Moses & Curio and the Raving Wigger

MOSES AND CURIO AND THE RAVING WIGGER





         Thrashes of light sporadically washed over the rave’s pulsating milieu, unrelenting high-hat flourishes tapping teeth while the vibrations of the synthetic kick drum bounced heads fore and aft in place.  Their bodies were a collective vessel containing a dearth of gleeful sensory overload.  Dozens of the turned-on turned out to imbibe in the full gale-force trauma of a mere night out on the town.

         The clear night’s scintillated cavalcade rocked together in a shared effort to wave away the rising of tomorrow’s sun.  They reviled the notion of that sun’s overbearing glare hitting them full on in their faces as they exited the safe lair where they were snug in their exuberant brethren.  Easier, it was, to bask in the staccato flashes of the xenon strobe bouncing across their sweaty bodies as they absorbed the nectar of one love in their laser-lit and smoky cocoon.  They writhed and slithered amongst each other as vipers do when in the midst of courtship, eager for the same outcome to await them after the mating dance and the elaborate courtship, however extended or fleeting it may last.

         Doses of exaltation dissolved on the flicking tongues of the pierced and unkempt parishioners as they readied for their catechism.  Each tab in the lascivious chapel of physically spiritual worship was far more divine than a sacramental wafer whose pious ingestion merely suggested heaven was in their possible future.  Those wafers provided the hope of floating in the clouds.  The ones swirled around in a swig of hot saliva and cold Poland Springs provided actual floating in the clouds with lithe and consummating angels to adore...or their money back.  And there was no need for scripture to be read, Reznor and Moby had the verses and curses all covered.  The idea of inglorious rapture and the outright stiff-arming of every care or problem they had in their mortal world drew in God’s fallen children at the cost of only fifteen Presidential singles.

         Within the four walls and earshot of the finest electronica available on wax or CD, they danced without a set of pre-learned moves.  There were no rules to their motions.  Their liquid limbs were extensions of a flowing grace the socially rigid and the chemically unplugged could not fathom.

In the incessant sensory sandblasting of strobes and varied lights, they embraced each other with their glazed eyes.  At times, the spark of smoldering eyes found tinder in their groins, was blown upon, and caught up with the flicker of sweaty flame.  If the party gods were appeased sufficiently and the night was young, they eloped away into the night or secreted themselves into wondrous pairings of exploratory caresses of tongue and lingering fingertips against the walls.

It was one of the wonders of the rave club that the four walls of disunity brought the cast-aside caste to its den first.  Only after some gay friends told their fag-hag co-workers or classmates, or perhaps when the singular leftist in a class or office made a friend amongst their peers, did the pretty people abandon a usual night at the theater or the bar and grills for a night of illicitness in a tingly purgatory with the pierced dervishes and leering freaks they would shy away from at parties in their high school days only months or a few years before.  When it was passed along that the world on ecstasy was indeed beautiful to all regardless of caste, catechism or car, the scene burgeoned further with druggies from other scenes…frat boy keg-pounders, hippie hash-heads, wired-up speed-freaks, coke-bumpers, crackies, pill-poppers…each and all shared the shared lust for the deviancy of the rhythmic flesh.  All were welcome and all were knowing the mood was one of transcendental loftiness and communion, not getting incoherently fubar.  The ravers drank copious amounts of fresh water from faraway lands…like Atlanta, Kentwood, or Zephyr Hills.

In the world of juicy hard liquor shots and booty music, the focus was on the strutting peacock and the attractive swans.  In the swirling lights it was a whole flock of ducklings learning to flap their wings beautifully, often for the first time without the nervousness of ‘am I really me?’ hanging over their gyrations.  Now in the unbiased hug of the club, they flowed with the go.

Best of all, what they paid for, really, when they peaked, was that every care they ever had back in the sane world could be ground down to the tiny gaps between their clenched teeth and exhaled away slowly in deep drawings of air through lips permanently molded into the face of a smiling kiss. 

Reality thus occluded; there was only the sound and the blurry.

It was a Saturday, midnight in Birmingham.  Saturday nights in the rave clubs were not right for fighting at all.  Aggression, ego, rage and pettiness rendered nil when utopia was so easily compressed into a pill.  Beyond the muscular and black-lit doorman, with his UV-green teeth and glowing stamp of approval, were carnal needs and expectations of those needs to be met.

Later as the hour of the end of it all neared, they stared as casually or as fearfully as their persona warranted, at their widened, pitch-black pupils in the cracked mirrors of the Spartan restrooms and wondered…If eyes are touted as the windows to souls, was their soul so black already at the age of twenty-one, there was no hope?  Then they would leave the patient fluorescence of the restroom and be reabsorbed into the dancing fray.  Crisis resolved.

         In their foggy midst, a truly depraved soul, who needed no dreamy hallucinatory gaze in some fluorescent white-lit mirror next to partying nymphs with the bent-back sniffles to know her black eyes did match her soul in so many ways, stood off to the side of the throes, her head nodding to the beats.  Most of the trip-hoppers danced so much more provocatively in their own minds that they could ever hope to pull off through the random swaying of arms or hips.  She marveled at their gliding mechanics, their free-flow.  She reveled in their nakedly earnest exhibits of carnality.  The woman was just getting there now, her lofty nirvana needing no pissy shag-head in smelly flannel to entertain her.  The party was where she made it.

         Curio Phelonie was no stranger to the world around her.  She was no stranger to the creatures of the night in any environment.  Tucked against her niche in the wall next to a black-lit poster of a wild-eyed Bob Marley, she waited patiently for the time to make her way to the dance floor.  Always an idle people-watcher in her youth and possessing a sharp set of eyes and ears now in her current occupation, she surveyed the melee.

A few of the women on the floor were up to her Pepsi challenge.  Like flamenco gypsies, they seemed to float about the floor, their arms waving in come-hither arcs around their bodies and often coiling around the bodies of others as their hips jutted forward to serve up their loose sex through their tight clothes.  She especially gawked at the transcendental pixies with their cropped bobs pinned tightly to their head with butterfly pins.  With their girlish braids, their tribal tramp stamps and studded piercings, both seen and unseen, they twirled glow sticks on strings and sucked erotically on both candied pacifiers and their neighbors’ faces and fingers as they flittered about the floor.  It was a shame the evening was a business meeting for her.  A casual menage-a-trois between friends on ecstasy was a delicacy.  Eyeballing one particularly cute blonde with her cleavage covered in glitter that reflected the colored lights, she sighed forlornly.

         She noted the tiny face bobbing up in the DJ booth.  A nameless man who was paid to wear eyeglasses sans lenses with tiny flashlights mounted on them instead.  Fist-pumping occasionally as he flipped wax records between turntables and loaded compact disks into awaiting receivers in such a manner as to keep an even flow to the state of the buyer’s minds.  She noted he tried to look cerebral and almost august as he could while emceeing an event where a sweaty breast could slip out of a halter-top and twirl a few cycles without its lady even realizing or really caring.  He was the omnipotent emcee sitting high above a happening where genitalia were openly fondled through baggy clothes on the floor beneath his feet.

The air itself hovered in layers in the pall of smoke breathed in heavy doses.  It smelled oddly like a baby’s post-bath talcum rub until it achieved a state of osmosis with the cigarettes and the heated sweat of millions of aroused pores.  The club then reeked of a primal freedom.  It was a turgid aroma, a slurry fog of body salts and sultry essence laid bare and boiling like some sexual gumbo set to simmer until served at its peak.

         In the club known as Lustins, Curio closed her eyes to mere slits and just watched.  She had a good view of the water bar and could see who was on fire in the crotch and really feeling fine just by the imbibing of the tiny waters.  She stood below and to the right of the DJ booth, waiting and watching.  To the average pair of eyes looking around the club for the faces of those familiar and the oh-so-needing-to-be-familiar-to-me, she was just another nymphet feeling the effectasy and taking a breather to enjoy the euphoric ride so popular among the old warehouse’s inhabitants.  Now and again, some guy and the occasional girl would try to make eyes at her in the strobe-lit party smoke and rapidly phasing vari-lights.  She would merely avert her own and turn her head.  Duty, not booty, called.

Her own dose was beginning to click on with her.  Already, she had the smile on her face; she needed only to be done with work.  The tab she took would not be an imposition on work at all.  In her native Louisiana vernacular, taking ecstasy in her peculiar employment was a mere lagniappe.

         Designer drugs were changing the face of clubs in the early 90’s.  Of course, the old tried-and-true mixer bars with purple hooter shots, the game night’s ESPN showcase, and fried jalapeno poppers would never fizzle out completely.  There was enough comfort in the brew and the burger to keep the doors to the traditional bars open.  If HIV did not keep drunks from trying to fuck strangers at clubs in the 80’s, nothing would stop the next generation behind them.  A whole new generation of youth enamored with free love and floating above the humdrum now dabbled in ecstasy…the very name of the drug said it all.  They eschewed for the most part the coke and glam metal speed scene of their older siblings.  Some chased the dragon.  Many mixed LSD and ecstasy and splashed around in manic bliss, flowing with the go.  Some mixed it all up and paid the price.

Far from needing the legally-mandated kitchen menu and wait staff bringing by fresh pitchers and pre-bussing, a decent rave club need only bring in a guy who was into the music and having his own DJ setup and a dream to club for even more people in the future.  Whereas a typical old-fashioned mixer bar needed beer vendors, liquor licenses, happy hour, linen service, controllable budgetary plans, an ambiance concept, backers, fronters, a kitchen menu, location, location, location and heaps of insurance, a rave club needed only to stock up a few number ten washtubs with Sam’s Club waters, buy a decent sound and light show setup, rent some old warehouse and get the power turned on.  Get some heads to paint the inside with fluorescent paint and hand out flyers at the college and let the enchanted arrive by the pair. 

         Drugs of course brought out the riff-raff as beer brought the macho and the sloppy.  The wink and the nudge handled most problems easily enough.  If someone were ripping people off, a dropped note to one of the numerous undercover cops everyone knew was around would pinch the offender.  If someone got too overt with the public display of the baggie, he would be asked to make sure the parking lot was his office lest the authorities drop the hammer, slaughtering the cash cow for all involved.  Further party fouls would end with an inconveniently timed traffic stop. 

         What a person had dissolving in their bellies as they paid the big dude at the door a ten for a stamp was their business.  Outside in the world of the palmed twenty and the Ziploc ticket to heaven, it was the ultimate personification of caveat emptor.  There was always that pesky detail in trying to reach heaven…arrest or premature death.

         As Curio watched from behind her half-closed eyes, Darryl Janokowski, aka Ginger Janks, moved about the room, slipping tabs into pockets and slapping palms with tightly folded twenties to trade.  He was one who had some clout with the two guys running the place.  They were a pair of twenty-something’s who managed to scrape up enough money selling hydroponic herb to frat houses at Auburn to get the club going.  One of the pair had an uncle who dabbled in real estate.  He found them the site and got a cheap lease for them.  While Janks kept the heads shaking, the club owners were getting ten a head at the door, two dollars and fifty-eight cents profit on every bottled water, ample fellatio, and quite a coke habit while trying to keep ahead of it all, night after night. 

Curio figured the club had been open long enough for them to start getting careless and wasting money trying to look like they were ahead of the game.  They made it clear that the dealing needed to stay in the parking lot as much as could be controlled.  Yet, loud and proud, Ginger Janks was going around telling every smiling and nodding head in the place every weekend that he was part owner of the club and he could sell whatever he wanted in there…the implication being that he kept them paid enough to ignore his side business as long as he kept things on da down-low, yo. 

He kept it on the down-low alright, if you call every person who walked through the front door displaying a hand stamp in the UV light making a beeline straight for him, then the pair of them heading straight for the restroom or a table where their hands would disappear for a few seconds low-key.  Covert was not in Janks’ vocabulary.

         Probably why I’m here, thought Curio as she watched him for a long while.  Stupid bastard forgot that shit is a felony every time he does it.  At least until they popped him for it.

         Janks was a goofy shit to lay eyes on for the first time.  Usually wearing baggy cargo pants and some rugby-style shirt or in a tee with something zany scribed on it, he wore a ridiculous frumpy Fat Albert hat perched on his light-red afro-styled hair.  He was a geeky, freckled, wigger.  A self-styled hardass gangster, straight up in the mix and ready to blast, yo, though Curio understood that he could always make a dash for the relative safety of his parent’s home in Cullman if anything too gangster went down.  He could relapse back to being just a goofy white kid working a fork lift for his dad at the lumber yard if he had to.  True to character, he was given to public random displays of ghetto-isms and far more likely to be blaring Tupac on his loud kickers than be in tune with what Metallica or Pearl Jam was up to like all the more sensible suburban white kids of his age.

A sloppy ragamuffin as he, with his faux-tough, turn-the-gat-sideways kind of hard-nigga-swagga, he offended Curio.  He was packing four gold fronts on his grill, another unacceptable trait in a white boy to her.

         He was packing a .380 pistol in one of those baggy pockets and had enough ghetto in his white-bread ass to pull it and start spraying little pieces of lead lacking aim or ambition out into the air errantly if he needed a way out.  That did not unnerve Curio.  It worried the hell out of her partner, Moses Holliday.

         “He’s wild, baby.”  Moses had warned.  “He heard too much of that, ‘shoot them niggas yo’ and not enough ‘run rabbit run’ while he was smoking all that dope back in high school.  Kid like that got more nuts than discipline or sense.  You watch his ass.”

         Incognito, she had gone to see Janks in the bathroom of the club the week before without Moses knowing and he was understandably livid when she got back to the hotel rolling her ass off.

“Just setting the mood, baby…”  She swooned in his arms and soon her efforts made his anger dissolve.

It would be an easy thing indeed for a man such as Moses to make Janks stop breathing.  He could do that very quickly or very slowly depending on his whim.

The wildcat in Curio, however, wanted to play with the frumpy mouse.  He was indulging her tonight. 

         Pissed, but indulgent. 

She loved her Moses.  While she was in the club starting to get her roll going and discreetly flexing her loins in anticipation of a wild night out on the town, he was sitting in the getaway car, smoking endless Winstons and waiting for her.  She could feel his gaze on the wall behind her.  In her mind, the whites of his eyes and the cherry of the Winston were the only details recognizable in the black of the car’s interior. 

         Intrigued by his way of life at first, she had made it her own.  A very happy life, at that. 

Tonight, she was working and raving!  It was an extravagance.  Far too many jobs were in grittier and far more dangerous settings than in a club full of ecstatic, beautiful, horny, dancers.  She reveled in the flow of the night, eager as ever to be on the clock and delighting in mixing her own larcenous sexuality into the shared indulgence in the feel of sensual autonomy amongst the beautifully sweating throes.  Watching Janks, she smiled with the omnipresent gaze of those fellow flyers clenching their teeth, casting fuck-me eyes all around them, enthralled to just dance until they melted together into a mixture of boiling sweat and ground flesh.

         Moses and Curio had been lovers for three years.  Forty-three-years-old now, Moses sported scars all over his body, most telling a tale.  Tattoos spoke about him as well.  Some were faded memories.  Some were kept looking fresh to keep him reminded of his current state of affairs.  Some were drawn by legit artists and some were chiseled in with a sewing needle and some India ink during stints at some ‘take a load off, get three hots and a cot, and rethink how you got caught’ locales.

         Something Curio had learned very soon after she met Moses was the fact that he had few reservations about snatching up some jackass and punching him in the face very hard with those tough, hard hands of his.  He would kill without remorse and had done so for years before taking her into his confidence.  That was not to say Moses was a violent man by nature.  In reality, he was a placid, jovial, good ole boy.  A gentleman to her at all times, he doted on her constantly, always wooing her despite her willingly placing herself irrevocably in his sordid world.  Best of all, in Curio’s opinion, he could bluntly stab through a man’s panicking heart with the same dedication to task as he could deliciously dance subtly around her clitoris with that slightly-wet fingertip’s mischievous tickle.

