Sex and Murder Magazine

Nik Korpon

Jimmy finally turned up today. They found his body in the parking lot across from the Oyster, wedged between the dumpster and stacks of grease buckets from the chicken joint. Burnt from his toenails to eyebrows, his hair singed into clumps like melted plastic. His skin, about the same as blackened tinfoil. Dental prints IDed him, though the medics had to take a leap of faith and bridge the gap of missing teeth, just assume they had been there. Though for a dope fiend, he had a surprising number of chompers. They cleared the scene a while ago and the crime guys have been sweeping it ever since. Shame that cops have to work on a Sunday.

The thing that really got us though, what we've been muttering into our glasses all afternoon, is that Jimmy never drank at the Oyster-avoided it, even. He always said there was something off about the place. me ill at ease, were his exact words. And he never saw Sofia's eyes, either.

Then again, apparently no one else did.

*****

A drop of condensation slid down the can of Natty Boh like a tear, only to be sucked up by the bandage around my thumb. I got it from an upstairs bathroom sink in a house we'd been rehabbing in Sandtown, when Stink called my name right as I was shortening the pipe. At the time I'd commented that the floor looked like a Pollock painting, all blood, sawdust and iron shavings. Stink only grunted.

Bert was relaying some supposed conquest from the weekend-one we all knew was basically a montage of Bert's midget porn, but still felt obliged to humor him about- flapping his arms all over the place. His obscene watch threw tiny orbs of light around the bar like a disco ball. He wouldn't take that watch off, not during a job or washing his hands, I'd bet not even when showering. Underneath the band, we knew his skin looked like pale moss.

Out of the range of Bert's arms, Slim fed coins into the Wurlitzer like they were child support, drumming the chrome edges to the rhythm of the song in his head. A sweaty-Memphis voice crooned through the smoke and I ordered another drink.

A sharp tapping cut through the song. On the stool next to me, Stink clinked his high school ring against his glass. Faint sunlight slanted off the ring's scarlet, center stone making it shimmer like a rabid dog's eyeball. He was giving the death-glare to a herd of guys hunkered over a table in the corner. They'd been high-school football rivals or something. It was all Aramaic to me; when they were trading insults and ass-slaps on the field, I was under the bleachers trying to see Jenny Franklin in her underwear. But me and Stink came from the same neighborhood, and rivalry doesn't abide by zoning bylaws, so I was grouped with Stink and the lot. So goes Baltimore.

Besides cheap liquor, I liked the Oyster because it sat across from a Gothic church and I could catch glances of it in the mirror behind the bar. My old man was a deacon, so I never got into Church-with a capital C-but the structures themselves, the symbolism and mythology that went into their design, that was what inspired me go to school to be an architect. To create that sheer power and sense of awe with just bricks and glass and steel. Then-well, then things happened, and then I started laying pipe.

Moose, the bull of the rival herd, stood up from his table and crossed the floor, all slow and Spaghetti Western like. Fistfuls of dust kicked up behind him. He leaned back on his heels and ordered a round for his table, shooting dagger-stares straight down the bar.

I could feel Stink's hackles rise, and debated whether to finish my beer in the bathroom or butterfly my blade and swing for glory, when the front door opened. It was Harbinger.

Chunks of dust seemed to freeze mid-air when he came in, a girl with hair like an oil slick cupping his arm. She was on the young side for me, and had a red and white checked shirt tucked into some jeans that shared the same shade of nothing as her hair. She looked so acutely displaced, like she'd fallen out of a of Hazzardcomic book, that I laughed to myself.

I gave Harbinger a psychic high-five, figuring he'd finally broken down and bought some Viagra.

They sat on the other side of me. The tension in the bar evaporated like smoke in the wind, but up my back it still felt like someone was playing what I'm writingwith an acetylene torch. I took a sip of my beer and checked behind me occasionally with haphazard glances in the mirror. Stink grunted at our bartender, Lauren, to order another beer then nodded towards Harbinger and the girl, to order one for each of them as well. I took the Zippo from my pocket, rolled it over my knuckles, and snapped my fingers to light it, then flipped it shut and did it again.

The girl's eyes were on me like heat lamps. I started to sweat.

She caught me glancing after a few minutes, bit her bottom lip to play coy and not smile. I flipped my Zippo, snapped my fingers and made a flame, then turned to her.

“I'm Steve.”

