Storage of My Work

Herman the Fool – Short Version

2010-01-24T22:26:00.001-08:00

“I’ll take it,” Sandra sighed at the cash register.

“No problem. Just make sure you take care of Herman when he comes home with you. He always takes up too much space.”

“Well, the little fellow does seem small for that.”

Easing away from the doll store counter, Sandra pushed herself out the door, as she weighed over 300 pounds. She now had a new friend for her collection, heading to her apartment downtown. She could not be a lesbian any longer. She was too old and fat – it had mattered - to keep her previous lover. And she knew she had to die. Her soul had gone out the window and simply never returned. But her own body groaned and creaked as she made it go up the stairs after she keyed into her small but dingy apartment building.

She made it up the steps to the top floor where she was forced to live. It had taken a long time to find the small studio apartment, far away from the boyfriend who had always made fun of her, in an occasionally funny way. He had been an actual man, before the lesbian – being a short, doll-like dude himself, not much unlike Sandra’s father, who had died recently. She gazed longingly at the dummy, as though expecting a mystery event. But she smiled her own smile as she held back against the frequent, insipidly small heart attacks. They were bursting her proud and imprisoned chest out, as she was holding her 1,000th Pierrot doll!

For you see, her apartment was stuffed with the Crying Clown, the smiling clown, the clown everywhere. She had built several levels of wooden shelves from kits. These were her only children. But as she gazed at her new doll Herman, she could swear she saw a worried look cross his painted face. He was worried, the little Herman, for her! She struck him. Then she shook him harder and harder.

“Say you’re sorry. Say you’re sorry, Daddy, for telling me there is an afterlife, and that you were God!” Suddenly, Sandra noticed that Herman’s little rouge-red mouth was cracked. Ouch! “Daddy,” she murmured; “Daddy, you are broken. Come to me…to my permanent home,” she intoned as the melodious…Mommy.

She placed Herman neatly on a shelf. As she looked around, the place resounded with marching band dolls, sophisticated dolls, Barbie dolls, kewpie dolls with their little blond heads, Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls stuffed with candy hearts as she had sewn them in, plastic dolls made by anyone whatsoever, purple and green ceramic dolls and some which were merely other kinds of clown dolls. The camera that was her eyes refocused on her brain. Something had been in there long ago, recording anything as she slumped to the floor, falling into her fat, having whittled down deep under it into the skinniest person. She was smiling at me, thought Herman as he rudely awakened. Now I am home at last, I hope, he thought to himself. Freeing himself from her death-like grasp, he hopped up and immediately walked over to her body.

“Godspeed, but I don’t know where you went. You have probably disintegrated. Good riddance to bad rubbish, I would say. Yet somehow, I would have liked to get to know you, my sweetheart, my…” Herman stopped. He gulped, and realized the worst fate had befallen him. This could not be Heaven.

“Hello!”

There was absolutely nothing left but dead silence.

Many doors slammed downstairs to let little him know this: that he had only his survival urge and his urge to have fun somehow left. There was no little boy with whom to play; there was no errant ear in which to fathom the obscurity called time. He even tried mounting her, but there was nothing there. As it grew colder inside, over the years, he groped in boring devotion to the nonexistent dead woman. But he was unable to do anything to bring her back alive. Bugs, weasels, cockroaches, mildew and tiny spirochetes: all ate him. Finally, he just keeled over, lying still in perfectly stately patience. And the gods were not there to pronounce his ultimate fate.

Who are those gods? Why, they are no one, nothing at all.

My Work Storage Blog

2007-11-05T14:30:00.001-08:00

This blog is going to feature some visible work, but 90% of the work is stored unseen and invisible as "drafts" - so I can keep a portfolio (free, in fact) of my ongoing work, old work and work in progress here.

THE END

Executive Director and President of Ghost Writer, Inc., Karen Cole writes. GWI at http://www.ghostwriterwriting.com is an affordable online professional freelance writing agency working for everyone from low end to celebrity clients, and specializing in the ghost writing, editing, promotions and marketing of books and screenplays.

Sample of Business Website Rewriting 2

2007-11-02T11:52:00.000-07:00

Sample of Rewritten Website Copy Done
For a Real Estate Website Creation Company

Edited by Karen Cole
Word Count: 1,500

1. http://www.site4re.com/view

This is an example of the website you can have: a website for real estate with an object's searching system and a convenient photo viewing system.

Our Two Primary Services

1. Website creation for real estate, including everything your site needs: domain name registration, web design, hosting and support.
2. Special further support: for only $214 per month you can hire a webmaster who will take care of your site and who will perform all the work related to your site.

We will create a real estate website for you and provide special support for its operation. The idea of support is to make sure that you will never need to solve any problems by yourself on your site. We will work on your behalf during the site’s creation and continue to maintain it after its completion. Simply put, we will take care of absolutely everything.

You are in the process of creating an excellent and professional business; let us create an excellent and professional website for you.

Total price to create your new website: $674

All inclusive:
- Registration of a unique domain name (web address) for your website: $10
- Unique web design development and personalization for you (logo etc.): $300
- Software needed for site and specialized real estate CMS developed by us: $150
- Special further support. Hire our webmaster: $214 monthly - 1 month is already included
- Free website hosting

Learn more about our special further support by contacting us.

2. http://www.site4re.com/view/demo

This is a demo website. It is an example of the site we can create for you.

Here you should pay attention to:
1. Real estate objects searching system. You can set as many options as you’d like. (Look below the left menu.)
2. Simple and convenient photo viewing system. You can see all the photos for the object without page uploading each time. (Click any photo of any object.)
3. Section "Hot Offers" has been designed for advertisements. You can put your best or your sponsored objects there. (Bottom of the page.)
4. Description for each object. You will be replacing the sample text with your own descriptions. There are no limits for texts, number of photos or objects. In fact, there are no limits at all.

Do not pay any attention to the web design or structure of this site - you will have your own unique design and structure of a completely personalized website.
Do not pay any attention to texts which describe objects (houses, apartments, commercial) or Rent/Sell buttons - these are all just examples.

Will your site be the same? No, it won’t. Your site will be exactly what you want, including unique web design, structure, domain name (web address), and content as well. An unlimited number of objects, photos, texts, pages and anything else you’d like can be placed on your website – there are no limits.

3. http://www.site4re.com/view/support

Our Special Support

When your website is completed we don’t give you tons of documentation telling you how to work with it, how to manage it or solve all those problems that may arise. We simply take care of everything ourselves.

Our support includes specialized technical support and handling of your website. Here is a brief list of what we will do:
• Place all necessary content on the website. You provide us with information (texts, photos etc), tell where on the website you want it to be – and we’ll place it. The only thing you need to do is give us all the information you want to put on the site. If necessary, we will even help you with this as well.
• Add new real estate objects (houses, offices, apartments etc).
• Manage all content of the website according to your preferences.
• Create / remove any number of pages, sections or anything else on the site.
• Solve all problems related to the site. We guarantee that you will have a website running, up and operating 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
• Take care of EVERYTHING related to the website.

4. http://www.site4re.com/view/cms

Real estate website content management system (CMS):

We offer you a content management system allowing you not only to update your site quickly and easily, saving you time and money and ensuring that your site is always up-to-date, it also:

1) Has a very comfortable and useful searching system designed for a real estate website. It has all necessary options for your visitors to quickly find any objects that they want.
2) Allows your visitors to easily navigate between your real estate objects, viewing all photos by scrolling them in a special window and clicking on them to enlarge, without waiting each time for a page to update.
3) Allows you to manage all of your objects and photos very fast and simply.
4) Has a lot of useful options for you to manage your real estate objects, photos, texts, site's pages and the whole website’s content when editing.
5) Has a unique database designed for the real estate website.
6) Is a really friendly, simple, fast and smart real estate CMS, both for you to manage the site and for your visitors to use it.

It is possible to see how our CMS works and to buy it. But we also offer special support, where you do not need to ever work on your website. We can perform all of the required and requested work on your site regularly and on an ongoing, continuous basis.

5. http://www.site4re.com/view/about

About Us

Our company specializes in real estate website creation and provides special further support after website completion. You do not need to solve any problems related to your site or work with it at all. We will take care of everything that comes up, whether it’s daily work required for website maintenance or work you personally request us to perform on the site for you.

The Way to Success

We believe that in order to be the most effective and successful people should do only one job, the one they do the best. Such people are called professionals. This is why in our humble opinion people who run a business (for example real estate professionals) but who don't know anything about IT technologies shouldn't make their own websites. If you want your site to be really professional, modern and powerful, if you want it to be a successful instrument of your business but not "a website for 5 minutes" - leave your website creation to us.

We are focusing all of our creative energy, talents and efforts upon achieving the best results.

6. http://www.site4re.com/view/faq

Questions

Why do we create in particular real estate websites?

Our company has developed specialized real estate website software that is necessary for the modern real estate website. Here are two main advantages of this software for website visitors:

1) The system of photo viewing which is simple, easy and convenient in use (you are at the demo site right now at the same time – click on any photo to check the system by yourself)
2) The searching system which is very important for any real estate website and its visitors. It is a specialized real estate searching system that differs from the more common ones (check it out yourself - below the left menu).

There are also a lot of advantages for owners of our real estate website software. Learn more about our real estate website content management system (CMS).

What makes us the best?

We are focusing all of our energy and efforts on achieving the best results. We believe that in order to be successful, one should concentrate all one’s efforts in one direction. We specialize in real estate website development. That’s why we say: you run your business - let us create and take care of your website for you.

What is the idea?

Simply the following: you do not need to solve a problem called a "website". Leave it to us - we will create a real estate website for you and take care of it regularly. The only one thing you need to do is to give us all the information that you want to put on your site. Learn more about our support by contacting us.

7. One paragraph. (http://www.site4re.com/view/domain_name)

Everything written below is included in our service; we will do it ALL for you. Ten dollars is the price fixed by our ISP (Internet Service Provider), and it is taken for one domain name registration for a one year period.

