. At the pulpit, while Preacher Joe continued his unnatural, motion-blurred dervish, the piano player began banging out a Southern hymn, one which the congregation latched onto with gusto. Feet clad in worn shoes and hands calloused from overwork kept time in a steady rhythm. Other members of the congregation began twitching and fainting, arms outstretched upwards to an unknown Heaven, terror transformed into exultation. One of the children of the ugly woman ran up to the pulpit, his tiny head shaking side to side in a mock impersonation of the frightening vision Preacher Joe presented.

Clara glared, her eyes seeking him out through the slats in the shack's wall. She was paid no mind by any of the congregation around her, their stomping feet a roaring crescendo that threatened to tear the structure of their makeshift church apart.

"He's like you," she said, angry. "Just my luck to find another alien babbler."

"It's not possible," he assured, but he knew he was lying. There was no mistaking that misshapen warping of space and time, the amalgamated effects of an indulgence in motor oil. It sped up engines and thoughts and time, morphing them into this blurred chaos that sent a rush of awe through those who witnessed it. Clara laughed as Preacher Joe spun around, a mini-storm brewing around his ankles as space and time were tied into circular knots and forced to dance with him.

"I'll give him this–he's more entertaining than you. All you do is leak black ooze and mope."

"I don't care about your silly observation."

"Yes, you do. Look at that, moping already."

He looked on, impassive at the spiralling display of tornado limbs and flesh, a storm that was comfortable in its chaotic dance. He'd been like this once, he thought. As he watched he felt a sudden longing for those days where the past didn't have to be relegated to fleeting glimpses in his mind. He'd been this whirling devil that held onto all possibilities, the ends tied so tightly on each that he had known no such thing as worry, no questions burrowing deep inside of himself. Nothing mattered but the ebb and flow of one's existence.

Perhaps these people were right, and that was a sort of Heaven. But even alien angels like himself could take such assurance for granted.

He had to wonder who this Preacher Joe was, who spun and pulled upon the heartstrings of all who lived in this tiny, isolated community, their belief so keen on his message they had forgotten the world existed outside of this shack. All eyes were riveted upon the preacher's dance, the men holding their chins with dirty hands, concerned faces knowing they were looking upon the supernatural workings of some incomprehensible God.

Only Preacher Joe wore a fully tailored suit. The rest of his congregation eked out a life in overalls, and what suits were present were threadbare affairs of patched elbows and arms that were far too short for long limbs.

As suddenly as his spinning trick had begun, Preacher Joe stopped abruptly, his arms held out to balance himself, no tremor disturbing his rigid stance. He stood to his full height, his head held high as his eyes rolled skyward, to the holes in the tin roof of the shack. "When the day comes we will be AWARE!" He shook his shoulders, his head slumping to his chest. "The DEVIL will not have his snare on us."

"No, Sir!"

"Amen!"

"He won't catch us!"

"We will RISE into the FUTURE. We will lay down into the PAST. We will embrace the PRESENT." He closed his eyes, his lips breathing a beatific sigh at the very thought of it. "We will go HOME."

It was Clara who broke the rapturous spell.

"There's no such thing as home. There's just a place where you can tap your feet to music and have yourself a drink."

She ignored the scandalized glares and motioned to her companion that they were leaving. "Come on," she said to his curious, secretive onlooking. "There's nothing for us here."

"That man, that preacher. He's another being, he's one like me." He hesitated in following her, his bleeding stump sloshing his liquid stomach into it, making him feel ill. "I don't understand why he's here. He's not my target, and there are strict rules against going onto foreign planes, especially linear dimensions such as this one. I was not informed there were others of my kind working here."

She shrugged as she let the crudely constructed door to the alien's church slam behind her. "Don't ask me, I don't even get what you're so worried about. I say we light a match and let the lot of them burn up. It's not like they aren't looking forward to Heaven and they figure they're shoe ins." She cocked her head to one side as she looked on his shocked expression. "Don't go getting all high and mighty again; we both know better. These people don't appreciate the life they have, and they're content to spend it in utter misery while they figure something better has got to be around the corner. There isn't. It's just a discarded gift, this life, that's all their suffering is for."

He cast a glance back through the slats of the shack. Hungry, miserable faces looked upon Preacher Joe with expectant want, a starvation of soul and body apparent in every hollowed out stare.

He shook his head. "It's not that simple."

"Of course it is," Clara snapped. Her pearls clacked against each other as she gingerly stepped through the bush, veering to the left and away from their motor crash. "They're wasting their time listening to his rot. He says nothing but lies."

# Monsters

It wasn't long before they found Preacher Joe's motor car, a slim convertible that made Clara salivate. "It's impractical, like that first one," he tried to warn her, but she was keen to slide her arm along its polished, graceful sides, her hip bumping against the gleaming painted steel in a sultry caress. She sighed and dug into her handbag, pulling out her tin cigarette case.

"It's a beauty," she said, fishing out a match and lighting up. Within the darkness she was a solitary red ember. There was a deep swell of breath held, then slowly released as her smoke gathered in the thick, misted air around her. "Built for two. A cozy ride, all the way to Hollywood."

He had more important things on his mind than the road that never seemed to end. Clara reached into the motor car, her fingers gently smoothing out a greasy fingerprint that lay in wait on the clutch.

"We can't steal his car, it's inappropriate."

"How so?"

"He's no doubt on a mission. One similar to my own."

She scoffed, and braced her hands on the side door, her heel delicately kicked up at the romance the motor car was working on her. "He doesn't deserve a beauty like this, an unethical man like that."

It was his turn to be snide. "Ethics. That's a strange word on your tongue. Mind it doesn't burn your lips."

He braced his lower back against the trunk of the motor car, his black oiled wounds seeping onto its pristine white surface. Clara shooed him away, and tutted over the mark he'd smeared onto it. "He's the focal point of a group of human beings, their philosophy one I haven't yet been able to fathom. That has to count for some philanthropy, as you call it. I only impersonated a priest, he truly is a religious leader."

"Lunkhead, that's you." She took a handkerchief out of her small handbag, the one that she wrapped her switchblade in. He knew it from the pale bloodstains still evident on the kerchief's surface. "He's no leader, he's a confidence man, as snaky as they come. Didn't you see the expensive cut of that suit he was wearing or that dental work? Those teeth of his glint good and shiny, and that tells me that repair is new, even if his flesh and blood isn't. He's the worst kind of con, taking money from poor folks who can barely rub two crumbs together." Her eyes were bright and earnest as she met his gaze, not a shimmer of hesitation within their glass surface. "Remember how I told you some people deserve their fates? This is one hell of a good example."

"You can't kill him," he reminded her. He sighed in impatience as she slid into the driver's seat, her hands testing the steering wheel in giddy glee. "There's a river near here. He'll just slither off into the water and find another host."

"He'll be stuck in a coyote, then," she assured.

"So be it, until he tears out the throat of another human being, creating a door to slip in. Coyotes are plentiful around here, and from what I've heard such attacks do happen on occasion."

She glanced at him over her shoulder, her skin opalescent in the moonlight. She had the appearance of stone and with just as much heart. She remained in the front driver's seat like a carefully polished, sanded work of marble, destined to remain in that haughty pose forever.

"I'm not giving this up," she promised.

"When I tell you that it's impossible to kill him, I hope you are not looking to me for a solution." He was feeling weak from the loss of tissue and sinew muscle in his host, and he collapsed next to the back wheel, his good arm draped over his stump, fruitlessly trying to stop the constant shifting of parts of himself through its gaping hole. "We don't just randomly murder our own kind, we're not like you."

"There is nothing random about what I do," she coldly informed him. She took a final drag of her cigarette and tossed the tiny lit stub that was left into the deeps of the thicket. A warm breeze pulled the branches towards them before tugging them back, a swaying gossip session in creaking wood. "You should quit the comparing, that stupid whining of yours, 'I have my target, you don't'. You don't understand what I'm here to do, that's all. Lunkhead. I have my reasons, and they aren't just blind orders."

"I'm not blinded by orders. What I'm doing is specific, even important."

"You don't know what your target looks like. You don't know where he, or she, is. You don't know how long he's been here, or even if you should be trusting me to know where he is." Her marble pose remained stock still while the shadows of leaves passed over her in the near darkness. A flickering statue of marble.

A reflection of a human being, that's what she was. An image, set on glass, real enough to believe solid, but impossible to touch. He was wrong, she wasn't chiseled out of rock as he had first thought. She was a wispy trick of darkness seeping through light.

"At least I have a word or two with the people I take out. You've never told me your target's crime."

He shrugged. "That detail isn't necessary."

"There's the difference between you and me. I'm a detail girl. I like knowing why people have to die and I have all kinds of good reasons." Her eyes narrowed as she peered into a deep, black part in the thicket, a rustling making her pause before continuing. "All you do is whine about it. 'My target, my target, my left watery nut for my target'. If you ask me, the reason you haven't found this person yet is because you don't really want to kill him. It's not a big moral dilemma to me. If you don't feel like killing your friend, then don't do it."