He was a killer by choice.  It was his sole trade.  Before he met Curio, he was indifferent to what he did, the peculiar employment, as his boss Grizzly Fontenot like to term it.  It was only a means to an end.  Now more at ease about the fact he was partnered with her youth and desirous fancies, he was guiding her, not leading her, through the work they did together. 

Tonight was further nervous proof to him that he was becoming far too indulgent of his young lover's often-precocious whims.

That goofy bastard may have been the easiest payday we ever had…  She smiled as she recalled her telling Moses her plan to ensure Janks’ demise. I got this one…no problemo!

         Curio looked at her watch.  One hour since blast-off!  The euphoria was becoming tangible within her.

Killing at first had been an uncertain undertaking, always handled under Moses’ strict oversight and planning.  Now, she had the taste for it.  It was invigorating.  Of course, she was operating with a lover she now regarded as her own personal Superman, who never seemed in the least bit fazed by the dastardly acts he involved himself, and now her, in.  A soldier who would not duck when shots were fired, who did not so much as grimace for more than a mere split second when the pain of some unlucky mark’s retaliation found his flesh.

         Yet still a man, Moses.  A man who would zealously protest her nursing him through a flu bug even when he was dog-sick with it.  Who would cook for her, clear her table, and clean the dishes without fail when she came to him.  A man who serviced her car and fixed up her house when things broke.  A man who loved only her.

Before they met, his cabin home on Bayou Flechette was a plain, unadorned domicile.  His backyard was littered with tripwires, for Christ sake.  Now he grew flowers in boxes along the last leg of his long driveway and would have some new stalks cut, when blooms were possible, awaiting her in a vase when she arrived to stay with him.  By day, they would hold hands and talk for hours on the couch by the hearth.  At night, his brutal hands that would fire pinpoint lead into men’s faces as they pled for their lives held her face earnestly close to the heart that beat for only her.

         Curio loved him.  She also lusted the job.  Already, she felt her panties pulsing, her wetness palpable.  Adding ecstasy to a job she was already ecstatic to do was a new pinnacle for her. 

Killing Janks was an easy enough task.  He could have been dead last week.  Their employer, Grizzly Fontenot made them hold off until he could find out for certain whether reports of Janks attempting to rat him out to the DEA were solid.  The kid moved a lot of product for Grizzly, but he was sloppy.  Rumor had it that a DEA sting caught him selling one hundred disco biscuits to a narc.

         The rumor proved true.  The green light was given.

         A super-remixed, trance-inducing version of Nine Inch Nails’ Gave Up erupted, grabbing the twin, short ponytails of the blond wig Curio wearing and tossing them from side-to-side.  She felt the space between herself and the dance floor giving way, the distance constricting as her breathing expanded.  And then she was off!  The music flung her ever so willingly into the middle of the crowd, lasers cutting the swirling V in the smoke cloud over her head.  She was suddenly in the fray, another enraptured siren calling a sailor to his doom with her charms.  Feeling the effectasy in her blood, a pistol in her purse, sheer rapture in her pores, a wet sexual mess in her panties, Curio Phelonie danced wildly to the song, watching Janks and subtly beckoning him to her.

         Janks palmed four tabs to the boyfriend of a girl that stood nervously with her back against the water bar.  She was probably some office chick, he figured.  Got herself a decent job in bookkeeping at some little firm in town.  Not far from a trailer park, maybe going to UAB part time if she had the Pell grants to do it. 

The dude with her seemed to be deferring to her future ambitions, being a gentleman and risking the felony to spare her the risk.  Janks sized him up as the guy returned with the score to his girl.  A UA or Montevallo student, probably with some money to get out of it if he got busted.  Probably slumming it in his mother’s opinion, if Mom even knew about her.  The girl was not particularly attractive but tried awfully hard to be so.  Probably on a rebound after the high school boyfriend she practiced sex with went after a diploma elsewhere.  Now she was tasting the sweet air of self-identity and found some Vestavia Hills hipster with a hemp necklace to show her the dark and sexy side of life as a sexually active young ingénue. 

Her face brightened, she squealed and then they rounded the corner and went to the darkened seating area to the right of the DJ stand.  She already had a water in her hand.  He watched as the boyfriend slipped a tab into his mouth and kissed her fiercely to pass it across their tongues.

“Bon voyage, playa.” He muttered.  He enjoyed what he did.  He made love connections, Janks often said. 

Transaction complete, he looked around for more faces rubber-necking him.  Seeing none, he propped against wall of the DJ stand and watched the crowd, smiling in agreement or nodding subtly as customers waved in gratitude or blew him a kiss from the multi-colored, smoking cauldron of vividly-lit ravers. 

He yawned.  Staying up late every night was not a problem if he had the daytime to sleep.  The sleep that day was fleeting for a great many reasons.  Today, the reason was him having to meet his guy to pick up a bag of tabs to move.  That meant a drive to Meridian, Mississippi and back, a four-hour trip.  His older sister’s son was having his second birthday so that meant stashing the tabs in the trunk, buying some random beeping toy and a gift certificate for McDonald’s and making an appearance at her and her husband’s place with a crowd of her friends who did not take to him easily.  Serena was a church secretary at a big Baptist outfit up in Trussville.  All of the women were hemming and hawing over jumpers and “learning devices” that oddly enough still looked like toys were saved in Christ and whatnot.  None were especially interested in him after a mere glance at his style and attire. 

Fuck ‘em, was his normal response.  Not very Christian indeed.

He stayed long enough for candles and cake, made small talk with his father and mother until his father jokingly acted ghetto to him to belittle him in front of the audience.  Riled, he feigned an excuse to leave and got away.  After riding back down to Homewood, Janks paid two months ahead on the payment for his teal green 1985 Caprice, got the ride detailed, bought beer and Kool’s, and called up a lady friend for some fun.  Damn if he didn’t end up having a few of his boys drop by not too long after she left for a few hours of Playstation and blunts.  They drank all of his beer and smoked all of his squares.  He managed to catch a nap for a few hours before his pager blew up incessantly as regulars started getting their orders together around six o’clock.  His last supper was a sack of Krystals he inhaled before the phone calls began coming in.

Before eight, he had most of the bigger orders done.  By ten, the subsequent add-ons to the regulars’ orders were done- the “three more of those we talked about, some more friends need to hook up” ones.  Those add-ons were usually how his friends made their money.  Jacking up the price for those last-minute buyers paid the most profit.  Janks was always keen on profit.  His employer insisted on making sure the markup was fair but profitable.

By 10:15 he was standing by a wall inside Lustins, dropping singles and pairs into palms as fast as he could.  By midnight, he was down to thirty in his pocket and another twenty in the car.  The dope was Israeli-made, legit MDMA, not the hit or miss concoctions that some wistful basement chemists crumpled together and sold.  The sheer power of the dose was well-received and it was the only brand he ever got from his connection.  The wafers were called “Davie Angels,” named because of the Star of David's stamped on them and the fact they would send you smiling up to the clouds.

Janks surveyed the dance floor, his ears usually averse to the trance-dance floatie-melodies his clientele preferred.  He was no stranger to the allure of what he peddled and had danced his share of jigs under the influence.  But he was into gangsta rap, trying very hard to be considered a hardass amongst his peers.  Floating in some smiling ocean of flailing arms like some pansy-ass hippie was not for him.  Seen in the wrong light, his street cred could suffer needlessly. 

Dope-dealing was hardcore shit, yo.  Janks looked the part as best he could.  He certainly lived his supposed role publicly and publicly, “Gangstas don’t roll dat way, playa!” as he told anyone who asked.

One nice perk was that gangstas got the bitches, yo.  Feeling the need to get clear of Lustins and into the bed soon, he looked over the herd.  A hardass beat kicked in through the speakers.  He recognized Nine Inch Nails but did not know the song and even if he had, that fuckin’ DJ Toolchest up in the booth would cut up a song mercilessly with samples and tempo changes.  Half of the time a song was practically unintelligible to all except those who just heeded its sonic effect rather than heard it.

Janks’ eyes swept the floor and locked on a dome of platinum-blond hair whipping the air with little pigtails.  The girl was short, wearing a black miniskirt and some kind of black sleeveless blouse that had a great many buttons undone.  Immediately he saw she had no bra on.  The tight blouse was holding her ample tits in place as best it could.  She wore an assortment of necklaces, like Madonna would do.  Her arms were bare, though.  No plethora of bracelets, just soft hands with clenched fists.

Black knee-high cowgirl boots, yo!  He admired her style.  She was beyond hot.

And despite her grooving to the music, her eyes carved into his.  When she was certain she had his full attention, she danced for him, never breaking away from his gaze.

         Curio stared Janks down, forcing a stare of lust at him she knew had to affect his mind, subconsciously willing him to her.  The music had her, but she would have him.

Reznor’s tempo was ferocious.  Wild tendrils of light enveloped the crowd.  The owners set up some rebar spars beside the DJ booth and periodically they would run some hand grinders across the metal to shoot some sparks out over the throes.  People jumped at the chance to be showered in sparks as they flittered to the earth.  They were dancing in falling stars.  It was great!

She felt the euphoria heaving inside of her as Janks latched onto her.  Her clit throbbed, sweat glistened on her chest.  Necklaces swung on a pendulum in front of her breasts as she clutched them fast to her.  She breathed deeply, savoring the taste in the air.  Knowing she was about to end an ugly life not worth existing, in the middle of such beautifully kindred souls, exalted her.

He moved toward her, no coyness or humility needed from him or her.  Both knew the score in Lustins.  He, with his brute clumsiness and churlish ghetto attitude toward women in general and hot bitches like her specifically, walked up to claim what was his, yo.  She, with her dark eyes and licking lips, sweat across her brow and ground teeth, accepted her man for the evening.

In the back of her blissful mind was the lingering fact that the boss decreed Janks a threat.  A threat to the boss meant a threat to Moses and Curio directly.  Threats were intolerable and a thing to be dealt with directly.

He walked to her, framed in keyboard strokes and synthesizer adjustments.  Trent Reznor screeched, “IT TOOK YOU, TO MAKE ME REALIZE.  IT TOOK YOU, TO MAKE ME SEE THE LIES!” over and over again until the powerful refrain dipped away into a hallucinatory halo of sweeping notes with the unceasingly crunching back-beats keeping the time while the ravers’ collective mind pondered the lighter lilt of the trance-inducing flourishes.

His hands were on her shoulders, his lips pressed to her cheek suddenly.  It snapped her back to as much reality as she could muster.  His mouth reeked of trashy Kools and a long while between toothpaste doses.  Curio broke off the embrace, trying to play it off into dancing.  She ground her groin into his thin thigh, gripping him around his surprisingly bony hips beneath his baggy, saggy jeans and stifling a laugh at the find.  Beneath those large clothes was a puny young man with a gun.

Poor ass wigger.  You need to eat some rice and gravy, boy.

“My name is Janks.  You one sexy ass lady, baby.  You straight for the night?”  His normal voice was high-pitched; it was shrill unless he put the ghetto gangsta bass into it for effect as he did without thinking now.

“I know you, Janks.”  She leaned close to his ear as he mistook her intentions and offered his neck for her lips.  In the temporary glare of a lingering vari-light, she could make out hickies of all ages all over his pale skin. 

Fucking nasty bastard!

“I’m Dawn.  Erica’s friend?  You hooked us up on some Davies last weekend.  My hair was red last weekend though.”

“No shit!  Hell I ain’t recognize you girl!” The name Erica resonated with him immediately.  She was a regular and a bisexual who brought an extra player with her from time to time.  He sized up Dawn, remembering they came by his crib just long enough to score and wave bye-bye since they had friends waiting.  “Where Dawn at, yo?”  He faintly remembered selling her a tab at the club the week before but the memory was hazy.

“She’ll be here in a little while.  She hooking up some things.” Curio almost had to scream in his ear over the music. “Fuck I’m feelin' good!  You got any more of those left?”

“I gotta’ shitload, baby.  Yo, dat’s what I do, yo.  I hook you ladies up with dat licky-lic-kay pill and shit.  What y’all doing later, yo?”

“Well, her idea was we were going over to the Studio for a while, but I’ve done got fucked up in here and I got so fuckin’ horny my pussy feels like I pissed myself.”

“That’s fuckin sexy.  Damn!”

Immediately, Curio knew she had him hooked.  Fish in my frickin’ barrel…

“Dawn told me you eat pussy like no one she ever had and she had a many.  You up to it…” She smiled at the word as she beheld him, “Playa?”

He pulled her to him, his hands rising up her thigh and clumsily finding her crotch as she kept dancing.  Curio stared at him coldly.  He misinterpreted for the grimace of the happily-rolling.  She reached under her own skirt and pulled the g-string knots loose.  She yanked away her panties and crammed the sopping triangle of the fabric to his face, giggling.

“Told you, yo!”  She laughed and bit her lip.  He caught the panties with his free hand, fumbling and parting her lips with the other.  She was slick with her own juice inside.

He stirred her, excitement welling inside him.  The woman was manna from heaven.  And later she would have a friend who was not as fine as she was but freaky as possible and the trio would have themselves a blast, he was certain.

Curio did not have to fake being turned on.  Peaking, being touched on his clit, the music and the scene enveloping her, she was on cloud nine.  And it was time to get paid and have her patiently-waiting Moses receive the full measure of her pleasure as soon as they were done working.  It was one hell of a job when the benefits were as such.

“Let’s go outside, baby!  Fuck Erica!  I’m horny as shit.” Curio bit her lip as another wave of pleasure swept over her.  Her vision got syrupy for a moment.  Inside her, prickly tremors of unquenched need rose into undulating waves of increasingly wet ferocity.

“I don’t wanna wait for Erica!  I want some lickin' from that badass tongue, yo!”          

“A-ight.  What you say yo’ name was again?”

Curio smiled at the corner of her mouth.  “I’m Dawn, Playa.  I’m Dawn and it’s reaaal fuckin’ nice to meet you…yo.”

“I gotta’ go out to the car for some product, Dawn.  Come out there wit me and I get you straight up satisfied, yo.  Maybe you get me straight, too.  I dunno’ though.  My dick got a power to it though, baby girl.  I don’t know if you can last it out, shiiit.” He clutched his crotch and looked away.

“Oh shit!  I hear you, baby boy.  Guide me outta’ here then, baby.  I’m not seeing too straight.  God, I’m fucked up!”

Janks grabbed her two arms and held them to his hips as he aimed for the door.  Curio Phelonie could only smile blissfully through her clenched teeth as shudders of ecstasy crawled up her spine.

Moses Holliday sat in a rented Ford Taurus parked in a common parking area nearby.  He had a view of the east side of Lustins and the entire parking lot.  The lot had four streetlights seated dead center on each side.  Two of the bulbs were shot out with a pellet gun earlier that day, hiding the rear of the lot in a murky shadow.  Janks’ green Monte Carlo was luckily parked in the dark zone.  Janks liked to park in the same area and that was a known thing to them.

He sat in the Taurus for an hour after dropping Curio off a few blocks away and watching her swish away from him in her short skirt and her high boots.  Chain-smoking Winstons, he slumped in the seat as club-goers looked for somewhere to park as they disembarked for carousing around Five Points South in the club district of Birmingham.