Rag Doll Man - Short Version

2007-11-02T11:36:00.000-07:00

Rag Doll Man – Short Version

Fan fiction about Malcolm X

By Karen Cole
Word Count: 8,800

Did you know that in the sixties, the men of X were Malcolm X’s, trying to take over the world for Black America, even though they always knew better? And also, the X-Men from Marvel Comics are an all white and probable hidden derivative life form from them.

The X-Men claim to be super mutants; I think they are rip offs from Malcolm X’s movement. But some think such a derivative evolution is simply a “sport,” which can go off in any direction it pleases, finding new natural zones in which to perform its adaptations. And some other beings say that man always has an eternal soul, meant to go places, do new things, and become and create new people.

Lastly, some people say that if you are alone, heroic and isolated, you are Satanic and meant to die…

…and so I have changed the names in this story to protect the innocent - namely, me and everyone else - from libel and slander charges.

The story itself proceeds as follows:

In a time of vast opportunities and no splendor but the eternal ongoing murder of one’s family and friends by each other, the authorities, petty circumstances, poverty, guilt and unknown hideous romances, an overburdened tall man once tried to halt the violent spread of social injustice. His way was rife with political questions that were never truly answered. Due to many frustrating circumstances such as these, that young man was stabbed four times in the chest; touching his heart oh so deeply before he went home. His home was a nice, normal house at the time, not far away from the black section of Harlem in New York City. That area is still poverty stricken to this day.

He looked in the mirror, saw a tall, skinny but thick cheated bull looking exactly like Satan, and he reflected. He had turned in some other people to the authorities, and now he had to pay the price for his actions. This largely involved suicide by firing squad. He had wanted not to be killed, and to be murdered meant its own diabolical implications.

“I’m black finally,” he thought to himself, “and they still don’t love me. Gee, why is that?” Mur knew he was only having a hangover for half a split second. “I have spent year after unadulterated year trying to become black for them, after moving around enough to have run away from nearly everyone. I am the utmost coward that I have ever met, and I only want to kill all of you. I don’t even know who you are as yet, strangely enough. It is because we are forever at war with each other. I am standing here with four gaping open wounds slowly closing and unclosing, and I have no desire left to go hit up a hospital anymore for my dough. I have pulled stickups, heists and burglaries.

“What gives with that, Mur? What happened to you? Ah shit, all my old family is dead, every last relative, and I am the man in the middle. I now have a family through Bette and the kids, and they’re waiting for me to give the last speech. I have to go mount that podium, don’t I? And I’m unlikely to make it there before I fall down dead.”

He knew Bette cared about him, as she loved him deeply. She had only had children with him, but he also had a feeling she was always afraid for them. She didn’t look around at other guys, and she seemed to be very proud of him. But he wondered what she really thought.

He felt like such a miserable failure at life, sometimes. Who was going to provide for his family? And what if the people who killed him killed them as well? It wasn’t that unlikely. And so far as he knew, Bette was pregnant again, due to give birth in a few months.

He watched himself ooze, shooting his cuffs. Assuredly, he thought it would be best to change these clothes, but considering the lack of anyone caring about me at all, he decided, it would be better to mount that podium as my own red self. Red, red, nothing but red. I would say a green light would be a better chance for him, the devil in the mirror, he sighed. And altogether, I am a Moslem no longer tonight.

As he gazed upon himself in the mirror, he gasped. He pulled his rag doll self deep inside to him, for he really had to “be a man” now. He had to still be his old, familiar self to his own eyes - but everyone he met had seemed to see a good man in Satan. He was the biggest, tallest, most strapping Lucifer that he had ever seen, as a yellow man. He didn’t feel half as unique as he looked, being surrounded often by other black men. Scots, he dreamed, must lead the most arrogant existence as white males that the world had usually told of. Old Nordic civilizations ruled his universe, but he liked the Islamic ones.

He drew himself up in full pose, reflecting upon how much a mirror can bleed. The pain that tore through his right chest enormously suited this new perspective. He smoothed back his simple haircut, a fifties crew that felt easier to take care of - but pathetic.

“At last, at last. Well, I’ve told Bette off for the final time. Bad cat.” He smoothed down the walls of his contained within a roughly six foot four body thick chest. It throbbed. It was interesting to feel such a noise coming from deep within him. “Help me, Allah. No, don’t. Actually,” he chuckled, “As you must kill me at the theatre, I suppose you would not like to be me any further, would you? I think I should make a cutting fellow for a few bullet wounds that could insist on. Dad, would you mind if I f----d up your speech?”

No, the chap in the mirror reflected as he frowned in supple manners. Black people, we don’t seem to go away, even when we’re ninety percent white. It is the heat of an African sun that lends us any such thing as mere superiority. A strong man who was laid in front of a moving street car with a bashed head should never have woken up. How could he - but if the streetcar had jarred as it cut into him, he could’ve felt it. Murdock was tired and getting dried out now. His Dad should’ve had his human rights somehow, and not simply been a human gravesite for good ideas.

I should be a Scot, as named “Sir Murdock,” he shyly whispered, smoothing down his newly bleeding white lapels. Africa suits me better, though, and I’m handling this death of mine well enough. He thought they would wince as inwardly as he did, chuckling. It felt good to be dying oh so slowly. Still, if he kept them waiting at the better theatre for his choice appearance…he raised his hand up to his mouth, lightly licking blood off his steak like fingers. They tasted awfully good. He drew his long tongue over each one in turn, relishing the taste of it.

Huh, he thought. I shall never impress my lady, but at least I already have her set up with her new husband. It shall not be more than a pain than (wince) to die slowly on stage, but my heart is stabbed through. As it opened, Murdock knew momentarily that he must die right now. The pain was telling him so, although the ache in his actual heart of a black and lonely selfless but fatherly soul began to override it. It pulled through him as it ripped wider within him. Needing to be saved from himself, he grabbed at his dresser drawer, staring above it at the vanity’s surface, which was slick and nut brown like him.

In the mirror of his awful features lurked a witless presence, peering through centuries of time and insane persecution. “Wander down to that Catholic Church on the street corner, and see what you saw before in the sidewalk, written in the anti Semitic letters of sand. Yourself, super stud, wanting to save the whole entire world through Satan. That is not the way, the truth or the guiding light. Who is an individual must reap the benefits of all human misery, and as a Black Scot, don’t you think? Would you rather be torn apart with knives - or with more bullets? What is the best performance?”

“Myself,” he freaked casually at the mirror, lips curling into a fair snarl. “Too much to take into infinity, and yet I have seen you before, whoever you are, and here I am as you. I am not your white, am I? I have never been allowed to be white under this set of circumstances which I think now I freely chose. Chuckle.” He decided he’d better set to straightening out his clothes and going, so he laid out a pair of shoes on his bed and began to shine them well. As he worked, which took all of five minutes, he thought about the audacity of a man who had been mostly shining shoes for white men. But having children in poverty meant to better their circumstances.

And he seemed to have a reflective crowd of black statues who pulled a fine spooky figure - for cowards. Actually, so many of them had helped him out so often, and had died bravely to serve the Cause. But were they his real friends? Or did they have nothing further to give him, now?

Completing the act of fixing his personal appearance, he combed his scrubby hair as his newly dying body throbbed. “How long I have is beyond me. Falling down on the way to the theater suits, but I must walk there now without panting. Hold on, bud, I really have to do this. It’s the last mile. I have murdered so many people through proxy, I must be akin to Hitler and surest will meet him where we all must go. I suppose I shall end up shining his shoes by making him eat them. Well, let’s be off.”

As his bloody hand pulled at the doorknob of his small bedroom, he looked back through time at the wall. He remembered when a chunk of it had flown over to him and landed at his feet, which were clad in bedroom slippers at the time. The noise of guns had been deafening, and he had reached for his, but once more, it had been spectacularly missing. “A cracker, a cracker, a kingdom for such sustenance from you, shadow weirdoes. I know I am hallucinating all this. Still, Bette’s safe, and so are the kids, so far. It must be the new family. I shall buy them tonight as my own personal future. It is best that way.”

A “cracker” was once an alliterative slur about white people in America. It has to do with them being shot full of little holes. However, such a being is improper sustenance.

Meanwhile, as he was dying, Mur began to wonder about the audacity of guns that were always placed conveniently out of his handsome reach. He also thought that Allah must be kind on one hand, as all his life he had never really wanted to shoot one. Too many people had been shooting at him personally for him to really want to kill them. On the other hand, he would have deeply relished the chance to slaughter them all back.

As a shadow slipped over the horizon, Murdock little peered around Harlem. Others waved at him, then flinched slowly as they moved away. Oh, I smell of iron, thought Mur to himself. Red blood is so full of lovely dark protein. Sustenance I suppose, but as the evening shades enveloped the wan smells of stores and people milling throughout the grey streets, he casually strolled towards his reckoning premise. On the way, he passed the filthy doors of that same Catholic Church, the small one for blacks that had inhabited Harlem since some time immemorial. It was never the same regal church twice, being frequently updated by its invisible black hierarchy. He turned right to brutally sigh, letting all the air out his huge chest, as the four wounds gainfully poured forth their fullest measure. How touching. It promised peace in heaven for the spiritual, such as his wife and children. They somehow seemed whiter than white to him.

“Well, this is as good a time for it as any, I would guess?” he stated aloud. The filthy door taunted him with its message of green paint peeling back the layers of the necessity of the thing called Death, which had been chasing him forever his short life, as he had noticed from when he was in crib and his mom had spilled talcum powder right into his mouth. The sound of multiple guns firing had come right through the door. This had over time put his mind into a useful state of grace, which he used to get around in traffic.

If I could quite recollect, I need to go down Cherry, take a right on oh here we go there’s the stoplight. Right, stay right there. Oh heart that is not made out of candy - be good. It is good. Yes, there’s the light. Murdock the Red walked against the light and then saw the theater and realized it was not where it ought to be. It had definitely been located between Alder and Bourbon with a little white people flower shop situated across from it. I believe that if I ever sliced into those white people I would see red blood, but I have never seen them at all in that form. My mother was whiter than I, and she ended up in many mental asylums over my dad. Meanwhile, I have never really killed anyone, he supposed.