He was angered by this. "My feelings have nothing to do with the matter."

"My target, my target," she whined, mocking him. "Feelings are everything. It's why you keep going on about it. If you ask me, this constant whining of yours says you don't give a devil's damn about what your friend supposedly did that was so bad because you know in your oily, slimy heart that the crime doesn't fit the punishment."

"What of your punishments?" he snapped back. "What did Stella do that was so evil you had to play a game of x's and o's on her eyes?"

Clara was quiet for a long moment, her attention still riveted on the dark hollow in the thicket. Leaves whispered harshly inside of it.

"I never killed her."

"I don't believe you."

She remained lost inside of the memory. Mention of Stella had created an inward question that he was surprised existed. When she turned her attention back on him, her face was as grey and polished as sanded stone, and the illusion of her solidity was set again. "Moral platitudes only work when you're on the other side of the universe. This is my dimension, and you have to trust me to know what's what. Don't judge me again. You won't like the outcome."

He clenched his remaining fist, longing to tell her how wrong she was in her assumption that he had to believe in her. Clara, like the preacher, was so covered in lies they slid off of her marble surface to evaporate in the air around her in a thick, impenetrable mist. Nothing she said was true. Not one observation, not one philosophical reasoning that slid from her ruby red lips had merit. She had only one concern: herself. The person to whom she lied to most of all.

He couldn't quite understand why he followed her, other than that there was nothing to lose in talking to a person who cares nothing for you or anyone else.

"I'm forgetting who I am," he said.

He slid away from the crook of the injured arm, holding onto the ribcage of his host, the only firm leverage in the battered body that he could find.

"Aren't you the lucky one," Clara bitterly replied.

There was a pronounced rustling in the thicket, a sound that made them both tense. Coyotes. He had read about these scavenging creatures, four-legged beasts that tore into human flesh. Or so the legends had it, for lies were common enough to be half-truths and exaggerations, and who was he to deny a meal to a hungry animal? To be free of this current decrepit human shack would be a comfort. The coyote, in its benevolenc,e would latch onto his throat and rip him apart and devour him, not realizing it was giving him a new place to live.

He closed his eyes, and waited for the teeth to sink in. He wondered what it would be like, walking on four legs instead of two. At least he wouldn't have to follow Clara any longer; he could forge his own path. His studies told him a coyote's sense of smell was strong, and he could search out his target with that sensitive organ alone.

Disappointment came in the human shape that emerged from the thicket, the clean cut vision of Preacher Joe who walked towards them out of the darkness, his arms outstretched in greeting.

"I never hoped to find another one of us again, not on this terrible, lonely place full to bursting with suffering." He smiled sweetly at Clara, his hip against the hood of his motor car. "How charming that he has found you as a companion. I've never much liked your kind, myself."

* * *

"That's right, my brother, just a few feet more."

"I can feel it, Preacher Joe! I can feel your healing power coming over my soul!"

"I'm sure you do." The bullet went clean through the side of the parishioner's skull, where it ricocheted inside the silky grey matter, killing him instantly. The parishioner collapsed to the ground, at the feet of the trembling figure that lay forcibly animated at the wheel of the motor car. With a relieved sigh he slid out of the gaping wound in the missing arm and slipped into the new offering, a bubbling acid bath laying thick on the sandy ground behind him. He coughed out a chunk of skull from the back of his new host's throat and shakily stood up, his jelly body melding to his new house. He turned to Preacher Joe, unsure whether he was supposed to be grateful or horrified.

"It's comfortable," was all he could say.

"It's quite a treat, Frankie, you stumbling to see me like this."

Frankie. That name again.

He frowned, not sure how to respond. "That's not who I am."

"Of course it is," his alien friend replied. "I'd know you anywhere. There's a certain shadow to your features no matter what cloak you're wearing, and you are Frankie, through and through." He grinned, white teeth and the gleam of metal shining in the darkness. "An imperfect reflection. Like ripples on water."

"I wouldn't worry about it," Clara warned him, her words an admonishment of Preacher Joe who was sitting across from them on a log, a long stick playing in the sand. X's and o's. Preacher Joe drew a line down the middle and giggled over its secret significance.

"He's obviously mad," Clara whispered harshly.

"Here I thought you were in California," he said, shaking his head. "Making your dream come true, whatever silly reality it was you wanted to create. I'm not upset you left me here, as you can see, I'm content to be here, pretending on paradise. But never you. You're more ambitious than I am, I suppose." He gave them both a toothy grin, his gold tooth glinting in the moonlight. "I wish I could be like you, Frankie. Just giving up those pieces of myself I didn't want to deal with. How much easier that would be, to just discard part of myself."

"I don't understand. Why are you here?"

Preacher Joe spread his arms wide, encompassing them both in his spiritual embrace. "Why not be here as anywhere? What other heaven can there be than this linear world, where the present is obvious and the past can't crawl back up on you, and the future is always open, like a vast horizon waiting for you to head towards it. I preach Hell and Damnation to these small-minded souls because they can't appreciate the beauty of what they already have. A moment to moment life. Every second an exclamation of something new. Small-minded and trapped in here, that's what these people are." He tapped the side of his head, the slight indentation revealing the bullet that had ended his host's life.

Preacher Joe had a great fondness for his pistol.

"They sent me here for exploration, and got bored when I turned native. That's what I figure. Haven't had orders in what feels like decades. Every now and then I get myself a clean house of skin and move on to another part of the country. A flock might go hungry, but a preacher never does."

He leaned back, resting his head on the tree behind him, a long stick drawing lines through his solitary game of x's and o's. His suit was freshly pressed, not a wrinkle from his earlier dervish visible. The pistol he sported was well hidden beneath his vest, with only the shadow of its handle visible in the moonlight. There was something eerily familiar about him, the imprint of a person they had met once before creeping along his features. He smiled and the mirage immediately faded, leaving nothing but an alien blur behind.

He narrowed his gaze at Clara, who stubbornly remained in the driver's seat of his car. "You, now, you're a puzzle. Why would you hang around Frankie, knowing what he is and how he has to survive? There's not a human I've met yet who wouldn't find the whole taking over a stranger's corpse thing a little unsettling. You didn't so much as blink an eye when Frankie slid into our Billy Jameson's flesh." Preacher Joe let out a low whistle at her apathy. "Billy was a mighty good carver, too. Shame we won't be getting that service anymore."

"He keeps calling me Frankie," he said to her, and she waved his concern away, agitated by Preacher Joe's judgement.

"We got more similarities of purpose than even he realizes," she explained. "We're going to California. I'm going to meet up with a contact there, a fella who's going to get me into the moving pictures. There's talk he's worked with Lillian Gish, and anyone worth their salt knows that kind of prestige isn't something you can ignore."

She checked her nails, and clucked over their dirt.

"You're mighty confident for a girl who has to beg a ride," Preacher Joe observed.

"Don't worry about me, I don't need to beg. I got talent in spades," she bragged as she rummaged in her handbag and took out a nail file. "I once won a beautiful baby contest, not a month after I was born. 'Chicago's Bonniest Baby', that was me. Front page and all. I was born to be in the moving pictures, I was."

"Frankie," Preacher Joe said to him, his voice in earnest. "Tell me you won't go back to California. You should stay here, with me, we can travel the rest of the country together, bringing our dance on the road, our Dervish Obscuria." He was intent as he leaned closer, the stick he had used to draw in the sand piercing the earth's flesh. "We can get into the souls of these stupid people. We'll take their money and go to Europe. Or not, Germany can be a superstitious place these days. It might be better to go somewhere farther, like India, where there are constant riots and thus plenty of new hosts to go around."

He bristled at the very idea, Preacher Joe's gold tooth sitting ill in his memory. "I'm going to California to take out a target that has been assigned me by my superiors," he insisted. He drew his heel across the game of x's and o's Preacher Joe had drawn in the dirt, obscuring it entirely. "I'm not here to play games with human beliefs in order to run from my responsibilities."

"A shame. You really are a fool." Preacher Joe dusted off his trousers and stood up, his hand held out in cheery friendship. "We can shake on it. That's how they seal the truth on this planet. By shaking hands."

He clasped the preacher's cold hand and was roughly pulled to standing, his nose nearly touching Preacher Joe's. Joe's eyes were black with motor oil, his breath metallic as his slimy words slid out. "You think you're the moral high ground, but you're not. Responsibilities. Targets. They don't exist. But then, how can I expect you to know that? You're only a fragment of yourself, Frankie. The only thing you are is a forgotten task that was never meant to be completed."

He released him, pushing him against the passenger door of the motor car. Preacher Joe cast a long, dark glare at Clara before shoving his hands in his pockets and shrugging inward. He rolled back and forth on his heels before turning his back on both of them.

"Take the motor car. I've no use for it anymore."

He descended into the thicket, its darkness obscuring him until he was completely absorbed. They listened, himself and Clara, for the breaking branches and footsteps to fade into an untraceable distance. On its periphery, hands were clapping in joy, humans dancing over the promises of death.

