"Who the hell's that? Where'd you dredge up a cat, huh?"
Raspy with sleep and cigarettes that she cannot afford, Maya sends her voice snagging on Corey´s nerves like a rusty hook. At least she didn't turn.
Thank fuck she´s still buried in her sleeping bag that gives off an awful stench of sex and orgasms. Corey pulls up his nose. He doesn't even want to know.
As long as the sleeping bag with the smell of sex, good sex, keeps eating her up like the greedy mouth of a constrictor snake, he is happy enough. Well, perhaps secretly praying that it will chew her and swallow her down, before she can open her mouth once more.
Too early for this bullshit! Nah, it is actually too late. All of a sudden her jaw gets moving like a grinder, hard to take.
"You can't keep it," she mumbles, then rolls over, face to the pillars of the bridge. She has committed to proving it.
Figures. Useless advice, that's all you fucking get out here, and of that a bigger shitload than an entire family of overweight dinosaurs could produce.
"I can see the shiny thing from here," she goes on talking dinosaur shit. "The heart. It belongs to someone, so my advice? Don't get attached."
Not that he has asked her. And, Attached? Christ…
Why would he get attached?
Attachment issues due to trauma in prior relationships, his ex-wife, the bitch, diagnosed him with, before she took off and traumatized him even more. She might have been a waste of space, but after all those online courses that he spent months paying off, she must have at least been good at her job, even if that meant diagnosing him with what he already knew about himself.
It is the cat who is getting attached, not him. Rubbing its head against his stubble, all soft fur and pointy ears. A low rumble is vibrating through him, a flicker of something he hasn't felt in years. Connection perhaps.
Oh Christ! A spark of warmth in the desolate fucking existence that is this life. Then it just hurts, the usual, is it?
No, it is the goddamn pendant, metal and hot from the fucking morning sun, that digs and burns a mark into his chest. Well, bonding moment over.
He flinches back. So does the cat. His hand grabs for his can of beer, and slaps it on the burn. Then his tension fades, and hers does as well. The eyes on the damn pendant, it looks heavy as hell, he bends forward and goes for the clasp. But before he can snap it open, the cat bolts.
Her tail is twitching like a goddamn metronome, when she sits down a few feet away, staring him down.
Alright, then, the pendant can wait! He has to win back the little cunt´s trust, and starts out by scratching behind its ears. Softly, like you would handle a bomb.
Why is she even fucking here?
Did she run from the godforsaken town and its people just like Corey did? Wouldn't surprise him. Only in grotesque disguise and mask of plastic, you are still permitted into the nightclub that is society these days.
Behind the doors they're dancing and drinking to keep the party going, while the fire of war is raging outside, fueled by the tax money they provide. Bombs are exploding, but behind the doors you wouldn't hear it due to the loud techno beats that are playing, while close to the threshold of the club the poor silently starve in the streets. It is okay, though, as long as nobody hears or sees.
The attendants of the party step over their dead bodies on the way inside, without taking any notice.
Oh, what a comfortable, happy life!
Back on Corey´s lap, the black cat starts purring again. Yeah, she probably fled from the few million Frankensteins in town. From the monster-human-mass that calls itself society these days.
Maybe she's one of us, he thinks, and hiding from the whole damn mess out here. Rubbing her head, his fingers hit something sticky. When he looks at his hand. Grimson, with a sweet, metallic smell.
Blood. He smelled it before. Last time, when a goddamn prison ward broke his fucking nose. Respect, what a punch! Leaned back, he is rubbing his fingers together to get the blood off that the black cat rubs off on him. It is probably that of mice as big as rats and of rats as big as fucking cats. You would see those down by the river all the time. Good for her, the cat.
She is still purring, and looking at him like she isn't even ashamed. What a bitch! Envy. Yeah, he envies her. She must have been hunting before she came across him, and blood comes with the fucking territory, like a boner with Viagra. Shameless, that is right. It's the key to her pride.
Why should she feel ashamed of who she is?
Why should she feel bad about stalking rats and mice? A pouncing on them, and snapping their necks at the first bite, so she can rip open their bellies, tear out their warm entrails, and gulp them down in order to survive?
It has a purpose. It fucking is what she is meant to do. Corey envies her because she's shamelessly and unapologetically doing what needs to be done. Unlike himself. He has always been ashamed.
In fact, he is fucking disgusted by what humans are supposed to do these days. Chase money, fake smiles, judge everyone they find. Lie your way to a wife, make a kid, and build a life that fits her Instagram and your bank account, but feels as inappropriate to the two of you as dirty talk to a goddamn Bible study group. Just because you are entirely fucking different from what you make others believe, and eventually you forget it yourselves, until you fucking forget it yourselves and become the goddman people that others see in you.
Corey is ashamed of all the things that people expect of other people nowadays, and maybe that is why he is here, after a bite of the godforsaken sun, under the fucking train bridge, and with a blood-smeared cat on his goddamn lap.
Here, where prostitutes hide from their pimps, and wait for loaded businessmen. Where teenagers hide from their parents to get wasted with Cannabis and a bit of drink.
Where dealers hide from the guards, and junkies from their lives, right next to homeless people like him, who are hiding from something as well. From the disheartening truth that no one cares whether or not they survive.
