The Empty Head

Ratwoman

She grew up in the days of fever dreams, of flesh melt, of scorched delirium. Huge spiked solar flares were dumping waves of deadly radiation on the Earth. Rat Woman was a pale rumor on the streets of crumbling Baltimore.

Crouching under the shadow of the port authority tower, the river a green shimmer in the distance, she watched the doomed dehydrated worms twisting and dying in slow motion on squares of steaming concrete. The storm had come suddenly in the night, soaking her, and she had sought refuge here, shedding old sweaters like layers of furred skin and wrapping herself in a sheet of orange thermal plastic. Visions of lovers she had never had, of the gentle touch of a human hand, came to her just before dawn.

The sun was a boiling fire. She watched people scurry like pink beatles beneath its glare.

She'd had a mother and a father, once. She'd had something like a home. Bits of memory like spiders crawling. A blurry picture of him, red-faced and screaming, as though seen through melted glass. He'd never touched her. The mother, dull with a heavy sadness, had spoken only in whispers, fearing his anger. One day they were gone.

A man passing by dropped a plastic coin in her cup. She heard the electronic hiss of his radiation screen, saw gleaming black shoes. He glanced back once; his face twitched in disgust as his eyes focused on the rough grey skin of her hand clutching the cup. She was used to it.

But there were some things you could never grow used to.

She heard a distant rumble and looked up to see the white hot flame of a torchship as it settled into it's berth, disappearing beyond the weathered blue vinyl shell of the Federal Complex, a vast hive of tunnels and factories, featureless cubes of ancient ferro-concrete masking the data cores of obsolete super-computers installed just after the first wave of bureaucratic panic.

She took a stack of ancient Wonder Woman comics from her cart and began to read, turning the brown pages slowly, completely absorbed. The upper right corner of one page had been folded over. She undid the fold and carefully smoothed it out.

Rat Woman smiles. She wants the pretty tiara with the star; she wants the invisible plane. The magic lariat doesn't interest her. The magic lariat makes people tell the truth but Rat Woman already knows what they will tell her. She reads until dusk sweeps the sky away and then goes to find a hole.

She has beautiful dreams at night.

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