How I do research

I've been asking indecent, confusing, or simply creepy questions since I was a small child, butting into a phone conversation my mother had about my brother. She said "He's changed extremely," and I, being something around nine years old and having heard of "extreme right" and "extreme left" political views, couldn't contain myself and asked her which extreme my brother was changing to.
It is this kind of inappropriate questioning that has led me to the best research opportunities since then.
I don't do story-related research that much because it's draining. Opportunistic research is more my kind of thing. This means, I write down every word or description I don't yet understand, go online and find out what it's all about. Sometimes I stumble over some interesting fact or a piece of research that inspires me, sometimes I end up on youtube and ultimately spend hours watching cat videos, but more often than not, I actually do learn something that sticks in my head until at one point I can use it. A few examples:

• Triploid chromosomes - Did you know that plants with triploid chromosomes are especially resistant to damage from UV-radiation? If you ever want to live on Mars, triploid plants are the way to go about it.
• Spetsnaz - Russian Special Forces. Their training is bat-shit crazy stuff.
• Bushido - An orally passed down, Japanese moral code that is often misinterpreted and glorified, but ultimately gave me an interesting insight into loyalty to family or monarchy to the point of self-mutilation.

Why do research at all?

When you start your literary career with reading best sellers and highly praised novels, like I did, you often get the impression that to be an author, you have to be creative to the point of reinventing the wheel on a molecular level. How do those big authors get their ideas? How the bloody hell did they come up with this much great stuff, and how can you yourself ever reach such heights? The gap between you as a young, inexperienced, blossoming writer and those old dogs seems almost impossible to bridge.
Then, like me, you take a look at the works of other budding author novices, and you start to get a feel for what writing actually is. Most of those stories are horrible, if compared to professional work, but some do actually fascinate in that 'raw diamond' kind of way.
I have read about, phew, 500 and more stories written for nobody in particular. If you read that many short stories and novels, you start to really understand a few not so popular facts about creativity-- namely that it spews the same shit over and over. There are no real 'totally new' ideas. If you thought of it, somebody else has already written ten pages of potential crap about it and tried to make it work. Which it didn't. Don't feel bad about finding your 'totally creative, new idea' already worked over like a 10-dollar-hooker in someone else's story. There are more than nine billion people on this planet, there ought to be at least someone who already thought the same thought.
Point is, just because someone else had the same thought as you had, that doesn't mean they were any good at processing it. Just look at '50 shades of grey', I mean, can you even imagine how god-damn-many BDSM romance stories I've read that were way, waaaaay better than that crap? Having written it doesn't mean it was done in a way that made it interesting to the broad mass of people. Either the time wasn't right, or the story was too long-winded, or too badly written, or any of a thousand other reasons why it wasn't received well, but that doesn't matter. What matters is the fact that you can write something that has already been written, but better, with enough subtle differences to make it work and look 'new' to the broad mass of people. Your own spin on a topic already broached.
Much more important is the way you write it. Make it realistic. Make it informed. Be sure you can write about it in an informed, non-psychopathic way. Answer all those questions people like me would ask themselves when reading. Don't go down the well-trodden Hollywood road where the same stupid shit is recycled over and over (and with loads of mistakes in it), because you want interested readers. You want to show them that you didn't flip a coin to pick the genre you're writing about, because that'll look like a cheap effort to make money. Of course, we authors want to be able to live from what we're writing, who wouldn't? A surgeon should love his work just as much as an author, but he'll get paid either way, so we should be, too. Especially since we always love our work.
Love your work, research. Find out what that part of society is all about, find out what your protagonist might struggle with, get a feel for their surroundings, what they might live with, what they might face. 

