Another Urban Romance...

The girl lay naked on the lumpy hotel mattress. Staring up at the ceiling fan as it cut the smoke from her cigarette into striated streamers. Brain watched her watching the fan. He sneakily eyed the three twenty-euro notes on the tiny wood dresser next to her. He smelled his fingers, the used condom and perfume smell making him woozy.

“How much to lick your arsehole?”

The girl deliberated, chewed her lower lip. Her eyes were rolling.

“Two euro.”

“How much for you to piss on me?”

“I don’t need to go.”

“How much for me to piss on you?”

“Fifty euro.”

“Pah.”

Brain lay down next to her on the bed, taking in the cracked ceiling, with its yellow and brown patina of concentric nicotine circles. He looked at her profile, the young face with ancient, animal eyes. Unseeing. She moved further along, staying out of his reach. Talking with a cigarette pinched between her teeth.

“Something stinks. Is it you?”

Brain sniffed his armpits, screwing up his face.

“You cheeky cow, I thought it was you.”

She rolled over onto her front, reaching over and picking up her clothes from the carpet tiles.

“Whatever, I need to go.”

Brain rolled over and slung his meaty arm around her shoulders.

“Don’t go just yet, I’ve still got some coke here.”

“No, you pay money, you get good time. That is what you got. I go now.”

He pressed his arm down and clasped the girl to his chest. Breathed into her face.
“Sixty euro should get me a whole night, or at least a go again.”

The girl barely resisted the one handed bear hug, sighing and rolling her eyes.
“Okay.”

He let her move onto her back, keeping one hand around her neck. In the next room two men were arguing. It sounded to Brain like Japanese or Korean, he could never tell the difference.
“Did you know, I’ve got the same birthday as Eric Bristow?”

“What?”

”Nothing.”

As Brain tried to climb on top of her the girl slipped his grip and slid nimbly between his legs, darting off the bed and grabbing her clothes. Brain had just enough time to shift off the bed and clumsily kick her in the thigh. She made a scramble for the door knob, and briefly opened the door, shouting incoherently as Brain dragged her back by the hair and slammed it shut. He flipped the lock.

He was beefing up, naked and pumped, ready to go primal. The girl huddled on the floor with her pile of clothes, not looking. Brain hulked over and grabbed her hair. The awful smell of the room and the dingy yellow light twanged a chord in his pissed up tangle of a mind. He was howling in the cave, raging on the battlefield, dead on the deck of a pirate ship. He was at his computer desk blowing out his brains.

Before the hateful blow was struck, the girl brought out a shiny thing. It had been hidden in her purse and now its thin and cruel form was hidden in Brain’s sub-clavian artery. The girl twisted the pen knife, and Brain screeched and shivered in horror at the feeling of sudden, massive bloodloss.

It took him a minute to die, and the girl sat on the bed in her jeans and vest, looking at his eyes as they glassed over. He pawed numbly at the pouring hole behind his collarbone. He was a big heavy bastard, and the girl had trouble figuring out where to hide his body. She shifted him over to the bed, pulling on his legs and rolling him over. She hauled the mattress off the bed, suddenly gagging as the awful stench rose up stronger than ever, from the cloth covered box spring.

She took her pen knife and cut away the fuzzy foam lining material of the wooden box spring. Stuffed between the springs was the desiccated body of a woman. Her bony hands were clutching at her throat, where a dull silver of metal wire had cut to the bone and dragged out deep rust coloured furrows in the crushed tissue. Blood showed black over the matted blond hair, straggled over a hollow face where eyes and lips had been sealed with duct tape.

The girl put the mattress back on the bed. She sat there for a few minutes in stunned silence, listening to the outside noises of life, shouting and music and sirens. She dragged the man over to the cupboard, placing his legs inside and then humping his torso up and wedging him in there. He looked sneaky and peaceful, like a fat baby playing hide and seek, fell asleep without being found. She shut the door on him.

Outside the room abstract symbols were transpiring. Mummified Mayan priests choke back to life on briar wine labelled IBM. A god metal smith pounds out his wares, in fealty to a pantheon of paper gods. 13th hidden sign of the zodiac emerges, and enter into its season with alacrity.