A Twist Of Noir 607 - Robert Crisman

A DREAM LAY IN WAIT - ROBERT CRISMAN

Roanne hungered.

Memory had ruled her forever. Shards, really, edged like machetes: daddy, whose fingers had eyes in the dark. Momma, ensconced in the shadows.

A church full of short eyes scoping the pretties...

The school playground—swoopings, formations, attacks. The girl she spit on. The boy who lit matches. A first stolen kiss. The snide little wannabe rapists who lifted her dress in a dark-cornered hallway. The nun who blamed her...

It was as if she’d been stripped and then laughed at in front of the whole third grade class...

Later, there was this movie she saw. In it, a woman, tall, muscled, proud, toting an uzi, and dressed in an outfit that flowed down her body, inseparable from her, weaving together the beauty, strength, and allure that made her The Queen.

The Queen wore a crown, a little black hat, a shell of black feathers, tipped forward to the side, with a veil that covered one eye.

The Queen! She held her gun ready and ruled. In circling attendance, a covey of young, supple gangsters. She was their rock, the dream they all dreamed of.

She stood there, inviolate, serene. She took Roanne over...

Roanne dreamed she’d be Queen. But her legs were...too short...

Wisdom has it, however, that clothes make the woman; they mold, sharpen flesh. Roanne had an eye for design; she could turn shadow to sinew. She would be Queen. The world would fall at her feet...

Women would give themselves over to her to be honed for war. She’d reshape the world: all women, men’s eyes...

Men’s eyes! Like all pretty girls, Roanne had been raised to be bait for boys. Which meant life lived in the prison of skin.

Boys tapped on her nerves—especially the bad boys who spit on the old folks’ religion. They somehow embodied a Fuck-You-All freedom denied her...a ticket away to some faraway place...

But their cruelties and callous indifference, their drumming, incessant need—what could these do in the end except sharpen her strong sense of place in the margins?

There were the yoyos, of course, yoyos who’d lick the shit off her shoes for the chance to get next. She filed these away for use later on...

Bait for boys; she’d use it, embrace it, and somehow escape it thereby...

She’d reshape men’s eyes and be free...

Roanne went downtown, age 14. Where the lights are all bright and the shadows are sleek. The Lost Paradise. Bad boys in heaven and she right there with them...

And Dope...

Roanne would be Queen. She’d learn how to game and get over, to outwit the wolves, fleece the lambs, run the maze. Then, past the maze, she’d exhume the dream and reshape the world.

She’d retire in the end to a house on a hill, where no danger or dread could ever molest her again.

She would live the American Dream, the Dream that ends in a splendor of uncaring comfort and ease, that soothes like a breeze on a raft floating down the White Nile, with the softest of suns caressing her lips and her brow and her breasts, and whispering the sweetest of nothings.

The Dream is 10,000 years old. It soothes just like chiva...

Roanne found her power.

She found it one night in the badlands. In the back of a fifth-rate hotel, in the room that holds all lost children.

She’d been dodging bandits.

She came there to rest and replenish.

She was so hungry.

A smorgasbord there on the table! She tied off and tucked in...

Roanne found her power and power reshaped her.

She hungered for more...

BIO: Robert Crisman writes crime and noir fiction. He spent 15 years on streets in downtown Seattle and has some idea of what really goes on in these realms. He has stories at A Twist of Noir, Fictionaut, Yellow Mama and Darkest Before Dawn. A movie he scripted, Chasing the Dopeman, is currently in post-prod down in L.A. and, with luck, it’ll be ready to go sometime this fall. He maintains a blog, chock full of stories, at 6S.