Moses watched the clubbing public from the dark interior.  The fleeting flicker of the cigarette’s coal cupped in his palm when he knelt down below eye level to inhale was the only sign of life inside.  Some, he figured were heading for Lustins and maybe the other techno club, The Studio.  Some he figured for patrons of Dave’s, the yuppie mixer joint.  Some swayed drunkenly toward the Zydeco or the Hippodrum.  There were couples heading for dinner at the Ruby Tuesday or The Mill, restaurants sitting in the middle of the area.  There were other lesser bars as well, plus the Music Hall just a ways down Twentieth Street to diffuse the crowd into nice little boxes of united frivolity.

His favorite place of all of them was the Arab takeout place, the Purple Onion.  He ate on a turkey pita and some hummus as he waited.

Nearly two hours after he let her out with his usual cautions, Curio reappeared, her hands clutching to Janks’ waist as he led her, stumbling and giddy, toward the Monte Carlo.  Janks’ eyes darted all around, looking for gankers or gawkers.  Moses gripped a .22 pistol with a silencer tightly, slinking slowly downward as he reclined the seat.  The red wig Curio had worn when she got a look at Janks’ apartment covered the gun in his lap.  Janks noticed him move and Moses froze.

Fuck!  He cursed for not being more invisible. 

Curio looked at him, her mouth falling open as she laughed at something Janks was saying.  Moses raised the wig with his gun-hand and pumped the hairpiece up and down, laying his head back against the headrest.

Nothing to see here, asshole. Move along…

“Who the fuck is that motherfucker looking at?”  Janks saw an older man look him over and then try to play it off as he eased back in the seat.  “I bet he five-o, yo.” His hand again clenched the pants at the sagging crotch. “Shiiit, he need to stop eye-ballin’ a motherfucka or I’ll cap his muthafuckin ass.”  Curio looked over at the Taurus, saw Moses see her and started laughing.

Dumbass wigger…you don’t got no damned clue about who you’re threatening.

A mop of hair was occasionally visible below the steering wheel.

“Oh shit!  That’s a faggot getting’ some head up in there!”  Janks laughed aloud as Curio stumbled behind him over the pot-holed parking lot.  She was glad it had not rained.  Mud on her sexy on her boots would not be kosher.  Janks stomped on the toe of her right foot accidentally once already and left a scuff without apologizing.  She would deal with that insult later.

“How you know he’s a faggot?  Shit!  I see that shit, too!” She laughed as Moses played the part.

“Nasty ass fairy motherfucker.  Pussy ass faggots suck yo.”

“That they do.” She laughed.  “That’s because they ain’t got some tight-ass wet love like I got for you.”

“Yeah, you right, baby.  That faggot bar is on the other side of the fence over there about two blocks over.  They come over here to suck each other’s dicks a lot.”

“You ever put that tongue to a dick, baby?”  Curio giggled as he snapped an angry look back at her.  “What?” she chuckled.  “You done kissed a kitty after you been in it before I bet.  You don’t think you got some dick taste in your mouth from that?”

“Fuck that, yo.  I ain’t no faggot.  My ride is up here.”  He dug out his keys.

“God, I’m so fuckin’ horny.  Erica ate me out last week but I ain’t felt no man in a long ass time.”  Such a lie...

“I’m man enough, baby girl.  Let me hit that and you’ll know what that man spoze to do to you...”

Curio looked into the window of the Chevy.  “That’s a big back seat, baby.  I’m so fuckin’ wound up, I bet we use all of it.” She rubbed his crotch from behind him.

“Oh hell yeah!” 

Janks could hardly believe his luck.  The girl was superfly.  She was already popping buttons open from beneath her tits.  She radiated sex.  He loved her supple face.  He was certain her complexion was far too dark for the curtain to match the rug, not that he had detected any rug when he felt her up in the club.  Janks remembered her more as the redhead with Erica the week before.  She had not said a word to him, just looking at him coldly as Erica paid and made small talk. 

Probably not sure how much to act like she wanted me in front of Erica.  No problem with you wantin’ it on the D-L.  I make it worth your while, ho.

         Janks popped the locks and Curio dove across the back seat, rolling over on her back as Janks looked around one more time.

         “Come get it, baby.  Shut the door so we don’t have that light on.” 

         Janks took one long, hard look at the Taurus, making finally certain the guy getting blown in it was preoccupied.  He climbed inside and sat between her legs as he pulled the door shut.

         Curio raised her skirt up, showing her shaved lips to him.  “That’s a sexy pussy, ain’t it, nigga?”  Her eyes were black coals in the dark car.  He could barely make her out with her black clothes but her tan skin radiated in the faint glow of faraway lights. 

         “The sexiest, baby.”  He popped the button on his baggy cargo pants and unzipped the fly as she slid up against the far side of the car, spreading her legs wide, draping her heels on the backrest and the driver’s seat.  “I want you to suck me off.  You like doing that shit, doncha'?”  He almost called her bitch but held that back.

         “I love it.  Bring that big gangsta dick up here, white boy.  Show Mama what her and Erica get to take turns ridin’ on later!”

         “Oh hell yeah!  Yo I gots some dick for that sexy ass mouth!”

         Janks was hard as a rock.  Her laxness toward the scenario was refreshing.  He wondered what his world would have been without ecstasy pills and thanked God silently.  Her hand suddenly thrust inside his pants.  Startled almost, he leaned back as she jerked his boxers down and grabbed him fully.

         “Damn baby, that’s a big ole ginger dick, ain’t it!  Shit, I’m impressed!” She eyeballed it. “Yo!”

In the throes of her peak, Curio actually was impressed.  The boy was puny as a whole but the dick wasn’t too tiny at all.  She expected much, much less.  She throbbed inside for release.  Inside she reviled him as a person.  But the situation was well in hand, literally.  There was no reason not to take a few liberties with the quarry. “Bring it up here, baby.”

         Janks lumbered clumsily toward her.  His pants wadded up at his ankles and he struggled not to fall across her.  Finally he moved on his knees using the floorboard space.  At last, he managed to semi-hover his cock near enough to her face for her to make a go of sucking him.  He propped his hands on the headrest of the back seat and the roof as she sucked him greedily.  Horny as he was, her technique was enough to make him come within a minute.  Her mouth never hesitated as he unloaded in it. 

Grunting, his hands slammed up into the ceiling. “Oh shit!”

         Curio felt him spurt and closed her mind to whose load she had flowing into her mouth.  At the end of the day, the semen of one she loved tasted not so different from one she did not.  She had hoped to suck it badly for him, at least enough for him to get flustered after a bit and then she could route him down to her wet pussy that was so very anxious to have its due.  But, he was fast on the draw and that could not be helped.  She swallowed so she did not get any on her black blouse.  It was bought at an awesome consignment shop in Biloxi and having some dead wigger’s jizz sprayed on it was not going to fucking happen.  He already dented her cute boots.  The blouse was going to saved at all costs.

         He retreated, panting.  “Damn you got skills, baby!  I ain’t never came that quick before, yo.  You got some mad lips to make me do that, baby.” 

She smirked at him.  You fucking liar, but hey I’ll admit I got skills.

“You lick it, Janks baby.  Mama needs to get her nut now.  I’m so fuckin’ wet for you.  Suckin’ a dick turns me on enough but fuck!  This roll is the shit!” 

She was wet.  Killing made her so wet now.  And it was time for work.

Janks, breathing hard from being sucked as forcefully as he ejaculated, wallowed down between her legs, finally getting a workable angle.  Spreading her with his fingers to expose her swollen pearl, he went downtown.

It became immediately evident Erica was being truthful when she told Curio…with Curio’s knife was held to her throat while Moses flicked his finger against a large syringe full of cooked-up Israeli ecstasy and pure coca paste…that Janks had one bigass, badass, tongue and he could use it.  She writhed as Janks did his best.  She was burning for the orgasm.  He went heavy on the clit and she tickled one off almost immediately, screaming until she gnawed on a seatbelt strap as he tickled her vagina with a fingertip.

         “Oh fuck, baby!  Oh fuck!  Oh fuck!”  She scooted back farther, allowing him room to lie on his belly between her legs.  He cupped her ass under his bony hands and lifted her lush pelvis to his mouth.  Curio locked her ankles in the air over his head, snuggly holding his head between her smooth thighs.  Her hands held the boots together as he tried to prove him worthy of Dawn’s accolades.

         She felt him go inside her with the tongue.

         Gene Simmons, eat your heart out.  Wigger boy got mad skills, yo!

         He went full inside her, deep enough for his teeth to press almost painfully into her lips.  Her g-spot was being touched, his motion was thorough…and her trap was sprung.

         “Like that, baby!  Shit!  Right there, right there, right there!  Oooo, baby!  Right fucking there!  Don’t move, just like that!”  Her hands crept into her boots, gripping a hidden handle in each of them.  Janks moaned as he kept up the pressure inside her, his tongue starting to tire but determined to see her through.

         I bet this bitch squirts, yo!  Ain’t no nigga eat a pussy like me, goddammit!

         She loaded up inside for her release.  He kept lapping at her g-spot, managing to arch a hand around and dip his thumb against her clit as he kept in tune with her building moans.

         “Oh shit!  Here I come!”  She felt the orgasm at its precipice and nearly crossing the marker into spasm when her hands came free from the black boots, clenching an ice pick in each of her tiny hands. 

“Fuck youuu, yeaaaahh!  I’m comiiing!”  Curio’s pussy exploded as she jammed both spikes into the back of his skull violently, sinking them to the hilt in the medulla area just a few inches above the neck.  Janks’ tongue seemed to grow another inch as the reflexive jolt of his brains being stirred made it flop out wildly inside of her.  His arms went weak and then seized spasmodically.  The tongue flopped wildly in her, too.  It only made her come that much harder.  She exploded with her juices on him, a puddle leaking from his mouth and running into the gap between the seat as she screamed in pleasure.  Her hands churned back and forth with the handles to sever the control center of his mind.  For a moment, she almost felt as if her hands were controlling his tongue through the handles of the ice picks.  He was, for an instant, her pussy puppet.

After a few seconds, he went completely limp.  She did as well.  Curio had known pleasurable orgasms as much as any woman, but she would never admit to anyone that one damn near topped any before or after in intensity.

And it was a ginger wigger that did it.  She pulled his head back from her crotch by his wild red afro.  His eyes were wide open, frozen in panic.  His long tongue was now limp and dangling like a lazy hound’s.  Who woulda’ thunk it yo?

The car door opened and in the blast of the interior light, Moses’ torso and legs appeared.  A long-barrel revolver with a silencer poked inside and he peered in at her.

“Hey baby!” She cooed.

Curio released Janks head and it flopped back onto her crotch.  “Ooo!”  She jumped and giggled.  “Still a lil’ sensitive, yo!”

Moses saw the handles sticking from the skull and jammed the pistol into a cargo pocket of the black BDU pants he wore.  “Did he hurt you?”

“Hurt me?  No, baby.  I’m just a little bit tingly to say the least.  Whew!”  She wiped her brow and made sure to give her mouth a wipe of her forearm in case she missed a lingering drop of him. “Roll this nasty fucker over off me, please.  I’m a lil woozy from all that.  Shit!”

Moses reached in and flipped Janks over onto the floorboard.  “Can you walk?  We’re public, baby.  Let’s roll.”

Curio breathed deeply, still rolling her ass off and trying to unwind from the climax.  “I’m good.  I’m good.  The boy had mad skills, yo.” 

She pitched forward and Moses pulled her by her shoulders from the car.  Setting her down on her wobbly feet, he pulled Janks pants from inside the car. 

“Shit that felt good!”  Curio looked up at the amazing starry night. 

Moses pulled out a baggy of tabs and other assorted pharmaceuticals and dropped them into a cargo pocket.  He found the .380 in a pocket alongside her damp panties- which he handed to her and watched her jam them nonchalantly into her boot.  Smirking, Moses took the gun as well as the wads of money spread around the guy’s six pockets.

“Dumb shit has got cash stashed everywhere.  Shoddy, boy.  Just plumb shoddy.” Moses muttered to the corpse as he worked fast.

  A quick search inside the console revealed another bag of tabs and even more money zipped neatly in a bank bag.

“Motherfucker had a good week.  More money than he could count.  Got laid...”  He looked at Curio as she smoothed her skirt and pulled the blond wig from her head.  She tossed it on Janks’ dead ass casually as she preened her own short black coif.

“He did alright until he died…Car!  She saw a stubby SUV sitting with its turn signal blinking on the road by the entrance.  Moses slammed the door and the light went out.  A car passed by on the road and then a black Explorer turned into the parking lot.

Curio leapt onto Moses, wrapping her still-shaking legs around his waist, kissing him hard while wildly caressing the back of his head.  The Explorer rolled slowly past, full of four young women who hooted and cheered the PDA as they circled the full lot.

“That’s so fucking hot, y’all!”  The shotgun passenger was enthralled by it. 

“Get a room and get…it…oooonnn!”  The driver chanted.  There were no spaces available so the Ford exited and disappeared.

Curio smacked her lips as she separated from Moses.

“God, I taste wigger dick.”  Moses scowled and winced.  He made a show of spitting. “Tuie, Tuie.  Naughty girl.”

“Welcome to the sisterhood, baby!  High five!”  She laughed as he scowled.  “I hear you there, ex-con.  Don’t give me that lie.  You getting nostalgic for Big Buford in cell block six, ain’t ya, Tex?”  Curio giggled and hugged him.

“Not hardly.”  Moses feigned a humiliated sniffle as he pulled a small duffel bag from beneath the car. “And his name was Thunderspear Stevie, not Buford.”  He winked at her and opened the door.  As he unzipped the duffel bag, Curio pulled her Luger pistol from her purse and watched for anyone who may be looking, holding it inconspicuously by her side.  Moses pulled out two three-liter drink bottles full of kerosene and unscrewed the lids.  Her moisture pooling on the dimples of the vinyl caught his eye.

“Damn.  You came a quart, didn’t ya?”

“I’m feeling a need to come more than that, sexy.  This shit is just now getting me peakin' just right.  It don’t make no sense how good I’m feelin.”

“The boss believes in the best whenever possible.”

Moses dumped a bottle of kerosene all over the inside of the Monte Carlo, drenching the backseat and the body.  He took a swig of the kerosene and swished it around his mouth, even gargling for effect.  Curio retched as he spewed it deliberately in a stream into the car and laughed about it.

“God, that’s nasty!”

“No where near as nasty as that motherfucker’s dick.  I oughta’ make you douche with this shit before I touch that lovable squeezebox of yours again.  You take too many chances like that, you’re a-gonna be pissin’ fire, mon cheri.  And me with you.”

“Yes, Daddy.”  She spoke like a little schoolgirl as she hugged his waist.  “We get back to the hotel, I’ll get all clean and fresh for Daddy and be all kinds of fucked up on X.  And Daddy can do whatever he wants to his lil Curio and she’ll love every minute of it.”

“So noted.”  He emptied the remaining bottle on the body entirely and tossed the bottles inside.  “Get in the car, baby.” 

He watched her swagger and stagger toward the Taurus.  After missing the door handle a few times, she managed to get inside.  Satisfied with a long look around that they were not being watched, he flipped open a dime-store Zippo knockoff and caught it afire.  With a casual toss of the lighter into the car and a kick of the door to shut it, the interior began burning, giving off an electric blue glow from within. 

Moses dashed to the Taurus and threw it in gear as he pulled the .22 from his pocket.  They drove quickly around the semi-circle.  He paused to shoot out the two driver-side windows to give the fire some life-giving air. 

“Hot damn!  That was fun!” She screamed out the window, fanning herself.  She was peaking out. “I love this shiiiit!”

They made the right on Highland Avenue, made their way to Red Mountain Expressway and disappeared into the Alabama night.



Five days later.