For one second, he clutched his failing heart, feeling it thud…once.

He briefly harrumphed, pulling at his collar, which was quite wet with perspiration. As the finality of the thing called Death began to travel through his entire body, he jerked himself awake. He had a fantasy about having killed a hooker and also being a gay prostitute who pimped. It promised him a summer sun, deep in the heart of equatorial Africa. He loved this strange continent, which was merely a giant world in his mind. But it was full of communist countries. Mecca had been fun to contemplate, as long as he didn’t really want to go to heaven. As he frowned, he realized he was being told that a total fix of heroin like before was on the horizon, and all he had to do was not walk into the theater. If he simply went over to the Busted Denizens coffee shop across the street, he could avoid falling down. It was a sweet little coffee shop, one where he’d almost had a good time. It beckoned to him like a way out of dying now.

A voice in his head said if he called it off, life would be normal again. He had been busted so many times, it was a wonder his military crew cut was yet in place. To be busted means to be under arrest for impersonating a large, scary animal, he reflected. He coughed into his reddened hand, gazing upon it with undying affection for himself. He was martial and military without feeling it. Having a tiny military of his own was entirely out of the question now, and he had to keep aware that many people didn’t like him or his new family anymore. These people would be gunning for them in mysterious ways, all of which promoted supernatural feelings. He wanted to kill the supernatural and stop.

The voice in his head, so very like his own, told him it is easy to kill it. All you need to do is face it down fearlessly, and then you can tell it what to do. But if you do that, you will have to suffer the immediate consequences of your dire and violent actions.

He looked over at the theater door. There was the usual bright red neon glowing sign, reading Apollo Theater. It winked on and off up high in the air, floating above the stacks of the chimney factory area down the block away from the street. Murdock sighed. This was going to be tricky, because he suddenly felt like his wife and children were not there in a theatre he was about to enter. As pain wrenched his body, he mumbled, “Enough. I am a radio program but not a television one. I don’t carry this forward anymore.”

The theater had been the one thing he could count on to be normal. It was not. As he searched out the front of it, he knew it was not at all the same theater he knew.

As the undying pains of possibilities racked that young amateur lawyer who had determined that merely attempting to save his people was enough for his soul, he pulled himself into place. His whole body coldly told him to fall down and die. As his knees buckled, he pulled a buck and wing and stood sharply erect into place. It had been a good idea, to wage war with the United States, and then die fighting. It had been appropriate.

There. That was enough. Feeling cold all through him, he realized the wounds had quit oozing momentarily, perhaps for the next twenty-five seconds or so. Ah yeah, I can reach for that door - push - and there we go, now it’s time to enter the theater and meet Death or not. Say, the thought occurs that I am already Death myself. It is like being made half of hot summer air, like usual. Right now though, I wish I could rend another wound most deeply into my lonely immortal soul. My last female cousin whom I can remember fell to a house burglary recently, but at least I still have one or two relatives left alive. There is something wrong with leaving my entire older, almost dead family completely behind. Yet I have now to save a father headed family - of mine.

I read somewhere that I am only two percent solid matter, and the rest must be winging its way around in there like crazy. If I push through this door, what could happen? Bette and the kids - and those murderous assholes - might be waiting in there for me, but come to think of it, I’m going to have to follow my elaborate plan. I have a speech prepared, but I have no idea when the bullets are going to begin through the air at me. Or us. And she and the kids are right there in the audience. “Whoops, there goes my heart again,” he told himself, nearly falling down on his knees. He finally tried, and got back up again.

As he went through the open door and gently let it slide shut behind him, he walked down the steps. Each concrete bar shot through him, but he was trying to guide it back behind him. Ouch, he thought, now I have to do something other than stepping forward, I think. So he bounded down the last five steps and landed, going: now I do feel I’m a nightmare marine. Odds bodkins, I’m definitely service personnel here, aren’t I? I’m going to have to lure them away from Bette and her kids. I wonder how. They are not out to kill only me - so far as I am aware, although I have done my best to attract them like a dust magnet. If I am truly Satan here, the racially mixed Jewish black man, they should be out to kill only me, under Islamic rules. However, they view Bette and the kids as pagans and are equally out to kill them. If they want to get at me. Satan should be enough to get their attention, but is it? Am I real enough a performer to pull this off?

Roger. I’m a big strapping Black American. So patriotic. If I needed to be patriotic to get out of this one, that ended a long time ago. I can’t stand the attitudes of the country which I am born into, as it is full of shit. Still, I am good at blaming our and their womankind for my problems. Yeah, blame mom, which will get me out of this one. She’s long gone in my mind, he thought smiling to himself - as he approached the stage door back. He peered silently around it, whipping off his narrow black glasses to quickly wipe and put them back on. They were now obscure, relatively difficult to see through. Shrug. I’ve handled that before, he thought. But no, there was something wrong this time. Still, I have about five minutes to get on stage. Umm, no, these go off. So Mur took off the glasses, carefully placing them in a side pocket. Then he shook with laughter at himself. Why keep the glasses, when he was not going to go on living?

He took his prescription frames, which he had worn since a boy, back out of the pocket, saying, “L’chaim.” Now I’m summarily Jewish, he smiled to himself, crushing them under his left shoe succinctly. This will make a stronger Satan for them, but I do not like this. I fear much for my true family. Stomping them once, they were a clear mess in the shadows under the floor, seeming to disappear as they so blended in. At least it will be a life without glasses for five minutes, he wheezed, patting his chest down again. Something was strange, for it seemed to be rising and falling in an unusual rhythm for a change. Well, he figured, this is not it. The floor is weird and flesh colored. I had a deep cut on my hand after a knife fight that I let to go, and it healed all right. These cuts can never heal again under any circumstances, and I would relish their claiming me.

Why, this is not it, again. Walk through door. There they are. Walk forward, stand in front of - no - behind podium. There is the white podium, off in the near distance. It is a few meager steps away to my simple death. The lighting is great tonight here at the Apollo. I see a huge crowd of the vultures, gathering to feed on the upper sky lighting. Not on me, I suppose, but on Negroes. None of them seem to know there are Negroes - and I believe they have now all become demons, white or black.

They seem to be gabbling away at each other, a hubbub. I wonder what a hubbub is going to turn out to be in the next realm. Surely, something pitiful, circling the skies over my head as I pitch up my lunch. Nah, I’m walking toward this. There is the gravesite podium, two steps away.

So Brother Murdock Shabazz leapt up the final steps to the podium and grabbed it with one fine thin brown paw. He was standing on a wooden platform behind it, one of those short stepstool ones, and needed to get rid of it. So he jumped back, kicking it away to the right side with one foot. He had done this solely because it had seemed “right.”

Something again clicked in his head. As he did so, the upper lights all flew on. He was looking over the podium, the top of which hit about chest level under his stomach, and he felt a little too tall and moist for the podium. So he grabbed it bodily, shaking it back and forth as it swayed, letting it settle down, and began his final speech.

It had been supposed to be about the Marcus Garvey return to Africa movement, but in fact Murdock had finally decided that movement was the one the white men had kidded his father into believing was possible. It might be, he thought, in an actual world. This is however not the real world so far as I can tell, he reasoned out, and I am leaving it. So he had to begin his “speech” now, while unable to read off the paperwork.

“Ladies and gentleman, welcome. I am now the Wizard of Oz. Oh, and I have no such announcements to make. As the Mafia is now situated in the audience, can I see a show of hands? What, no hands? Hey, looka here. Hi there, how ya doing? Wait a minute, this podium is getting a little juicier than me.” Mur tipped his head to one side, thinking this was surely the Jesus Christ moment of reckoning. It could slip away there, but as he had to protect Bette and only Bette surely, the best way to do it was to crash the podium. So he grabbed it and pulled it away to the right, where it neatly bounced off the side wall of the entry area he had come through, landing within a curtain and pulling if off stage to one side. It nestled there, after having made a lot of loud noise, crashing resoundingly.

The distant echoes of this shut up the entire audience momentarily. As he grabbed the mike, he looked down and noticed the speech someone had prepared for him was held within his left hand. He frowned at it summarily, and ripped it into several bunches of white pieces of paper, the lofty ripping of which filled the entire anteroom. These then dribbled down, as he pitched forward a little. Then the strangest feeling enveloped him. Bette and the kids were over on the right wing side of the auditorium, and she was giving his oldest girl a sandwich, but she wasn’t looking at him. Checks, that’s Bette. She remains calm in these difficult situations, but tonight I have to show her something, he decided, involving what she should do to leave immediately. She’s the best…

My wife, he brutally cried to himself inside, spent a lot of time in her life noticing me, my accomplishments, and many of the things we did together; she helped me all along. She isn’t selfish; she’s oppressed, and that is what I always wanted to believe, thought Murdock X. But I have this all set up for her if I can ever survive this theater, which I cannot do. Meanwhile, I have to keep the audience as distracted as humanly possible. She has got to handle the kids in a few moments.

Frowning summarily, while clenching his teeth against the pain, he decided to make his final announcement anyway. He had been listened to before in the early days of his movement, but now he was apparently getting old and slow. “Okay, I always have been completely one with “Stan” - the Devil White Man. I sold my immortal soul to all of your white Christian enemies millennia ago. I am Satan, and it is time for my public execution, which should be in keeping within the heavy rules of Koran order. I hereby commit the unforgivable sin of evil pride and renounce all ties to Islam whatsoever. I am obviously supposed to go straight to Hell itself for you. Wonderful, because that’s exactly what I’m going to do here tonight for all of you wonderful…Godly folks.”

In the original version of this, the event was supposed to hit the newspapers and cause political changes to happen, several of which may or may not occur in anyone’s real lifetime. Some people think they may, and some people think it may never happen. But in this instance, something had to go in an entirely other direction.