An Example:
If you want to use a hacker in your story, puh-lease don't forget how many hours, days, stupefying amounts of dreary coding it takes to hack anything at all. They do have two or more screens and fancy keyboards and all the thingemagogs, some of them do listen to music, but coding isn't something you can do in a crowd with loads of people making noise, partying or crawling all over you. By all that is holy, please don't, don't ever make a hacker a hip kid with a hacker's club and loads of cool gadgets and sexy girlfriends/boyfriends. Hackers are often socially awkward, rather quiet, and have little interest for gatherings, but they did start to drift into the sports world as of late. I know a lot of rock climbing and bouldering hackers, stuff they can concentrate on and do alone or in small groups to balance out those hours and hours of sitting around and waiting for their tools to finish their work.
Don't take your own computer skills as a basis. There actually is a big difference between iOS and Windows, Linux and Unix when it comes to coding. Coding on a MacBook (or to hack MacBooks) is vastly different from going after Windows users, and most hackers I know have an unhealthy relationship with Linux. I'm talking objectophilia here, people.
Think about what kind of targets your hacker might specialize in. Is it big businesses? Then go with Windows or Linux for his hacking ware. Does he do cyber terrorism? Then he probably will add Unix to the mix, or even specialize in it. Most big, important systems (power plants in particular, but also rocket silos) still use Unix, because damn, that shit is ancient and incredibly hard to hack. Does he specialize in information and 'reaching the common folk'? Then he probably will use iOS, because smartphones.
Don't make your hacker into a "hacks everything" kind of guy. A medical doctor who specializes in all fields probably sucks in all of them, same principle can be used for hackers.

Eh, what now?

Soo, research. Do it to fill your tool-belt with useful stuff. Research to get a better picture of the world, to get a feeling for the topic you want to write about, to make scenes more realistic, to capture your audience with little bits and pieces they might recognize. That idea that you had and someone else already used? Still yours. You can still do it, you can still make it work, and research is your way in. To use the hacker example, if you want to write about a hacker being hunted by the FBI-- you can probably count off at least three books or movies that would fit that description--, use a different modus operandi (m.o.). There are so many little known reasons for the FBI to be after a hacker, you could write another ten stories just with that set-up, and still have a totally new story each time. But you'll first have to research it, and I mean really get into that stuff, ankles-deep and all.
And no, watching TV-series does not count as research! As I mentioned, Hollywood does get some of the facts right, but more often than not, they don't bother with that much research and just fill in the blanks. If you see something you consider using, please just grab the key words and google it yourself until you can be absolutely sure you understand it right.
That's the key to writing something awesome, right there. You're welcome.

Something fun for you to google as a parting gift: Try to find out why TV-series with policemen pointing guns leaves real policemen in almost physical pain.

I'm looking at you, Totally Bound Publishing!

Sooo... I've been looking at my options for getting published. Of course, I've done that for years, always trying to decide if I should post this or that story on Gay Authors first, or directly go to a publisher, so I've done a lot of looking, and very little doing.
Since every author has his idols or favorites, I zeroed in on the publishing houses providing me with all the hot and fizzy stuff I gulped down over the years, and finally settled on Totally (e-)Bound Publishing. What can I say, I just love their style of rating books, and they seem open to a lot of different types of fiction :)
I'm still fighting the good fight to finish two or three of my 'almost done'-stories, but I'll take the jump then. And if they don't like those stories, well, more material for GA!

If you have experience with that publisher, and would like to share, please contact me.

Writings on the wall - Pt. 3

‘Knock, knock,’ said the spider, rapping on the cocoon wall. ‘Argh, grah, gah,’ said the fly, slowly disintegrating inside.