         Curio Phelonie knocked a second time on the heavy glass security door and folded her arms impatiently.  Standing on the footstep of Epiphany Leblanc’s Garden District home in broad daylight aroused only bad memories.  She stared at a flurry of old scratches in the black paint around the keyhole.  Most of them were as a result of her drunkenly showing up at all hours of the day and night and missing the lock with her key. 

         Seven years and she still ain’t had that door painted…

She sneered as she thought about how many times Auntie P railed against those minor key scratches on her door.  Always griping about how much it would cost to get the wrought-iron repainted and how maybe Curio should get a job and pay for that!

         Curio was wearing headphones as she walked up to the door.  Cinderella was still blaring, “The more things change, the more they stay the same,” from the tiny speakers now looped around her neck.

         She thought about the refrain and sneered. “Not this time.”  Yet she still fidgeted nervously and mumbled, “I hope.”

For once in her life, visiting Auntie P’s house would not be some embarrassing and frustrating exercise in taking a berating, a sermon and an attempt to make her feel sorry for distressing poor old Auntie P so much.  She was no longer Lemarie Leblanc the wayward teenaged niece of Epiphany.  No longer was she that damaged-goods slut of a daughter that was the sole living reminder her late sister, the junkie stripper-hooker Duchess Leblanc.  Lemarie Leblanc was a distant memory she did not care to recall.

Curio had changed the instant she said yes to a life with Moses Holliday nearly three years to the day before she walked up to the manicured home for a visit.  She was twenty-one, dressed to kill and was in fact, a dedicated killer.  Curio Phelonie was now who she was.  Lemarie was no more.

When they arrived back in Gretna after the job in Birmingham to pick up their pay package, she found within it a handwritten note from Pete Fontenot.  He heard through the grapevine that her aunt was in a bad way and suggested she may want to make a visit to pay her last respects.

Discretely, the note reminded her.

“How does he know this stuff about people?” She asked Moses.

“He just does.  Keep that in mind if you ever think about screwing them out of something.  I made a mint off people who underestimated the reach of his eyes and ears.  He’s straight outta’ Total Recall.  I swear sometimes he has one of them little psychic Quatto mutants hiding in his belly that sucks up people’s inner thoughts.  Folks just tell him shit and don’t never know they a-done it.”

The weather in south Louisiana was nice and there was nothing to do after the Birmingham job but shake off the effects of rolling on ecstasy for two straight days and nights.  She slept for a day afterward, sore all over from sex and dancing.  The day was bright and awesome when she awoke after the day in bed so, on a whim, she decided to visit her aunt.  The lady was, after all, her only living relative, to her knowledge.  With her, the Leblanc name would die.  For Curio Phelonie, it was good riddance to bad rubbish.  Being Lemarie Curio Leblanc was never a blessing.

Thinking back to when she last saw Auntie P, she figured it was at least a good three weeks before she first met Moses.  Seventeen, dressed in stolen clothes that were rarely washed, her hair needing a trim in the worst way, she had knocked on that very same glass and iron door and waited as she did again at twenty-one for her aunt to make her scowling appearance at the door.

“Well, I say!  Lookie he-yah at this stranger on my front po-ach.” Auntie P always spoke with the syrupy-sweet intonation of the Fifties debutante she once had been as she opened the wooden door.  She did not open the security door at first. Instead she looked Curio’s sweaty, disheveled appearance up and down and hooked her long, delicate fingers on her perfectly French chin with a frown.  “Or would I be out of place to say look what the cat coughed up?”  She folded her arms and sucked her teeth.  Her eyes were always slightly annoyed at the sight of her young niece. 

“I think not, Lemarie.  Good God do you try to ruin your skin in this sun on purpose?”

“Hello, Auntie P.” Curio wiggled her fingers that were pressed on her sopping forehead shading her eyes as she shuffled her backpack higher on her back.  She was battling a serious draft-beer hangover and the late July sun was landing head shots and body blows on her that would have made Tyson proud.  Her hand was all that was shielding her brain from exploding, of that she was certain. “I really need to pee if you don’t mind.”

Epiphany waited long enough to let her displeasure about the latest impromptu “Lemarie occurrence” be acknowledged through silence and finally turned the key in the lock.  Curio hunched over with her backpack and marched past her as she held the doors open.

“Wipe your feet, Lemarie.  I just mopped.”

Curio made the gesture of scrubbing her feet on the rug.  She had walked in the summer sun with a hangover from a friend’s house at the levee end of Gov. Nichols all the way to Auntie P’s house.  The soles of her old Nikes were long beyond having any tread left on them to capture any lingering mud or crud from the sidewalks.  Auntie P knew her, though.  Wherever Lemarie was spending her nights, it was undoubtedly filthy.  The filth traveled with her niece every place she spent her time outside of Epiphany Leblanc’s impeccable home.  It always had.

She had dropped the pack off in the foyer and made a mad dash for the half-bathroom.  The half-bath was a source of constant ire as it was located next to her parlor where she entertained her visitors- bridge partners, the random suitor, and the occasional priest.  Epiphany found it reprehensible that guests could be heard using the john when such modest things were clearly to be left unknown.

“Man, it sure is hot out there today.” Curio said as she made a beeline for the bathroom.  “Someone told me one of the news channels actually fried an egg somewhere Uptown.”

“Imagine that.  Hot in Nawlins in July.” Auntie P locked the door behind them. “Would you like some tea?”

“If you got some made.” It was a formality.  Sweet tea was always made.

Epiphany poured up two glasses and took them into her parlor.  “Good God!  I can smell the liquor coming out of your very skin, mon cheri.  For God’s sake, Lemarie!  Why on earth do you insist on smelling like a brothel every time I see you?”

“I ain’t workin’ in one yet.  If that’s what you’re wondering.” Curio closed the door. “I did ask though!” She giggled as she envisioned the look on Auntie P’s face when she said that.  “They told me I was still too young.”

“Yes, but not for much longer, eh, mon cheri?  Won’t eighteen just be the grandest day for you!  You’ll finally be able to go topless in front of all those men you see without them wondering if those pesky statutory charges could well stick to them.”

Curio inhaled through her nose as her joke was foiled.

“I left you some toiletries in the cabinet, Lemarie.  You need to freshen yourself up, little girl.  It is simply shameful for a young woman who could be so much prettier to not even make the effort to do so.  You are still pretty, I’m glad to see.  When last I saw you, some drunken bitch had slapped you, didn’t she?”

“Not as hard as I punched her back.”

“Well, there’s small comfort in one-upping some random tart when it could cost you some horrible beer bottle scars all across your pretty face, Lemarie.  But I applaud you coming out on top, for what it’s worth.  I bought some makeup for you.  Do you see it with the toiletries?”

“Yes.  Thank you, Aunt P.  It’s good I came by then.  I lost my toothbrush yesterday.” Curio chuckled as she spoke from the toilet.  It enraged Auntie P to no end when she did that.  She always had her toiletries in her pack. “That beer fur has been something else today.”

“Yes, well, cheap beer in the middle of that nasty bunch in the Quarter can lead to far more than plaque, cheri.  Tidy up and come have some tea.”

Lemarie took a few minutes to wash her face, powder her shiny brow and brush her teeth before she emerged.  Her hair was now pulled back into a ponytail.  She changed into a cleaner, drier shirt and readied herself for her Aunt’s examination.

Epiphany was seated erect in her Queen Anne chair, legs patiently crossed.  Her sweating tea glass was wrapped in a paper towel and rested without fail on a thick wooden coaster next to her.  Curio gulped as she realized the plastic cover Epiphany usually kept on her couch was missing.  She kept the plastic on the furniture when she expected Curio might be due to be coming around, which was anytime in those days.  She removed it only when respectable company was due to visit.

Curio forced her into the “drastic measure” when she snuck in a boy she met late one night and was caught making out with his hand up her skirt.  When Epiphany jerked the canoodling teens up to berate them, a slight wet spot was clearly recognizable on the leather couch where Curio sat.  She thought Auntie P may well join Fred Samford’s Elizabeth in that instant.

She was persona non grata in her home for several days after that.  Epiphany made a show of pulling out the plastic and carefully fitting it over the furniture every time Curio showed up.  Curio’s door key was relinquished after that night as well.

“You’re expecting company or did they already leave?” Curio guessed Epiphany decided she would be less of a horror show for the endlessly Scotchguarded fabric if she avoided the couch entirely.  The tea glass, wrapped and sitting on her coaster, was placed next to the matching chair that faced the couch as the other leg of a V. 

Curio sat down and slurped her tea.  She was parched and cotton-mouthed.

“Father Hurley just left not twenty minutes ago.” Aunt P took a postured sip from her glass.  Her movements were always deliberate.  Her dark eyes continuously gazed with forlorn disgust at her wayward niece without fail.

“How’s he doin’?  Didn’t he have a thing with his liver?”  Father Hurley loved to swirl some sippin’ whiskey around his mouth every so often.  It was merely a recurring series of unfortunate circumstance that he always swallowed most of it.

“He’s quite well, actually.  But myself, I’m having an incredibly terrible time with the emphysema.  I can’t catch my wind after I do my washing half of the time nowadays.  The doctors are quite worried about me having so much to do to keep the home together here.”

Curio remembered doing the laundry was her chore to do when she stayed at the house for more than two days.  It was a subtle dig at her absence causing Epiphany yet another inconvenience.

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Father Hurley asked about you.  He wondered what school you were in since you had that incident at Prompt Succor.  I was terribly disgraced to tell him I had no idea.”

“Incident?  You mean when I bit down hard on Henry Buchanan’s hairy communion wafer when he tried to stick in my mouth?  That incident?” Curio scowled and looked at the floor away from her aunt.  Ever afraid of scandal, Epiphany had done little beyond convincing the Monsignor to replace the fallen man after his recuperation from her niece’s “assault.”

“So you say, Lemarie.”

“So the police said to the Bishop when Henry got sent away.  That how you remember it?  It’s certainly how I do.”

“Father Buchanan learned his lesson.”

“I don’t call him Father.  I call him a nasty pervert.  I wasn’t the first one he used that little trick on.  If his unit still works I bet won’t be the last.”

“Any how.  I had to tell Father Hurley I had no earthly idea where you were half of the time.  He prayed with me for you, Lemarie.  I was embarrassed I had to tell him that.  You disappear and reappear so much I’ve told most of my friends that you are studying to be a gypsy.”

“I’m sorry I ain’t been around much.  You coulda’ told him I was at a camp for potentially fallen nuns studying chastity.”

“Haven’t been around.”

“Haven’t been around much.”

“Good God, girl.  I know you haven’t been studying anything but your bare heels pinned up by your shoulders but despite what you might do with your mouth, it helps to not sound classless even if you are so hideously classless in your habits and tastes.” She sipped her tea, shaking her head in dismay.  “With your looks, you could have a prince, Lemarie.  If such a thing was to be found in America, anyway.”

“I heard there’s a Prince in Paisley Park.  Does he count?”

“Prince of where?  Paisley Park?  Is that in England?” Duchess pondered the location.  It was just at the tip of her tongue.

“Milwaukee, I think.  He’s a funky musician, Auntie P.”

“Oh.” Epiphany frowned and shook her head in exasperation. “Don’t sass your old aunt so, Lemarie.  It’s just such a waste having a pretty girl like you stumbling through those filthy sidewalks like some vagabond half of the time.” She pointed a finger at her.  “And why should I lie to my priest about what you do?  He knows you and he knew Duchess.  Anything I might say positive about you these days would be a lie and there’s no sense sugar-coating a thing about you, Lemarie.  They all know better.  Land’s sake, I dare not use the words nun and Lemarie in the same sentence for fear of the certain bolt of lightning striking me down where I stand.”

“Nice one.” Curio blushed. “I haven’t been around much because I’ve been staying with a friend of mine a lot lately.  He’s a painter.”

“A painter?” Epiphany sensed hope. “Has he been exhibited?  If he has, be sure to drop me the date of his gallery showings and I’ll see to it he gets some rich buyers without taste.” She snickered. “Oh the fools with trust funds these days, I declare!  They buy the most senseless garbage to put on their walls.”

Lemarie thought about that question for a moment.  Her painter friend was a devotee of Mapplethorpe.  He painted a great deal of exhibitions in his studio.  She often chopped up railroad tracks, manned the lights and played the Bauhaus cd’s to set the mood.

“He exhibits from time to time, that’s for darn sure.”  She chuckled as she thought of a few choice exhibitions. “That I can definitely say for sure.”

“Is he good to you?  Do I know his family?”

“He’s from San Francisco, so I doubt it.  He lives down in the warehouses so I seriously doubt you would know him or anyone remotely like him.  Except me, of course.” She shrugged.  “We get along pretty good, sure.  He has the most comfy bed ever.  Of course, I’m not always crashin’ out in it and all, but it’s straight-up plush.  You’d love it.”

“You’re sleeping in his bed?  That figures.  I’ve told you how that cheapens your greatest gift from the Lord, Lemarie.  God frowns when you give yourself so freely to those men like you do.”

“He’s the one giving himself freely to men.” The teenager snickered and crunched on some ice. “I just bang some of ‘em sometimes.”

“Is he…” Auntie P swallowed hard, trying to choke out the word.  She whispered, “A homosexual?”

“Flamin’, Auntie P.”  To use his words, he’s a straight-up sword swallower.” She grinned as Epiphany revolted.

“Sweet Lord, Lemarie!  Those people carry a plague, cheri!  I hope you are cautious around them!  Have you been tested for the AIDS?”

“I don’t sleep with gay folks.  I’m pretty sure I’m not having near as much sex as you think I am.  At least not the full-throttle kind.”

“Full throttle?  I don’t know wha…oh Lord!”  It sunk in immediately.  She crossed herself.  “Change the subject, mon cheri.  My heart can’t handle thinking about you and what you do.  I’ve known you since you was born and I think I shall surely know you when you die at the rate you’re going.  Lemarie Leblanc, you don’t get off that street and stop carousing with those sinners and ne’er-do-wells and apostates, you are going to end up dead in a gutter.  I hope I’ve passed on and don’t have to know that was your end, mon cheri.  But somehow, I don’t think the Lord is going to grant me that luxury at the rate you seem to be going…”

Curio Phelonie snapped back to reality as she heard the tumbler turning on the wooden door and smiled as the doorknob turned.  Her smile waned as a young black woman in pastel scrubs opened it.  With a perplexed look, she opened the security door a few inches.

“Can I help you?” The lady asked her.

Curio lifted her sunglasses to her forehead.  “Hi, my name is Curio…Lemarie Leblanc.”  It sounded strange to say her name.  “I’m here to call on Miss Epiphany, ma’am.  I’m her niece.  You her nurse?”

“Miss P?  You her niece, huh?” The woman scowled immediately. “She told me you was probably dead.”  Curio knew that was probably the very least Miss Gabby had told the lady.  Over iced tea, she reckoned.

“She was wrong.  She home?” Curio set her teeth.  The woman seemed to be spreading herself to block the door.

“I’m not her nurse, baby.  Miss P sold this place to me and my husband two years ago.” Two toddlers ran up, sloshing Kool-aid all over themselves and the tile floor. “The medical bills got to be too much for her and she reckoned she couldn’t keep the house up no-ways.”

“Hi!” “Hi, nice lady!” The tykes waved happily and begged for their mama’s attention.  Curio waved at them.

“Is she dead or something?” Curio asked.

“She’s in the Cypress Bend Nursing Home out in Kenner.  It’s on Overton just off of Veteran’s.” The woman jammed her hands into her hips as one of her kids pushed his dirty hands into the glass door.  Curio noticed the glass was rife with sticky old handprints and grime.  One of the kids had scribbled on a wall with a permanent marker.  It was a thing that Epiphany Leblanc would never have stood for an instant.

