The Empty Head

Big Dark City

The rats gather when the sun goes down. Blue Steel haunts the streets looking for someone. She is the most beautiful woman in Big Dark City. The rats come in human form and nibble at her heels. But they cannot find her. She knows all about them. All their dirty little secrets. Sometimes when she gets bored she waits for them. That's when the fun begins. In the dark where all the colors come together. What she needs.

When she was 12 she left her father face down on a dirty linoleum floor. A gift in the form of a rainbow seen in the pool of blood and alcohol sugared by broken glass. People always get what they want in the end. She never looked back. Now there was only the city and herself, a white blood cell in stiletto, purifying the stream. Outside the Big Dark, monkeys played on the jungle floor with sticks, with termites. They didn't know what they were missing.

She has learned to dance, the movements precise, controlled. The man dances too, just outside her reach, taunting her she thinks. The form is strict; one movement is for the money, another is just for fun, with the rats, with lesser creatures. But the man eludes her and she cannot finish without him. His scent is what she follows. Always at night when sick yellow has faded to pure black.

Almost dawn, another night wasted. She burns with the question. But will his answer—seized in crimson fingertips—be anything more than the echo of her heels on wet asphalt after the rain?

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