~

The marble floors came to my rescue as I crept through the giant villa. Marble never creaked, whether you walked in the middle or to the sides. All you had to do was watch how hard you stepped. Marble made the most curiously harsh and dim ‘clank’ sound, whenever one wasn’t watching their pace, but I did. There was still no alarm, no police sirens and no people attacking me with baseball bats, so either nobody was home and they had forgotten to arm the security system, or they were at home and hadn’t heard my grand entrance through the window. Judging by the size of the building, that second version was more than possible.
I stayed near the walls wherever I could, but I kept a good distance to every piece of furniture. Wouldn’t do me any good to creep around like a half-frozen ninja, only to bump into a vase and send it crashing down to the floor. My heart was pumping like crazy, doing its little dance through the rush of adrenaline I was having… for no reason at all. Well, there was a reason, getting ready for violence naturally led to rushes of adrenaline and other funny juices, but with me things were a little different. I had grown up in a number of institutions, most of them medical in some way, and it had left me broken and with no social or moral skills to mention. Maybe I hadn’t had those to begin with, but try as they might, my caregivers hadn’t succeeded in teaching them to me, either. Breaking into a house and digging through other people’s stuff didn’t feel wrong to me. I didn’t get nervous or fearful when I broke a law, because I didn’t understand the reasoning behind most of them. That didn’t spare me from instinctual responses, though; violence was one of the things even monkeys understood. Expecting violence drove my heart to its gallop.
I did know fear, of course. There were a lot of things I feared, although they probably made no sense to other people. They couldn’t see what I saw on a daily basis. They couldn’t see the dirty, malicious, depraved, foul, rancid, darkness. They couldn’t see how it stuck to everyone, everything, especially places where evil lived. Small evil bore small darkness, a smattering of tar-like drops clinging to men and women, pulling out in threads when it touched other things, like spittle. Big evil drew darkness into big, encompassing fog, or smoke, if you like. And where that evil nested, a sea of stinking rot was born, growing up the walls like fungus and seeping into the plastering like roots.
I feared the darkness like nothing else, but at the same time, I was very used to seeing it. People who paid for murder usually had evil in them. And the people I murdered, well… It made my job very easy, murdering those who bore darkness into this world. It made it easy on my heart, easy on my mind, to pull the trigger, or cut their throats, or, well, shove them off bridges. I was a creative assassin, albeit an opportunistic one.
In this house, though, there was no darkness. None. Nowhere. Not seeing it on a job made me more uneasy than the lingering cold in my limbs.
Something was wrong. There was always darkness at the places I went for money, just like the people paying me always were demon-monsters. I hated those dark places, the moving walls, the cold shiver running down my back, the innate feeling of dread, and I tried my best to stay away from them, but…
Nothing. This house was untouched by demons. Huh.
I stopped at the big, shiny-white stairwell and looked up into the bright darkness above. The steps were broad enough to make a good sleeping place, and there were enough of them to house thirty people if they squeezed together, but the pale marble and the screaming white walls would never see homeless people finding shelter. Some of my ‘neighbors’ would have killed to spend a night in a place like this, even if it were only sleeping on the stairs, but not me. I preferred dark rooms with boarded up windows and peeling paint, because they made nights darker and contours indistinguishable. Not being able to see where I was sleeping hid possible dark spots and helped with the anxiety.
Ever so slowly, I crept up the stairs, stopping on the last half dozen to peek over the upper edge into the drawn-out hall. No marble here, only dark, old, hardwood floors. Those creaky little bastards. And doors, oh, so many doors, more than any game show could ever fit into one trademark sentence. So many choices were coming my way, I really couldn’t decide how to best proceed. Contestant number one! Will it be door number one, right next to the ceiling-high window? Door two with the slightly peeling paint? Door three, with the  bump on the antique doorstep? Door number four, with that touch of moonlight shining on the wood, or maybe door number five, sitting in the shade? And would somebody please wake the audience for this next part?
I blocked out my galloping thoughts and listened and looked for a few more moments, hoping to see or hear a sign of where to head next, but everything was quiet. Too quiet, too normal, too… dark-less, for all I cared. It made me doubt my mission, if just a little bit.
Four doors were on the opposite side of the hallway, two more on my side. From what I remembered of the outside layout, there was a big, cavernous, windowed gazebo right at the back center of the house, and I could just imagine the private library inside. I decided the library would be behind the opposite right door, because in my imagination a left-turn after entering that door felt more natural. Rich people had enough money to make things more natural.
That left me with five other choices. The other door right in front of me wouldn’t be a bedroom, it was too exposed and demon-people were too paranoid to sleep right at the end of stairs. I went up the last few steps, then hovered there for a moment, trying to decide. Left or right?
Finally, I decided to turn left, because I myself was left-handed. If in doubt, do as you’d do. I crept down the hardwood hallway, wincing ever so often when one of the boards groaned softly beneath my soggy boots. Whoever had to bear the aftermath of my visit, would have a lot of fun with the drops of water I left in my wake. And the blood I was supposed to shed, but there were professionals for those kinds of cleaning jobs.
I slowly, carefully, checked both doors in the left wing of the first floor, holding my hand out against the old wood, all but touching it. I was trying to feel for the tingling sensations that the darkness usually brought upon me, but there was still nothing. That put me between a rock and a hard place— I’d have to either open every door and take a peeky-peek inside, risking to wake whoever was home, or I could sneak back, continue to the right wing, and risk tripping some kind of alarm after all.
Did I mention how bad I am with self-control?
I opened the first door on my left, risking a glance inside. It was a teenager’s room, judging by the posters on the walls, and it was clean and empty. It looked just like in a TV series, all nice and comfy, with a rug and a desk and a stereo, and I wanted to mess it up. I’d never had such a nice room. I’d never had my own room, as it happened. Sighing, I closed the door and crept over to the one vis-à-vis of it, listening for a moment. It wouldn’t do me any good to barge in on an old, rich couple going at it, after all.
That door opened soundlessly, too, and I was treated to another teenager’s room, its layout an exact copy of the other, except for a change in colors and poster themes. Two children, then. I hated killing children. I should have asked about this when I had taken the contract, damn it! Or had I stumbled into the same room again, too confused to orient myself? That, too, had happened before, and that, too, had led to a beating to remember. I carefully took a step inside the room, drippedy-dripping cold Bracket River water onto the flashy carpet beneath my boots, trying my hardest to remember and compare what I was seeing with what I had seen.
The safety-switch of a gun clicked behind me, and I froze.
“Don’t move a muscle,” a sharp, deep voice ordered.
Shit.

