DarkTalesfromElderRegionsNY

by Hieber, Leanna Renee

  “When the blood stopped showing up on my hands, I panicked. As long as I was coughing up blood, things were working themselves out. If I still had glass in my throat, it wasn’t over yet.”

  Josh pours his cup of warm liquid onto the frozen asphalt. He stomps hard on the cup, turns his body toward me, looks at my mouth.

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  I look at the bandage. I count the individual threads woven together to create the beige fabric. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen . . .

  Josh stands away from the ambulance. A police officer approaches us and asks us questions, then offers to drive us home. We get in the back of the cruiser. We drive in silence. At Josh’s apartment, his wife waits outside, smoking a cigarette, looking down the block. The police officer lets Josh out of the backseat. His wife grabs him, weeps with his neck close to her mouth. They walk up to the apartment complex and shut the door. The officer and I continue through the Bronx.

  “If you need anything, there’s a hotline you can call,” the police officer says.

  I watch the black snow shuffle into the gutters.

  “You okay? You staying alone tonight?”

  We pull up at a stoplight. A woman with a large white umbrella waits for the walk signal. She looks at me.

  “No,” I say. “No, I’m not.”

  “Okay, good.”

  We pull up in front of my complex and he lets me outside. He shakes my good hand. I ride the elevator to the 6th floor and open my door.

  There it is, my bag of prepared glass, sitting neatly on the kitchen table. I go to the kitchen sink, open the cupboard below, pull out my tackle box. I unlock the tackle box and examine my collection of glass. Bits of beer bottles, Christmas ornaments, eyeglasses, pocket watches, stolen tchotchkes. The kitchen light bounces off the pieces and makes them look like diamonds. I shut the lid and put it back under the sink.

  I walk to the kitchen table, grab my bag of pre-crushed glass and gaze at the pieces. I put my hand in the bag and touch the small crystals, rub them between my fingers, enjoy the feeling of sharp sand. I walk to the trashcan and pour in the shards. I close the lid.

  I walk to my bedroom, close the door behind me. I leave the light off and lay on top of the covers. Headlight reflections from the street below bounce through my window and dance on the ceiling.

  A stray headlight hits the dark light bulb above my head. It doesn’t move.

  ~~END~~

  Wallflowers

  by Lilah Wild

  It was a quarter to nine, getting close to the Limelight’s bedtime.

  Once upon a time, 47 West 20th going to sleep so early was utterly inconceivable. The late hour was when the former church had thrown its arched doors open for loud, raucous business; devotees would cluster together in a midnight mass of sensual intoxicants and wild pageantry and all-night dancing. It was one of the best —some said the best— clubs in the city, back when the nightlife romped around multi-level playgrounds throbbing with hard beats and glistening skins, when going out meant choosing which strobe-lit maze would be the most fun to spend the evening in.

  Not anymore. The infamous nightclub had gone under the renovation knife and woken up as a glossy boutique. It was heartbreaking but not surprising. Not after the complete sanitization of Times Square, or the arrival of J.C. Penney. Not when the poets’ terrain of fire escapes and ironworked stoops was steadily being eaten by a profusion of luxury glass cells. The city would now rather go shopping than dancing, said those who jacked the rent. And the Limelight changed from Bacchanalian labyrinth to trendwhore temple.

  Her name was Jillian, or Taylor, or maybe Ashley, and she stood behind a counter. She was a thing of tasteful nude lipstick and aspirational handbags, dressed in the slate and teak of newly constructed condos. No name tag profaned her silk blouse, nothing at all to proclaim her role here but the imperiousness and perfectly-kept hair endemic to high-end salespeople. She tapped her manicure against the glass, and gazed out across the Limelight’s latest incarnation.

  Key pieces of the church had been left intact throughout the building’s past lives: the vaulted ceilings, the stained-glass windows. But now, there were registers, and mirrors, and a black-and-white checkerboard floor that felt like an attempt to be sophisticated Bloomingdale’s, but came off more surreal Disney. A pair of glass doors had been installed at the entrance, greeting entrants with columns of accepted credit cards instead of towering drag queens. Track lighting brightened up every secretive corner, and clothing racks brought the dance-floor to a permanent halt. Instead of a DJ in the pulpit, auto-tuned pop tracks coursed through the speakers. Alcoves for trysts were filled with gilded baubles, pricey dresses for parties that would never be as cool as what used to happen here.