He turned to Clara, who remained staring at the black hollow of the thicket. "We should go."

"You two... you're just...." She bit her bottom lip, the pearls at her throat rolled between forefinger and thumb. "I'm always stuck with the monsters. Rotten luck, I guess."

He stepped gingerly over the steaming remains of his former injured host, his hands braced on the passenger door. "Like attracts like," he explained.

"Like hell it does." She narrowed her eyes at the thicket, her lips pursed in thought. "What if I did it? What if I just left you here to spend the rest of your days with him, to be some leftover monster spreading poison all over the world?"

"You won't."

She turned on the ignition, the engine coming to life with the smoothest hum they had ever heard. He remained balanced against the passenger door, his hands clutching its side, waiting with perverse expectation for her to make good on her word and escape from him. Perhaps she would drive forward a few feet and then careen back, eager to run him down. Perhaps she would turn the engine off, and get out and walk.

Each of those scenarios filled him with a strange joy.

She reached over and opened the passenger door, beckoning him to get in. His liquid heart fell into the bottom of his host's foot, settling deep in the heel. He slid into the passenger seat and its luxurious comfort with ill ease, the road they were set to travel a long, tortuous stretch before them. It was rife with dangers. There was so much blood on their trail, someone was bound to sniff them out. That kind of bloodhound could rip them both apart.

She reached under the driver's seat and pulled out a shining piece of metal. As she turned onto the road and began following it to their destination, she tossed it into his lap.

"I'm guessing that's a souvenir that Preacher Joe decided to keep. He'll be sorry he lost it."

He turned it over and over in his palm, the implications curious.

A sheriff's badge. Sheriff Borgen's.

Preacher Joe's gold tooth was the same brassy hue.

# Reynolds Hotel

The Reynolds Hotel was a bleak affair at first glance, especially considering its location. Though it was built for comfort, it had an imposing aura, not unlike the outside walls of a prison, the simple windows begging to be lined with bars, with lonely, angry men staring out of them. The latter was prevalent, since the hotel was the usual stop for travelling salesmen. They stared out of their small windows to the street below, sallow faces devoid of family and friends, carefully monitoring the world's miserable progress.

Most of the cars on the lot were black coaches, with layers of desert dust and mud caked on the hoods. The salesmen themselves looked worn, their suitcases and small packages of wares dragged behind them, all of them seeking a good stiff drink and some decent rest. It wasn't an easy job travelling across the country over and over again, trying to make a buck. Reynolds Hotel was the one place a hard-working peddler could drop his professional ruse, undo his tie and grab a solid bottle of whiskey to drink alone and in peace.

The lull of motor oil tickled the back of his throat, but he ignored it. Clara was all smiles as she parked their ridiculously extravagant motor car in between two basic black coaches, the gleaming off white paint job mocking the simplicity of the other automobiles.

"Can you believe we're here?" she giggled. Her eyes danced as she took in the clientele trudging through the entrance. "I came here plenty of times, once with Ricky Blue Eyes, and once with Jimmy the Shank. I can't really say who else, they're all the same face after a while. But this is as far as I got no matter how hard I tried to get to California. Someone always dragged me back to Chicago, kicking and screaming."

"I imagine."

She pursed her lips and checked her lipstick in her small hand mirror, her pale white skin glowing eerily in the dusk. "I know the concierge here. I did a bit of fancy work for him a while back, and he owes me one. So put away your wallet, this one's on me."

He didn't need her favours, and he peeled off a few bills anyway, shoving them into her palm. "That's the last of the cut you stole from Georgio. Unlike your friend, I don't believe in owing you anything."

She cast him a cold glare, her exit from the motor car swift and graceful while his own was clumsy. He fumbled with the door, and she left him behind as he struggled to open it, the long body of his host unfolding from the car like a complex origami puzzle. He smoothed out the wrinkles of his suit and adjusted his vest, the gold chain of his watch dangling at just the right angle, his pork-pie hat affixed in as jaunty and cheery a way as the drummers who populated this place.

He felt constrained and over eager. He fit in perfectly.

Though the Reynolds Hotel sat in the middle of what was the most southern of places, that being Texas, there was a distinctive northern feel to it that couldn't be shaken. He passed a couple of snaky-looking characters who mumbled to one another as he followed Clara inside, their hats obscuring their faces, cigarettes lit and held aloft in question after them. The foyer of the hotel was far from grand, its furnishings simple, the atmosphere oppressive and dark. A long oak counter separated them from the inner sanctum of the hotel, an impressive array of cubbyholes filled with various envelopes and packages cluttering the space behind the clerks. A young woman with bleached blond hair plastered in severe waves against her scalp gave them both a warm smile, one that didn't reach the hollow judgement in her blue eyes.

"Mr and Mrs...?" she asked.

"We aren't together," Clara assured. She pursed her lips and shrugged her shoulder at him, dismissive. "He's my assistant. We have two rooms booked, one for Clara...."

"Clara!"

A short, thin man with a weasel countenance and sharply parted, slicked back black hair marched up, his arms outstretched in greeting. He kissed her on both cheeks, his hands pressing a firm grip on her arms. "Clara, my Clara, how good it is to see you again!"

"Now, Reggie, you don't have to be so formal, not when we're old friends like we are." She gave him a coquettish wink and flicked the tip of her finger across his nose in flirting familiarity. "I'm not some special guest, you don't have to give me the royal treatment. Just simple and plain, that'll do. Only... A wine list might be nice. So send that on up later."

"You have no idea how much I've longed for you to come back! Nothing but the best for you, my dearest Clara!" he exclaimed. His grin faltered slightly when he realized she was not alone. "And you are?"

"This is Frankie," she said, too quickly, and Reggie gave her a puzzled look.

"Frankie," he said, obviously trying to paste the face he saw now to one he already knew. He shook his head. "I'm sorry, I didn't quite recognize you. But then, it has been over a year. Things change so quickly in this business, isn't that the truth? People in, people out, business in, business out. A real valley and peak of success and failure that never wants to end." His former exuberant appearance tripped over his inner disappointments, leaving him confused in their presence. "Clara..." he said, as though not sure she was really there, and was more illusion than fact.

She slid her arm in the crook of Reggie's elbow and pulled him along towards the elevators, which were richly decorated in hammered tin, the surface gleaming with complex flowers in raised relief. "We'll have a drink, Reggie," she said, her voice full of sing-song pleasantry. "We'll go to the same room, just like last time."

She gave her companion a glance over her shoulder. "Finish up, will you, Frankie? Reggie and I have some catching up to do."

As quickly as they had arrived, she disappeared into the elevator with her old friend, his arm shaking as he held it across her shoulders and guided her further in. The elderly elevator operator gave them both a respectful nod before shutting the gates and pulling the tin doors closed with his expert touch on the lever.

"Everyone knows she's just a whore."

He rubbed his jaw with the palm of his host's hand and turned to the bleached blond woman at the hotel desk. She was leaning over a ledger file in what a Hollywood director would call a 'provocative pose'. She tapped a pencil at her bottom lip, her blue eyes sizing him up. "She's bad news, but I get that you've figured that out already."

"What I don't understand," he said, "Is how I can be in Texas and no one here possesses one fifth of that famous Southern hospitality. Or accent."

She gave him a slow, lazy smile and rested her elbows on the large, oak desk. "Nobody who comes here wants to be here. It's just a rest stop to somewhere else." She nodded at the elevator where Clara and Reggie had taken off to catch up on old times, a meeting he hoped didn't end in a game of x's and o's. "Your girl has a long history with this place. She tends to come here, draped on some backwater bully's arm, thinking she's all special for it. But she's no different from any of the other molls and mistresses who come here, keeping them travelling salesmen company. She's just a shot of whiskey. Feels good at the time, but too much of it just plain ruins your life."

He leaned against the oak desk, and rapped at the thick wood with his knuckles, feeling the strength of its solidity. "We're going to Hollywood," he confessed. "She thinks she's going to be a star."

"Her and a million more girls just like her." The blonde rolled her eyes and leaned back from the counter, her chin jutted out in haughty judgement. "I'll give her this, though. She's got a real killer attitude. That alone might get her toes through the door."

His own blood pulsed cold alongside his host's veins. "Yes. You are absolutely right."

She gave him a small smile and then slid over to the wall and its rows of keys. She picked room 313 and handed the key to him, pressing its cold metal shape into his palm and closing it up with a teasing embrace on his hand. "It's a nice room," she promised, her voice a near whisper. "You're a nice guy, from what I've met of you. You don't want to be hanging with a girl like that. She'll destroy you, in ways you don't even know yet."

He clenched his fist lightly around the key and gently pulled away from the tenderness of her touch. "I'm afraid I know all too well," he told her. Then, because he felt she understood some of his secrets, that she had knowledge that was deferential to his cause, he looked her in the eyes and said, without hesitation: "May I have a can of motor oil sent up to my room? And if you could supply a shot glass as well... That would be most beneficial."