She looked down at the bar, either self-conscious or to extend the game, I didn't know which. My heart beat more than a few times before she raised her head. Her mouth opened to tell me her name and would probably have gone on to accept the offer I was about to make to take her out to dinner and a movie, then possibly to get a drink, then some coffee, and then to sit by the edge harbor sharing anecdotes about bad past relationship and how easy it is to get sidetracked from future aspirations until the background music played us away. But Bert barged over, stabbed out his hand and confessed his love for her, spilling her and Harbinger's beers over the counter. The broken glass and wasted beer formed into puddles around their stools, making two abstract shards like a heart. Lauren cursed him and smacked him with a drink shaker. The girl sat frozen-frame, as if nothing had happened.

“I'm Sofia,” she said, more into her hand than me. She giggled and looked up.

That's when I saw her eyes.

Her eyes, damn, her eyes.

Even now, they still seem impossible. To start, they were almond shaped, but not like the beauties in melodramatic novels. They were longer, and thinner, almost as wide as my pinkie is long, but depthless. They untethered me; I drifted as if lost in the background of a Dali painting.

Her pupils looked cut from diamond, and oblong like a cat's, but all the light that would've reflected off anyone else's had been sucked in by something behind her eyes. Colorless diamonds don't do it justice: Sofia had black holes for pupils. And all surrounded by a cornea the milky yellow of malaria.

But those eyes, they were sunk into something that couldn't have been carved by the most talented hands in all of ancient Greece. Standing next to Sofia, Venus de Milo was a gonorrhea-scabbed harpie, and Helen of Troy, well, fuck Helen of Troy.

Cheekbones like velvet alabaster and lips that could turn a man sterile. Her breath smelled like a wind-swept field on a summer's day. Even her laugh was more a symphony of accentuated breaths than a spasm of her diaphragm.

*****

At the job site the next day, Jimmy was jonesing again, hopping from foot to foot and scratching his neck. Branching blood vessels obscured the whites of his eyes, but that pathetic junkie stare of his burned through like a solar flare. He would've hopped into the hole where the stairs were going to go if Stink hadn't grabbed him first.

Lying on my back beneath a dual sink, I scratched at the beads of rubber rolling underneath my skin. Sofia had worn a path through my head ever since she'd left the Oyster the night before. The thought of her made my gut twist itself into grotesque origami. I got twice as much piping done just trying to stay occupied and not think of her.

“Just twenty, man. Just twenty.” Jimmy's whine reverberated through the pipes above my face.

Across the house, Stink laughed.

“I need to get my phone turned on.”

“You haven't had a phone for three months.”

“How am I supposed to call my woman if I can't get my phone turned on?”

A trickle of blood ran down his neck; but, he didn't seem to notice, just kept scratching.

“Use a payphone,” I said.

“Jimmy, got your damn phone.” Stink cleared his throat and spit something orange on the floor. “You sold it to me last week for six bucks, and that's only because I ain't let you blow me.”

Between his whimpers, the damp stench of charred insulation, and the migraine Sofia's phantom steps were giving me, it was all too much. I toyed with the idea of kicking him down to the basement.

“Here, you goddamn loser.” Stink hung a twenty out like a fishing lure. “Get going. You're making me anxious.”

Jimmy snatched the bill from his hand and bounded away like a cartoon deer. I gave the pipe an extra hard twist and breathed an exaggerated sigh. Definitely stripped it.

“He's never going to clean up if you keep helping him.”

“I ain't enabling him.”

“Just don't do it.”

“I saved him a broken neck. I was about to throw his ass out the window.” He laughed and took off his tool belt, sat next to my feet and lit a cigarette. “Forget him, what's up with that girl last night, is what I want to know.”

“What about her?” I unscrewed the pipe and looked inside, the threads were beyond gone.

“Don't know. You were the one talked to her all night.”

“She seemed nice. I introduced myself, that's about it.”

I walked to the window and tossed the angle piece into the carcass of the shop next door. They couldn't keep up with the payments and rather than have squatters and needle-jockeys take over, they'd set it aflame. The pipe landed with a muffled echo, kicking up a cloud of dust.

“I wouldn't call it all night.”

He blew smoke through his nose like a bull. “You two seemed pretty cozy.”

“You notice anything weird about her?”

I leaned against the window frame, saw her in wood knots and ringed burns where nightwalkers had dropped their crack-pipes. Stink raised his eyebrows.

“Her eyes, they were… I kept seeing them in my sleep. They were really, well, freaky.”

“Sorry, compadre. I saw parts of her, but they was elsewheres. And speaking of--” he stretched his arms above his head, his flannel shirt revealing part of a faded tattoo on his hairy gut, “-bout that time, I think.”

