working title: Hunter or Hunted
This was written after this tweet by beloved Paula D Ashe. Sometimes I see friends say things and ask if I can have or borrow the phrase and if they consent I tuck it away and most of the time they tickled my brain into an idea to write.
HERE WE IS. I was also inspried by this slowed reverb version of a fave song. Not loud, no bad words I think. Have a listen. Enjoy while you read. Also this is literal first draft how it came out of my brain not a single edit.
Just want to give a shout out to all the weird dudes wandering around my neighborhood 24/7. I see you strange kings, with your noticeably full (and sometimes entirely empty) backpacks and a cassette player with the orange foam headphones. Stay out of trouble you odd ducks. Paula D Ashe
the tweet
–
Most people assume they are addicts. The houseless addicted shuffling through the witching hour in search of their next high or assume they shuffle through the streets looking for rest, it doesn’t matter. The men, they are always men all look the same. Empty eyes, heavy backpacks slung on hunched backs that look both too full and too empty to bend a man so. Only the others up at the witching hour can ever tell the difference, they know the difference between a crackhead shuffling on sore feet and those guys. She knows what happened.
“Hey bro, bro, bro, hey bro I’m talkin to you.”
Only the inexperienced ever talk to them, the night sees the newbies trying to shuffle along faster than their quarry but find they can never catch up, the men don’t seem to move any faster, they never look up when some other night guy tries to stop them looking to score, they never seem to exist beyond the two dimensions their full but empty bodies took up. The old heads all know, round about 2:45 in the morning they real ones start to slink off out of sight.
One of the men carrying a full empty backpack stands across the street, his slack face turned up as if to the sun. He is new, the newer ones often retain something of life before 3 am. Another of them stood close and the new man worked his mouth to form sounds, his tongue felt loose, like a shoelace without an aglet. “Mmm here, she here, she-” his tongue moves over his lips thick and sticky, “pussy.” The sound that comes out of him is too clear, too sweet and bell like, the giggle pinged off of the glass and steel tower above him as he stared upwards, “her.”
Most people don’t get close enough to them to hear what they say, no one knows where they come from or what happened to them. No one wonders in modern times. In times before they wandered the wood with strangely heavy empty sacks, they have been the men seen meandering castle grounds to be mistaken for shades, the ones in mythos called the fool, the wanderer. All moments in time have seen them. All have seen but none know the secrets of the shuffling men.
At 3:27 AM the elevator inside the lobby dings and the man at the desk stands up straight, “good evening Miss Qheslisa, off for a bite?” She smiles like she always does, “maybe just a bite.” He opens the door for her and bows slightly, “I will be waiting when you get home.” He watches her as she glides away, hers is the walk of the self-contained, self-actualized and unbothered. He never watches her walk away.
The secret men may not know is when they are prey. The secret of the best predators is no one knows when they are prey.
Qheslisa is her name, she is only one of others. She is hungry, she is needy, she is the strange queen ruling the pack of strange kings. The next weird shuffling man with his orange foam covered headphones, the aged relic of a Walkman in hand is near to hand, when he turns from where he’s pissing on a dumpster, he sees her. Oh, she is lovely, she is luscious, she is dark chocolate dessert on a late night, she is worth the thirty bucks he offers for around the world, he knows her place because he knows his own.
Nothing is shocking. By the time that long dimmed, long buried glitter of animal self preservation kicks in it is too god damn late. Qheslisa is too close, the man gone fawn. “What the fuck are you?” She is, she is beautiful. She is beautiful as the poison dart frog and the saltwater crocodile, “I am as you made me.”
When and only when she is satisfied does he finish his initiation. What walked out of a club drunk and horny, walks out of an alley shuffling away, his inner world focused only on finding her but, like everything else she took even the memory of her face. As she walks behind him she finishes, “I am the Alpha and the Omega…”
The new one will only remember the glittering twinkle of her cackle, he will know his route, he will walk holding his battered but somehow clean khakis up, his backpack empty.
As she walks up to the building the doorman again bows and opens the door for her, his eyes on the floor, his tone velvet solicitousness, when she says goodnight he goes back to his post to write in his journal as he watches the new one shuffle by.
Most people assume they are addicts. The houseless addicted shuffling through the witching hour in search of their next high or assume they shuffle through the streets looking for rest, it doesn’t matter. The men, they are always men all look the same. Empty eyes, heavy backpacks slung on hunched backs that look both too full and too empty to bend a man so. Only the others up at the witching hour can ever tell the difference, they know the difference between a crackhead shuffling on sore feet and those guys. She knows what happened.