* * *

No one from the South stayed at the Reynolds Hotel. Not even the bellhop possessed a proper Southern accent, and instead had little understanding of English, babbling incessantly in his native French. "J'ouvres la porte, pour vous."

"Thank you."

The bellhop ushered his luggage into the room ahead of him, small suitcases that were placed at the foot of the bed with theatrical flair. There was a hasty brush of a hand on the hotel bed and a slight tutting sound emitted over the occurrence of a wrinkle in the top blanket, but once these problems were dealt with, the bellhop had little to say, other than 'Merci, monsieur'. The bellhop then performed a heel to toe rolling balancing act that suggested he was expecting something.

"Is it money you are looking for?"

"L'argent, un beaucoup de l'argent, monsieur. Merci, monsieur."

He sighed and reached into his side pocket, pulling out the very last of Georgio's wealth. "I'd disinfect this first, if I were you. I hear a dead man's money tends to hold curses."

"Merci, monsieur."

The bellhop was unconcerned as he pocketed the cash and whistled his way out of the hotel room, his happiness echoing down the long corridor.

He slumped into a chair near the door, contemplating the dullness of his surroundings. The bed was simple, the linens crisp and clean. In a small room to the right was a bathing room the size of a closet, with an upright shower for the convenience of hotel patrons. An unusually extravagant addition, he thought, since most hotels of this ilk had a communal bathing room at the end of the hall, where one had to be given an allotted time slot for cleanliness. An unwrapped mint lay on his pillow, which he picked up and discarded into the trashcan near the window. Outside, the world drifted past in sandstorm dunes, a Mars landscape of molten heat and dry desolation.

He turned away from the small window, reluctant to be yet another drummer prisoner, eking out the spare moments of his free time by staring down the jailing of his freedom. He hung up his suit jacket and placed his host's hands in the deep pockets of his trousers, the black bands on the arms of his white shirt chafing the starched fabric against his skin. Despite the art deco wallpaper and a few flowery touches, this room wasn't much different from the one he had occupied in Chicago. All that was missing was the outlined shadow of a cross above the bed.

He opened the side table drawer. No omission, then. A Gideon had placed a portable copy of the New Testament within it. He closed the drawer, overwhelmed by the unpleasant feeling of running in place to a point past exhaustion.

There was a knock at the door and he opened it eagerly, hoping it was his order of motor oil. They had taken their time bringing it. He was looking forward to the slick, black ooze that made life on this linear dust bowl easier to bear, the liquid outline of its influence muting his increasing sense of unease.

So it was with grave disappointment that he saw a man in a police officer's uniform standing before him instead, his badge held out in proud view.

"Don't mean to be causing you no inconvenience," the officer said in what was a strangely refreshing Texas drawl. "But seeing as how the folks using this place has been on the road and all, I was just wonderin' if I could ask you a few questions."

There was an eerie familiarity about the policeman, as though they had met before. He nearly asked him if they had, but stopped himself just in time, wisely not willing to reveal too much about his acquaintances, especially with Clara as his road raging companion.

"There was an accident, just up a ways between Foss and Texola. Pretty nasty smash up, don't know how anyone could have walked away from it." He looked his target up and down, searching out invisible injuries. "I reckon you don't know much about it, seeing as how not a hair on you has so much as a bend to it. Mighty strange business all around, I must say. Leaving a scene like that and not telling no one. Killed a farmer outright. Truck on fire, burnt him to crispy bacon."

The officer gave him a wan smile, and the familiarity grew into an understanding. He had shades of Sheriff Borgen to him, enough to be his brother. Perhaps this was the lunkhead he had spoke of, the one he had trouble keeping in line. There was no one to do so now, not with Preacher Joe sporting that gold tooth and the rest of Sheriff Borgen's skin.

"A nasty accident ain't something I properly set to mind," the officer continued, his hat tipped again in polite deference. "But seeing as how my brother ain't answering his calls these days, and not a one has seen him for the past couple of weeks or so, I'm getting a little on the worried side. Can't blame a man for asking questions when someone he knows well has gone and vanished and there's a car wreck on the horizon with more than half its passengers missing. Makes a guy ask lots of questions, that it does." He smiled, but there was little mirth in his voice. "A brother don't just up and disappear like that, no sir. Especially not when he's a Sheriff and all." He narrowed his eyes on his prey. "You seem a mighty quiet sort of fellow. Like you're thinking hard on something. You got some information I might be requiring?"

"No. I don't think so."

"Well, that's a strange way to answer, if you don't mind my saying so. Either you know so, or you don't. It's just a car crash is all, you either saw it or didn't. Not thinking so doesn't go into it, if you ask me. What is it you don't think happened?"

Sheriff Borgen was wrong. His brother was no lunkhead. When brains had been handed down the Borgen clan, it was this brother who had gained all the intuitive cells, his understanding thrusting through the miasma of unspoken lies and hidden meanings to get deep into the truth. Borgen's brother frowned slightly at the malingering silence that greeted him, and shoved his way into the hotel room. He took his hat off in standard Southern politeness, the rim turned around in half circles by the busy workings of his slightly tremulous fingertips.

"It's a mighty strange thing to lose a brother," he said, his voice losing all sense of brevity and descending further into a strained treble of desperation. "Him and I, we shared a womb together once. Him being my twin and all. Oh sure, we don't look alike none, but when you bunk with someone that closely at the beginning of life, you get a connection you don't have with anyone else." He brushed a hand over the suit jacket draped on the coat rack, the tip of his thumb brushing against the tiny drop of dried blood at the centre of its collar. "You get certain ideas about things that might have happened to your bunk-mate, like a phone line that ain't made by people, but that lives between you. Something umbilical. Like how I know when he's in trouble." He let out a low sigh, his gaze riveted to the paisley carpet at his feet. "And how I knows when that line is dead."

"I don't know anything about your brother."

Borgen's twin kicked at the carpet, his heel dredging up fibres on an ugly red paisley flower. "You say that so quick, like you're right sure. Like you met him once and you got to convince yourself you don't remember him." He tapped the side of his head and offered another wan smile. "Got all the intuition, but my brother, he got all the brawn. A bit of a handicap. You can't go lying to a guy like me, I can suss one of them fibs out with the best of them. Trouble is, I got to figure on how much of a lie are you telling, and the only way I'm going to get that answer is if I drag you off to my station and give you a proper talking to."

He grinned, his teeth stained by nicotine, their alignment perfect. "But I don't want to do that. I can see by looking at you that you're a man that thinks all the world is full of nothing but evil and sorrow. That there ain't no good in any of it, and all we're made for is to kill or be killed. It ain't all like that, no matter what it is that's making you believe it to be so. There's real good in this world, good people too, like my brother. Like me. Don't go giving us good folks a short shrift just because the bad is loud and noisy. Folks like to help out more than just run each other down, that's a real rule those bad folks don't tell you about. There's more of us than them. They don't want that getting out, neither, and maybe it's the same for good folks like me, like my brother. Like you. We're just real quiet about it, is all."

And he was quiet.

A long, tortuous moment that stretched past infinity between them, defying the linear time that ticked each second off in measured amounts. An eternity of information erupted, a long, never-ending confession that ended with a cough directed nervously into his fist.

"These things do happen," Sherrif Borgen's brother agreed.

"I didn't say anything."

"Don't need to."

He closed his eyes. Clara had been so wrong, thinking they were immune to the reaches of the law. Good people, bad people. No one was truly invisible.

"I'm sorry," he said to Borgen's brother, who merely nodded in sad understanding and reached for the set of cuffs at his side.

His liquid, jelly body pulsed within his host's arms, tensing the hands. He'd never done anything this tactile before, but he knew the strength he could muster was considerable.

Coordinated speed was never his strong suit, but he managed to subdue the officer long enough to get a good grip on his neck. With one twist he gave it a radial snap.

The body collapsed at his feet.

"I'm so sorry," he repeated.

# Feather Boa

She was breathless in the morning when she arrived at his door, a large ostrich feather boa draped around her shoulders. "What's all this? New digs already?"

She peered over his shoulder into his room and tutted over the acid burn stain visible on the carpet at his bedside. "You'll have to move that throw rug over to cover it. Jeez, what was the problem this time, that last one looked healthy enough. Not a blemish on him and you go wasting it. I thought he fit properly and you were happy with it. Guess you're more into the fashion angle than I thought." She cocked her head to one side as she studied him. "Yeah, this one does have a slightly stronger jaw. I can see why you like it."

He didn't want to talk to her. He had spent the majority of the evening staring at the acid blotch the disintegration of his last host had burned into the carpet, the wide brimmed hat of policeman Borgen turned in half circles by the workings of his fingertips. It was early, he'd had no rest, and her painful cheerfulness grated on the remaining impulse of his host's nerves, causing his own inner jelly body to ache.

"We need to leave," he said.

She rolled her eyes and tossed her feather boa over her shoulder and sauntered ahead of him, her fancy, beaded handbag clutched firmly in her grip. This morning she was an actress in high form. She sported new shoes, he noted, and a new, silky, silver-coloured dress that draped over her in carefully measured pleats, a fashionable lesson in geometry.