  Jillian, or Taylor, or Ashley, was the type who would have dug bottle service, but that whole concept was so last decade. Now, the hotspots were modeling themselves on the speakeasies. The perfectly muddled cocktail was the order of the day, tiny venues going for an intimate vibe and dropping the dance-floors completely. She approved, but of course she would, helping to plush out the city’s rough edges with safe nests of pin-tucked leather and hulking chandeliers. These insatiable appetites for fine things had already upscaled so much of the charm right out of the Village; all the legendary hustle and quirk paved over with block after block of nine-dollar appetizers. St. Jerome’s all-night hair-metal party . . . Bleeker Bob’s, and their endless bins of vinyl . . . Lucky Cheng’s, high-tailing it to the theater district . . . Don Hill’s . . . Religious Sex . . . Motor City . . so many more . . . all gone.

  She herself admired what John Varvatos had done to CBGB’s. A boutique full of thousand-dollar jackets was so much better for the city than that howling filth magnet.

  She floated about the store like a pretty little fish in a tank, chatted here and there with other Jillians and Taylors and Ashleys while she patrolled the aisles. She adjusted a drooping sleeve here, rearranged a pyramid of candles there, kept an eye out for shoplifting while simultaneously ignoring the customers. Most of them weren’t going to buy anything anyway.

  She had the intimidation thing down, possessing the hawkish eyes that scanned guest lists, the sharp voice that guarded the velvet ropes of the upper strata, an eager enforcer of the refined atmospheres that were just as much about who you kept out as who you let in. She spotted a girl walking away from a skincare display, her hair unevenly dyed candy-pink, a weird rash of acrylic paints splattered across the back of her jean jacket. She was rubbing her hands. Jillian-Taylor-Ashley sprang into action.

  “Excuse me. Were you trying the lotions?”

  “Yes,” said the girl, brightening a little at the attention.

  “It’s not self-service. You need to find someone to help you.” You, customer, are expected to come to me.

  Teenage shoulders dropped into a slump, and a hurt expression crossed her young features as she slunk out, back to whatever bridge or tunnel she’d come from. (One day, she would get her experimenting right.)

  Jillian-Taylor-Ashley tossed her head, and immediately caught another customer in the midst of an infraction. She marched over to a stained-glass window.

  “Excuse me! Pictures are not allowed in here.”

  A guy in rumpled black denim lowered his smartphone, stepped up to her, all politeness. “I’m doing a study of historic New York buildings. I’m a student at—”

  “Pictures are not allowed.”

  “But it’s art! How can you—”

  “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave, if you don’t abide by our policy.”

  “But—”

  She arched an eyebrow at a Justin, or a Brett, or a Kyle, who came over and escorted the wannabe photographer off the premises. (This student would go on to showcase his work at an enormously popular online gallery.)

  The clock finally crept onto five of nine, and the pop music died into an obvious time-to-leave-we’r
e-closing-up silence. She loudly herded the customers towards the doors, as the other Jillians and Taylors and Ashleys spritzed the glass counters and ran brooms across the checkerboard floor. Around the Limelight she walked, locking each door, all the different doors where years ago, different factions of nightlife had come streaming in. How to spend the rest of her evening: browsing a brand-new designer-discount website, or maybe a drink at the opening of a chic new bar down the street. It didn’t matter what she chose: this Manhattanite would create no new art, would pump no fresh burst of creative lifeblood into the city.

  All was secure. She turned around, and came face to face with a short, slender figure in combat boots and cargo pockets. Boy? Girl? She couldn’t tell. Quickly she scanned the store, and saw that the other Jillians and Taylors and Ashleys had disappeared, all left for the night. She was alone.

  “How’d you sneak in here?” she snarled, with all the power invested in her by the retail elite.