“Unfortunately, the entire Jewish race is not dead in a major forest fire yet. That is what the Hell in the Koran is about, up in the frozen north. That’s what is in the book in the portion preceding my death. That is supposed to happen before the Devil here can hit such a town as Hell. I have an associate who has slipped me this impertinent information. Would one of you guys in the audience like to tell me who it is?” He crossed his mostly African feeling business suited arms across his massive chest, which was heaving inwardly with the sighs of a lost paradise that he’d never truly obtained. Everyone in the audience seemed to be having a lot of a good time at his expense - as true universal cold enveloped his entire body. It felt excruciatingly good. Still, as he looked the thing over, he could not see anything out there that looked ripe for a kill. He needed about ten men with guns, he figured, to show up. Ten, twenty, four, whatever was there.

“Hey, friends, where are you? Please show up, now. I’ve come to give you milk and honey and all the images and all that. You know, guys with the guns. You must have about ten of you ready now, like a Roman numeral ‘X,’ c’mon, lemma see those major firearms. I’ve been waiting for rifles all of my life - and you’ve all been keeping them out of reach. Please, pretty please, I beg you on the mercy of being a Negro, come show me your guns so I can see how pretty they are. There you go!”

As the paced out group of men in the middle section pulled out their handguns one at a time, they pointed summarily at his closed off chest, telling him to open up so they could begin the firing squad action they were set to do. He had already turned himself in for the petty crimes he had committed, and now it was time to be blasted away. He had fought with something like meager thousands of these before, and had suffered through some skirmishes, but as the coalescing group began to murmur about how long it was taking, the solution materialized in his own mind like an Egyptian pyramid.

Maybe it was time to unleash brute force upon you people, but you can’t dive into an audience like they’re a swimming pool. How do I keep these guys busy, when my family is not going to leave the theater without me? Bette is the least realistic person I have ever met in my life, though she guides me to paradise in her own lost fashion. Still, this must be done. Perhaps keeping these children of mine distracted enough to ascertain their own political purposes and not bring in the other beings with weapons would help. I can keep both groups at bay until something right comes of this situation - or something wrong.

“You know,” said Murdock as he unbuttoned his shirt collar, “It is getting so bloody hot in here, muggier than the deep south, and oh pardon me is that my ugly Mommy in the audience? Say, I am going now to open up my chest and front and get some air. It’s stuffy here at this Asshole Theater. You know, how about if I rip myself wide open, to make it easier for you? Maybe I can show you the right methodology of dying.”

He daydreamed about an earlier obscene group of white men, easier to keep track of, called the Ku Klux Klan, which had faded away into obscurity and become several black groups, all of which wanted the honor of disposing of his body in improper fashion. The Klan had been big on killing blacks, and so were all his present groups of people.

Brother Murdock then slowly pulled apart the sticky remains of his reddened shirt and undershirt, ripping it all open as he went, baring his black and hairy muscular chest ever so carefully until he pulled it all away as far as he could get it open. He exposed himself as much as possible to the wall of guns that were steadily pointed at around his chest walls and stomach, peeling himself like he was a kind of overripe tomato. As he peeled, a mysterious change started to overcome him. He had to pick off parts of his brown skin and white shirt, tearing a goodly shred of it over one of the stab wounds. Then he finally grabbed everything he could scratch at with large hands, and pulled it all away. Now he felt his reddened and raw chest expand appreciably. It felt so lousy to take in lots of stale cigarette smoke laden air, so he wrenched his dying chest outwards, inwardly cursing out loud. Heaving back a single sob, he thrust out what he could feel moving.

“Here am I, crowd of strange African wonders. I love you all with my entire being, with all of my heart and soul. Here - I am a strange voodoo object of merriment and good times remembered, in the last fifteen seconds anyway.” He bent his head back and said, “I wish you could all be here instead of me. It’s such an enjoyable experience.” Wilting inwardly, he began to realize he could croak before any of his persecutors bothered to fire. He thought: I must tell them exactly where to end this altogether, for it looks like the weather outside could tend to rain shortly, and there are those on foot who must leave this our major theater and walk home in the pounding rain. Therefore, I am going to have to sacrifice my family and friends. There is no other way out of the theater and into this movie. I honestly don’t know who is making a major production number out of this, but it’s for the media so far as I can tell. Perhaps the Mafia is here also. The cameras are steadily rolling over there, and every flash bulb is ready to be popped.

“Hey Rubes, would you believe I have a speech all prepared in your shaggy heads? It’s about how you need to shoot me right here, and aim at it really well. See the chest? It’s deep brown - for no apparent reason. It doesn’t light up that well, I guess. Please, lighting, go ahead and train the spotlights on it. Whoomph! There, that’s good. Now you can all see exactly where to aim. Wouldn’t want anyone in the audience to get hurt.”

Heaving harder, Mur stuck his manly breast out much further. The lights at the Apollo seemed to flicker momentarily, as though they would go out as he pushed himself open. “I’m crowing, world, I’ve done this before - and it is finally the time. Hey guys, how come none of you are human beings yet? I woke up and didn’t become one either. Here’s the blood, the meat and the wine and all that, here’s this strapping black animal and all, here’s what you have been coming to this theater to collect on an artificial altar and pray over and feast upon for hours. Where are the billions of gunshots? I’ve been waiting for this moment all of my life. Shoot Bette!” He had said this last thing to indicate to her she had better get her act in gear and soon. But he also truly meant it, down to the bottom of his black hearted soul. He shouted, “If you shoot my wife first, shoot me next!”

As the hubbub died down, one large portly lady in the audience said, “What, boy?” There was a loud crashing sound in the back of the auditorium. No one however was coming through the doors in back. It seemed to be a distraction of some kind. As Mur overlooked the crowd, he could finally see the faces of some of the unusual beings with the guns as they began looking over to their right at his wife, who seemed to be putting her hand over her face. No, this is not the right way to have done this. I should have simply read my prepared speech, been shot in the middle of it and my chest, and died.

“No, actually,” he cried, “I didn’t mean that. Say, look over here, why don’t you? I am here already. I just wanted to let you know that Satan makes a great shoot. Look, I’m ready to take down and all, meat on the table for you and everything. The cameras are sitting all around this beautiful goddamn auditorium training on my gorgeous existence and you all are here for the ride. Look, suckers, calm down. I’m ready for Hell here.”

Every move a serious politico makes is always questioned in great detail by the authorities, the petty ones or otherwise. Would this one work better for the cameras? Every cut hurts, every trait any man has is magnified if one is a bull well boy or something like that, every drop of blood screams for high pressure, every taunt is a welt, and every time someone must come up with something new, the question occurs.

He raised one eyebrow as the men with guns pulled away their attention from Bette, slowly spreading the guns out in a wave at the entire audience, as though they would begin to fire if there was so much as even another mild crashing sound. Then there were several little streaks of light filtering in from outside, cluttering up the windows. Murdock X knew there was an odd chance of other groups occurring on the premises, ones which also wanted to kill him. Still, it felt as though something was controlling the premises. Maybe the sixteen other groups with rifles, machine guns and bombs were busy.

Still, Murdock reflected, the “people” in this audience don’t seem to be getting any of my outer space messages. That’s pretty normal for them. I’m the leader of “us all” and that must be an influence on life, I guess. “So it would,” he roared at the top of his bull stomach, “be most kind of all you shits in the audience,” he smoothly squelched through his dying outthrust lungs, “to continue to point all them guns in my general direction, no, put them together a bit more, there you go. Are you almost there?” The fetching group of silver automatics, each with one or more potential rounds, waved like tentacles from the octopus like group of faces behind them. “Do you think you can tell us what to do, when you’ve condemned us?” said one of them, not materializing from the crowd at all. “We were hired to blast traitors who don’t believe in the Nation of Islam - to death.”

“Yes, I told them all about Black Nationalist Supremacy, but the problem is that I am now a Black Nationalist. So I decided to die at them, so sue me. No, don’t. Put the guns back in place and point them straight at me, here’s the target and everything, right here. I love you. I love you all. I am a huge undying wall of blue meat here, I am going to die incredibly slowly - and I am waiting to be slaughtered, fools! Seriously, fire right into these major holes, or I’ll kill you. I’m Satan, I’m burnt ready, and here I am. C’mon, what took you so long?” Murdock looked down at the unmoving guns and flinched inwardly. Now was the time of reckoning. All of this could go any way, or another.

If they would shoot him, he would not be there to make sure his family got safe home. Meanwhile, the theater ushers were starting to open the back doors as if to give him some air. This alone caused a great unutterable disappointment to rack his very being. He had tried, he figured, and now that he was about to faint dead on the floor he oh pardon Satan that’s it he decided - summarily pitched forward and pointed at the open doors.

“Those who stay in their seats get an expensive prize for inadequacy if they move at all. I have six open guns trained on all of you behind the stage doors on either side of this auditorium. If you so much as move, I will have them all fire at you. Say, bunnies with the guns, is you ready? I am determined to not be the only cuss to die in this theater tonight. When I give the signal, all of those guns are going to open fire.”

As the entire audience froze motionless, and the ushers alone rushed to shut the back doors, Murdock sagged down. This was getting to be a dismal meeting for a night at the good old Apollo, one where he had summarily enjoyed nights out with friends on rare occasions. He’d even circulated a depraved underground flyer claiming he needed someone to kill someone else for him, for once, maybe a blond kid. Circumstances had forbid it ever being anyone else but him. What was with Black America?

“Well, can you get back here with the guns? There you go.” Murdock now had a clear field to see them get ready. He asked them inwardly if they were really subhuman enough to fire at nearly the one exact spot that was hurting the most. Then he asked them repeatedly if they were really subhuman. The guns bobbed up and down with a kind of silent laughter, then pointed steadily at various parts of his anatomy.

“That’s more like it, blind fools. Can you listen to the sound of my voice? It’s a mighty timorous majesty now, one which you’ve seldom encountered. Listen, you need to take aim right all over my body, or even my head. It’s there, just don’t be nervous. I see you’re not nervous. There you go. All over myself. You’re my children at last.” Murdock waved over at Bette, trusting she was looking, and smiled. “Please plug this sucking crow right now, as soon as I give you the order to fire. We’re not going back to Africa except on vacation from now on, and for the entire consecutive future.” I wonder how these folks will afford such vacations, he had to realize. We could, or at least Bette could, as her family has some money.