"I haven't even had the complimentary breakfast," she pouted. She gave her own chin a playful pinch and giggled as she made her way down the long, dimly lit hallway, her fingers playing in the stringy down of the ostrich feathers, pulling them off one by one. A trail of soft lines lay behind her on the dark red carpet.

A feather floated past him, then settled on the heel of his shoe. To his dismay it held a bright red dot upon its pristine white surface. A calling card for murder.

"I thought Reggie was your friend," he said. He bent over to pick up the feather, the blood smearing onto his fingertips as he touched it. "I'm guessing this is a recent argument."

"Uh-uh, I asked a question first, and you still didn't answer me. Why did you need a new host?"

He bristled at the playful intensity of her accusation. The last thing he needed was her twisted lectures on right and wrong. "We need to leave. Now."

He grabbed her by the arm and dragged her to the elevator, her feather boa trailing behind her, tiny droplets of red visible at intervals as it twisted along the corridor carpet. She swore and tried to tear herself away from him, but he ignored her protests and shoved her into the opening elevator, its elderly operator mute as they argued within the tiny tin confines.

"You're a miserable brute!"

"Just settle down. We'll head straight to the car, we'll be out of here while the morning's young."

"I'm not going anywhere with you! I want my continental breakfast!" She punched him with her stony fists, her excellent aim giving the elevator operator pause as he raised his white bushy brow.

Two solid punches, right to the jaw.

He felt the wallop rock his head back, and he shook his shoulders to bring his host's broken neck back into alignment.

"That was uncalled for."

"I ought to play it, you know, I ought to force a few x's and o's onto you for good measure. You deserve it, you brute. You coward. You miserable, boring bastard!"

The elevator landed on the ground floor and he tossed her out of it, her heels catching on her long strand of pearls, the force of it alternatively choking and toppling her. She shot a look of killer proportions back at him before righting herself, her heavily painted lips a twisted grimace. The broken string of pearls rolled in a scattered circle around her, threatening every misstep.

Her careful guise was easily ruined. With her hair askew, and the skirt of her dress hiked past her knees, she was every inch the vicious whore she was accused of being.

"I hate you."

The blond clerk watched them with amusement, a nail file put to use as she feigned disinterest. She was no actress. She gave him a knowing wink as he marched past, the corner of her lips upturned in carnal understanding.

"Don't worry, these lover's spats don't last long, especially not with a girl like her."

"I'm afraid they can last for an eternity," he informed her.

He tried to ignore the confused expression on the blonde's face. This was the beginning of her morning of horror. Perhaps she would have that same expression when she finally found the bleeding body of Reggie, her boss, his eyes a game of tic-tac-toe. In his mind, he could already hear her bloodcurdling scream.

He slammed the front door to the hotel behind him, eager to get back into the motor car and onto the road. He'd leave Clara behind if he had to. There was no reason to drag her along. He'd find his target without her.

He would have to.

But he could see her from where he was standing on the top step, and she already poured herself into the driver's seat, her white gloves angrily gripping the steering wheel as she waited for him. She hated him, but still needed him. This was how her version of care worked.

He passed two shady characters on the stairs, possibly the same men from the night before, though it was difficult to tell. They all had the habit of anonymity, the brims of their hats creating an everyman gangster that couldn't be properly identified in a police station.

"Be seeing you around, Frankie," one of them said, and took a long drag of his cigarette.

He paused and turned back to them. He wanted to ask them, once and for all, why everyone he met thought he was this Frankie person, and just what was so significant about him. But Clara honked her horn and he didn't want to raise any more questions than he had already left behind. The discovery of murder wasn't going to take long.

He ignored the two men whose gazes followed him intently as he made his way to the car, skipping two steps at a time to gain speed. Clara was already pulling out of the parking garage, and he latched onto the passenger side door, opening it while she slowly turned the car around. He slammed the door shut as she put the car into a higher gear and careened back onto route 66.

"We'll drive all night," she said. Her voice was curt, still angry. "We'll get to California in twenty-four hours if we keep following this road. No looking behind, no looking to the side, got it?" She let out a deep sigh as she peeled off her ridiculous feather boa and shoved it at him. "Put that under the seat, mind you don't ruin it. It's expensive. Those feathers don't come cheap, you know. And here..." She tossed him her handbag, its weight landing in his lap with a cruel snap. "Get me a cigarette, why don't you. A girl could shrivel into ashes waiting for a smoke from the likes of you."

He slowly took her cigarette case out of her handbag, but not before he fished out the familiar switchblade. It was encased in two layers of handkerchiefs, and even this didn't stop the blood from leaking out of its steel prison.

Behind them, the Reynolds Hotel was already a small square on the horizon, the horror it held secreted away in stains on the carpet and mysterious disappearances. He patted the inside pocket of his jacket in a nervous twitch, one that mimicked Clara's need to clack pearls at her teeth.

This is what murder does, he thought. It gives you strange habits.

The weight of the gun he had taken from the body of Sheriff Borgen's brother made him feel off balance, even when seated. The handle dug into his host's ribs, a steady reminder of an unfortunate end.

The open road lay before them, a pristine vista of opportunity, sanitizing the ugly actions of the past. They were now exactly past the halfway point to California. Through New Mexico and then Arizona, a straight line that cut through the desert, a preserved road, locked into an eternity that was as stoic as the vast plains of rock surrounding them.

"Have you ever regretted killing someone?" he asked.

She flicked her fingers over the radio dial, bringing a scratchy ragtime piano tune into clarity. She bopped happily in her seat, her hands keeping time with its positive rhythm. "Some people deserve what they get, I told you that before." Her cigarette stumbled at her lips. It fell into her lap and she quickly retrieved it, uttering a harsh curse. The motor car veered slightly to the left and she steered it back onto the road, which was thankfully empty of oncoming traffic.

Too much of her existence depended on that nebulous concept known to her kind as Fate. She tempted it at every turn, even when it had been against her. A veering, near crash sometimes saved at the last second, sometimes not.

"Once they're gone, there's no point in worrying about it. Done is done." She flashed him a wide, disingenuous smile. A predator's grin. "This ride is wonderful, ain't it? And to think it has a radio! I never been in a motor car that had a radio before, it's real treat, ain't it, being able to listen in on the world like this. We didn't have no radio in my house growing up. No music, no dancing, no card playing, no books. Real upright and uptight. Twas immoral, that's what they said, all the uptight adults in my life." She sucked a long drag of her cigarette and then tossed its remains onto the dusty road. "Sure taught me, all those rules of what you can and can't do. There's power in going against what folks think is proper. I'm living proof of that."

It wasn't a power he was envious of, but he kept his opinion to himself. The closer they came to his target, the more he felt an inward unease, a rising sense of guilt that started somewhere in Chicago, poked holes in his ideology in Foss, and now, with the blood and skin of Sheriff Borgen's brother sliding over his jellied essence, he felt fully engulfed by Preacher Joe's descriptive Hell. She was better suited to his job, he knew. There were no moral questions burning in her black heart, no ambiguities of purpose. Her world wasn't full of good people versus bad. The quiet influence of caring meant nothing to her.

She put her foot on the gas and spun headlong into the abyss. It was his own failing if he couldn't do the same.

"There was this dog, once," she said. She shifted in her seat, uncomfortable. "I was only a kid and it was only a little thing. Some tiny dog, all yippy and miserable, just like the old lady that owned it. All it ever did when I walked by her fence was bark at me like it hated the sight of me. Couldn't stand that thing."

He put the switchblade and its handkerchief cover back into her handbag. She took it from him and tossed it into her lap, space competing on her spindly legs with the cigarette case. "That was the first time I ever used it."

"Your switchblade?"

"That's the one."

She patted her purse absently, as though it were a dog itself in need of petting. "It's helped me when nothing else would. That little dog hated my guts. Told me so with every little yip it shot at me through her iron fence. And one day, I find this switchblade just laying on the ground and I think to myself 'I'm going to teach that little yipper a lesson'. All it took was one swipe. Not even a yelp to say good-bye."

The landscape sped past them as she pressed harder on the gas.

"Pulled its little body through the iron bars of her fence and tossed it onto the road. She thought it got killed by the wheels of a coach. Stupid old broad."

# Sediment

Trunks of rock lay scattered across the horizon, as layered shelves of the earth's former life loomed above them. On his right was a riverbed that had spent its lifetime drying up, until a million years later it transformed itself into a mountain. It was strange to him, how this linear world could forge such examples of eternity and yet the sentient beings that walked the periphery of that mystic riverbed were themselves nothing more than specks of dust in its memory. There was no forever for a human being on Earth. Only the vague recollection of carbon in the mountain's layers could distinguish what was human and what was animal. One day even this civilization would disappear beneath the sediments, the only clues to a human populace being the rims of motor cars, porcelain plates reduced to tiny shards, the occasional arrow head and a rusted switchblade.