  Elaborately painted eyes regarded her through red-tipped dreads, like cherries on clove cigarettes. A smirk of flawless black lipstick was not afraid of her couture bravado at all. The androgyne reached into a spiky rubber bag that had been all the rage twenty years ago, and lifted out a palmful of rainbow glitter.

  A wide, almost pitying smile, before those midnight lips softly blew the glitter towards Jillian-Ashley-Taylor’s face. She clamped her eyes shut and jerked her head to the side.

  When she opened them again, her reflexive command to leave was barked to an empty room. The kid had vanished.

  Colors shimmered from her neutral silks, from the black and white floor. As she tread through the sparkle, a heavy scent climbed the air. Thick as incense, salty like frankincense, sweet like jasmine, it rose up through the levels like the fumes of a priest’s censer. The track lights dimmed, and the stained-glass windows started to glow

  A form took shape in the chiffon whirl of a skirt. Another collected in the wave of a banner that proudly proclaimed LIMELIGHT MARKETPLACE. A steady progression of techno beats spilled out of the speakers and grew louder, and the shop’s perfumes receded behind the stench of cigarette smoke and spilled beer. Spinning spotlights awakened to sweep the room in red and green and blue. She heard —impossible— laughter.

  The cutaway rooms and lofts above started buzzing with voices, and the stairwells came alive with people— artists, musicians, writers, drag goddesses, goths, kids from Staten Island thrilled to have gotten into a Manhattan club at all— a wildly eclectic blend of personalities gathered at the railings of the mezzanine, peeked down from the higher levels. The more festive ones strutted the stairways in flamboyant costumes and incredible makeup, their neon plumage on display like birds in an elaborate black cage. Evening gloves and chandelier earrings, bobbed wigs and skyscraper platform boots, the room was ablaze with Patricia Field. Betsey Johnson. Tish and Snooky. The Salvation Army.

  They were beautiful. They were terrifying. They were coming towards her, the one live human standing at the bottom of it all. She recoiled from their ghostliness, but also from something else: the place in the city they inhabited, a slice of town where her platinum-Visa dreams were not welcome, an underworld of sweat and lunacy and danger that was completely incomprehensible to her.

  A bright vision was descending from the ceiling to join them. A mannequin had taken on the outspread arms of Jesus, the pose of crucifixion covered over in tiny disco mirrors, transformed into a gesture of sparkling benediction. No bloody hands and pleading eyes conferred guilt upon these masses; dazzling light beamed from every inch of the human form. It had held steady through all kinds of bad nights. Alcohol-fueled binges, nasty breakups, the drugs going strange places, it was a radiant savior fed by all the disciples who had ever looked up from the midst of a midnight hell and needed some kind of hope, some kind of connection. The redeemer’s hands reached her face, her shoulders, and came together around her.

  Its embrace was ecstasy. It wrapped her in a sweet caul of warmth, a flood of love that weakened her knees and melted her brittle glass heart.

  She’d always believed that wearing beautiful clothes was all you had to do, to matter. But in the icon’s arms, the dark world around her changed. She felt it now, the pleasure in subverting the fashion dictates, instead of bowing down to them. There was a glamorous laughter in the way they dressed, that they were taking this so seriously and not seriously at all. Earning your way through on wit and imagination, not a credit card —she understood their sneers, finally.

  All kinds of people had gathered here, people who never would have dreamed of ending up together when the night was over. In phat pants and corsets, in baggy tees and thigh-high boots, they clustered around her in an impromptu chill-room and stroked her skin, light winking from a green-glittered manicure, O-rings chiming from a bondage bracelet. The communion of exotic substances, the sanctuary of a stranger’s hot flesh, getting lost in the beat for hour after hour, moving on to the next rosary bead of a freshly queued track: this was what it had been like to come out and play in the big city, and she never wanted the sun to come up.

  But this was New York, and she wouldn’t be getting off that easy.

  The warmth became too warm. Much too warm. Her pulse started to gallop and her pupils constricted, as the mirror-ball Christ held her tighter and tighter, all that love and light sending her into the convulsions of an MDMA overdose.