Murdock heaved a sigh, knowing he was only himself and not Satan. He never had much thought as that stereotype, but it came together in a blinding flash that he would have to be one of the most Satanic caricatures for whites ever if he kept this up. He tightened himself, breathing slightly, and realized he was far, far away from his own dying process.

Coldly, he stood erect and eased back on the execution stage. He briefly recalled himself as a young man, but knew that everywhere he’d been, he had seen something unfamiliar at every turn. The supernatural could kick butt, he figured, but only if it was under my own particular command. I don’t want to do this, he suddenly decided.

He froze in a summary surprised gape. The guns were still trained on him, as though the beings behind him did not exist. And the beings in front of him began to pull him back to his human status. “I know I’ve been a bad daddy for all of you pukes who have been following me for so many years, for to have to live with this haunting imagery is the most pathetic attempt at a buck god of raw meat the world has usually seen. We have them on the run at last, I believe, those frozen stones of the north. Do we not? And now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country. There. All of your guns are now aimed right at the center of my immortal soul.” He appreciated the fact. Here we go.

Ahhh, they are indeed. The strangely marinelike head of Murdock X, which had come up with one number as the digit signifying his death and the deaths of many others, centered over his manly body in a nearly perfect diametrical line. He froze up, thrusting his meaty white chest out, making sure to pull back the last of his shredded black clothes, which were oozing in porous layers every drop of life and banal men’s soul left in him. He looked over the huge audience, thinking he would have liked it if any of them had ever chanced to be real or human in any form. In a way, they were almost like his Bette.

They still weren’t doing anything in his direction. Not just yet. Somebody switched on the music from “Carmen” and it began playing sweetly and softly in the background.

“Red is for blood, black is for death, white is for all right, and pure yellow is for me. Meanwhile, are you ready? I doubt it. But you must take aim and fire. Point the guns now. Straight at me in perfect little lines. There. You are now ready.”

I mutter as I mumble, methinks himself ah yes I am surely this at last. I would rather go to the permanent hell as a boy than see Bette and my children ever get shot, leave their home again, or go anywhere else but the shopping mall and to all the wonderful places I have seen in a distant dream as we packed going from house to house to evade their awesomely boring enemy. They had come through the walls too many times. Yes, this is surely scientific reality, and I will not get my death - as I am an utmost raw fearless coward. I am made out of shit, excrement and pee, and that is where I must go.

Looking at the stage lights in their myriad crystalline colors, he begged God to let Allah there go to the best possible place where a girl could make up for a strange difficulty. To the pages of a book serene, or perhaps a small field and a polluted stream. He smiled, smirking to himself as one silver point crossed his mind. None of this was fun. It seemed like the setup for children that his life had streaked through, in a wonderful way.

He looked, feeling weirdly like himself one last time over at Bette and his children. She seemed to be staring at him with something like hatred but akin to respect lighting her features, as if at long last. He swung his head back to the beings awaiting his purple command in the audience. They still awaited it. I am a good little tin soldier, I am, he thought with the greatest swell of black pride he had ever felt in his life. It filled his whole being, overflowing into his soul as it finally dawned on him what was doing. He had figured the enemy was somewhat right about something, and this must be what it was. They had been evolving the form of the thing that opposes the sun, and he was still its primary victim, merely a man. His children were now on the proper path. Or were they? He fretted for them momentarily. Then he gazed up at the lighting, which was not the same way it had been before. Oh, my oath for a better Apollo. Take me, do not take my wife and kids, do what you will with me, but make it a better theater.

Stuff it up my rear later soon as can be for a better reality for all the below, he thought to himself. “Oh and you suckers in the crowd, now is the time. Here are the simple commands for you to never follow again, ever again, in the future.” You don’t know that I am genuinely thinking that for you, and you don’t even care. You don’t know how ready I was to flay my soul itself completely to Hell for you, to serve all mankind. For I am only a father now, Allah and Moses incarnate, and I am also the supper. I am the only level God incarnate in this entire room. It is all that I ever wanted out of life, save death, but you still know that I am only a bugger. That means I want to only bug you into shooting me as painfully as possible. Please take your time and fire each bullet slowly.”

“What?” smirked one of the white Mure denizens with the guns. Each of the ten or more guns was pointed straight to the center of his chest, which was throbbing with a kind of sexual ecstasy. He couldn’t get past an enormous feeling of infinite endless love for all human and otherwise mankind, and the mostly sexual part of it was dribbling away rapidly. As he spread his bleeding, growing and bursting arms wide, and as each brutal shot rang out summarily spaced apart by exactly one century or more of time, or as each shot spaced itself farther and farther out into space, the slowly dancing rag doll prayed the event would matter somehow - and also that the crowd would not descend and feed upon him later, or that they surely finally would. I must now keep this up, he figured out, to the last me. He also prayed that Bette and all of his real children would shortly vacate the theater, as they were getting nervous. He heard the doors of Hell open and close, and knew his wife was perhaps locked in there with him, but waited. Suddenly, the voice said they left summarily and were gone home. He breathed a sigh of relief - for awhile.

Still, the rag doll witlessly danced on the stage, absorbing each bullet and pushing it out his burst open back.

He spread his demonic white boned winged shoulders back as if he was one plunging black crow, a hunk of exploding feathers that were opening up to the center of his virile but exploding chest. A deep blue and black fissure was swiftly forming, exploding ever outward into an enormous blossom, the only flower of truest Scottish manhood. How erotic, smiled the once incredibly handsome black man - to only himself.

As he fell over backwards, on his knees forever at last, all the scarlet sap of a true Harlem sucker was oozing out of his sunken in chest - and it felt so weirdly cool. A round of applause came cascading over the rafters.

Could be the best draw for tickets the Apollo will never have again. And this one time, I got to tell off the crowd the right way, although I cannot do it ever again.

As the United States Marines, Murdock knew he was stuck in hell as he cocked his head to one side. He had shown too good of form to live. He stood up. Everything was wavy, nauseating, and increasingly painful, only set to go further along. He always had to tell them where to shoot him. Or for a change, he had to tell them where to shoot them.

They were on a hill. It was in Scotland, where they had to defend this overhanging hill while the enemy was coming. As several of them charged up the hill, several of the clan had to hold positions downwards. Using swords, bows and arrows, and shillelaghs, they swarmed fiercely. Guns weren’t involved - shields were too heavy to carry.

They were in the Battle of Dunkeld in 1689. It involved the Jacobite army. Dunkeld was the last battle in Scotland in the 17th century to restore the Stewarts to the throne. The men were all cowards, so slow and stupid - no, they were but worn out from battle, which had raged many days.
Out of nowhere, an impenetrable wall of sticks began arcing through the clear sky like straight birds. Mur heard them whistling as they raced down, sinking deeply into his side’s exposed chests, limbs and faces.
His men would all die, if he didn’t move. Shocked into the utmost living horror, he gave them his eternal orders:

“Ready…aim…fire!”

THE END

The end of this story was based on the fact that after the death of the brilliant James Graham, Viscount Dundee, at Killiecrankie, the Jacobite army was said to have “no leader of quality.” Maybe now - they had one.

Rag Doll Man - Medium Length Version

2007-11-02T11:33:00.000-07:00

Rag Doll Man

A Novelette

By Karen Cole
Word Count: 13,500

Did you know that in the sixties, the men of X were Malcolm’s, trying to improve the world for Black America? And the X-Men from Marvel Comics, about which you’ve probably heard, are “white” derivative life forms. These comic book characters have been quite popular for the past several decades, and nowadays “hit” movies are being made about them. In the comic books, they claim to be genetic “mutants” who are persecuted by normal people.

What do the X-Men signify? Some think such a derivative evolution is simply a Darwinian “sport,” which can go off in any direction it pleases, finding new natural zones in which to perform its adaptations. And some other beings say that man always has an eternal soul, meant to go new places and become new people. Lastly, some people say that if you are alone, heroic and isolated, you are Satanic - and simply meant to die.

In a time of missed opportunities without happiness or splendor, there were once the ongoing murders of one charming young man’s family and friends by hideously evil people, the authorities, multiple petty acts of greed, outright poverty of both the pocket and the soul, and unknown hideous political affiliations. This erudite man was an overburdened and handsome tall, charming and sophisticated black dude with a modest good sense of timing and a wicked but underplayed sense of humor, who had originally wanted to become a defense lawyer. He was only trying to halt the violent spread of social injustice, which was one long attempt to kill him, one which finally succeeded in February of 1965. He was only 39 when he died, the same age as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at his death, but his memory lives on - much like Dr. King’s has, and for similar reasons.

His way was filled with important political questions that were never truly answered. Due to many frustrating circumstances such as these, that young man was stabbed four times in the chest, touching his heart deeply before he finally could go home. However, his home at the time was a nice, normal house not far from the black section of Harlem in New York City. That area is poverty stricken to this day, mostly populated by black people, but areas within it are now dedicated to this man, as he worked hard to save it. He ended up dying there, blown away by his fellow militants at a public theater for having tried to turn in their leader to the authorities.

On the day that awful event happened, he looked in a full length mirror lining the wall of his small bedroom, and he saw a tall, well built, handsome but thick cheated elegant black bull - who for some reason looked exactly like Satan. He was forced to reflect upon this. In Islam, his religion both of choice and circumstances beyond his control, Satan was a character killed off in their holy book, the Koran. This was so he could go to eternal Hell with the Jews, the pagans and other such “unbelievers.” Of course, true Moslems don’t go there, but it’s debatable as to what is a “true believer.”

In order to look more Islamic, he had grown a small goatee, and this small beard combined with his dark skin made him look like a smart brother, but somewhat Satanic. This seemed eerily appropriate to him, as he had turned in some other black people to the authorities, men he had considered to be his brothers and leaders, and now he had to pay the ultimate price for these actions. He felt he had done the right thing, but was worried. Now he had to go speak in public, and in all probability, die in front of a crowd.