The heat was the worst he had ever experienced, an oxygen-deprived wasteland that was fit to fry a lizard. Clara was likewise melted by the pursuit of the sun, the silk top of her dress billowing out as the motor car forced a breeze over them. The desert sun cooked them with its even heat, a slow, symmetrical roasting.

"We should have stopped in Nevada when we had the chance," she complained. Her lips were dry as she spoke, her hands never leaving the wheel to rummage for lipstick in her handbag. She was as rooted to her post as the trees that lay in stone on the vista surrounding them. "We could have stopped at The Northern Club, out on Fremont Street. Bit of gambling, bit of drink, would have done us good."

"Nothing good comes from us," he reminded her. She was wisely silent at this, her jaw set and determined as she concentrated on the long, desert road before them.

They passed the stoic remains of trees, the graveyard of a forest long dead, the route outlining the tragic story of the earth, where sands tore over craggy rocks that were once winding veins of life, now red sediments full of the blood of strange creatures that once walked a very different surface. A vague memory of his own home assailed him, a multicoloured landscape of bubbling tar and swirling twin moons. Just as quickly, it disappeared, a fragment of a dream only partially remembered, yet its residual feeling left a haunting imprint, one that constantly poked at his jellied substance, making him long for motor oil.

"We're heading towards Meteor City, near Two Guns," she said. Her lit cigarette pointed out to an unidentifiable spot on the horizon to her left. "It's a big hole, left by some rock from up there." Her cigarette pointed upwards at a ninety degree angle, ashes raining down the belly of her wrist. "They say it might have wiped out the dinosaurs. Covered the whole planet in ashes and choked them all out." She narrowed her gaze at the horizon as she took a long drag of her cigarette and tossed its stubby end onto the moving sands beside them. "Kind of strange, when you think on it. Maybe even a little scary. That's how easy it can be to wipe us all out. A big rock hitting the desert. Like a bullet in the gut, I'd say. Everything dying all at once–that's just the earth bleeding out."

He could feel his inner body squash itself along the right side of his host, an unconscious need to be separated from her even if it wasn't physically possible. Of course she would use an analogy similar to murder, her mind so preoccupied with that heinous act that she had no other frame of reference from which to draw her understanding. He turned to her, reluctant to engage her in conversation, yet needful of finding any sentience upon whom he could confess.

"Why did you kill your friend?" he asked.

She shrugged, as though this mattered little, and in her case, it didn't. "Reggie always had good liquor," she said, by way of explanation. "A nice tall glass of rum does a body good, it really does. You ought to try that instead of that nasty motor oil. Goes down hot and smooth, settles the nerves. It's from the islands down south, you know, where all those pirates used to put their feet up. Rum is all full of that kind of history. Guess some of it rubbed off after a glass or two."

"What are you talking about?"

"Pirates, you lunkhead." She sighed, picked at her cigarette case, debated snatching another cigarette from her handbag, only to toss it back at her side, delaying the inevitable. "All they're famous for is mayhem, stealing and murder. Rum is what they drank, morning, noon and night. So, like anything, like a clock on a mantel that witnesses a family growing up, like some rocking chair that an old granny spends her last days in, it gets itself haunted. That's what rum is, it's a haunted drink. You get that spirit in you, and you can't help but go a bit pirate yourself."

She pressed her bare foot firmer on the gas pedal, forcing the motor car engine to rev up to its top speed. The road spit up a cloud of sand and dust in protest, every grain infected with the spirits of distilled, former life.

"That still doesn't explain why you killed him."

She let out a hiss of frustration through her clenched teeth, and he was sure she was going to careen into the ditch out of spite, just to toss him onto the road and be done with him. Perhaps she would do him a further kindness, and murder him as she had once promised she could. Her hands clenched the steering wheel, and her jaw softened slightly as she spoke.

"He got grabby. I don't like it when they get grabby. I told him to quit it, but I guess he had too much of that pirate in him, too. Reggie, he wasn't all there, if you get what I'm saying to you. Watched his family burn to a crisp in a fire once. That does things to your mind. Makes you a little strange. A little off." She shook her head. "Poor Reggie. But still, he had the grabbies, and I can't tolerate that from no one. Like I said, I had plenty of that haunted rum in me, too. If I went a little Blackbeard, then that's Reggie's mistake. He should never have offered up that rum."

* * *

The half can of motor oil he'd sipped along the way had hit him hard, and when he awoke it was night, the moon a bright white circle, its shine making him feel like the sky was eyeing him. He rubbed his host's eyes, forcing a wakefulness into them that he hadn't felt for days. Or was it weeks by now, or even years? The desert that surrounded them in its speeding vista rolled past time, defying all linear logic. The present rushed headlong towards a future point they hadn't yet visited. Every grain of sand was full of next week.

He was still in the throes of a motor oil dream, of the kind that reminded him of home. He felt frightened and comfortable all at the same time, the drifting days and years coalescing into a single point in his consciousness.

To his right, a great black chasm had opened up, and he stared into it, wondering if that was where the past was finally resting. It was a good enough vessel for it. A deep, impenetrable valley chiseled between massive cliff faces. "We should leave it here," he advised her. His words were thick and blackly oiled on his tongue. "The past and all the terrible things that had to be done. Let's leave them right there, in the middle of that darkness where it belongs."

She scoffed, white hands unfeeling and tight as carved, polished stone on the wheel. "Don't be stupid," she chided. "That's the Grand Canyon, seeing as how you don't know nothing. Everybody who comes here thinks they have some kind of nature commune or getting into their roots, or some other artsy fartsy epiphany. Beats the heck out of me. All nonsense, if you ask me. It's a big ass river that dried up, and there's nothing worth throwing in there but trash." She cocked her head to one side, the marble hue of her skin beneath the moonlight congruous with the walls of rock that surrounded them. "Mind you, I got plenty of trash to get rid of, you're right on that. Maybe you're onto something after all."

She let out a low whistle, one that had a longing for a cigarette in its cadence. She ignored the way he slouched in his seat, the bubbling essence of motor oil seeping into his consciousness, destroying his sense of linear time. He could see her, as a child, driving the motor car, her hands dripping with blood, bits of terrier fur embedded beneath her fingernails. He closed his eyes, only to discover the back of his host's lids were covered in memories of a lunkhead brother with a tooth knocked out by a rock and a slingshot. A gold replacement glinted in an adolescent afternoon spent fishing at the local pond rather than going to school.

He rubbed his host's chin with the heel of his palm. "It's all slipping away from me," he admitted.

She glanced sideways at him, a narrowed cat's eye view of concern "You really got into it this time. Look at you, barely able to think, can't make a real sentence up right. You're a mess. Here we are, almost at the finish line, and you're a big, oily, goopy piece of work. Tar sands, that's you."

"I'm not..." he said, but the universe was spiralling around him, the lines of the road's edge curving and twisting into knots, black asphalt and dirt and water seeping into every time frame. Huge motor cars made of solid steel sailed past them like ocean liners. Bullets roared in the sky, leaving long, thin trails of cloud behind them. A horse galloped beside them, pulling a waggon full to bursting with a harsh-looking family who stared him down for the villain he was. They disappeared into the billboard declaring they were now in Perch Springs. He could still hear the clack of the horse's hooves as they scurried off into the past, the dust settling itself behind them.

"Hot like Hades, ain't it?" Clara complained. She fanned herself with her hand, but it was a futile gesture. The only relief they had was if she kept her foot on the gas and pushed the speed high enough to create a decent wind current. There was little relief for the air was acrid, leaving a sandy feeling at the back of the throat.

"Get used to it," she warned. "It's a long stretch of desert before we get to California. The most boring ride you'll ever have in your life, even if you are with me."

He coughed into his palm. A black, sticky glob lay embedded in it. He wiped it off on the rail of his window, his body positioned so she couldn't see what he what he was doing.

"You said you never got this far."

"No. Never."

"So how do you know it's boring?"

"I can read a map, can't I? It's only what I've been doing since Chicago, gee whiz. You really are some kind of lunkhead, that's what you are. How do I know it's boring–of all the stupid things I ever heard! It's boring because boring is what's on the map you big lunk. One big stretch of nothing at all, it's right there along the thin blue line, in case you were wondering. See?" She tossed the map at him, which he puzzled over, unable to decipher what any of the strange symbols, lines and complex layers of illustrations meant. "Flat as a pancake, all along Route 66 to Pasadena. Nothing, nothing, nothing. We're riding into purgatory, that's what we're doing."

She pursed her lips, and let out smoke from an imaginary cigarette. The shadow of one played upon her lips, a past event superimposed upon the present. "That body you were wearing was just fine. Why'd you change your clothes?"

He fished in his pants pocket for the badge belonging to Sheriff Borden's brother, the metal hot against his skin. "I don't know," he lied.

His neck ached as he turned to her, the milky hue of her skin luminescent beneath the moonlight.

"Maybe I'm becoming like you."

# Target

The radio spat scratchy ragtime as they sped into the heart of the desert, past Perch Springs, past Valentine and its tiny red schoolhouse made especially for Old World settlers. The journey had given up the night and was now fully engulfed in the fireball of day, the heat melting their every pore.

