You’re a whore! I swear I hear it aloud, but maybe it’s in my head.

“Oh, yeah. I forgot introductions.” Bella picks up a beer and gestures at Leon. “Maddie, this is Leon.” She motions her hand at me. “Leon this is Maddie.”

He slowly turns around in the barstool with a smile plastered on his face. He’s wearing a baseball cap low on his forehead, his eyes shadowed, and between that, my blurry vision, and the dim lighting, I can’t see his face very well. “Pleasure to meet you, Maddie.” He sticks out his hand for me to shake, his sleeve riding up a little and I detect the dark lines of a tattoo on his wrist that of a dragon with fire blazing from its mouth.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Leon,” I say. I think he has brown hair, his eyes look black, and his face is rough. “Do I… know… you…” My voice sounds like an echo in my head.

“You’re a whore,” I swear I hear someone whisper from nearby, but I keep my eyes on the Leon, feeling as if I look away, I’m giving up my power over myself and I’ll fade into the dizziness.

He gives a low chuckle, “I don’t think so.” He says something else but I can’t make out what it is, his lips move, his eyes studying, hand on mine, but nothing makes sense. There are people in the room, but I feel none of them, almost like I’m surrounded by dead bodies. I should be okay with the idea—I usually am. Calm. Cool. Collected. I don’t like to feel out of control. That’s Maddie’s thing and if I didn’t pick up the other end, I wouldn’t have much of a purpose. But right now I feel like I’m hanging off the edge of a cliff, holding on with one finger.

“Leon’s going to be chilling at the bar for a while,” Bella says, but her voice sounds far away.

My pulse throbs underneath my flesh. “Oh yeah… that’s… nice.” My palms sweat… bones ache…

“I’m going to be helping Glen out for a while,” Leon says, eyes still fixed on me. “While he takes a few weeks off for vacation.”

“That’s nice.” My eyes start to roll into the back of my head, my legs about to give out. “Will you… excuse me,” I say, pulling my hand away from his. He laughs again and it makes me want to slam my fist into his face, but instead I stumble away toward the stairway, figuring I’ll go take care of someone else and get my control back, no matter what it takes.

Maddie

I remember the first time I saw a dead body, the first time since after the accident anyway. I was eighteen years old and the incident strangely occurred by choice, which probably isn’t very common except for maybe a mortician or a detective or a serial killer.

I’d been out back of the diner where I waitressed at, taking my fifth smoke one break of the day. I was going through my 1950s to 60s movie phase, curious to see if perhaps I felt more peace in that era than I did in the current one I was supposedly born into. I proceeded to watch every classic one I could get my hands on and while I was fascinated with the simplicity of the time, I didn’t feel particularly moved by anything. But I started acting like a character from that time, a hobby of mine since I have no idea what character I really am. One trait a lot of the characters had was they smoked from cigarette holders. It made them seem so dazzling and sophisticated and I found myself obsessing the demure. So I went out and bought a sheath dress and saddle shoes from a vintage store, along with a cigarette holder, jade with a white tip. I wore the outfit for a week straight, everywhere I could, which caused a near panic attack from my mother and scrutiny from my grandmother, yet I kept on wearing it.

I was wearing the get-up the day I saw the body. Standing out back, smoking near the dumpsters, two guys had wandered past the end of the alleyway that leads to the main road. They were talking about a crime scene they just passed and how the body was still on the sidewalk. I don’t know why I did it. What really pushed the compulsion to manifest? It’s not like I’d spent hours upon hours obsessing over the need to see a dead body. Thinking about the dead. Or even killing. I hadn’t quite gotten to that point yet in my life. But I still found myself putting out my cigarette and walking down the alley to the street where I spotted the blue and red flashing lights of cop cars, but no ambulance. People were gathered in a restless cluster. That had to be the spot. Shuffle off the curb, I slowly made my way across the street toward a row of shops on the other side. The crowd was growing in front of Mel’s Fine Seafood and I noticed the window on the second floor of the store was broken. Slivers of glass were scattered and covered the sidewalk. Whenever the sunlight above hit them at just the right angle, they’d shimmer like diamonds. The illusion of pretty.

I approached the edge of the people and stopped toward the back. There were some people crying, some whispering about how tragic, some shaking their heads with sadness. I squeezed my way up to the front where two policemen in uniform where standing with their arms out to the side, trying to keep everyone back. But the people were drawn to it, wanting to see, yet not wanting to. Just like me. I was no different from them at the time, except that maybe I couldn’t remember a huge time of my life. My emotions were the same, though. Part of me wanted to go back to the diner and continue working as if I hadn’t seen anything at all. While the other part of me wanted to stay. I would have blamed the need to see it on Lily, but she was strangely silent. So it was just Maddie, myself, no one and nothing else that made me step forward. I did it on my own.

I couldn’t get up close and personal, because of the policemen, but I could see a girl, probably around my age, lying just behind them with her arm kinked above her head, her legs sprawled out on a sheet of blood soaked concrete, and it was in that moment, I knew this wasn’t the first time I’d seen a scene like this. I didn’t know when else I had or who it was, but I knew I’d stood and gazed down at something similar before.

The blood looked like spilled paint, the patterns of splatter and droplets creating a symmetrical abstract painting that told a story of how a girl fell through a window. But that’s it. There was no story of what caused her to get to this moment in time, what had happened right before. If she was hurt to begin with or if the glass cut up her skin. If she did this to herself or if someone else did it. I wondered what the story was.

Inching closer, I noticed the girl was missing a shoe. It wasn’t anywhere around, either, and part of me wondered if maybe someone had killed her and the killer took it. I had no idea why I’d think such a thing. I didn’t watch crime shows. But for the briefest second, I swear I could feel… almost see myself doing something similar once before. Holding someone’s shoe after they died and feeling powerful over it. Then I suddenly thought of the box of buttons in my closet that feel like my treasure in a way, and I had to wonder if that’s what they’re from? But as quickly as the image surfaced, it was like ..

Maddie

I can’t escape. The fear. It’s scorching within me. Fire and smoke. Suffocating like the rain crashing down from the clouds. It drowns me. My soul. I can’t outrun it… Can’t escape… Can’t escape the flames… The fear. Everything I’ve seen… done… To myself. To him. To her. But I need to… but she tells me I can’t. That I have to feel it. There’s no other way.

Someone is screaming from inside the house, something about someone being a whore. I hate when I hear the screaming, because it means something bad is going on. I don’t want to move, so I lie there on my side, staring at the wall. The concrete is cold on my skin. I’m sick of how cold it is. I don’t want to be in this room anymore. I want to see the sun. Smell the rain. Breathe fresh air. But I’m a prisoner.