“I heard she ain’t doin’ too good.  You should go see her, chile.  She was such a nice lady to us when we looked at the house.” The woman lit a Kool and took an open-handed swing at one of the wild kids. “Boy, if you don’t take that drank in the living room and watch TV!”

“Okay. Thank you.”  She waved at the kids again. “Bye y’all!”  The lady nodded and pulled her kids inside.  She closed the door with just a tint of indignation.

“Lucky little shits.” Curio muttered as she walked back to her Miata.  “Auntie P would slap the shit outta’ y’all for spilling cherry Kool-aid on her floor if she caught y’all.”

         

As best she could recall, Curio had never been in a nursing home.  Neither of her maternal grandparents lived long enough to see their granddaughter…the one borne of some meaningless sexual romp between Duchess and some random mystery man whom she could never name as the possible father of her only daughter.  The unpredictability of her mother’s lewd existence and their frequent disappearance into the various drug dens for days at a time when Curio was a small child went on long enough for her to have missed any chance of ever visiting some great-aunt or uncle spending their latter years in such a facility.

Bearing an armful of flowers and a bag of lukewarm beignets, Curio walked past a mixed bevy of old people and their bulky guards smoking outside the door of the Cypress Bend Senior Center.

The scent of disinfectant and aged bodies mixed with their functions hit her full-on as soon as she was buzzed in through the sliding doors.  The elderly, often shaking from the various neurological afflictions, milled about down the hallways and around the nurse’s station that sat just inside the door.  Nodding respectfully at some of the patients as they looked her over, she asked the LPN on duty at the station about her aunt and was pointed toward room twelve-B. 

As she pulled the flowers and the paper bag close in to her body nervously, she marched in her stiletto heels and dapper dress in the direction of her aunt.  Before she got six steps, two old men and one old woman mistook her for some long-lost relative.  The old lady realized her error immediately and begged her pardon. 

The first old man just smiled at her and said, “I thought you was an angel!”  She replied, “That’s sweet, thank you!”

“You have a nice day, ma’am.” The old fellow waved at her and continued his labored walk toward a sitting room she noticed not too far to her left. 

The second man came out of his room and saw her.  His eyes widened with a mix of sheer terror and joyful recognition of her as his blessed savior.

“Please, Francesca!” He shuffled in his slippers and food-stained robe and reached out to her.  A large bald orderly sitting behind the LPN saw what was about to happen and laid his Sporting News down to head their way. “Take me home, baby!  I’m packed up and I’ve been a-waitin’ for you!”

Curio froze.  She knew he was harmless but the wild look in his was unnerving.  She knew she was seeing the true face of a demented man.

“Mister Stockdale!” The burly orderly hurriedly intercepted the old man.  “She isn’t your daughter, sir!”  He nodded at Curio.

“Sorry, ma’am.  A lot of them get that way in here.  Who you lookin’ for?”

“Epiphany Leblanc?” She croaked.  The man kept trying to get to her.  He was a zombie craving her solace rather than her meat.          

He pointed down the hall and noticed another old man squinting at Curio as he shuffled up spryly on a walker.  “Ain’t no sense strolling up here.” He laughed and held up his hand to the shuffling interloper. “She ain’t Miss Carrie, Joe.”

The walker put on his chained glasses and kept coming, bearing a wide, toothless smile.

“Hubba, hubba, heck yeah!  I know she ain’t, Larry.” The old fellow said. “She’s too good-looking to be Carrie.” Curio gulped as she saw he had an erection poking out from his gown.  “How are ya’ sweetheart!” He wiggled his bushy eyebrows like Groucho Marx. “Lovely weather for a lovely lady to be in, eh?  Hey, I’ve got a bottle of cold gin back in my room…”

“Oh shit.” She whispered.

“You ain’t got no gin, Joe.” Larry chuckled. “Quit telling that lie to every lady you see!  Miss Carrie’ll slap you silly if hears you tellin’ that to a pretty woman.”

Mister Stockdale started crying. “Please!  Francesca!  I just wanna’ go home again!  Can I please go home to you and Mama?  I won’t mess the bed no more!  I promise!  Daddy loves you, baby!  I just wanna’ go home and eat some fried chicken with you and Mama.  Like we used to, you know?”  He sniffled and moved in to lay his head against her.  The orderly blocked him with his body.  “Please, baby?  Please!  You still look just like your Mama!  Is she in the car?  Did you check the tires?  Your mother always forgets to check the tires.  I told her a thousand times…” His eye’s mania disappeared into a vapid incoherence.

Curio never felt so helplessly morose and uncomfortable in her life.  Given her past and her lifestyle, that was a dubious achievement. 

Larry pointed her down the hall further as he blocked the two men for her.  “Miss P is down there that-away.  Next to last one on the left.  She can’t talk too loud so you ain’t gotta’ knock.  Just go on in.” He started to push Mister Stockdale away.  The man reached for her one more desperate time.

“I took you to your first movie, Francesca!  Don’t you remember?  It was Breakfast at Tiffany’s!  You said you wanted to be Audrey Hepburn!  I wanna’ take you to another movie, Francesca!  Can we catch the matinee?  Maybe John Wayne has one we can see.  Or maybe Daddy can get you’re a sundae!”

She nodded and turned away, eyes misting up immediately.  Something in the desperation in the man as he kept crying out to her as she walked away ripped away at her.  “Shit…” she broke down as she clicked away in her heels. 

Curio had done her makeup as precisely as she had ever managed.  No all she could think was that her mascara would be ruined and Auntie P would cluck her tongue like she used to do.

“John Wayne passed away a long time ago, Earl.” Joe the walker said to the crying man.  He winked and nodded at Curio’s swaying ass.  “Now that’s there’s a tush, Larry.”

“Francesca!  Take me home and take me to see Chisum!  They’re showing it at the Poplar Cinema at four-thirty!  We can make it a family night again!  Daddy’ll take you to Picadilly or Bonanza or wherever you want.  Please, Frannie!  I don’t wanna’ die here!  These people ain’t your blood!  Daddy is!  I feel better…really!”

“Oh man.” She wiped her eyes.  He kept it up a few more times as she walked away.  Finally, Mr. Stockdale just bawled as Larry herded him toward his room, gently trying to console him.  She heard the lady LPN tell him it was okay.

“Daddy loves you, baby!  Please take me home for supper…” The voice echoed down the hall a final time before she heard it muffled behind the click of a shutting door.

A number of the rooms’ had open doors.  As she passed, her eyes caught glimpses of lingering old people in bed, attached to tubes, TV’s blaring.  Some were sitting in wheelchairs in their rooms, almost always seated where they could gaze out of the single window centered perfectly in every room.  The rooms were all doubled-up with patients.  Their final days, after a lifetime of living their lives in the world at large, were spent in half of a quaint room separated by mundane curtains from the complete stranger dying next to them.  Curio could think of nothing more terrifying.

She paused at the door for a moment.  It was closed.  Auntie P always insisted she knock and await permission to enter.

Her tiny hands pressed lightly against the door.  All of her life, Epiphany Leblanc was a woman in full.  Her affairs were in order, her appearance was impeccable and her repute was pristine amongst her peers.  Curio wagered the same could be said for any number of the elderly residents she had just seen wandering aimlessly in various stages of dementia and physical ability.  To know that Auntie P was reduced to a shared cubicle in which she would pass on was enough to give her vicious niece a need to collect herself before merely entering the room.

When last she saw her aunt, she was the haughty harbinger of an occasional meal and a bed Curio could sleep in without fear of any physical harm.  Her emotional wounding was far deeper than any fisticuff outside the Hog’s Breath.  At the end of their relationship, Curio risked the street life’s potential of degrading herself by choice rather than endure the barbs and obvious disgust of her aunt.  She could never live up to anything approximate to the patrician notions of the Leblancs of the Garden District.  Her potential was damned before her birth.  Now with her hands that wielded death as a vocation pressing on the metal door, she would finally see how the fate of Auntie P might have mirrored her own…if Curio lived that long as a Leblanc of substance.  Taking a deep breath, her hands could not find the strength to push the door open.  Her fingers were white as bleached bone.  They trembled as she took a few deep breaths to steady her racing heart.

She could hear the shuffle of Joe’s walker as he made his way down toward her.  That old man’s hard-on easing in shuffling steps down the long hall toward her was enough to force her to rap on the door and abruptly open it.

“Hi!”

Curio beamed as she took a step inside, speaking without looking.  She was speaking to an empty bed by the door.

Surprised, she turned and looked at the other bed.  It was barely visible behind a threadbare curtain with faded shapes.  There were the outlines of two feet visible at the foot of it but the rest was hidden.  Even though she made noise entering, the feet did not move.  Her predatory instincts instantly took over.  She sensed the room as if she were on the job.

The dim room was silent except for the hum of a tiny fan mounted just above the window and a rhythmic hiss of a respirator valve.  Something about the size of the woman under those sheets seemed entirely too delicate.  It was sickening to her suddenly.  Auntie P had wasted away.

Curio laid the bouquet across her arm, straightened her posture and tried her best to smartly click her heels just an octave higher as she marched forward those few linoleum paces to meet her aunt and make amends.  Her eyes were red, her face was flushed, her lip was quivering, yet she was determined to meet her frequent bane as the woman she now was.  Fierce, independent, loved, capable, and as beautiful as Epiphany would have wished her to be.

Each step, however, brought her closer to those two feet and to her life before she was Curio Phelonie.  It was oddly out of sorts for her.

Epiphany Harriet Leblanc laid asleep, sitting upright in her bed.  Curio tried hard not to gasp but it came out naturally. 

Auntie P was indeed a shell of her former self.  Never a large woman- none of the Leblancs dared to be heavy- she looked impossibly fragile under her pale-blue skin.  Her mouth was covered by a breathing mask.  She seemed so slight the adjustable mattress pad barely dented under her weight. 

She noticed immediately Duchess’ hair was unruly and grey.  Her hair was fixed and colored if needed every week when Curio was young.  Oddly enough, her mother Duchess Leblanc, even when broke and wondering where she and her daughter would sleep any given week, also managed to hit a salon weekly most of Curio’s life.

“Upkeep, Curio.” Her mama would say while she was getting trimmed in a cheap salon chair, often by the hands of a cosmetology student at a school.  She was always fully engrossed into the very pertinent news of the National Enquirer as some nervous student snipped and combed under the tutelage of her instructor. “A lady has got to have upkeep.”

“Upkeep, Lemarie.”  Epiphany would say when her private stylist Luverne would trim and prickle at her hair in the spare bathroom upstairs that she turned into her personal styling center.  She would be reading a Cosmopolitan. “A lady has got to have upkeep.” 

She must be truly dying, Curio thought.  That’s the only way she would let her hair look that bad. 

“Auntie P?” She spoke softly and touched Epiphany’s hand. “You hear me?”

Auntie P snorted slightly under the mask.  Her soft brown eyes fluttered and studied Curio intently.  Her unplucked brows furrowed as she seemed to make the connection.  Curio smiled at her and nodded.  Her dark eyes watered uncontrollably as she watched her aunt’s presence stir before her.  The cheekbones of the uncompromising face were still set in a scowl but there was far less muscle beneath her skin.

“Lemarie!?” Her voice was a whisper.  But her eyes were immediately locked opened in shock.

“Yes, it’s me, Aunt P.  It’s Lemarie.  It’s good to see you!”

The serenity of the silent bed exploded.  The old woman seemed to unravel into panic, just as the feeble-minded Stockdale.  For a moment, Curio wondered if anyone in the place had any marbles left.

“I’m so sorry!  Please, Mother Mary!  Mother of God!  Please forgive me!”  Epiphany cried out wildly.  “I tried!  By God Almighty!  I’m so sorry, my Lord!  I beseech thee!  Please, please!  Forgive me!  Forgive my trespasses, for my sins were unintended…”

“It’s okay, Auntie P!  I’m here…”

“I’m so sorry!  Please…I don’t want to burn in hell!  I tried!  I swear to you Lord!  I tried!  I tried!  I tried…” Her bawls disintegrated into sincere beseeching. “I’m so sorryyyy.” She choked the words out in a small voice of dismal regret that descended into a blubbering sob. “I’m in hell…Oh my Sweet Lord.”

“You’re not burning in hell, Auntie P.”  Curio tried to soothe her.  The flowers and the bag of beignets were tossed at the foot of the bed.  She held her aunt by both thin arms and rubbed them softly.  She could feel the twin bones of the forearm distinctly beneath the paper-thin skin. “You’re gonna’ make it to heaven faster than the Pope, I bet.”

Epiphany paused.  She looked around the room again.  Her eyes fixed again on Curio.  Curio saw the brown eyes sharpen on her face and then she acknowledged she was being touched skin to skin.  A scowl could not be helped as Epiphany relaxed and shook her head.

“Good Lord, Lemarie.  Forgive me, girl!  I thought for sure if I saw you again, it was because I sinned beyond God’s tolerance and went straight to hell.  You’re still alive, right?  Please tell me you’re actually standing there.”

Curio scoffed at her and dejectedly shook her head. “You thought you was in hell because you saw me?” She sighed. “That figures.”

“Cheri, you been gone so long,” She wiped her eyes. Curio dared not wipe hers lest the make-up smear. “I figured you got knocked in the head and got dumped in a swamp.  I just thought…I’m sorry.  That wasn’t right of me.  What are you doing here?  Where have you been, child?  I read the paper every day looking to see if they found a dead girl’s body they can’t identify.”

Curio snorted and chuckled.  “Nice to see you, too.  Glad to see absence ain’t made the fuckin’ heart grow fonder for some people.  Jesus.”

“I see that filthy mouth hasn’t changed in your absence.  I take it you weren’t off at some college?”

Curio shrugged and shook her head. “Does the school of hard knocks count?”

“Well, speak up then.  What brings you here?  Are you in trouble?  You’re not expecting, I hope.” Epiphany’s eyes cut to the tiny couch beside the window. “They don’t allow overnight visitors so I’m afraid the couch over there is not available for you.  Do you need money for a hotel?  I think they’ve been stealing it from my purse but you may get lucky.”

Sighing, Curio just looked at her with subdued exasperation. “Well, no, Aunt P.  Amazingly I ain’t managed to get knocked up and I don’t need couches to crash on much these days.  I just came to visit when I heard you were here.  I brought you some flowers and some beignets.”  She folded her arms and smirked at the little old lady. “Sorry my mere appearance bearing gifts damn-near gave you a near-death experience and made you believe you died and went to hell.”

“Don’t get me wrong, mon cheri.  I’m so happy to see you, girl.  I swear, Lemarie…I so very thought you were dead. I’m sorry for saying that.  You were just such a wicked girl…”

“Can I get a simple hello, please?” Curio pinched her forehead between her forefinger and thumb. “Is it too much to hope for a mere 'good to see you, Lemarie'?  Maybe a ‘hi, you look well, Lemarie?” Curio laid the flowers across the bed and kissed her aunt on both cheeks.  Aunt Epiphany self-consciously checked her gown to make sure she was covered and as presentable as she could manage.  Curio thought it had to be sheer terror for Epiphany Leblanc to have only a hospital gown to wear.  Her closets were the stuff of fashion fantasy when she was a child.

“Take this mask off, girl.  I sound like Darth Vader in this contraption.”

“You okay with that?  Your color’s kinda’ pale.”  Like a corpse…

“My color stays that way, baby.  It lets me know I ain’t got long on this earth.”  She wiped her shriveled hands across her hair and pursed her lips in shame.  “That lazy beautician doesn’t come around to see me no more.  I guess she’s waiting to do my last haircut when I’m cold on the slab.  Such is life, I suppose.  I ain’t had nobody family around here to tell them otherwise lately.”  She glared slightly at Curio, who did feel suddenly awful for that.

