LunaticStar

It was time. Between the serving periods. The shuffling lines thinned back to just a few stragglers, the older ones mostly. Sister Elene knew by their feet, mostly wrapped up in oilskin against the constant wet. She'd done the same, as much for the quiet as for keeping out the salted mud. She discarded her apron, grabbed her pack, a roughspun hooded robe and her lantern from their hiding place in the back of the storeroom. Under the robe, she belted on the knife. It pulled at the scars, her chest felt like strips of leather. Elene wanted to look at the knife, say the prayer, but no time. It had to be now. She knew where he'd be, knew he'd b

1. Summer was a burning blade rippling through the streets of Manhattan. It made ovens out of the tenements in Harlem and mocked the struggling window units that dotted their brick facades. Perspiration coated the nameless faces that passed beneath the open mesh of Mallorie Ortiz’s fire escape. She sat, leaning forward against its bars, her hair hanging loose in a tumbling cascade, her tan, sandaled feet dangling high above the broiling pavement. Traffic was grid-locked and noisy at that hour; the poisonous smell of diesel exhaust just typical city incense. “Eat something.” Her mother hurried past the living room window, f

But we were kids back then, arrogance a weight cocked on jutting hips and recklessness a riot sleeping in our bones like summer suicide or the time we peeled the skin from the sun as if it were dried-out orange peels curling into fresh limbs and ate the young fire to have something more than words burning in our throats. Yet in the end our muddied hands gave the horizon back to the sky, because even then something inside us had a passion for the empty spaces that ached and ached and ached. You said to me: there's nothing like having a cold bottle of pills in hand, tipping forward as you thumb the young, naked souls of griefless g