A nauseous wave of déjà vu swept over me.

Thirty minutes after Lauren served us, I was still nursing my first and Stink had already killed a six-pack. The earlier incident with Jimmy might've touched something deeper than I'd thought, but either way, it didn't bode well for the evening. Stink rose to go to the bathroom, steadying himself like he was sailing the high seas. I stared at the patterns in the particleboard floor, watched chunks of grey ash blow away when the door opened. I peeked up without moving my head. Moose came in, his boys filing behind like ducklings.

Lauren snapped her fingers in front of my face. Her bleached ponytail swayed when she moved. She held the bar phone with her hand over the receiver.

“You seen Bert today?”

I shook my head, asked why. She pressed the phone to her shoulder and said it was his wife. I called across the bar and asked Slim, just as drunk as Stink and holding himself up on the jukebox-again. The urge to smack myself welled in my arms, to wake from what I hoped was a Dream Purgatory.

“When she sees him, tell him I'm pissed. There's a ton of work he was supposed to do today and if I have to haul my crap up that ladder one more time, I'm going to run him over, then pop it into reverse.”

She smirked, “I'll relay the message.”

I lifted the beer to my lips and a hot-wax sensation spread over my skin. I didn't need to turn around to know Sofia had walked in. She sat to my right, smelling like the air before a lightning storm.

“Fancy seeing you again,” she said.

Her tone was somewhere between drink too muchand was hoping you'd be here, soI just smiled back and waved to order two more. Sofia caught Lauren's arm and asked for a Manhattan instead. That Memphis voice started playing on the jukebox.

“Christ, Slim,” I groaned, “can't you put something else on?”

“Fuck you and your college-boy music.”

“I just said else How is that college-boy music?”

Slim wobbled, muttered something, and smacked his fist into his palm.

“Go write a book report.”

Lauren sat our drinks in front of us. I turned to Sofia.

“I did go to college, just so you know.”

She arched a single eyebrow. “Okay.”

“Sometimes things happen that you don't expect and it changes things.”

“So change them back.”

Her corneas contorted and swirled, the surface of twin suns separated by only a delicate nose.

“Or are you waiting for them to change more favorably?”

The rubber beads burned underneath my skin.

“Do you ever feel like you know exactly what's going to happen tomorrow, because it's exactly what happened today?”

“I never wonder about anything.” she cooed leaning towards me, her hair falling in ringlets like manicured tornadoes. “Don't tell anyone--” she licked her lips, her tongue a shimmering indigo ribbon, “-but I'm psychic.”

“Do you have a hotline I can call? I could use some advice.”

“A psychic is different from a helpline, but I'll see what I can do.”

She nestled a cool finger against my lips, “” and closed her eyes. Her lips twitched and from her expression, a ghost 'vebeen giving her a message, “I see in your future, that you will finally do something with your life.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

Her eyelids were clamped shut, yet they still moved like they held swirling sandworms underneath. She said, “You'll need to make a choice, and that choice will change your life.”

Her finger fell from my lips like a dead leaf.

I took a long sip from my beer and held it in my mouth. The carbonation bubbled like centipedes digging into my tongue with steel pinchers. I pressed my thumbs against my eyelids, debated whether that meant she had a boyfriend.

Moose sauntered over towards us, probably imagining a spotlight on himself, glinting off the bottle in his hand. He leaned down, resting his forearms on the chipped bar top. His whisper to Sofia was like dried leaves blowing down an alley, and I couldn't make out any of the words.

She took two long sips from her drink. The entire time he spoke, his eyes never left her chest. She stared off at some point invisible to the rest of us. A parallel universe, possibly.

When he'd finished making a pass at her, she turned to him. I yawned, and in a sideways glance at the mirror, saw her tongue shoot out like a snake's and lash his face. Her jaw dislocated as if she was about to consume him whole, two fangs glistening white with venom. I gasped, blinked, and she was breathtaking again, laying her hand on Moose's chest, whispering an inch from his face with honey breath and a complexion to make a man weep.

His face distorted, so aroused he was ready to melt into a puddle and let the wind take him. She took the cherry from her glass, put it in her mouth, then, still facing him, reached her arm behind her and placed the stem in my palm. She'd tied it in a knot with her tongue. A square knot.

“How in God's name did you-”

Stink's Biblically loud voice cut me off, “What the fuck are you doing talking to his woman?”

