Repose

[News]

[Rae emerges from the dream with the sense of inevitability and so now, then that lingers on the skin like old perfume. When is a hiding place no longer a hiding place, or isn't that how the joke goes? It ends in prisons, or she thinks that's the punchline in the back of a car that deposits her smoothly at the edge of the Red Light district in the Capital. Of course, she could spend a day or two or six in the area of town where crime is unpredictable and the blocks, the streets are contested between gangs and no one would notice a few bodies in the morning. But she doesn't feel like it. Rae wishes to consume and she spends a full night in the District. There are three, by morning. A pair of high heels, a briefcase, a pair of glasses that the man had held by the arm and tapped the earpiece against his mouth. Discards, not dead but certainly not thinking anything coherent.

When Rae returns to town, it's like taking hot wind from the Sahara with her. For the first night, it's one of the girls from the Capital who takes the bus out of the city and the room rented for her in the Motel is somehow far nicer on the inside than any of the others. The men who come that night, talk. And the next night, there are four girls and more men and by the third, the Motel is pulling, determinedly it has to be said, at the anchor that is Hookerville in the cheap shanty-town on the outskirts and hauling it into its orbit. Rae isn't competing so much as she's not quite decided what she'll do with the competition.]

[After this.]

Tell me what your friend Misha is.