This largely involved “suicide” by firing squad, as he had to give a speech while knowing he was going to be assassinated. He had for many long years not wanted to be killed, as so many people had been gunning for him. To be murdered meant diabolical implications, not only for him but his own new family, including his wife and small children. They would be there at the theater with him. He was now stuck laying their lives as well as his on the line, which he’d known about for several months. It made him feel slightly guilt-ridden, but he knew he had done the best he could, given the circumstances. There had been attempts to blow up and burn down their home and gun them down earlier, anyway.

Those events or similar ones actually happened, but this story is about what could have happened if a different chain of events altogether took place, one which would involve Malcolm X actually being an “X-Man” - like the ones in the famous comic books. What would that have been like, in other words, if Malcolm X had to face his death like a true X-Man? His life, harsh as it was, was as fraught with danger as any comic book hero’s was, and in the case of his public assassination, was given much media play. That’s why I’m afraid the X-Men are nothing but a rip off from him, like the Marvel Comics “Avengers” were a rip off of the TV show of that name.

So this story is an attempt to “avenge” that, although it’s rather tongue in cheek. I’m leaning on the grand old “colored people” traditional literature of the French’s “Cyrano de Bergerac” and “The Three Musketeers” - and the Spanish’s “Don Quixote” - in this somewhat lampooner, ribald tale. I don’t mean disrespect, but the X-Men are teenage children’s comic book characters, all white (albeit they are also “mutants”), and they have their own particular style of witty panache. So this story has to reflect that - while it “updates” Malcolm X - in true inimitable Hollywood fashion.

In this fanfiction story, to keep away from outright libel, I am going to refer to the title character as “Mur” or “Murdock” – another popular Scottish name of its time – and not Mal or Malcolm. The latter was merely a “slave name” from white people, anyway. It even means "a white dove," and it was quite popular among Scottish nobility, but I think Malcolm kept it because it was the name given to him by his mother, Louise Little. I also attempted to alter as many names of people and places that I could, given the complex circumstances of trying to tell a straightforward fan fiction story.

Malcolm loved his mom, who was put away into a mental institution for over twenty-five years simply for trying to defend their family against the Ku Klux Klan. As a small boy, he dove for a shotgun a moment after his mother got to it, and apparently she was caught pointing it at the white men who were attacking the Little’s family house. This memory has stuck around for so long, there is a black boy icon at Yahoo! Mail that clearly is based on the young Malcolm X. I’m not sure if it’s derogatory, laudatory, or explanatory. At any rate, this story was not inspired by that icon. I’ve been meaning to write it for years, after I found out about the X-Men and their connection with the life of the real Malcolm Little Shabazz X.

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

“I’m black finally,” the dapper, but bleeding, young dude thought to himself, “and they still don’t love me. Gee, why is that?” Mur decided he was only having a hangover for half a split second. “I have spent year after unadulterated year trying to become black for them, after moving around enough to have run away from nearly everyone. I am the utmost coward that I have ever met, and I only want to kill people now. I don’t even know who you are as yet, strangely enough. It is because we are forever at war with each other. I am standing here with four gaping open wounds slowly closing and unclosing, and I have no desire left to go hit up a hospital anymore. Why bother? I have pulled stickups, heists and burglaries, and waved around a sawed-off shotgun, but I’ve never killed anyone - yet.

“What gives with that, Mur? What happened to you? Ah s--t, all my old family is dead, every last relative, and I am the man in the middle. I now have a family through Bette and the kids, and they’re waiting for me to give the last speech. I have to go mount that podium, don’t I? And I’m unlikely to make it there before I fall down dead.”

He knew Bette cared about him, as she loved him deeply. Sometimes he wondered why she loved him. She had only had children with him, but he also had a feeling she was always afraid for them. She didn’t look around at other guys, and she seemed to be very proud of him. But he wondered what she really thought.

He felt like such a miserable failure at being a husband sometimes. Who was going to provide for his family? And what if the people who killed him killed them as well? It wasn’t that unlikely. There had been so many attempts on their lives, the kids were used to it. And so far as he knew, Bette was pregnant again, due to give birth in a few months. He’d surely be dead by the time that happened.

He watched himself redly ooze, sighing while shooting his natty cuffs. Long ago, he’d been called by the nickname “Red” due to his ruddy hair color, which he hated - as it showed he was part white. Now his clothes were growing redder by the minute. Assuredly, he thought it would be best to change, but considering the lack of anyone caring about him, he decided, it would be better to mount that podium as his own red self.

“I’m red, red, naught but red. I would say a green light would be a better chance for me, the devil in the mirror,” he sighed. And altogether, I am a Moslem no longer after tonight, unless Heaven does go ahead and receive me. What determines whether I’m a Moslem; my own feelings, whether I’m anti-Semitic, which I’m not, or my supposed treachery?”

As he gazed upon himself in the mirror, he gasped. He pulled his rag doll self deep inside to him, for he really had to “be a man” now. He had to still be his old, familiar self to his own eyes - but everyone he met had seemed to see a good man in Satan. He was the biggest, tallest, most strapping Lucifer that he had ever seen, as a yellow man. He didn’t feel half as unique as he looked, being surrounded often by other black men. Scots, he dreamed, must lead the most arrogant existence as white Mures that the world had usually told of. Old Nordic civilizations ruled his universe, but he liked the Islamic ones.

He drew himself up in full pose, reflecting upon how much a mirror can bleed. The pain that tore through his right chest enormously suited this new perspective. He smoothed back his simple haircut, a fifties crew that felt easier to take care of - but pathetic.

“At last, at last. Well, I’ve told Bette off for the final time. Bad kitty cat.” He smoothed down the walls of his contained within a roughly six foot four body thick chest. It throbbed. It was interesting to feel such a noise coming from deep within him. “Help me, Allyah. No, don’t. Actually,” he chuckled, “As you must kill me at the theatre, I suppose you would not like to be me any further, would you? I think I should make a cutting fellow for a few bullet wounds that could insist on. Dad, would you mind if I f----d up your speech? You were great, and I’ll never be great like you.”

No, the chap in the mirror reflected as he frowned in supple manners. Black people, we don’t seem to go away, even when we’re ninety percent white. It is the heat of an African sun that lends us any such thing as mere physical superiority. His dad had been laid in front of a slow moving street car with a bashed in head, and he should never have woken up. How could he? If the streetcar had jarred a man as it cut into him, over time. This was done to him because he’d been a Garveyite, and Mur’s speech tonight was going to be about Marcus Garvey’s movement.

Murdoch was tired and getting rather dried out now. His Dad should’ve had his human rights. I should also be a Scot, as named “Sir Murdoch,” he slyly whispered, smoothing down his bleeding white lapels. He thought they would wince as inwardly as he did, chuckling with a dry sob. It felt eerily good to be dying - oh so slowly - but finally; it felt especially good to so spite his idiotic and overly determined to kill him - enemies.

Still, he could keep them waiting at the theatre for his choice appearance. He raised his hand up to his mouth, lightly licking blood off his steak like fingers. They tasted strangely good. He drew his long tongue over each one in turn, relishing the bitter, iron like taste of his own flowing blood.

Huh, he thought. I shall never impress my lady, but at least I already have her set up. It shall not be more than a pain than (wince) to die slowly on stage, but my heart is stabbed through.

Just then, the wound in his heart tore apart, and it opened. Murdoch knew momentarily that he must die right now. The pain was telling him so, although the aches of a black and lonely selfless but fatherly soul began to override it. It pulled through him as it ripped wider within. Needing to be saved from himself, he grabbed downward at his dresser drawer, resting his now heavy trunk upon it, staring above it at the vanity’s surface, which was slick and nut brown like him. Leaning over both his straightened arms, he gazed upwards at his turned up eyes, which made him look serious.

In the mirror of his awful but handsome features lurked a witless presence, peering through centuries of time and insane persecution. Wander down to that Catholic Church on the street corner, and see what you saw before in the sidewalk, written in the anti-Semitic letters of sand. Yourself, super stud, wanting to save the whole entire world through Satan. Do you think being a p--p, a gay male escort, and a John really helped the Cause?

That is not the way, the truth or the guiding light. Who is an individual must reap the benefits of all human misery, and as a Black Scot, don’t you think? Would you rather be torn apart with knives - or with more bullets? What is the best performance? I’m going to the Apollo tonight to give a speech, and it’s going to be my last one.

And Bette and the kids will be there, forced to watch me die, which is not a pretty picture, blue and black exploding manhood flowers aside. I painted a picture of my chest exploding, as I’m stuck dwelling on that now.

My sweet Lord, God, Allyah, Jesus, Peter Paul and Mary, Hare Krishna, Buddha, clear skinned beacons everywhere, Jews yet, the Ivory Coast, whatever; they could all get shot, too. Why doesn’t anything stop that from happening? Where are these supposed African American friends when I need them? Nobody’s doing anything real about this. My original family is almost entirely dead; now my new one is in deep, dark jeopardy.
My family is at least prepared for the very worst…like, being all killed. Their staying out in the open is the best we could come up with. You’d think all those black admirers of mine could try something to stop this.

Probably it’s because I’ve been expurgated from the Nation of Chocolate Milk there, which I used to run singlehanded, by some old dude named Muhammad, who thinks he used to run it singlehanded. He named me “X” to replace my slave name. Hell, what kind of name is just an “X”? I hate the b-----d, because he sleeps around with even more women than I do, so I probably am going to go to Hell tonight, unless the Sunnies save me.

Rain, rain, rain on a Sunnie day. S--t, if it comes to that, I’d rather be lost and in Scotland, with a kilt up my a--. Yes, what is the best performance at the theater tonight, given that? I wish we could all flee to Scotland…

“Myself,” he croaked casually in the mirror, his ruddy lips curling into a complex, fair, but highly disdainful snarl. He didn’t feel afraid to die. He felt afraid of being too white, which has to happen when all the blood runs out of your body. “Yeah, mighty night finally, ya red headed fool. I’m too much to take into infinity; and yet I have seen you before, whoever you are, and here I am as you. I am not your white, am I? Am I secretly Jewish?”