Moose straightened like someone hit him in the spine with a cattle prod. A bottle shattered, and light reflected razors off the brown glass littered over the bar. Two bangs and Stink was howling, blood leaking between the fingers clamped against his cheek. Slim locked Moose in a wrestling hold, hands behind his back. I didn't even see him come over.

Lauren sprang from behind the bar, stained baseball bat in hand, and hit Moose. His collarbone cracked like a fresh carrot. The stool tumbled as I rushed over to Stink, a wad of napkins in hand. His blood poured so fast it made my fingertips sticky. I turned to tell Sofia I'd be back in a minute. Her seat was empty. Her glass, full.

It took fifteen minutes and half a roll of paper towels to stop the bleeding. An empty bottle of superglue sat on the ledge of the mirror. Stink's face looked like a cheap Halloween mask.

“What the hell were you thinking?”

“I was defending your territory.” He touched the gash-now early-morning grey under all the poor-man's-stitches-picked off a flake and rubbed it between his fingers. “Keeping that damn vermin from your woman.”

“Hey, Fucknuts,” I smacked the back of his head, “at least look at me.”

He turned, still staring at the glue between his fingers, edged with pink.

“She's not my woman. And besides that, she left because you two started playing slice-o-matic out there. So you ruined the thing you were trying to preserve, ended up with a vagina on your face.”

“Oh.” he said.

“That make any sense to you?” I thumped him on the forehead with my palm. “Next time, at least let me ask for her number first before you try to go bonecrusher on someone, okay?”

“Sorry, brother. My bad.” He touched his face again, like it might be ancient parchment. “How's it look?”

I told him it wasn't great, but at least he wouldn't leave splatters every time he looked down at the sidewalk. He opened the door to leave. Sofia's stool was still empty.

I washed the flecks of blood down the sink, scrubbed my hands, and splashed water on myself. My face was a rain cloud. With every drop came an uttered promise to re-enroll, draw more often, go to the gym, eat more salad; I grabbed a handful of towels and dried off. I fished in my pocket for the Zippo like a nervous tic. Something metallic and cool touched my fingers. But not a square lighter. I pulled it out, held it in the light.

“What the fuck?”

Bert's watch.

On the inside were small patches of something green. Like pale moss.

*****

Stink bailed on the job the next day-Bert, too-leaving only me and Jimmy to do the work. Which basically meant me. I figured he was recuperating from the bottle wound, so I called Slim for extra help.

Jimmy skittered from one spot to the next, stopping and starting like someone was experimenting with a film projector. Slim almost cold-cocked him, just to get him to stay still for a minute. Before he could swing, I snatched the wrench from his hand.

I went to put it inside my toolbox, and sitting on the latch was a cherry stem, tied in a square knot.

I told Jimmy to go home, and slipped the cherry stem into his pocket like a voodoo doll. Maybe it would ward the monkey off his back, scare needles from his arms. Slim and I went to the Oyster. In the corner, Sofia sat, statuesque with her perpetually full Manhattan; and, despite my best efforts, I inevitably drifted to her, like Icarus. Her eyes threatening to melt my wings.

Slim flapped his lips for a long time, alternating between the pros and cons of Johnny Cash and Shooter Jennings, and interrogating me about the alleged torrid affair with Sofia. Everyone was talking about it, he said, you and that smoking hot bitch. He said he'd trade his wife and refurbed Charger just to smell her panties.

“But her eyes! Don't they freak you out?”

“What're you talking about, eyes? Brother, did you see those mammaries?”

I shook my head and kept sniffing the inside of my shirt. The hint of gasoline clung to me.

At some point, one of the other regulars came in. He said he'd seen Jimmy creeping around an alley. Supposedly, he'd ripped off his dealer.

All I could smell was gasoline.

*****

The job fell a week behind schedule, but I didn't bother to call Slim for help.

Pink fingers of morning wove across the sky, the sun burning away the overnight fog. All across the city, church bells rang out in an accidental symphony, their tones overlapping and harmonizing with each other. A blue jay perched on a stud, watching me work. Two blocks down, a bakery turned on their fans and covered the neighborhood with the aroma of fresh bread.

And still, the only thing I could smell was gasoline.

I sliced open my hand twice, trying to move too quick and keep my mind occupied. Her face came to me in jagged pieces and soft pulses. Cheekbones and lips and a forked tongue. Jaundiced eyes with swirls like hot lava. Every time her image assembled itself, my stomach knotted the way it had before I'd asked Jenny Franklin to move away to college with me. Then the swirls in those eyes sunk their claws and my body crumpled from the inside. It was Jenny saying no all over again.