Why is believing in yourself so hard?

Sooo... I've had a crazy week to say the least. I should be learning for a "statistics in life sciences" exam, but every time I try to sit down and really do that, I twitch and suddenly I'm writing. And I'm not even writing what I should, that being "Unwilling" and "Shapeshifter", oh no. I'm writing a whole new story, and right now I'm topping out at about 5,000 words a day. Those of you who 'know' me can attest that this isn't me, and that it's really creepy.
I've just broken the 30k-mark on a story that doesn't even have a weekly anniversary yet, and I'm having suspicions about this. I didn't dare hope or believe or do that usual "yeeeh, you can do it!"-tango that I normally turn to when something goes well for me, but I'm still positive that this will be the first story to be finished.
This will be a break-through, and I thought I should celebrate it with doing some promotion for myself. I stared at patreon for a while. Then I surfed through a number of romance labels who might or might not be interested in publishing my works. And the Amazon self-publishing sites. And all the while I had this song in my head, a song I've been hearing since I was a teenager. You might know it.

"Do you really think you can do that? You're not a real author, you know that, right? Don't make a fool of yourself by trying to play with the big boys. You can't just click that and type there and make money, honey, that's not how life works. You might think your work is good, but if you click that, you'll find out that it isn't. It's not even a question of 'if' you'd fail, you'd fail. Don't do that to yourself. Stay where you are. It's cosy there, isn't it? Why would you want to change that? What if you really are successful and people suddenly expect you to do things you aren't comfortable with? You can't keep up with others who self-promote, you're not that good. Not that convinced of your work. This will end in heart-break. Don't!"