“I went by your house.” Curio delicately sat on the edge of the bed.  “The lady you sold it to sent me here.  How long have you been here?”  She slipped off the mask and laid it aside.

“Lord, I have no idea.  What day is it?”

“August tenth.”

“What year?  I seem to forgot those sort of things a lot lately.  Don’t ever get old and sick, by the way.  It’s terribly uncivilized what happens to you in such places as these.”

“1993.”

“How long has it been since you and I spoke?”

“Three years, I think.  That sounds pretty close.”

“I’m waiting to hear a reason for that.  Do you have any idea how scared I was that they would find you dead with a needle in your arm?  Or raped.  Or strangled. It happens to street girls all the time.  Lord you should sit and watch the news as much as I do.  It’s such a terrible world.”

“I’m not a junkie, Aunt P.  And frankly, anybody who dares to try raping and strangling me?  They ain’t gonna do too good with that.”

…And they haven’t!

“Where have you been then?  Did you run off with that artist?”

“Artist?  What artist?”

“The…” She leaned closer to Curio and whispered the word, “gay one.  The homosexual.”

Curio laughed.  “No.  That crazy ass rim-jobbin’ faggot is happily living down in Miami last I heard.  Nope, I ran off with a very straight Texan, Auntie P.  He ain’t much of an artist to say the least.  He ain’t gay either.”

“Mind your voice, Lemarie.  There’s a number of those kind working here.  God forbid they hear that word and have some twisted retribution on me on account of you.  Merde, you should hear some of the rumors they swirl around this place.  The only men who seem to have kept their minds intact in here are the perverts.”

“Holler at one then. You might like it, Auntie P.” Curio chuckled. “What you got to lose, right?”

“Dreadful girl.  Always the advocate for a life of lazy vice and I see the years you’ve grown haven’t changed you one iota.”

“Lazy vice?”

“Sleeping around for the sake of it.  Casual sex, I think they call it now.  Being slutty is what I say it is.”

“Getting fucked is my personal favorite.”

“You stop with that filthy mouth!”

“Sorry.  Getting screwed.”

“Save the jokes for Johnny and Ed, Lemarie.  You’re never as funny as you think you are.  Your man, now.  He’s a Texan, you say?  I assume that he works in the gas fields or is he leaving you to your natural roaming habits while he’s offshore for a month?  How much do roughnecks get paid nowadays?  Y’all gettin’ by?”

She looked at her aunt with amusement.  “He’s rough and a bit of a redneck but he ain’t a roughneck on some oil rig.  They do have other jobs open for Texans who cross the line over here, you know.”

“None I’ve met.”

“You’ve probably never met a roughneck, anyway.  No, Auntie P.  He’s smart.  Don’t get me wrong- he still wears those damned cowboys boots everywhere.  He’s even got the Stetson and all.  But he’s actually a company consultant, kinda’.  He and I work together.”

“That’s a very vague title.”

“We work for a vague company.”

Epiphany peppered her with questions, trying to get her words in before she had to suck at the oxygen mask again.

“Well, is he like a CPA or something?  Is he in a Lodge?  He’s not Jewish, is he?  You know they can’t marry out of the own religion!  Did you learn shorthand?  I never would have dreamed you could be a receptionist!  Is that why you dress so well now?”

“None of the above.  He’s kinda’ like a trouble-shooter, you could say.  He comes in…well, we come in, and we handle problems with like, staffing, or logistics or whatever the problem is.  We’re kinda’ like a relief valve, kinda.  I don’t know how to explain it exactly.  When there’s a problem, we come in and try to fix it so the bosses don’t have any more problems like that.”

“Does it pay well?  You seemed dressed awfully nice.”  Epiphany studied her niece.  The girl was far prettier and put together than she remembered.  As a young woman, she had arrived.  Epiphany was proud of that. “Is that Chanel?  You’ve learned to dress yourself finally.  My Lord, those curves are to die for.”

Curio beamed and modeled the dress. “It’s a Vera Wang.  She’s frickin’ awesome.  I got this in Houston.”

“You live in Houston?  Oh, my dear!  You should go immediately back home and look up Felix Terusso over at the Holston Financial Group!  I met him and his wife Lillian at the retirement dinner for Damien Peppers a few years ago!  His son plays for the Astros.  I heard he’s quite a dish.  And he’s single...”

“I’m happy with Moses.  Thank you though.”

“Moses?  What kinda’ name is Moses?” Epiphany looked shocked.  “Moses…is he white?” She held up her hand abruptly. “Good God, don’t tell me if he isn’t.  I’d rather not know.”

“No, Auntie P.  Since you ask, he’s not white.  Not by a long shot.  He played some high school basketball.  He’s real tall and he has the most awesome gold teeth.”

“Oh good Lord!  Lemarie…”

“He’s from the Ninth Ward.  Well, he’s from there originally, anyway.  Of course he just got outta’ jail for some bullshit burglary charge but he swears he’ll beat that rap.  He got me this chain, though.” She held out a necklace with a teardrop diamond swaying from it.  “He says it’s even real.  God, he’s so sweet.  We got matching tattoos last week!”

Epiphany crossed herself.  “Lord, I knew when I saw you holding hands that time with that little Collins boy you’d end up with a black.  Please tell me you aren’t about to show me some pictures of my mulatto grand-nieces.”

“He ain’t black, Auntie P.  God you old people and your stuck-up ass ways!  Moses is from west Texas and he’s about as Cracker Barrel as they come.”

“Well, forgive my assumptions, mon cheri.  I just have never heard of a white man by the name of Moses is all.  You never had a problem before mixing it up with them blacks.  I could hardly blame you.  It would not surprise me in the slightest that you took up with one.  After what you saw your mama tie up with I could hardly blame you for not knowing right from wrong with regards to that sort of thing.  I swear, Lemarie.  You and your jokes.”

“Different strokes for different folks,” she smiled. “Yo.”

“Some strokes are best left with one’s own kind, Lemarie.”

“What kind is that?  I thought it was supposed to be all God’s children and all that.”

“I’m sorry I brought it up.  You weren’t taught right about a lot of things.  Most of that is my fault for not trying to get custody of you when I saw the road Duchess was going down.  I’m sorry if her habits and preferences made you the way you are.”

“That is so typically mean of you!  You have no idea the way I am.  I’m in love, Aunt P.  I have a job that pays well and I get to travel all over the place.  I’ve traveled overseas even.  And I have a man with a good heart, good hands,” she cupped her hand to one side of her face and purred, “and one helluva big dick.”  Winking at her shocked aunt, she shrugged.

“I think I’m doin’ pretty damned good for a junkie’s fuck trophy, Mademoiselle Leblanc.  You never had none of those things from a guy or you wouldn’t be sitting here all alone sleeping with your mouth wide-open.  You better watch out doing that or one day that old guy with the walker out there might take it as an invitation to hide that boner he’s lurkin’ around with.”

Curio chuckled as her aunt fidgeted and struggled to find the words.

“You shouldn’t talk like that!  Have some respect!  Indeed!”

“Aunt P, look,” Curio opened up the takeout from Café Du Monde. “I didn’t come here to argue or fight.  We could do that all day and all night but at the end of all that, I’d still go home to my happy man and you’ll still be in here waiting for the good Lord to call you home and whatnot.  I brought you some beignets.  Would you like one?  I bet you ain’t had one in forever and I remember you loved them.”

“That’s was thoughtful of you.  I’m surprised you remembered.”

Curio sighed and shook her head.  “I remember you taking me down Decatur Street a lot to get them when Mama was indisposed.”

“You mean in jail for prostitution.”

“Or I mean indisposed.  Damn, you never could give her a break, could you?  Not that she deserved a break. I ain’t sayin’ that.  Hell, you’ll never catch me sayin’ that.  She was some piece of work.  But damn.  She got shot four times in front of her daughter and died thinkin’ the men who shot her were about to shoot her little girl in front of her and she would get to know the last thing she saw on earth would be seeing me die in front of her before she did because of her sorry ass screwing over a crack dealer.  That had to suck for her, so I kinda’ call it even.”

“We were sisters, Lemarie.  Of course I mourned her.  But I knew her as a child and I saw where she was going long before Mama and Daddy did.  Lemarie, she was far younger than I was but she never grew up.  That’s why she didn’t deserve a break.  She was a petulant child and she grew into a wild woman.”

“You always said I was the spitting image of her.”

“But look at you now.  You had the sense to grow outta’ whatever filthy shenanigans you ran off to do.  Someone must have taught you how to carry yourself.”

“Someone taught me to be me.  Only I had no idea who in the hell me was.  I know now.  Believe you me.”

“You mother, though?  She had Mama and me and all her friends in school to look to as examples of how proper women were supposed to live.  I still regret to this day taking her with us down into the Quarter to a wine tasting and she cut away for us and got a good long look at that colored bastard that ruined her.  You have no idea how hard I tried to get her to leave that damned Tarvin Jones alone.  I tried my best to take her other places where she could meet some nice gentlemen.  Men with futures, you know?  Men with pedigree.”

“Stuck-up white saltines, yo?” Suddenly Janks made sense to her as she heard the Caucasian spite dripping into her aunt’s hushed voice.

“You would think like that.  Yes.  Rich white men.  Perish the thought!  Men who weren’t into the nasty dopehead foolishness she got caught up in just to spite Daddy.  Mama had to keep the fact that Duchess wasn’t over in Metairie with me like she told Daddy she was half the time on account of her not wanting Daddy to drop dead from shame.  She should have stayed the course she was destined to travel.  But not Duchess.  God forbid she settle down with a good layman and lead a quiet life.”

“You mean be a WASP?  Don’tcha’?  You mean be a trophy wife and sit around playing bridge and sipping on them God-awful Manhattans you used to make?  Honey, you don’t have to dance around it.  I know what you mean.  You mean be taken care of.  That don’t sit too well with me.  I like being worth something besides some stupid smile next to some guy and just being a warm, wet place to germinate some heirs for some Domino Sugar VP.”

“Yes!” Epiphany barked at her. “I meant rich white men who weren’t into the foolishness she got caught up in.  Men with futures.  Men who mattered.  Men who my Mama didn’t have to lie about when she told Daddy where she was half the time.  She’d have to lie, Lemarie.  She was a god-fearing woman and a devoted wife.  But she lied to protect him and Duchess from themselves.  It would’ve killed Daddy to know his little girl was down on Decatur in some smoky jazz bar dancing her fool ass off.  Down there at all hours of the night just so she could try to make some colored trombone player leave all those other trampy white women he was seeing behind and take up with her.  Which he never would have!  His kind never settle.  They just rut around.”

Her scorn for the man Jones flushed her blue face suddenly into pink.  Curio was shocked to see the hate for a dead man from twenty years past could bring such vibrancy to a corpse that did not know it was no longer alive.

“He was scum!  But boy, she liked his kinda’ scum alright.  She liked Tarvin Jones enough to put my Daddy in a vault at the age of fifty-two.  She always wanted to buck tradition.  Like it was some curse to be born with a good family and parents who loved her.  She was the baby, Lemarie.  I had expectations.  She had the doting.  But it was never enough for her.  She always wanted the rush.  How’d that end for her, eh?”

Curio marveled at her aunt’s outburst.  The woman was clearly flushing out some anger, but Curio had seen that flushed on her every time the front door opened to her at the Garden District home. “I never none of heard this.  Who’s Tarvin Jones?”

“Well, he’s dead now.  He was found with his throat cut way back in ‘71.  Before you were born.  But he wasn’t dead in time enough to stop my sister from learning how to smoke those foul reefers with him and all of those other race-mixing communists and beatniks down there in the Quarter.  And he didn’t die fast enough to not show her how to melt down all those filthy powders and punch them into her veins.  No sir.  Before he died he did plenty to get her walking down the street to hell she ended up dying on.  I tried to stop her from mixing herself in with them.  She just saw something in that man that the life of leisure amongst her own kind could not satiate.  It was always an itch she wanted scratched.”

“Who killed him?”

“Who knows?  Someone did.  I wish I could give them a medal.  Good God the pain he caused.  It makes me sick even now.”

“Did Grandpa find out?”

“He did.  Mama couldn’t cover for her when she got pregnant and started showing.  He went ballistic.”  She wheezed from the nervous exertion.

“Pregnant?  With me?”  Her mind raced.

“No.  Before you.”

“What in the hell are you talking about?”

“Hand me the mask for a minute.  My breath gets loose of me quick when I get upset.  Duchess has been dead ten years but she died to me the day I saw my daddy’s heart broken when he found out she was carrying a black man’s bastard in her belly.  It still troubles me to think about.  I loved my daddy.  I was his firstborn, you know.  I did everything right and still here she comes and of course, she’s the baby.” Epiphany mocked the memory. “But there’s some things Daddy would not stand for.” She jabbed her finger at Curio. “She knew it and still she decided to push his buttons and see what he would do about it.  Well, she sure found out, I guess.”

Curio got the mask affixed.  Her mind was processing tidbits of her youth.  When she was barely out of diapers, she remembered her mother giggling and leading a tall black man wearing a swanky leather hat and John Lennon glasses past her tiny bedroom.  Something random about what she overheard suddenly resonated from the deep recesses of her memory.

“Tarvin is past caring about your needs, baby.” The man was saying.  “He couldn’t keep that need filled like Stevie can no way.  Big Stevie got somethin’ fo yo’ tight little white ass.”

“He was your friend, Stevie.” Duchess snapped at him but still led him toward the back bedroom.  “I loved him.  Show him some respect.”  And Stevie looked at tiny Curio.  She giggled at him and waved a teddy bear at him.

“That ain’t his baby is it?”

“No.  His baby died…” Then the memory faded in her mind as the couple passed into the next room.

         “So what, she had a miscarriage before having me?” Curio asked. 

Epiphany wheezed as she caught her oxygen up.  She shook her head no but raised her hand and wiggled it.  Kinda…

         “Abortion?” 

Again, no. With the added plus of shock as her insinuation. 

Drawing in several breaths, Epiphany pulled the mask back off.

         “Abortion?  You know the church and that.  No, Duchess said Daddy made her miscarry.  He called her to come over to the house to explain herself one day.  One of Daddy's close business associates apparently congratulated him after seeing Duchess walking down Canal Street with her belly clearly showing that she was expecting.  Daddy found out that way.” Epiphany nibbled at a beignet. 

“They got into it real bad, of course.  Daddy was inconsolable and Lord, that man had a temper when he wanted one to show up.  I guess that’s where we all got our tempers because Mama never got mad.  I’d never have said it aloud when he was alive, but Duchess always said he put something in her food or her drink that day.  She miscarried the very next morning.”

         “Damn.  That was kinda’ harsh, wasn’t it?  With grandparents like him, who needs Kevorkian?”

         “Times were different, Lemarie.  Daddy was not going to have a mixed grandbaby in his presence.  No, sir.  Now, I don’t know if he did that or not but given how heated they were at each other and knowing how Daddy thought about such things, I scarcely put it past him to do something if he could.  For all I know she stressed out too much over them fighting like they did and that caused it.  I don’t know.  But I will say this, she miscarried on April Fool’s Day that year and not a week later, Tarvin Jones met up with his knifing.  Duchess was nowhere to found for a long time.  She flat-out disappeared.  Daddy even hired a detective after a while.  He never found her.  She just showed back up after a while.”

         “A detective?  What did he miss her or he just wanna’ know where she was to make sure she didn’t try for black baby number two?”  Curio handed her another beignet and ate one herself.