A robin joined the blue jay on the stud. I tore bits of crust from my sandwich and laid them on the frame, creeping slow to not scare them away. Outside on the street, I half-expected to see Jimmy slinking along the street, peeking over each shoulder before coming inside and trying to bum twenty from me. A woman with wrinkled charcoal skin held the hands of her two grandchildren, dressed in their Sunday best. The boy picked up a chunk of brick and hurled it through the remaining window of the shop next door. The birds pecked at the bread.

After I ate the rest of my sandwich, I hunkered under the pipes to finish my work-at least as much as I felt like doing that day. Some junkie had snuck in during the night and ripped out twenty feet of copper to sell. They might've been smacked out when they did it, because they hadn't bothered to look underneath the tarp in the corner. I pulled two lengths of pipe from it. Something fell out alongside, a grommet or something. I bent down to pick it up.

It was a cherry stem, tied in a square knot.

Hot electricity shot through my body and I threw the stem into the street. I tossed tools from the box Stink had forgotten, hoping to find a pack of smokes. No luck. I paced for a few minutes, chewing on my thumb. Another bird landed on the stud. I watched them watch me as I calmed myself. Eventually, I slid back under the pipes.

There'd been a problem with the main drainage. Too many traps, and whoever had set it originally had angled the long section upwards, so the drain water just sat there festering. I undid the valve, careful to not spill anything. It was still too far up, so I got a rubber mallet.

I started with gentle hits at first, but they became harder and harder. A dull thump vibrated through the pipe like it was a cheap Chinese gong. After a dozen wallops, it started to tip down. I leaned on it, thinking body weight would help, and something red flashed on the ground. Before I could grab it, the pipe cracked and I tumbled down, black water, thick like vomit, pouring onto me. It coated the cracks of my eyelids and the inside of my ears. I rolled away from the rancid fountain, scraping my hand along the floor for a cloth. Instead I found Stink's jacket, the one he forgot two days before.

The pipe calmed to a steady drip. Water covered the floor like chunky tar. I choked back my gag reflex. The smell of gasoline wafted through sulfur and rot. I looked up and the birds were gone. Couldn't blame them. Church bells rang, and I coughed something up, and spit in the water. A flash caught my eye again, like a blip on radar. I swept at it with my foot. An oblong chunk stuck to the bottom of the red flash. I swallowed, and picked it up with only my fingertips. Bile rose in my throat. To my side, I felt for the jacket and dropped the chunk in it. I cleaned it off, that feeling in my stomach again, then peeled back the cloth.

The flash, a scarlet center-stone, like a rabid eyeball.

Underneath the stone, Stink's finger, down to the knuckle.

*****

“Double Turkey, Lauren.”

Like a reflex, the drink appeared in front of me. Two other regulars were there, both facedown, at the end of the bar. I swallowed the bourbon without a breath, slammed down the glass.

“Another, please.”

The reflex.

Beside me, Sofia materialized, seemingly from vapors. She caressed my side with fingers like frozen claws, slipped them into my front pocket. Her breath lapped against my neck in faint currents. Church bells rang, funereal dirges trailing down the street.

“Lauren,” I called, “one more.”

*****

One of the crime scene cops kneeled down and picked up something from the pavement. He turned it over in his hand, his eyebrows furrowing like he was deep in abstract thought, putting invisible pieces together. After a minute, he waved to his partner. They conferred, exchanging rebuttals.

Fingers so cold they were hot pressed into my back. I curled my hands around the edge of the window to get a better look. Sofia whispered in my ear but I couldn't understand. Or I didn't want to. I turned to tell her and her crazy fucking eyes to fuck off and never manifest in front of me again, but caught my arm on the rusted nail where they hung keys.

I looked up and the cops were a few feet from the front door. I assumed my stool, slumped against the bar and sipped at the drink I thought was mine. A blast of humid air came in when they opened the door. Lauren gave them a curt nod. In the distorted reflection on my glass, I could see them survey the place.

A static voice squaked from a walkie-talkie. Its owner turned it down.

“Steven Forster?”

Silence fell over the already quiet bar. Only the squeak of Lauren drying a glass remained.

“Is there a Steven Forster here?”

Someone grunted, out of the line of sight in my glass-reflection. I had no idea who it was, but a hand fell on my back. Hot wax spread over my body and I felt Sofia's skin on mine, her sunstorm eyes warming my blood and melting my wings. Her cheekbones caressed mine, teeth scraped my neck and tongue licked my jugular. The cop's hand spun me around on the stool.

“Mr. Forster, we're going to need you to come with us.”















































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