This sucks. I know my mother heard that same song in her head, she told me so when I was eighteen and failing high school because fuck this shit. She told me how much she envies my father who just... does stuff, and then other stuff happens, and everything falls in line for him. She always says, if she could master that skill, that "just doing it and to hell with what other people think"-skill, she'd probably rule the world in a year.
I believe her.
Difference: I WANT to rule the world. I just have to convince myself that I actually COULD, if I WOULD finally click that damn button!

Well... I'll give it another try tomorrow.

Writings on the wall - Pt. 2

Dwellers of the ghetto, my kind as you could say, don’t get into Central District, or the Evergreen Isles, or even near the borders to those fancy places. Knights in blue armor sitting on shining metal steeds block the streets and shine the light of truth into the face of each and every one a-knocking on the portals to heaven.
~

I had never been to the fancy districts myself, but there were those in the throngs of hobos who spoke of dumpsters full of unspoilt food, and of street lights that made every nook and cranny as bright as a cloudy day, and of the police actually patrolling the streets. In cars, with real guns and enough bullets to actually shoot more than once. Even their loony bins were chock-full of rich people. I only ever got carted into one of those those mediocre, health-insurance paid places, where they kept me for a maximum of two weeks, pumped me full of the good stuff and dumped me back onto the streets without so much as a ‘hail fellow, well met’ for departure. Admittedly, the good stuff kept me happy and blissful for a few more days after that, but it never stuck.
Luckily, I only ever got picked up when my hypergraphia— this is the obsession to write things, and in a very specific way, if you need to know— got the better of me, and that only happened when one of the really powerful monsters touched me. People tended to frown on walls full of bloody scribbles, so I got sent away when I wrote my prophecies. I, personally, liked blood ink. It was easily procured and cost-effective.
I was walking bent in half, because the sewer pipes connecting the villa part of the Central District to the harbor were too low to stand upright, and there were cobwebs near the top area. I hated spiders. Their webs felt like outside thoughts trying to get into my brain when they stuck to my face. This didn’t stop me from finding the best way to my target, though. Nothing could stop me, once I had a job to fulfill.
Maybe I was crazy, but my flavor of crazy made people very intent on giving me money to do things, because somehow I always got them done. Steal drugs from a police vault? I could do it. Shove a 290 lb wrestler down a flight of stairs and make it look like an accident? Done. Break into Central District to kill a man? No problem, I always found a way. It was the good kind of crazy, not the bad kind. Okay, so maybe killing was evil, but since the monsters were paying me to kill more powerful monsters, it was a good kind of evil. Most of the time I didn’t even know how I was able to do those things, because people like me weren’t supposed to really be ‘all there’ in the head, but somehow I always managed.
And sometimes the distinction between what I saw and what the rest of humanity saw got me confused and frightened. For me, about a third of people in the world were monsters. They either looked like really horrible, demonous accidents, or like cold, frightening, heart-shatteringly beautiful creatures, but both kinds were monsters. Twenty-two years of psychological treatment, of screaming and raging, of banging my head against the floor and scribbling truths onto walls with my own blood had taught me that nobody else was seeing it. Not even the monsters themselves knew what they were, except for the powerful ones. I kept a good distance from those, and they seemed to do the same with me. I supposed they didn’t like what I was writing when I met them.
I slipped out of the end of the sewer pipe like a snake, falling the twenty feet drop into the frigid Bracket River without a sound. The water was so cold I almost breathed in from the shock as I dove back to the surface. Swimming in late February was suicide, but that was exactly why I had chosen this route. Nobody would think of it, and that meant that nobody would see me coming.