         “She was still Daddy’s little girl.”  Epiphany sighed and frowned.  Curio could see the jealousy still palpable.  “It broke his heart to see me not marry anybody and then to see his other daughter end up dancing naked for dope money and taking up with anyone she thought she might shoot up a bag with for a night.  It killed him.  Literally killed him.  But not before he signed everything over to me.  He told Mama there was no way that anything he had ever worked for was going to her if that was the way she wanted to live.” She took a timid bite of the spongy sugar bomb.  “Thank you for these.  God, I’ve missed them.”

         “You’re welcome.  I would get mad about that if I was Mama and I found that out.”

         “Oh she did find out.  When she finally decided to call the house one day after we hadn’t seen or heard from her in three months.  Daddy died right in the middle of those three months.  No one could find her to tell her Daddy had passed.  God bless his soul.  She came to claim what she thought she was going to get and the lawyer told her directly how much that amount was when he had her tossed out of his office.”

         Curio felt her face flush. “So that’s how you’ve been livin’ so good without a job all this time?  I thought you was hookin’ some kinda’ way without me knowing!” Curio laughed mirthlessly.  “You’ve been riding high on Mama’s cut all this time, huh?  I’ll be damned.” 

Her teeth was ground together as things her mother would tell pushers and passersby while under the influence suddenly had truth posited within them.  She told anyone who listened an unchanging sob story of how her family had cruelly tossed her aside just to spoil the "good sister." Curio always assumed Duchess probably had it coming after witnessing her screw over dealers, charitable benefactors, and landlords throughout her young life. 

Hearing her aunt speak truth to power, she did not doubt what Epiphany was saying.  She did remember her own tumultuous childhood.  For years, she wandered the streets and motels with her mother, aimless Bohemians in a town that prided itself on festive wanderers.  The woman was a dreg.  Curio had no illusions about the general worthlessness of her mother.  Had there been an iota of pride, determination for success or overt dedication to the betterment of her only daughter’s future, Curio may have thought differently.  Yet, Curio began to sniffle as things somewhat made sense.  Her temples began to pound as tears welled.

What about me?  Mama’s cut?  What about my cut?

Curio felt angry as every bad memory of her youth began to collage through her mind.  They were like an unending series of photographs shot by some commando Life magazine photographer touring some desperately foul slum in search of the horrors of the American Diaspora.  But they were all she could recall before the clarity of her lovely meld with his beloved Moses. 

         “You know she couldn’t have access to that money.  Duchess would only have put every dime she had in her arm and made some pushers rich.  With that money, she probably would have died far younger, Lemarie.  I could not allow everything Daddy put into his family’s status, and also my Mama’s and my own welfare anywhere near the likes of her.  Any notion of her being my sister died when she went off away from what would have been a successful life to go stagger around the filthy street.  And her dragging you along with her, consequences are damned.  It was contemptible.”

         Yeah, what about that draggin’ me along with her, Family!

         She ground her teeth and her eyes fixed into the snarling rage that many a mark had seen before their lives ended viciously.

“Auntie P.  With that money, and maybe even some family’s help, your own sister might have been able to get some help kickin’ the habit and maybe actually find that great white hope that you sure as fuck never seemed to put your lily-white claws into.”  Curio’s eyes darkened as she glared at the old woman.

“With that money, maybe I wouldna’ had to cut my hair off because I got sent home in the third grade because I had her damned pube lice crawl up in my hair from the mattress we had to share.  I looked like those pictures of those French whores who they shaved bald because they fucked the Germans.”  Epiphany started to say something.  Curio pointed at her maliciously.

“No, Curio’s talking now!  Maybe with that money I wouldna’ got fingered for a fucking hour by this skanky Polish fuckin’ crackhead while I was crying for Mama to make him stop it.  And with her back in the back room screaming at me to shut the fuck up so she could get this motherfucker to nut so he’d pay her.  And hey she’d buy me a Happy Meal when they were done and all to make it up to me.  As she nicely put it to her ten-year-old.  Never mind making the guy with his finger inside me stop.  Can’t be that bad, right, girl?  Hell, we all get it put in us at some point.  Better to learn it early when you heal faster, huh?  I never got that fucking Happy Meal neither.  She had to go spend the trick’s take on another week at the apartment.  Hell, I had to steal one of her pads because I bled.  Yeah, that was fun.” 

She jammed her finger in the bed as Epiphany looked away, dismayed to hear aloud what Curio knew she was privately aware of anyway.  What she was saying only seemed to offend Aunt P because it was uttered with a vulgar mouth.  The actual deed?  Par for the course for anyone attached to her sister.

“Maybe with that money, you could have adopted me when you saw me that time at Thanksgiving and I didn’t have no shoes and it was raining and cold as fuck outside.  That whole month…Mama was on one helluva nice heroin run and just plumb forgot to send me to school where I could at least get fed twice a day and maybe color a picture or learn something besides how to sit at the card table in a roachy-ass kitchen all day because the couch and the chairs was full of motherfuckers passing weed around while they waited their turn at bat with ole Dutchie’s big tittied-ass in the backroom.” 

Curio blubbered now.  She cursed herself for losing her composure but the words now flowed and dragged the tears by force from those dark eyes that had witnessed much and relived such scenes as a defense against her going insane.  It was a battle she often wondered if she had lost or could have ever begun to fight as she held a gun over a dead man alongside her lover.

“Or maybe with that money there wouldn’t have been that time she didn’t get to pack any of my clothes or my toys when J.C. Edgerton kicked the two of us…literally kicked the two of us out of his house and didn’t stop kickin’ until we were halfway up Phillips Street.  It took one of those,” she cupped her hand to her mouth and whispered, “homosexuals,” she fired up again, “to get a nigger stick from outta’ his car and beat the ever-living fuck out of J.C. to keep him from probably killing one of us.  J.C. took an ass-whippin’ so bad he could barely move from the middle of the street.  He just laid there moanin’ and bleedin’, right?  So Mama saw her chance, right?  To run back in the house and grab a big ole baggie of J.C.’s dope and whatever she could grab of ours, right?  And what was ours, you may ask?” Curio tallied the take in her palm with an indignant forefinger.  She ignored her nail cutting crescents of blood up from her palm.

“She only remembered to grab her clothes because if she hadn’t she mighta’ not ended up naked on stage that week.  She might coulda’ danced naked but she sure as hell couldn’t show up at the front door of Big Daddy’s that way!  Don’t matter if it’s Bourbon Street or not, even them dancin’ whores must enter places with some clothes on.  Her kid’s clothes, though?  Hey, sorry about dat!  Curio’s seven, right?  She’s a big girl, mature for her age and all that stuff.  She’s wearing some clothes.  So hell, she can wear the same two-sizes-too-small shorts in early March when it sleeted and froze up and stayed cold as hell for three days.  And also wearing the same long-sleeve shirt that got mud on it when I slipped on the ice and sprained my wrist.  For…a…solid…week...straight, I wore the same shirt and shorts.  So I would like to say thank you, since I’m seeing you now!  Thank you for buying me some pants just for kicks that time.  Ain’t that what you said?  ‘I was at Kaplans and I bought you these just for kicks, Lemarie?’  ‘You need some good pants that ain’t so tight on you everyone can’t see your religion.’ You were sooo funny, Auntie P!  You talk about me jokin’?  You was the damned joke.  But thank you all the same for those pants.  They came in handy since they were the only ones I had until Mama got me some more clothes at the Salvation Army a few weeks later.  At least my legs didn’t freeze as bad.”

Auntie P was crying. “I’m so sorry, baby…”

         “What?  Am I wrong for pointing all that out?  Hell, I don’t think so!  Maybe for you though, with that money it was that much easier for you just put on your badass wardrobe and make a few calls every weekend, huh?  You hosted all them pah-ties.  You went to dem’ Endymion balls…” She wiped her eyes.

“I remember all that.  Maybe with that money, I…” Curio thought of her wearing Mardi Gras beads as a girl.  Tossing them effortlessly over her shoulder like her Auntie P would do with her strands of pearls.  Glaring, she now recalled so many squalid images of her youth and looked at the shriveled old woman dying in front of her.

“I can remember you calling up all those blueblood friends of yours all laughing and shit on the phone talking about how rahhh-vishing everyone looked last week and how y’all were gonna’ tear down the house the next time you got together for a real riii-ot.  Only I didn’t get to see any of those rah-vishing parties when I had the good luck of actually sleeping in a nice bed with clean sheets at nice ole’ Auntie P’s house, did I, Auntie P?  No, oh hell no.  I got tossed in a hotel room with some old hag of a babysitter who sat around watching Dallas or Knot’s Landing.  My treat was she always fed me a whopper and made me go to sleep while she talked to her married boyfriend about the welfare bitch’s nasty kid she made twenty bucks watching.”  Curio stood up and dropped the bag of beignets on the bed.

         “You sitting there defending some bullshit honor code?  Like we had the name Leblanc so by God, we should always be Le Whites?  Aunt P, you sittin’ there…” She was suddenly exasperated.  Her small fingers pressed into her eyes.  Curio felt queasy.

“It was wrong and I’m sorry.” The old woman mumbled under her mask.

“I lived a life of sheer hell?  Just because Mama liked to get down with brown?  I got fuckin’ fondled up at least once every three months…just because them rich old racist coonasses that raised her wasn’t having that bad daughter ruin their socializing?  I guess that meant you neither, huh?  Anything to not have some Elysian Fields snob chuckle behind any of y’all’s back at the University Club, huh?  Ain’t that just a bitch?”

         “Lemarie.”  Epiphany pointed at her and growled. “Your mama could have come to me any time she wanted to and I would have helped her.  She never would.  I did try to talk her into moving away and taking you somewhere besides the city.  Mama did, too when she found out Duchess was pregnant with you.  Of course, Mama passed away right after that, but she made the effort.  But Duchess loved the city.  She wasn’t going nowhere if it wasn’t in the city.”

“She always did.” Curio sighed. “Mama always said N’awlins could forgive anything except not living life as you wished.  There’s a room for every freak history ever invented somewhere in the Big Easy.  And always has been.”

“The city is wonderful place for most but for some it just pulls your soul down into the mud if you let it.  She flat wouldn’t listen.  Duchess was dead-set that somehow, someway, she would do whatever she wanted to do no matter who it hurt, even it was herself.  And when you came along, you weren’t enough reason for her to change her mind.  I’m sorry to put it that way.  But the truth is not always pretty, Lemarie.  She was selfish to a fault and on account of it, you were born under a bad sign and I’m sorry.  It’s just a shame and I’m sorry for it.”

         “Born bad?  Yeah, that’s an understatement.  I was born bad, huh?  Just the underweight baby of a junkie nigger-loving whore, right?  Just a slut who would rather smoke up the rent or shoot up the light bill every once in while.  It is what it is and ain’t it a bitch, huh, girlfriend?  Poor little Lemarie, right!  Yeah, that about sums it up back then, no doubt about it.  But that’s not how it is for me now, Epiphany Leblanc.” Curio forced herself to not prove to her aunt exactly what kind of person she had become.  She thought of the cautions of her man and forced herself to only speak rather than stab.

“Nowadays, I got a good man.  I got a place carved in the world and I got love.  I got money and I still got all my goddamned teeth despite how many times I got back-handed for threatening to call an ambulance for Mama when some john or some pusher beat her ass for ripping them off.  ‘Nobody likes a snitch, Curio,’ she used to tell me…when she couldn’t hardly move.”

Curio realized despite her dangerous existence, she’d outlived them all. 

“Now, though?  Oh, I’m fiiine!.  Really!  I might not be all that right in the head and I damn sure don’t live some chaste…bullshit call-me-to-Jesus kinda’ life.  But I wake up happy.  Really, truly happy.  I wake up safe in the arms of my man who would take a bullet for me.  Hell, he’d take a Mack truck for me.  And I really think he’s strong enough that the truck would wreck if it hit him, not him.  He’d take it for me.  Just for me.  There ain’t nobody else for him but me.  He puts his whole world on hold for me!  Do you have any idea how awesome that is?  You, Mama, the church…ain’t none of y’all had me occupy your world like that.  Not even my own damned mother!  I was just a shit-stain.  A fuckin’ hassle.  I was just in the way of other people’s fun.”

“I never considered you that way.”

“Coulda’ fooled me.” Curio wiped her eyes again.  She stared out the window, her lip trembling.

“Moses, though?  You probably can’t even begin to comprehend what it took for him to even be seen together with me.  He basically risked his life just to buy me a goddamned pack of cigarettes the day we met.  Do you understand that?  No, you don’t.  It was selfless and you fuckin’ Leblancs never learned that word at the dinner table apparently.  You couldn’t understand that because you were the only person who would do that for you.  And you know what?  I’d do the same for him.  He’s awesome to me in ways I never knew possible.  And ain’t it just ironic?  He ain’t exactly a fine upstanding law-abiding citizen.”

“Is he a criminal?  Lemarie, you…are you a criminal now?”

“That’s putting it mildly, Auntie P.  But shhh,” Curio put her finger to Auntie P’s thin lips, “some things belong in a casket with you.”

“I knew it would come to this for you.  The men you chose…it makes sense you would find him.”

“I don’t make sense at all.  But you know what?  It was a man the likes of him that showed me what it meant to be desired not just used and tossed aside.  Not my cross-kissing stuck-up ass old racist...family member, for God’s sake.  Not my mama.  It was him who pulled me out of that fucking sewer pipe of a life and made me truly happy.  I make him happy, too.  It has a cost, but hey, costs come with the game, right?”

“The cost for some things is high, Lemarie.  Don’t think that I haven’t laid here dying and thinking of things I wanted to do and should have done for you.  I’ve got no children.  Never had a man like you speak of.  My family’s all gone when I’m gone, too.  Aren’t they?”

Curio leaned in, sneering. “You better believe it.”

         Curio looked at the wispy old ghost of her formerly imposing aunt.  She had not known what seeing her aunt on her last leg would be for her.  In that instant, the thought of Moses smiling and patting her leg as they rode away from a murder in Birmingham and kissing her with the wry wink in his eye she loved to see was all she could think of.  The old woman fumbled for her mask, trying to catch her breath to further defend herself against the apparent apparition that was Lemarie Leblanc.

         “I did love you…”

Curio was not having it.

“No, you loved you.  And that’s okay, actually.  It made me learn how to take shit if I have to but how also to drop shit of my own if I don’t.”  Curio tucked her purse against her hip and stiffened her posture. 

“Well, Auntie P, I’m so glad we had this chat.  It’s just been ages since we caught up and all, hasn’t it, dah-ling?  We really should do this more often.  But from the looks of you, I’m kinda’ doubtin’ that’s happening.  Any other pleasant tidbits about my past you care to share so I can go home all good and pumped-up to get out the old scalpel for my wrists?  You weren’t never the most jolly of people I ever met but damn, this sho’ didn’t go like I hoped it would.”

The more things change, the more they stay the same?

         “I didn’t…I shouldn’t have said any of it.  And you were wrong about no one loving you.  I did, and God always does!  What you went through and what you do now doesn’t make you any less deserving of God’s love and his forgiveness, Lemarie.” Epiphany swallowed a bite of beignet with difficulty as she wheezed.  “Your man you talked about.  The Texan?  Is he religious at all?  Is he a man of the Church?”

         “His daddy was a preacher man, Aunt P.  But I don’t think it’s an understatement to suggest the teachings musta’ kinda’ fell a little short on credibility for him.  He ain’t immortal. But by God, he’s God enough to me.  And when we’re still alive together at the end of a good day’s work with only each other’s company, that’s all the blessing I need.”

Curio straightened her dress and stood pertly for inspection. “Do you remember how you always made me ask you how I looked before I went somewhere?  It was usually a good sign that you would buy me some clothes when you looked me over.  I looked so crappy back then.”