He began to notice the tempo of his voice rising to a whine as thin blood spurted in small amounts from his chest. I’d best calm down, he thought.

“I have never been allowed to be “white” under this life, which I think now I freely chose, somehow, at one point or another. Nah, I never chose nothin’. Or at least I chose to turn in the brothers of Allyah. Whether or not it was the right decision, I shall have to leave to Allyah, although living people will decide my fate. People. What kinds of people kill people? All of them I guess. Now I’m glad I only wanted to kill people. Chuckle.”

Sighing over his fortunes of not being able to harm a fly in his life, let alone kill people, in spite of getting in some knife fights back there somewhere, he decided he’d better set to straightening out his clothes. They were wet, but he needed to apply some good looking shoe wax.

So he laid out a pair of shoes on his bed and began to shine them. He’d worked as a “shoe shine boy” in the past, when he was lost in the white man’s world, and he did a pretty professional job. As he worked, which took all of five minutes, he thought about the audacity of black men shining shoes for white men. But having children in poverty had meant to better their circumstances. And he seemed to have a reflective crowd of - following him - black statues who cut a fine spooky figure - for cowards. He felt ashamed of himself for only giving speeches to serve them. Yet so many of them had died bravely in battle, one way or another.

They tended to stalk around wearing dark glasses, which he secretly loathed, and act tough. He felt like more people ought to appreciate real eyeglasses. But maybe they make me look like a dink, he thought; is that why they want me dead? I’ve run into nothing but weirdoes in my life but Bette, the kids and the people I met on that pilgrimage, seems like sometimes. Why don’t they care? Why don’t they do something?
Do you suppose they’ve all decided I’m gay? Mur smoothed down his bleeding chest some more. They sure seemed rapt on putting holes into me when this happened. Could be all they remember is when I was gay, and they forgot I was only an invert for paid political reasons. Sheesh!

Completing the act of fixing his nice personal appearance, he combed his ruddy, scrubby hair as his newly dying body throbbed. “How long I have is beyond me. Falling down on the way to the theater suits, but I must walk there now without panting. Hold on, bud, I really have to do this. It’s the last mile. I have murdered so many people through proxy, I must be akin to Hitler - and surest will meet him where we all must go. I suppose I shall end up shining his shoes by making him eat them. I hate anti-Semites, and don’t want to ever be one again. I’ve been anti-Semitic enough in this life, and I still haven’t really met any such Semites. Well, let’s be off.”

As his bloody hand pulled at the doorknob of his small bedroom, he looked back through time at the wall. He remembered when a chunk of it had flown over to him and landed at his feet, which were clad in bedroom slippers at the time. The noise of guns had been deafening, and he had reached for his, but once more, it had been spectacularly missing. Never a rifle around when you need one, he reflected.
“A cracker, a cracker, a kingdom for such sustenance from you, shadow weirdoes. I know I am hallucinating all this. Still, Bette’s safe, and so are the kids, so far. I shall buy off their souls tonight from the slavery of death as my personal future. It’s best that way.” Maybe I’m my own cracker, thought Mur, licking briefly at his fingers again but tiring of the taste.

“Cracker” - by way of explanation here - was once an alliterative slur (with crap) about white people in America. It has to do with them being tiny little squares who were shot full of weird little holes. However, such a being is improper sustenance for a dying man, especially only one such toy.

Smiling, Mur thought to himself, I’d go to Hell for just one chance at one of those buck white Southerners. On the other hand, I am one. Well, what’s a body to do but be half and half? Lots of people are, and I’m nobody special, I just made thousands of people pledge to kill thousands of other people, and seldom do so. At that rate, I should be a born suicide. So it goes. If I go give this speech, it’s suicide by proxy; I don’t get to murder that way, so I guess I’ll just have to bow out of the picture. Bow out; ha ha.

He thought about putting on his bow tie, but decided it wouldn’t look good as a torn apart rag, so why bother? “I’m going to be a rag doll tonight,” he sighed. “Rag doll, rag doll, ya ya,” he sang to himself oh so softly. He sauntered out the door, down the steps, and was hitting the streets of a city just outside of Harlem. He had quite a little ways to walk. Victims of gun violence were common in these environs, but why worry now?

Meanwhile, as he was dying, Mur began to wonder about the audacity of guns that were always placed conveniently out of his angry reach. He also thought Allyah must be kind, as all his life he had never really wanted to shoot anyone. Too many people had been shooting at him personally for him to really want to do the same thing. On the other hand, he would have deeply relished the chance to slaughter them. He’d just rather kill them with his bare hands wrapped around their white and hairy “cracker” throats.

Just then, a white man passing by him said, “You’re a mess, boy.” Mur gave him the finger, but the guy didn’t see him, walking away coughing to himself. It’s cold season, Mur thought. Death is one way to avoid that.

“Hey, dumb a--, I won’t get your colds ever again in this frozen waste of a country, you excuse for a…redneck.” Mur had been warned by some journalist not to use the term “cracker” on white people. It wasn’t popular. Why, he didn’t know. The guy was already out of hearing range anyway as Mur winced in sudden agony. He put a hand to his chest, and yes, it came back quite soggy.

“A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse, or a Kingdom Cab. A Kingdom Come Cab, thy will be done.” Giving up on the walk, he tried to flag one down, and got nowhere. “Can’t even get one near Harlem. It figures. Nobody loves me, I wonder why. Aren’t I good looking, aren’t I a stud, aren’t I married, aren’t I a womanizer…well, sometimes.” Frowning, he thought about the sex he’d had with other men. Was that what paying this penalty was secretly all about? If so, so what? Well, it might mean his wife and family. “Curse every white dick in the vicinity. I wish I had a giant club and could beat a white man to death for every time I had to fart.”

What were those giant clubs they had in Scotland called, he wondered. Shillelaghs, I guess. They used spears in Africa, and stakes, but I wish I had this mother f-----g giant club - I‘d lay right into someone with it. Damn, I have violence tendencies. Chuckle; maybe that’s why I’m being killed. Well, they killed the Kennebunks, and they say they’re going to kill Dr. Queen, so I guess I’m just a side trip that’s par for the course. Four men; one Scottish golf foursome of dead guys who couldn’t get along with each other.

It figures. I liked Dr. Queen, but we couldn’t stand those New British. Blacks versus whites, Scots versus the British. Someday, I’ve got to tell Allyah off about that. What do brown people do, stand around a lot? Mostly, make war on each other in the Arab world against Jews, I guess. If I had to go to Hell, I guess it would be there. Isn’t war the worst of all hells?

As a shadow slipped over the horizon, Murdoch peered around the open streets of daylight laden Harlem. Others waved at him, then flinched slowly as they moved away. Oh, I smell of iron, thought Mur to himself. Red blood is so full of lovely dark protein. Sustenance I suppose, but as the evening shades enveloped the wan smells of stores and people milling throughout the grey streets, he casually strolled towards his reckoning premise. He crossed the vaguely demarcated line into Harlem. The area he was in was somewhat pretty, but strewn with garbage and littered with odd relics. There were shops and stores with bars on the windows, and graffiti everywhere on the filthy sides of buildings with peeling paint.

Why did I ever love this place? I loved the black people in it, he sighed. A few people who were coming to see him at the Apollo, he figured, were still his good friends; yet no one was planning on stopping the attack.

On the way, he passed the filthy doors of that same Catholic Church, the one for blacks that had inhabited Harlem since some time immemorial. It was never the same regal church twice, being frequently updated by its invisible black hierarchy. He turned right to brutally sigh, letting all the air out his huge chest, as the four wounds gainfully poured forth their fullest measure. How touching. It promised peace in heaven for the spiritual, such as his wife and children. They somehow seemed whiter than white to him, although he was nauseated at the comparison. He’d rather think of them as blacker than black, in spite of the “evil sinner people” referencing.

“Well, this is as good a time for it as any, I would guess?” he stated aloud, meaning, why not drop him down to his knees right in front of it. The church door taunted him with its message of green paint peeling back the layers of the necessity of the thing called Death, which had been chasing him all of his short life. The sound of multiple guns firing had come right through the door - on many occasions. This had over time put his mind into a useful state of grace, which he used to get around in traffic. He had terrific schizophrenia potential, but wasn’t too worried about mental illness. They’d stuck his mother in a home after his father’s death. Lousy place to be; but death couldn’t be any better. I’ll see them again someday.

If I could quite recollect, I need to go down Cherry, take a right on oh here we go there’s the stoplight. Right, stay right there. Oh heart that is not made out of candy - be good. It is good. Yes, there’s the light. Murdoch the Red walked against the light and then saw the theater and realized it was not where it ought to be. It had definitely been located between Alder and Bourbon with a little white people flower shop situated across from it. I believe that if I ever sliced into those white people I would see red blood, but I have never seen them at all in that form. My mother was whiter than I, and she ended up in many mental asylums over my dad. Meanwhile, I have never really killed anyone, he supposed. Doesn’t that make me “white?”

Is that the reason no one respects me enough to save my life? Not even Bette? Is she seeing someone else? For one moment, he clutched at his failing heart, feeling it thud only once. Maybe it was drained dry, and he was a walking dead Haitian voodoo zombie - who didn’t know it yet.

He briefly harrumphed, pulling at his collar, which was quite wet with perspiration. As the finality of the thing called Death began to travel through his entire body, he jerked himself awake. He had a fantasy about when he thought he may have killed a hooker - and also one about being a gay escort who p--ped. He was looking out a door, at the outside. Across the street, in his real life, was a local popular coffee shop.

It promised him a summer sun, deep in the heart of equatorial Africa. He loved that strange continent, which was a giant world in his mind. But it was full of communist countries. Mecce had been fun to contemplate, as long as he didn’t really want to go to heaven. As he frowned, he realized he was being told that a total fix of heroin like before was on the horizon, and all he had to do was not walk into the theater. If he simply went over to the Busted Denizens coffee shop across the street, he could avoid falling down, and get the finest cut of heroin for free from the owner, who liked him. Yes, Mr. Drayfuss did like Murdock. He’d given him free coffee, back in the old days when Mur was getting lots of media attention promoting the Nation of Chocolate Milk, trying to get people to “kill whitie.”