"I can't wait to meet Charlie." Clara's eyes were wide and bloodshot from lack of sleep and hot crumbs of sand creeping into the corners, the wheels of the motor car pulling them from the dusty road. "He won't know what hit him when he meets me, I'm going to walk right up to him and give him a big sloppy kiss, one that says he can't say no to me, no matter how much he might try."

"Charlie Chaplin," he muttered. The motor oil had lost its lustre and now sat ill in his liquid gut. He was going to have to get rid of it soon, and since Clara refused to stop the motor car, his only recourse was to retch over the side. A splatter of black littered the passenger door, marring the shining cream-coloured finish. But Clara had other things on her mind, and the wrecking of a car would only mean finding a way to get a new, better one.

He settled back in his seat, sick from the constant rocking motion of the motor car on the uneven road. Clara's rambling was another wave that kept crashing over him, doing its best to capsize his stomach.

"Charlie's a genius," she assured. Her dark eyes danced with glory, their whites wide in an unsettling eagerness that infected her entire demeanour. "When we get there, you have to be on your best behaviour, no whining in the background, no looking all rumpled and bored. Besides, your target will be there, at Charlie's house, you can feel that like I can the feel the camera on me, and the flicker of that film clicking frame by frame. We're helping each other now, aren't we? Charlie's mad for girls like me, girls with open minds and willing to do what others won't."

Her grin was lopsided, her lips bleeding and cracked, blistered from the relentless heat. "We ain't stopping. We're heading straight on, through the heart of Los Angeles and onto Sunset Boulevard, we're going into West Hollywood, and we're going to Charlie's house."

"Glad you know the route." He yawned and settled back in his seat, the queasy feeling of his inner body sloshing inside of his host easing slightly. "We don't even know how long we've been travelling. He might not be home."

"Oh, Charlie will be home!" Her eyes widened further, shots of red piercing the whites in tributary rivers. There was something wrong with her, he thought, and a real nag of concern assailed him as she began her chatter anew, talking of Charlie, of silent films, of Lillian Gish and switchblades and fat men with wallets and one goodfella after another, each with a bottle of good booze.

"Charlie, he'll put me in the lead, and I know I'm going to get it. 'Romeo, Romeo.' Do you hear how I'm saying it? All forlorn and hopeless and knowing it's the end? 'Romeo, Romeo.' He'll point that camera of his at me, his lead star, his main lady, his 'It' girl, and he'll shout, loud as you please–'Fire!'"

He frowned.

"They don't say 'Fire' when they're filming movies. They say 'Action!'."

"Don't be stupid. They aim and they shoot with those cameras, don't they?" Her bleeding grin was for the highway alone. "We're ready for you, Miss Clara. We'll try that shot, the one Lillian used last time, in The Sparrow. Steady now. We want to see fear, Clara. Real terror. That's right, like a little trapped sparrow banging against its cage. Hear that? That's the clap of a black clipboard by some nobody, that kid who's just happy to be there. He's on his own dime, but he'll give a feel if he gets a part. FIRE!"

* * *

He could sense the ocean, even though they couldn't see it yet. The air was scrubbed clean with salt, oxygen-full breezes coursing over them the more they drove. It was early evening sometime in summer. Their days had ceased being labelled by months, days of the week or even hours. Clara was keen to tap her heels and keep the radio tuned to the same scratchy jazz station, a musician's horn blaring in uneven spurts.

"Just listen to that guy play!"

"He's no Langley."

"This one's got a name for himself. He's been in pictures."

"Ones with no sound. There's no comparing, Clara. Langley's soul is in his horn, and you'll only find that kind of honesty in Chicago, in a basement, with no one caring whether or not anyone hears it."

"You're a big, nasty grey cloud on a sunny day, that's what you are." She did a sharp turn to the right, onto Huntington Drive, following it south. "This will take us right into Los Angeles," she said, her voice breathless. "You can taste the Pacific, we're so damned close!"

He was exhausted. From one state to another, bathed in blood, he had no energy left for Clara's misguided enthusiasm. "We're close to what?"

"Charlie. The party. Your target. Don't you ever listen?"

His host's eyes were partially closed, an expected darkness overtaking them. He was so damned tired.

"Target," he repeated.

"That's right," she said, falsely bubbly and full of energy for her own goals. The switchblade was forgotten in these moments of vanity, but he knew it was ever present in her possession. Her eyes were wider than usual, a strange mania present in her that sent a shiver of worried understanding through his jelly essence. Her lipstick was uneven. There was a tear at the hem of her dress. There were bloodstains on her shoulder. The feather boa she'd taken as a gift from Reggie was tattered and wilted, most of the larger feathers long since shorn by the wind that whipped at them as they drove. She wrapped it around her neck anyway. She looked like a sick bird with a molting disease.

"I need to fix my eyes," she said, a shaky fingertip smudging the days old kohl that lined them into black pockets, giving her the appearance of a corpse. She snatched her hand mirror out of her hand bag and with one hand still on the wheel, she fished out her kohl with the other. She propped her hand mirror onto the steering wheel with her elbows, and in this awkward pose managed to apply another line of black without poking herself in the retina.

"There," she said, smiling at her ghoulish reflection in her hand mirror. "Let them try to say no to me now!"

"You haven't eaten," he reminded her. "We could have stopped at that gas station, back around Pasadena. You should have had a sandwich, at the least, and a cup of coffee."

"I don't need that sort of thing, not anymore," she said, her words a harsh whisper against the road, his doubts, her own intentions. "I'm going to go to that party, and Charlie is going to have one look at me, and it's all about becoming the flickering light. That little dash between dark and light, that's going to be me, that's going to be my grey shadows up there. Nothing else. Nothing at all, and that's the way it should be."

She drove right, onto Mission Road, and then west onto North Broadway before crossing interstate five. They sped above the Los Angeles River, the desert already a distant memory behind them. Long, spindly palm trees lined their ascent into the arms of Hollywood, a quick jaunt past Sunset Boulevard, where Clara's wide, crazy eyes were full of stars in the surrounding darkness.

"Almost there, almost there...."

She let out a horrific, tortured squeal, one more suited to her victims than as a cry of victory. She released her hands from the steering wheel to punch the air, her feet kicking in happy, barefoot glee. Lines of blood were etched across her ankles. She'd cut her toes driving without shoes.

They pulled into a modest looking house, its front end surrounded by cars of all shapes and sizes, a showcase for those enamoured by the wheels only wealth can buy. She slammed the brakes and pulled the car into park beside a black Chevrolet, the wide expanse of her trunk blocking it in.

"You should park across the street," he tried to tell her, but she was already out of the car, heedless of her bleeding feet, her tattered feather boa trailing behind her. She was roadkill, and she didn't care. She'd made it to Hollywood, to her own target, to this party, and nothing else mattered but shadows and her mindless vanity.

The door swung open and they both slid in, serpents uninvited to that first, perfect garden. She waved her hand high, heedless of the odd looks the wealthy patrons of the party were giving her. "Charlie!" she shouted, trying to gain a small, rather shrivelled man's attention. "Charlie! It's me! It's Clara!"

Charlie slowly broke free of the tousled redhead at his side and made his way with practised calm towards her, his cane offering him poor support. This wasn't Charlie Chaplin, of course, and judging from the tall glass in his hand it was clear he had more than a small rum runner connection.

"Clara," he said, and his voice was broken glass. He held out his arms and she ran into them, giving him a severe kiss on the cheek. "It's good to see you. It's been a little while. Chicago, it's too cold and too far for me, I like the ocean air." He smiled softly and patted her cheek, his eyes as cold as hers were black. A mutual assassin. "Imagine that, you showing up here. You got nerve, kid. You got some kind of crazy devil in you to bring you here."

He glanced up, catching a good glimpse of her companion. "Hey, Frankie. Look who it is. Our old friend, Clara." She winced as he dug his fingertips into her clavicle, her smile faltering slightly as she looked back at the man who had been her companion for her bloodbath of a trip. "Bet you never thought you'd see her again, did you?"

Charlie's watery eyes narrowed as he looked on him. "Frankie...You not feeling good or something? It's the strangest thing, I thought you were on the patio, out the back, by the pool. You got changed, too." He shrugged. "Do what you want, you always do, pal. Just like my little Clara, here. Now come on, sugar, you and me, we got some catching up to do."

"You got a part for me, Charlie? You going to put me in your pretty pictures?"

"Sure, sure. I'll make some pretty pictures of you, all right."

She giggled as Charlie led her into the melee of people, the party in full swing. It wasn't much different from the speakeasy in Chicago, the same worn faces, the same drunkard props at the bar drooling onto the counter. The only difference was the softening salt air that coursed over them, and the desert warmth that refused to fully leave. A Chicago that was physically easier to bear. The soul, however, that was what was missing. False, tinny laughter drifted towards him from the back of the house. Langley's trumpet would never tell its tale of woe to this crowd.