I had to swim a good ninety yards to reach the other side of the smaller confluent, and when I finally grabbed on to the steel ladder next to a painted water gauge, I was almost too cold to climb it. My felt coat was so heavy, I had to shrug it off and hang it onto the rail before I could pull myself out, and the next few minutes I spent with hopping around, teeth chattering like castanets and shaking the gun to get out the excess water. I honestly didn’t care if it rusted, I just had to get off one or two shots, and I would leave it there since there were no fingerprints to collect from it. It hadn’t been intentional on my part when I had cut my fingertips again and again to do my writing, but by now they were so full of scars I just didn’t have to be careful anymore.
The night here was even darker than it had been in the ghetto. In front of me there was nothing but a small summer cabin sitting in the midst of a dried-out, half frozen carpet of grass short and thin enough to remind me of scalpel blades, and in the background there were thee giant, ancient weeping willows darkening what little light the moon offered.
Behind the pristine landscape, I could see the white-ish shape of a Victorian style villa. Was I at the right place?
I spent the few minutes it took to get to the back patio trying to remember the address that demon-lady had given me, only to realize I couldn’t check because it probably was written on a plate outside the front gate. I was too cold to care at this point, I would simply have to remember to check the mail inside the house to see if I had gotten to where I was supposed to be.
When I stumbled trying to climb the marble stairs leading to the back door, I found out just how cold I really was: Cold enough not to feel my soggy feet. My lockpicking skills were probably down the drain too. This was going to be no fun at all.
At least it was a beautiful door. Not one of those modern steel sheets, but real, dark wood, lacquered in a nice mid-brown color and studded with bronze adornments. And the best thing: It didn’t look touched by the darkness. I could actually look at it without fighting my ever-lurking panic. Thank god for lazy rich people who didn’t visit their manicured garden to spread the taint flowing through them.
The lock unfortunately didn’t offer the same courtesy of age. It was new and tricky and stubborn beneath my frozen fingers. I felt almost warm when I finally decided this was not going to happen anytime soon, and feeling warm when you’re soaked through and out in the cold was definitely a warning sign. Why was I trying so hard anyway?
The window wasn’t nearly as fancy and new as the lock, and it broke after three hits with the butt of my gun. There was no alarm, which puzzled me a bit, but not enough to slow me down as I crawled through the self-made entrance and into the blissful, nay, painful warmth. I got a few cuts and scrapes as I rolled through the shards of broken glass, but the cuts didn’t bleed too much. If I still had my coat this wouldn’t have happened. Leaving blood on a crime scene was bad, because no matter how much I cut myself, there was nothing I could do about my genetic fingerprint. They’d be able to find me through my medical records.
I’d have to remember to spill some bleach over the shards on my way out. And maybe pee on them. No, not pee on them, that would give them only more DNA samples. But do something to ruin the blood.
The interior of the villa was like a wonderland for me, a strange country of opulent, oversized furniture, clean carpets and wide hallways. The smell was the strangest new experience for me. I knew hospital smells, loony bin smells, police station smells, and all the myriads and masses of different scents only the ghetto offered, but this was different. Stone didn’t have a smell, and of all the stones, marble was the most scentless, but the rooms still had a vibe to it that I couldn’t describe as anything else but “clean marble” with a hint of window cleanser and carpet foam. It smelled like a home, and I had never lived in one.
If I didn’t kill my victim soon, he’d find me rolling and writhing on his couch. I’d done that once, and it hadn’t been fun. They had beaten me to a pulp, and now my nose was a little crooked and I looked like a Thai boxer. Or would that be half-Thai? I wasn’t up to speed on political correctness about mixed blood heritage.
I got the scent of home out of my nostrils with a snort, then I pulled out the gun and clicked off the security switch. Time to find that rich bugger and put a hole in his devil face.
And then maybe raid his kitchen.