  Fingers that had never held a paintbrush, or strummed a chord . . . lips that had never sang a ballad or slammed poetry at a crowded village café . . . The city was demanding its measure of artistic lifeblood from her anyway. The chill-room hands stroked her harder and harder, looking for something, something they couldn’t find. They dug into her skin with nails, and then teeth, ravenous for the next Basquiat or Finley or Ramone and not getting it from her, never getting it from the Jillians and Taylors and Ashleys who were tombstoning the galleries and the dives and the coffeeshops with fro-yo. Gore clotted the silk of her blouse, the net of her stockings as those hands kept digging, deeper and deeper, coming away empty.

  The colors were blurring. The glowing windows, the whirling spotlights, all those tiny mirrors, blinding as a migraine, all of them were becoming one. Soon, her body stopped shaking, and her sight went white as the dawn.

  *************

  In the morning, when the doors were unlocked and a long day of waiting on customers was just beginning, glitter and blood was found puddled across the Limelight’s floor. A lot like how it used to be, back in the day.

  ~~END~~

  The None Percent

  by Warren Frey

  John shifted in his bed, uncomfortable and alone. He hadn’t felt right since the Monterey deal a week ago. A billion dollar windfall was supposed to make you happy, he thought as he sank further into the sheets, but all he felt was empty.

  He sat up and coughed, his lungs straining with each breath. I need to get this looked at, he thought as he wheezed, wiping tears from his eyes.

  John lay back down, his lungs roiling, his back seizing up.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have gotten high,” he said to himself, but soon banished the thought. He loved getting high, sick or not.

  He could feel the cough tickling its way up his windpipe, inching forward like a spiky worm. He pulled forward as his lungs ballooned and contracted with each heaving breath.

  “Oh God,” he said, his vision obscured by a million points of light. Getting up, he stumbled across the bedroom to the balcony. A little fresh air couldn’t hurt, could it? Although, he reflected, fresh air was the one thing a Park Avenue magnate couldn’t buy.

  Still, he had to clear his head. He had a big meeting with the Chinese tomorrow and they tend not to tolerate being ripped out of your gourd at breakfast.

  John opened the wide French doors and felt his way across patio furniture, avoiding the incline near the gas-powered fire pit and couches in the middle of the balcony, heading for the edge. If he was going to cough his lungs up, he was determined it
would land on someone far below.

  Suddenly his lungs caught fire and he gripped the railing hard, coughing and retching into the New York night for what seemed like an eternity. He leaned forward, the night air making way for the contents of his stomach and….no, that couldn’t be right.

  John shook his head, edging away from the balcony. He felt not just light-headed but actually weightless, and it took real effort to put one foot in front of the other. He fought past the cocaine, past the post-cough euphoria to lay down on one of the couches by the fire pit. He was already covered in sweat, but he felt as if cold fingers ran all over his body and pulled him toward the couch.

  And then he felt nothing at all.

  John blinked, his eyes adjusting to the harsh daylight. His head had that pushed-through-a-meat-grinder feel to him. Not a new sensation, but definitely an unpleasant one.

  “Fuck!” he yelled, to no-one in particular, sitting up, blinking as daylight seared his eyes.

  “How the hell did I end up on the balcony?”

  No matter. He got up, brushed himself off, and looked around. Everything seemed normal. In fact, it seemed better than normal. The pain in his head was gone and he felt cleansed of whatever had plagued him. Glancing over at the balcony, he was aghast at what and looked like blood stains and, on the top of the stone railing, bits of…meat?

  “No more cocaine,” he muttered, turning to make his way inside.

  His hands fumbled, rubbery fingers slipping across the sliding door handle as though his fingertips and palms were covered in vaseline, though they felt perfectly dry.

  “Just…c’mon!” he yelled said, doing his best to wrap his fingers firmly around the handle. Finally, with one vicious yank, the door slid aside and he stumbled indoors, headed for the closet. He’d been putting off this meeting for weeks, and negotiating with the Chinese was a delicate art, requiring clarity, vision, and a really fucking snappy suit.