and vodka, and an endless supply of paper ever since.
Cecilia handed Bill a bottle of Stoli that she’d carried from the gig. He looked sick, his eyes hollow and desperate, and she knew he needed a drink. But he would never come out and ask her. Not her. Then again, he didn’t need to.
“That shit’s like drinking poison, you know,” Cecilia said, as she kicked a few needles out of her way to get to him.
“No, Night Queen. Anger is like drinking poison. . . . ”
“And expecting the other person to die.”
“That part sounds more like jealousy to me.”
“You’re a smart man,” she said, unwrapping his sandwich to make sure he ate something.
“No, I’m just a junkie with a typewriter.”
“Okay, then, you’re a dangerous man.”
She sat there in the dark, next to a smoke stream of sandalwood incense, strumming her guitar for him until he ate. Then they sang the parts of “Fairytale of New York.”
She watched as he began to nod off, bottle still clutched in his hand.
A junkie lullaby.
It was the same every night—Cecilia covered him up with a spare suit jacket that he carried around, finished smoking his lit cigarette, took the poem he wrote out of his typewriter, and then made her way over to the steel reinforced door and down to her apartment. She would read his work at night and return it before he woke up in the morning. He was writing for her, anyway. He would never sell his soul, but he would give it freely, lend it to someone who needed one. To her.
That particular night, as she reached her floor and rounded the corner, she could see the sign on the door.
She was marked.
She’d seen the signs on the doors of others and knew exactly what it meant.
NOTICE OF EVICTION
The Landlord has legal possession of these premise spursuant to the Warrant of Civil Court.
She leaned her guitar case against the stack of thirty-gallon garbage bags that had been piling up outside her door, pulled the old filament lightbulb hanging overhead toward her, reached for her key, and tried in vain to slip it in the lock. She didn’t have a prayer that it would fit, and after a few frustrating seconds of recapitulating the stages of grief, she gave up. It wasn’t her life that flashed before her but a series of special-delivery envelopes from her landlord that had been turning up in the past few weeks. Letters that were piled, unopened, six inches high on the kitchen counter next to her beloved vintage hand juicer and a terrarium made from a broken liquor bottle that Bill gave her last Christmas. It was filled with moss, a cigarette butt, a wad of chewed-up gum, an old subway token, and a switchblade, all orbiting a tiny plastic baby figurine—a cupcake topper for a baby shower that he scavenged out of a bakery Dumpster. He called it “Street Life.” She joked that she could sell it for a hundred bucks to a Bedford Avenue boutique. But she never would. Not for a million. Not even now.
Cecilia collapsed into the door, banging her head against it just hard enough to hurt, hard enough to remind her of how bad things had gotten, hard enough to press a teardrop from her heavily mascaraed eye.
Besides not having a place to sleep or shower, the thing that upset her most was the element of rejection she was suffering and that it was her own fault. She was used to getting thrown out of apartments late at night; it just wasn’t usually her own. The other thing was something much less self-involved but just as urgent. She grabbed her guitar, slung it across her back, as two black tributaries meandered down her cheeks and flowed together to form a liquid soul patch under her chin as she read what Bill had written.
Our Lady of Sorrow
No hope for Tomorrow.
No soul left to Borrow.
Your hands hold Tomorrow.
Cecilia smiled through her tears momentarily, and walked outside with her guitar strung across her back. She nodded good-bye in the direction of her friend on the roof, and hailed a pedicab.
3 “Don’t ever speak to me again!” Agnes yelled at her mother, her eyelids now in the shape of half-moons. Her mind was a raw, open sore, and Martha would scratch and scratch at it relentlessly, trying to bust it open any way she could.
“Why? Because I was right? Why are you so afraid to hear the truth?”