         “I do remember.” Epiphany smiled slightly. “Remember what I told you to remember about your appearance?”

         Lemarie Leblanc chanted, “Teeth neat. Eyes wised. Hair’s in place?  Look out, guys!”

         Epiphany smiled.  “You do remember!”  She wiped her eyes with her bed sheet. “I’m glad you grew up so pretty.  It helps in life.”

         “I remember it because Mama said the same exact thing to herself when she was gettin’ ready in the mirror before she had a john coming over.”

         “Oh my.”

Curio Phelonie looked at the shell of Aunt Epiphany, thinking of a young Lemarie Leblanc.  She remembered sitting and watching the two women in her life both approaching their evenings in almost exactly the same manner.  But in far different venues and with far different expectations and potentials for the night’s outcome.

“When I got old enough to start tuning into the world I just thought that you were the classier whore of the two.  Hearing all that about you and her now, I really ain’t so sure.  In fact, no.  I was dead-ass wrong.  Mama wasn’t worth a flying fuck but she was just a junkie and I ain’t met one of them yet who was.  But you?  You’re worse.  You had no reason to ignore me other than the fact that you could.  You decided to go along with the way that bullshit was.  Even when you saw how bad it was for me.  I can see why you wrote off your sister.  You can call it because she liked blacks or whatever you wanna’ call it.  But me?  I only liked being able to sleep on a mattress that didn’t stink like God know’s what!  Maybe with a good meal in me once a week, if it wouldn’t put you out too much?  My needs were meager, I think.  But fuck me for dropping by and making you be put out.” She waved her arms, feigning her aunt’s huff, “Oh damn, it’s Lemarie again.  Can’t I just give her a twenty and send her away?” She started to cry again as she mimicked putting money in her purse.

“Of course you could, Aunt P.  A twenty was usually plenty because it was usually nineteen more dollars than I had on me when I asked most times.  With all your money?” She shook her head. “You were so wrong for that!” Curio tried futilely to catch herself before she broke down completely.  She failed to do so.

“What in the hell did I ever do to you except drop by your house when money was nowhere to be found and Mama knew she was gonna’ have to keep the fellas’ on a constant rotation and that meant she couldn’t watch me and do her business like it needed to be done to turn enough of them to make a week?  You oughta’ know, it takes a lot of upkeep to get the game face back on after you been fuckin’ and it got kissed away or whatever, right?  Only I bet you never had to redo your makeup six or seven times because you had to wipe off your makeup along with the cum you got sprinkled with just so you could charge some pervert an extra thirty.  You have no idea what I saw and heard.  No goddamned idea at all!”

“You saw all that?  God love you!  Duchess told me she only stripped and she just saw those men just sometimes.  And only when you were staying with me or had someplace or some friend to stay with.”

“Yeah, well...” Lemarie wiped her eyes and sniffled as she collected herself again. “I guess junkie hookers must be liars too, huh?  You have no idea what kind of life I had to live. You didn’t really care to know.  Duchess made her bed, so she and her dirty little fuck trophy can lie in it, right?  Right?  She’s dirty so…so be it.  Do you know how it made me feel to see you cover your fucking furniture with plastic so I wouldn’t contaminate your pretty little house with my cooties or whatever the fuck you thought I had?  It was humiliating. Trust me, I figured out early what you thought of me, Auntie P.  So when I met Moses?”  The name alone made her smile.  She could see them cuddling in their hot tub.

“Yeah, when I met him I didn’t lose much sleep for the last three years wondering if you ever worried about me.  I knew better and we’ve been kinda’ busy and all.  And you know what?  Yeah, you were right to think you was in hell when you woke up and saw me standing by you.  Cuz’ every day you saw me back then?  I was in hell!  So why think any different just because you’re closer to kicking the bucket than you was back then?  The next time you see me, it probably will be in hell.  But so be it.  I’m bringing a goddamned lawn chair and a cooler with me and at least I can kick back in it while I burn because all the hard parts of living in hell has got to be over and done with after the bullshit life I had.  It can’t be no worse.  It just can’t.”

Epiphany covered her eyes.  “I’m sorry.  Really.  I don’t have any excuse.”

“Of course, you did, Auntie P.  Mama liked the thighs and legs and not the breast, right?  Horribly inexcusable.”  She pulled out her keys and dropped her sunglasses over her red eyes as she sniffled again.

“Well, I guess it’s toodles, Auntie Bitch.  By the way, you should see how filthy your whitebread-ass parents’ house is with all them horrible blacks living in it now.  They’re letting their kids tear it up in there.  Maybe if you hadn’t been so hateful I coulda’ helped you die in that perfectly clean palace of yours instead of this godforsaken shithole.  You think about that before you walk into the light.  Adieu.”  Crying quietly, she marched out the door as Epiphany sucked at the oxygen mask, trying to gather her scarred lungs together for one final outburst.

“Lemarie…wait!” She coughed hoarsely as the door slammed closed.  The click of fast heels echoed up the hallway.

“I know who your daddy was…” She took a deep breath to bellow a name.  A sudden cough caught her unawares and a piece of donut came up unexpectedly.  Sucking at the mask, weakened by her introspection, the sweet kibble from Café Du Monde, that delicious morsel of the sweet life she once led found its way atop her throat.  She sucked hard at oxygen mask, panicking as she realized her life’s wind was waning despite the respirator.  Try as she might, she could not summon the wind in her decrepit lungs to cough again. 

Fading out, she struggled to whisper the Pater Noster as she felt her head lighten. 

Finally, Epiphany Leblanc died.

An hour later, her roommate, an elderly Creole widow named Michelle Watkins came back from visiting her family in the sun room.  She saw the blue pallor and the look of horror on the strangled face and shook her head sadly.

“Oh my Miss Epiphany!  You poor ole girl!  They just don’t check up on folks around here and look what happens to you. Uh, uh, uh…”  Michelle pushed the nurse-call button and shuffled over and got the bag of beignets from the deathbed. “I don’t think you’ll mind if I have a few of these, will you?  Lawd, it’s been years since I hads me one of these.  No one loves me enough these days to bring me these sweeties.”

She pulled the blanket over the body and laid the pretty flowers across the chest as she chewed. “God bless you, Miss Epiphany.  You was a good woman.  You always carried yourself so well…”



         Moses Holliday pulled up to his house and was alarmed to see the Miata parked at an odd angle in his driveway.  He opened the door and immediately pulled out his pistol.  Behind the house, a flurry of outgoing gunshots erupted. 

         “What in the hell!”

He rushed to the corner of the house and circled it cautiously.  Peeking around the corner, he saw Curio standing alone in a designer dress.  A myriad of guns were strewn across the picnic table.  She was furiously firing weapons at unseen phantom targets out across Flechette Bayou.

Cautiously he walked up to Curio.  She was bawling inconsolably.  As her Luger pistol emptied, she flung it aside.  Picking up an assault shotgun, she furiously pumped round after round from her hip at nothingness, screaming in rage between her sobs.

“Curio!”  Moses hollered.  She barely looked at him and smiled briefly before tossing the shotgun on the ground next to several other guns.  She cried openly as she sprayed a full thirty-round clip from her CAR-15.  Moses walked up behind her and held her from behind.  The assault rifle fell slowly from her hands to the ground as she sobbed.

“Here.” He handed her his .45 when she threw the rifle disgustedly away when it clicked empty.  She aimed the big Colt at the bayou and blazed away until the slide had nothing else to chamber.

Moses looked at the other weapons on the table. “Any more need testing?”

“I’m sorry.” She put the pistol down on the table and collapsed on the bench.  Laying her head on her arms, she sniffled.

“Was she that difficult?” He knelt down on the ground next to her so he could hug her around the waist.  His tough hands pulled her to him as he kissed her bared back in the low-cut dress.

She raised her head and turned to look at him. “Thank you for loving me.  You have no idea what it still means to me.”

“You’re welcome, baby.  The pleasure is all mine.”

He could see the trauma in her eyes. Since he had known her, Moses knew somewhere under the moxie and ferocity of Curio Phelonie, there was a furnace of repressed pain that fueled it.  Despite the many tests of her inner and physical strength she endured as she worked with him, she had rarely so much as sniffled about the dastardly turn of events that had happened to them from time to time.  A few minutes with her aunt was more than enough to shake away her strident façade and lay bare the rotted studs that kept her together.

“You sure?  I’m not so sure.”

“I’m sure enough for both of us then.”  He kissed her upper arm. “Beyond sure.  You okay?”

“You’re here.  I’m okay.  I just…I dunno.  I found out a few things I never knew or just didn’t care to know.  Fuck, I never had time to know, I was a kid, right?  I guess I shoulda’ known and maybe I suspected it after what Mama said sometimes.  But to hear that old bitch lay there and basically tell me the whole time she knew me she just wrote me off as Duchess Leblanc’s little personal tragedy and she basically just chalked me off to tough shit in her book?  Huh, well hell, life’s just tragic like that ain’t it, Lemarie?  Yeah, it was kinda’ difficult.”

“You had it rough, baby.  That’s why I try to make sure you have it easy with me.  I really wish I could make things different for you in the past.  I really do.  It ain’t right that you come up thataway like you did.  It ain’t right how they did you.”

“I listened to all that and yeah, I was crying about it and all when I was standing there.  And I cried like hell all the way over here and I just wanted to waste every damned thing I could get in front of me.  But behind all that, all I could think of, was I couldn’t wait for you to come home.  All I could hear was screams and guns this whole time since I got back here.  But you’re here.  Listen now?  It’s quiet.  It’s peaceful.  It’s safe and it’s because it’s just us.  I knew you would make it all alright the day I met you, baby.  I don’t know how I did, but I did.”

“It was the hurricanes.” He shrugged.

Laughing, she wiped her nose and smiled. “See? You’re being a dick but I love it.  I love you so much, Moses.”  She bristled as she thought of Epiphany’s smirk at the mention of his name. “I love you more and more every day.”

“That’s the one thing I cherish, mi amour.” They kissed.  She stood up and wiped her eyes. “God, I’ve got to clean all these damned guns.”

He looked at his watch. “Let’s get to it.”

Despite her obvious perking up when she was now with him, her depression was carved deep into her cherubic face.  It was a pallor of constant gloom that took seventeen years of her life to frame perfectly in her pouting features.  For the last three years, the gloom was hidden behind the bright effusive glow of her happiness together with him.  He spoiled her endlessly and acceded to her whims as often as possible.  Their happiness alone in each other’s company was a constant and cohesive bond that allowed them to work as ruthless killers when tasked to do so.  Through him and on the job, she exorcised her demons and was a beautifully capable young woman, his cohort and lover, whose adoration he treasured.

One visit to an aunt dying in some bed somewhere undid all of that in less than a half hour.  His neck prickled with anger.

She hugged him around the waist, burying her wet face in his chest.

“So where did she end up being holed up at?” Moses asked innocently. “She in a nursing home somewhere?”

She murmured the nursing home and gave a vague description of her day.  He rubbed her back and looked coldly east…toward the scourge of her New Orleans’ childhood.

         Curio awoke the next day at his home.  He was missing from beside her.  She listened and knew he was gone from the house.  Shuffling through the kitchen in her bra and panties, she found a stack of pancakes wrapped in plastic on the stove and a pot of coffee set to brew at the flip of a button. 

A note was folded on the counter.

         “Headed to Opelousas to check on a firing pin for the Beretta.  Be back by lunch.  I love you, Curio Phelonie.”

         It seemed odd for him to write out her name like that.  She looked toward the rising sun and somehow she knew he was not anywhere near Opelousas.  Smiling, she shook her head.  She had been hurt and he was viciously intolerant of that.

         “I love you too, baby.  Give my regards…”

         Outside the Cypress Bend Nursing Home, Moses Holliday handed a Winston to an old fellow who asked to bum one and lit it with his Zippo.

         “Thank you, young man.” The fellow wore a cap signifying the battleship Oklahoma.  It was sunk at Pearl Harbor. Moses nodded in deference to the man’s naval service and stubbed out his own butt. “It’s a fine morning.”

         “Every one of them is these days, after you was on that ship, I bet.”

“Amen to that.” The old man shrugged and hot-boxed the Winston.  “Damn Jap bullet liked to took my jimmies off on December 7th.”

“Most never know what a bullet can do, do they?” Moses nodded and went inside. 

He stopped at the door and acknowledged the layout of the facility.  A black lady with over-sized glasses in blue scrubs smiled at him.

         “Can I help you find someone, sir?”

         “Yes ma’am.”  Moses took off his cowboy hat and nudged open his suit coat.  A crucifix swung obviously from a chain on his neck.  He pulled out a piece of paper folded in the inner pocket.  “I’m looking for an Epiphany Leblanc.”

         “Oh!  I’m sorry to hear that.” The lady pitied him with a downturn of her mouth. “Miss Leblanc passed away suddenly yesterday.”

         “I’m sorry to hear that.”  Moses actually was.

         “Were you family?  We’re having some trouble finding someone to notify.  She’s been taken to the Spanish Orchard Funeral Home.”

         “No ma’am.  I was sent by the diocese to come see her and pray with her.  They were aware she didn’t have many visitors and she was very generous to the church.  I hope someone came out for the rites?”

         The lady nodded.  “They did.  I’m sorry you came out this way.  Y’all got any idea if she had any family living?  We got a name…” she fished out a file jacket from a basket. “A Lemarie Leblanc on here as the only kin listed.  She’s a niece, maybe?”

         Moses shook his head in much the same way the lady had done. “No, she didn’t have nobody then.  Lemarie Leblanc passed away some time ago.  No one told Miss Leblanc that?”

         “I guess not.” The lady folded the jacket closed and flipped it back in its cradle.  “That’s sad.  There was a girl who came by yesterday to see her.” She slid the sign-in sheet to better read it. “Lisa Smith?” Moses shrugged at that name.  The lady shrugged as well.

“She brought by some beignets and apparently didn’t know no better.  Miss Leblanc choked to death on a piece of one.  It was very sad.  The lady was thought of kindly.  She always tried to carry herself well.”

         “Oh I’m sure she did.” Moses put his hat back on.  “It’s a sad end for a lot of folks.  And a sad beginning for some as well.  Sorry for the trouble.  But I guess the Leblanc ladies are all gone now.  Thanks again.”

         An old man shuffled by him on a walker and paused by the door.  He put on his horn-rimmed glasses hanging on a chain around his neck and looked intently through the glass doors.

         Moses turned to leave but the old man tugged at his coat. “Excuse me there, sir?”

         “Yes sir?  Can I hep’ ya’?” Moses smiled at him and looked the man up and down.  The gown jutted out uncomfortably at the waist.

         “You ain’t seen a cute little brunette number running around here in high heels today, have you?  You can’t miss her, boy.  She’s pretty as Liz Taylor…but kinda’ short, you know...fun sized, eh?”  Moses chuckled.

“Don’t reckon.  She stacked up, huh?”

“That don’t begin to tell it.  Boy, she got a rump that’d make a man convert to Islam on the floor of the Holy See if that’s what it took to kiss it.  If you see her, you make sure and remind her ole Joe in 32-B can make up a mean Tom Collins for the right company, would ya’?”

         He chuckled and slapped the old man amicably on the shoulder.  “I’ll be sure to.”  Winking at him, he said, “God bless ya’ and tuck that pecker away, ole boy.  Y’all scare the neighbors waving that gun around.”

         “What?  This old thing?  Damned thing ain’t worked since ’78.  I seen her yesterday and it come back to life, though.  Hell, it’s still living.  She must be an angel.”

         “Maybe she is then, bud.”

           Laughing, Moses walked out through the double doors, flipped the rest of the Winston pack to the old sailor and headed home to his angel, Curio Phelonie.