Writings on the wall - Pt. 1

I was bored. ;)


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Walls are barriers to keep the empty from the full. There is always one side to a wall that is poor and void of anything worth notice, and another one holding precious and dear things in. This is why houses are so sought-after: So many two-sided barriers, so many precious things inside, so much to collect, so much to lose.
~

I stared at the brick wall. The seams were moving ever so slightly, following the pull of passing car lights like flowers followed the sun. In the darkness, it was all too visible, even better than in the daylight. It also made it way more creepy for me. Other people didn’t see it for what it really was, they called it ‘physics of light’, but I did. I was sweating profusely as I watched some stones bend forward, some bend backward, like a corn field in the wind, and I knew. I knew that something dark had passed this wall, and maybe even the one on the other side of the street, and I was very sure that it was a bad sign for the remainder of my evening.
My breath became shorter and gaspy, but I tried to keep it quiet. If I only made low panic sounds, the rustling of late-winter leaves and the constant hum of the cars would drown my whimpering out, and nobody would find out. And maybe if I didn’t move, that unholy movement in the bricks would go away? But if I didn’t move I would starve to death, or freeze to death, or die of thirst… oh, there were so many different possibilities for perishing, just because of this one dark spot.
A hand hit the back of my head none too softly.
“Crave!” a female voice hissed, but the pain helped more than her noisy voice. I could finally look away from that bad, bad wall. I used my newfound freedom to turn around and stare at the woman’s breasts, drawing in deep, controlled breaths, just as I had learned at the nuthouse— pardon my language, clinic. It helped with keeping my panic attacks in check, but it didn’t make the fear go away. It never did, so I didn’t bother trying.
“Please call me Bart,” I mumbled, shifting my weight from one foot to the other. I had seen her face before, and it was like the wall. Not good. Really not good. It looked like rotten meat, half-eaten by rats and worms and burnt with a flame-thrower. Nobody but me could see it, to everyone else she probably looked like any other burnt-out street walker, but I saw. All that was left of her human face were her thin, angry lips and her chin. I didn’t want to risk another glimpse at the horror before me, so I glanced at her perky stuff.
Sometimes people, especially women, hit me when I stared at their chests, but this one didn’t. The one guy who called himself my friend— I really didn’t know his name or how he came to the conclusion of us being friends— probably had told her that I was a wacko, and it did make things easier. It didn’t lighten her mood, though, and it didn’t make her any more patient.
“I’m talking to you, you freak! Can you do it?” she hissed, crowding me against those angry, moving bricks. Her dirty stilettos made nerve-grating, shrieking sounds as she ground her heel onto the gutter lid. She probably could punch a clean little hole into a man’s head with those things.
I tried to concentrate, but knowing that wall was about to touch my back didn’t make it any easier, so I slipped to the side and out of her corralling arms. “The wall is tainted. You shouldn’t touch it,” I offered in a breathless whisper, because along with the rest of the human race she probably didn’t see the darkness, and being helpful was a good trait for someone who didn’t have much else going for them.
Another car drove by and the passing lights made the bricks shuffle and shift. I took a step back and gasped, then turned away my eyes. Sometimes if I stopped looking, those dark places stopped moving, and there really wasn’t much I could do other than that.
I saw her fingernails as she grabbed my collar. They were chewed down and badly painted, a shade of pink so bright it shone out of the grimy blackness of my old felt coat. “Can you do it, or not?” she practically screamed at my face, shaking me just a bit to make her point. How she was keeping her balance and what little dignity her belt-like skirt offered on those shoes, I’d never understand. The street whores around this part of the ghetto were cat-like and incredibly nimble, and they had to be. With walls like this around, they probably had to run for their lives on a daily basis.
“Kill someone? Yes,” I finally answered, and turned my head away so I wouldn’t be tempted to look at her mangled demon-face. It was all she had wanted to hear and she promptly let me go. Sometimes I wondered why none of the frighteningly beautiful monsters ever came to offer me a job, or maybe a normal person. It was always those demon-faced ones who wanted me to do things for them.
She slapped a badly maintained gun into my hand and turned with a huff. As the clickedy-clack of her pumps disappeared into the distance, she muttered a last “damn fucking lunatic”. I blinked and pulled my coat tighter.
She didn’t even know half of my lunacy.
I am a prophet of god.

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