A hand rested on his shoulder. Its familiarity sent a shiver of memory through him, and he closed his eyes against its onslaught.

"I can't believe you brought her here," a voice, so similar to his own, hissed at his ear. "She's a cannibal. She wants to be in films so she can bend out of the screen in spirit and tear into the crowds so she can eat them."

He turned, and wasn't surprised to see a familiar face.

It held every nuance that were his usual features, apparent after every host was taken over. A certain cut to the jaw, a definite height and shape of the neck and shoulders. The face was always the same, and it was this face, his own face, that stared back at him in longing sympathy.

"Frankie," he said. He cocked his head to one side and his larger twin did the same. "I was wondering who that was."

"It was you," Frankie said.

"I don't understand."

Frankie smiled. He placed his hands in his pockets, casual and cool, a man that made others envious of his calm. "She never told you how she made you." He let out a bitter laugh. "Of course not. Clara and the truth never see eye to eye."

"Who are you?" he asked, a sudden rush of anger burning inside of him. This man who had his face, his mannerisms, his structure–Who was the impostor? This version of himself seemed more solid, as though there was more of him holding him together. Frankie nodded and gave a friendly wave to a pretty young woman and her beau as they passed. When they were gone, he slid a cigarette out of his side pocket and slowly lit it.

"She was the one who did it. Who tried to kill me. She almost got her wish, but I managed to get away, even if a little bit of me got left behind." He took a drag of the cigarette and let out the thin smoke in a single breath. "That's what you are. Poor Mikey, getting full of that little bit of me, just because she happened to feel a tiny bit of remorse." He laughed and shook his head. "You know what we're made of. Jelly and black tar. Well, she shot me point blank in the face and the host just crumpled up like paper and I fell out. Then she went ahead with that stupid switchblade of hers and started cutting into what solid bits of me she could. Of course, I managed to scrape most of myself together, but I guess you're that little bit I left behind." He took another drag of the cigarette. "I have to give you credit. You lasted all that way with her, and she never once tried to cut you up. That's something even I couldn't accomplish."

He couldn't understand. He didn't want to. It wasn't like this for them, it was humans who were fractured and blindly searching for memory, who put images on screens in hope of silver light to trigger some forgotten emotion within themselves. They wilfully ignored the truth. They didn't see the director shouting orders in the background, the actors carefully memorizing their lines. They didn't see the rising starlet running her palm across the front of the producer's trousers. They saw shadows and light and believed in nothing.

He held his hands against his head, pressing his palms against his temples as though warding off a terrible noise. Langley's horn was a crescendo in his memory.

"Don't tell me any more," he pleaded.

"You know who you are," Frankie harshly chided. "You're the shadow, that flicker of myself that follows the rules, who can't leave them behind. Cutting you out was the best thing Clara ever did for me."

He tossed the remains of his cigarette into the pool behind him, the surface one of polished pearls. "Do you know who our superiors are? Dead weight. That's right, dead. There is no home to go to, no place to rest our weary heads when our target is achieved. They dumped us here to punish us. Criminals who dared to feel singular instead of part of their constantly churning, never fluctuating futures."

"The future was always changing, and there were consequences," he tried to argue with this thing, this larger chunk of himself. He could feel his voice getting hysterical, his throat constricting in fear. "We can't just walk away from our responsibilities."

Frankie scoffed. He grabbed two drinks off of a visiting tray from a harried waiter and handed one of them to his twin. He took it and downed it, wishing it was motor oil.

"You should drink more of this stuff," Frankie advised. "It makes a good preservative. Better than the oil."

"I don't want to talk to you."

"But you will. What choice do you have? You're me, after all, a little piece that got chopped off and was allowed to grow. I feel sorry for you. Sorry for myself. All you've believed about yourself and your purpose is nothing. All you are is a task, a thing to get done. I'll bet you spent the whole trip obsessing about your target, and how he'd better be here for you to kill. Do you know what the target really was?" He took a sip of his scotch, wincing at is went down uneasy into the pit of his black stomach. "It was you. And me. I was so angry they put me here, so miserable to think I was stuck with that psychotic bitch, Clara, I wanted to end it all. I knew how to do it. Just a wrong look her way, a little threat to her ego by brushing her hair from her eyes and trying to be coy. It's that easy. That's how the devil springs out of her, and it worked perfectly, she cut me down, blew my host's head off and hacked me into pieces." Frankie let out a bitter laugh over his drink. "Shame it didn't work, of course."

He collapsed against the side wall, settling in among a dried flowerbed. The drink in his hand rolled onto the patio stones, and a drunken actor kicked it out of the way.

"Suicide."

"Murder in all forms."

"It's not right. Killing isn't right."

"You picked a strange travel partner, if that's what you believe."

He felt sick, the oil he'd consumed earlier wanting to visit him anew. He grabbed another cocktail off of a wandering tray and downed it, much to Frankie's amusement.

"I killed a man," he confessed

Frankie merely shrugged. "Who hasn't?"

"He was innocent. He just wanted to find his brother." He pressed his fingers against his host's temples. "It was sad."

Frankie tapped his fingers on the side of his glass.

A nervous gesture. A thought turned physical.

He took another swig. A warm rum on a hot night.

"You're right. That is very sad."

They stood studying one another for a long moment, imperfect mirror images that couldn't quite recognize each other. Finally, he let out a long sigh and forced himself to stand, Frankie offering his hand to help him up.

"She's a bad person," he said, meaning Clara.

"We're all bad people," Frankie said, reassuring him with a soft squeeze on his shoulder. "But take some good advice and cut her loose. She tried to kill us once. You know what she's like. She doesn't leave anything half finished."

Frankie patted his back. His name was called, and it floated above the crowd, a singsong need for a dance. "That's her," he said, and bit his bottom lip in thought. "She tries to kill me and now she asks for a dance. I know how you feel. You want to be rid of her, but you can't. She'll kill you before you get a chance to do that for yourself. She's like that motor oil, slick and black as death and just as smooth as it goes down. Inevitable. Quick to run you down."

With this he slid into the crowd, off to his fate with the girl and the switchblade, leaving his accidental twin behind. He had to wonder, how many other splinters of himself were wandering out there, each captivated by a task he couldn't properly fulfil. There could be dozens.

Clara had shot him point blank in the head. The splatter of his essence had to have been significant.

He'd forgotten to ask, how small had he been before he found his way into Mikey's body and grew into it. An inch worth of jellied substance? A droplet?

There could be hundreds of fragments of himself out there, lost, wandering the linear desolation of this violent world alone. A mob army of disconnection.

He sloshed within his host's gut. Sick. Unsettled.

# Achievement

Morning arrived and the party was finally winding down, the last few stragglers blindly searching their way home. He had no wish to be a part of Frankie's world, so he'd spent the night in the motor car, slouched at an uncomfortable angle, his essence pooled into the lower half of his host's gut. The last jubilant tunes of a jazz band cascaded across the dawn in sparks of sound. He dozed, only to be awoken by a pair of confused young lovers attempting to sneak an early morning copulation in the seat of a random motor car, their drunken laughter halted when they saw he was there.

"Sorry," he said, as he watched them stagger off.

The dawn was a pale, misty blue that gave him a strange sense of peace. The ocean, not far from them now, kneaded the sands with crystal clear purpose. There was no mission. No target. There was no need for him to be here.

The ocean swept across the sands, scrubbing clean his conscience.

Clara swore as she stomped towards the car, her feet leaving thick, bloody imprints on the white stone of Charlie's porch. Her hips shoved him over as she clamoured into the driver's seat. There was blood on the back of her hand, across her knuckles. It stained her hair, gory pieces of humanity embedded in her feather boa. The front of her pink and grey dress, the one she had stolen from Stella, was saturated in red.

All that effort, and she didn't even get the part.

"I've come to understand something," he said.

"I don't care," she replied. She shakily took out a cigarette and cursed when she couldn't find her matches.

"That sometimes our goals are wrong. Blindly pursuing them can only destroy us."

"Tell me about it."

She found her lighter and let out a small sigh of relief. She popped a cigarette between her clenched teeth and lit it, enjoying the smooth smoke as it slid down her throat.

"You find your target?" she asked.

"Yes. I did."

She grinned, her teeth bloodstained as the gore dripped from her bangs and into her mouth. "You see? You can't do this without me. I've been with you all along, and I never steered you wrong, not once, not never."

"I know," he said. He gave her a genuine, heartfelt smile. "I will always be grateful."

He pressed Borgen's gun to her temple and fired.

# About the Author

  1000. Jones has been published in many venues, both online and in print, and made her first foray into the experimental medium of web serials with 314 Crescent Manor. The fidgety dead have been known to rise and walk about, especially in M. Jones's novel Frankie And Formaldehyde, available at Smashwords. Experimental horror that blends science fiction, suspense, drama and a good scare are the tools of M. Jones's trade. That sound heard in the upper floors of a semi-detached home are the scrapings of poisoned knife tips on an old Olympia typewriter. The letters hit the blank page like clacking teeth. Never read over her shoulder.

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