Since they stopped living the way that the monster-human-mass tells them to be living, they haven't been human to them anymore.
They are not wanted in the towns, because in town dumping waste isn't allowed, and that is what they are to others, waste that would compromise the tidy fucking picture that they are trying to create.
Like trousers after a fucking feast, the homeless shelters in town are bursting at the makeshift seams, with which the talentless government seamstress is trying to hold the scraps together, and ever since the homeless haven't had a place to stay in town, they have been banished from there.
The black cat is purring, like she doesn't give a rat's ass. Maybe she could teach him. It would be worth a shot, and out here, most things are not…
She rubbed her head with the sticky spot all over his chest, and smears fucking blood all over him., when Big Joe crawls out of his sleeping bag, like a bear that leaves its cave after a long, cold winter. He yawns at them and drags his heavy feet closer.
"Ey, Corey! Seven days, ponjat´no? ? Preduprezhdayu teya, don't forget," he mumbles, shaking his legs awake, with the soft rustle of fabric against fabric. The heavy sigh that escapes his lips next is thick with the weight of unspoken threats.
"No waiting any more, ty ponimayesch`? Almost half year later now. And Bratva… They want what you owe, or they break you legs, slischisch menya´? Not maybe break them, but will, eto totschno! Seven days, khorosho?"
The last sentence ia punctuated with a fucking look that could drill through goddamn steel. The cat ducks down, ears flattened, like it senses the shitstorm that is brewing.
Corey touches her gently, and tries to calm her down. A hoarse "hush" crawls from my lips. Low, but Big Joe hears it. Pranced, he comes closer, all respect and superiority.
"Hushing me, suka? Idi na khuy, you only pussy! We pretend you mean new friend on lap this time, but next time, blyad´… This is warning, ponyatno? I remove vocal cords out of throat with knife, if you not careful. You don´t use anyway, maybe would only be favor!"
Corey´s mouth opens, but nothing comes out. The fucking story of his life. At least lately. His voice is lost somewhere, wherever the fuck… Well, in his own throat, everytime he tries to talk, that's for sure, but why can he not just get it out? Where the fuck are you supposed to even look for a voice that´s lost if not there?
Perhaps in his office next to the laptop that the police confiscated. In his dream apartment, before government people took the fucking keys away. In the dirty urinal of the jail cell that he left, on a can of beer that he trashed, or in a pried open vagina that is waiting down the street until a gynecologist will take a look. It could be either one.
What does it fucking matter where exactly he lost it, anyway? Fact is that he won't get his hands on it anytime soon, and he will just fucking have to live with the unability to speak up. A cruel curse for a man who used to be goddamn brilliant with words, so he fucking was!
The fingers buried in the cat's obsidian fur, he gives Joe a nod. Submissive enough to send him away and relax again.
Why did he cramp up in the first place?
He isn´t fucking afraid of him. He used to be a goddamn journalist, and can smell bullshit a mile away. He knows that the stories you hear about him out here are fairy tales. Except for one. Something, no matter what, ties him to the Bratva, to organized crime. Corey knows it to be true, because thanks to him and them he made it out of jail with a new identity and got to go into hiding out here.
Despite his crime scene ties, Big Joe isn't the man that everyone out here sees in him. He doesn't break legs, doesn´t cut off fingers, doesn´t beat up guards, doesn´t remove organs, doesn´t side with pimps, and would never traffic women. If he did any of it, why would he be sleeping under the bridge?
He's more scared of those goddamn people who tie him to local gangs than Corey is, even though he is the fucking one who owes them a quarter of a godforsaken million.
Stupid cunt! He should never have taken them up on their offer. He should never have let them help, but it is a different fucking world in jail, where you wake to the threats and insults of prison guards every morning and start looking forward to godforsaken death.
More often than not, you feel like you have already met it, because for the goddamn world out there, you cease to exist, once you are locked up in a fucknig prison cell. Then your eyes get so fucking weary of the bars that are going by that they fail to grasp anything else. You start to feel like these are a thousand bars you see, a thousand, and no world beyond. Only now and then, the curtain lifts in silence, and an image is entering your mind. Then your tensed up limbs start trembling in violence, before the shiver fucking dies again, and never even makes it close to your numb heart and your soul.
Corey has known what the locking mechanism of a prison´s security doors sounds like even before they put him behind. He was in before, but as a journalist, and voluntarily. It felt different.
When you are in as a terrorist, not even the locking of the doors behind you sounds the fucking the same, because you have not chosen to be locked up yourself, and you know one thing for sure. Your fate has been taken out of your hands. It isn't yours anymore.
When they approach you then and offer you their help, you will fucking take it. In what might be your last and only damn attempt to feel in control of your own life again.
The worry about paying them has to wait at first, it is the last fucking thing that is on your mind. It is standing somewhere in a damn long queue of other bullshit that is going on with you. Thing is that it stays there, it won't do you a favor and go away, and eventually there will be a moment when it is the next in line. In Corey´s case, this moment is now. They are coming for their 250,000, and he won't have it for them. The thought sends a shiver down his spine. The cat jumps off and vanishes behind the pile of useless crap that lays right before him.