It was a sweet little coffee shop, one where he’d almost had a good time. It beckoned to him like a way out of dying now.

The voice in his head said if he called it off, life would be normal again. He had been busted so many times, it was a wonder his military crew cut was yet in place. To be busted means to be under arrest for impersonating a large, scary animal, he reflected. He coughed into his reddened hand, gazing upon it with undying affection for himself. He was martial and military without feeling it. Having a tiny military of his own was entirely out of the question now, and he had to keep aware that many people didn’t like him or his new family anymore. These people would be gunning for them in mysterious ways, all of which promoted supernatural feelings. He wanted to kill the supernatural - and stop thinking so much.

Spooks on the street aren’t going to kill me or us. Hired guns are. But how do you kill supernatural Catholic lying b---s--- stuff that curses you out? It and even our religion is all, you go to Hell for this, and you go to Hell for that. A voice in his head, not unlike his own, told him it is easy to kill it. All you need to do is face it down fearlessly, and then you can tell it what to do. You can even use it to kill people, if you so desire. But if you do that, you will have to suffer the immediate consequences of your dire and violent actions. You might even have to suffer if you don’t kill anyone.

Mur looked away from the coffee shop and over at the theater door. There was the usual bright red neon glowing sign, reading Apollo Theater. It winked on and off up high in the air, floating above the stacks of the chimney factory area down the block away from the street. Murdoch sighed. This was going to be tricky, because he suddenly felt like his wife and children were not there in a theatre he was about to enter. As pain wrenched his body, he mumbled, “Enough. I am a radio program but not a television one. I don’t carry this forward anymore.”

The theater had been the one thing he could count on to be normal. It was not. As he searched out the front of it, he knew it was not at all the same theater he knew. It looked too different to be the same one. But it reeked of being from the same economic conditions: terrible ones.

As the undying pains of possibilities racked that young amateur lawyer who had determined that merely attempting to save his people was enough for his soul, he pulled himself into place. His whole body coldly told him to fall down and die. As his knees buckled, he pulled a buck and wing and stood sharply erect into place. It had been a good idea, to wage war with the United States, and then die fighting. It had been appropriate.

There. That was enough. Feeling cold all through him, he realized the wounds had quit oozing momentarily, perhaps for the next twenty-five seconds or so. Ah yeah, I can reach for that door - push - and there we go, now it’s time to enter the theater and meet Death or not. Say, the thought occurs that I am already Death myself. It is like being made half of hot summer air, like usual. Right now though, I wish I could rend another wound most deeply into my lonely immortal soul. My last female cousin whom I can remember fell to a house burglary recently. There is something wrong with leaving my entire older dead family completely behind. Yet I have now to save a father headed family of mine.

At least I got…me…a brother still alive; I think he’s in trouble somewhere. He always was in trouble, but at least he helped out with the Nation and was alive. I’m street educated, but that cat could out read, out write and out wit me anytime. Hmmm. Nothing looks the same…in the neighborhood, here. Do you suppose this is another dimension? Have I entered the Eventide Zone? Maybe I should look around for Rod Sterling or something.

I read somewhere…that I am only two percent solid matter, and the rest must be winging its way around in there like crazy. If I push through this door, what could happen? Bette and the kids and the rest of those a--holes might be waiting for me, but come to think of it, I’m going to have to follow my…usual elaborate plans. I have a speech prepared, but I have no idea when the bullets are going to begin to fly. And my wife and the girls are right there. “Whoops, there goes my heart again,” he told himself, nearly falling down on his knees. He finally tried, and got back up again. “If this…is another world…maybe they’re not there. Maybe Allyah answered my prayers. On the other hand, where…are they?”

As he went through the open door and gently let it slide shut behind him, he walked down the steps. Each concrete bar shot through him, but he was trying to guide it back behind him. Ouch, he thought, now I have to do something other than stepping forward, I think. So he bounded down the last five steps and landed, going: now I do feel I’m a nightmare marine. Odds bodkins, I’m definitely service personnel here, aren’t I? I’m going to have to lure them away from Bette and her kids. I wonder how. They are not out to kill only me - so far as I am aware, although I have done my best to attract them like a dust magnet. If I am truly Satan here, the racially mixed Jewish black man, they should be out to kill only me, under Islamic rules. However, they view Bette and the kids as pagans and are equally out to kill them. If they want to get at me. Satan should be enough to get their attention, but is it? Am I real enough a performer to pull this off?

Roger. I’m a big strapping Black American. So patriotic. If I needed to be patriotic to get out of this one, that ended a long time ago. I can’t stand the attitudes of this country which I was born into, as it is full of s--t. Still, I am good at blaming our and their womankind for my problems. Yeah, blame mom, which will get me out of this one. She’s long gone in my mind, he thought smiling to himself - as he approached the stage door back. She’s safe, in Heaven at least. I tell you, I’m going to see her again, someday.

He peered silently around, whipping off his narrow black glasses to quickly wipe and put them back on. They were now obscure, relatively difficult to see through. Shrug. I’ve handled that before, he thought. But no, there was something wrong this time. Still, I have about five minutes to get on stage. Umm, no, these go off. So Mur took off the glasses, carefully placing them in a side pocket. Then he shook with laughter at himself. Why keep the glasses, when he was not going to go on living?

He took his prescription frames, which he had worn since a boy, back out of the pocket, saying, “L’chaim.” Now I’m summarily Jewish, he smiled to himself, crushing them under his left shoe succinctly. This will make a stronger Satan for them, but I do not like this. I fear much for my true family. Stomping them once, they were a clear mess in the shadows under the floor, seeming to disappear as they so blended in.

At least it will be a life without glasses for five minutes, he wheezed, patting his chest down again. Those things require so much care and attention.

Something was strange, for the ground seemed to be rising and falling in an unusual rhythm. Well, he figured, this is not it. The floor is weird and flesh colored. I had a deep cut on my hand after a knife fight that I let to go, and it healed all right. These cuts can never heal again under any circumstances, and I would relish their claiming me.

Why, this is not it, again. Walk through door. There they are. Walk forward, stand in front of - no - behind podium. There is the white podium, off in the near distance. It is a few meager steps away to my simple death. The lighting is great tonight here at the Apollo. I see a huge crowd of the subhuman vultures, gathering to feed on the upper sky lighting. Not on me, I suppose, but on Negroes. None of them seem to know they are Negroes - and I believe they are now all demons. They seem to be gabbling merrily away at each other, in a hubbub. I wonder what a hubbub is going to turn out to be in the next realm. Surely, something pitiful as me, circling the skies over my head as I pitch it up. Nah, I’m walking toward this. There is the gravesite podium, two steps away.

So Brother Murdoch Shazam leapt up the final steps to the podium and grabbed it with one fine thin brown paw. He was standing on a wooden platform behind it, one of those short stepstool ones, and needed to get rid of it. So he jumped back, kicking it away to the right side with one foot. He had done this solely because it had seemed “right.”

But it seemed to leap away from his foot, like a mere feather in the wind. It had been a solid wooden piece of step, too. Wonder how I did that? The crashing noise had been deafening, but the audience paid it no real heed. He glanced out, but it was so dark, nobody could be made out.

Something again clicked in his head. As he did so, the upper lights all flew on. He was looking over the podium, the top of which hit about chest level under his stomach, and he felt a little too tall and moist for the podium. So he grabbed it bodily, shaking it back and forth as it swayed, letting it settle down, and began his final speech.

It had been supposed to be about the Marcus Garvey return to Africa movement, but in fact Murdoch had finally decided that movement was the one the white men had kidded his father into believing was possible. He and others had made some visits back there, and a few people had left to live there, but it was mostly a Communist continent, which made life there difficult. It was not the “dream world” he had hoped it would be.

It might be, he thought, in an actual world. This is…however…not the real world…so far as I can tell, he reasoned out, and I am…leaving it. So he had to begin his “speech” now, while unable to read off the paperwork. He heaved one last sigh, which felt like his final one, and began:

“Ladies…and most definitive germs, welcome. I am now…the Wizard of Oz. Oh, and…I have no such announcements…to make. As the Black Mafia and its sidekicks, the Black Moors, is now situated in the audience, can I see a show…of hands? He bent over as blood dripped in a growing trickle onto the podium, streaking down its sides. This will make a mess for the janitor in the…morning…

“What, no hands? Hey, looka here. Hi there, how ya doing? Wait a minute, this podium is getting a little juicier than me.” Mur tipped his head to one side, thinking this was surely the Jesus Christ moment of reckoning. It could slip away there, but as he had to protect Bette and only Bette surely, the best way to do it was to crash the podium. So he grabbed it and pulled it away to the right, where it neatly bounced off the side wall of the entry area he had come through, landing within a curtain and pulling if off stage to one side. It nestled there, after having made a loud noise, crashing resoundingly, making the night ring as though with the sound of laughter.

The distant echoes of this shut up the entire audience momentarily. As Mur grabbed the mike, he looked down and noticed the speech someone had prepared for him was held within his left hand. He frowned at it summarily, and ripped it into several bunches of white pieces of paper, the lofty ripping of which filled the entire anteroom. These then dribbled down, as he pitched forward a little.

Then the strangest feeling enveloped him. Bette and the kids were over on the right wing side of the auditorium, and she was giving his oldest girl a sandwich, but as usual she wasn’t looking at him. Checks, that’s Bette. She tries to remain calm in these typical situations, but tonight I have to show her something, he decided, involving what she should do to leave immediately. That’s it; get her and the kids to leave the theater. Is there any reason she should stick around, and be bored to death?

My wife, he brutally cries to himself inside, never spent one moment in her whole life noticing me, any of my accomplishments, any of the things I did except those which suited her fancy for the moment. Nah, that’s way too harsh. She complimented me several times. She worships and respects me. She isn’t selfish; she’s oppressed, and that is what I always wanted to believe, heaved Murdoch X Shazam into his sleeve cuffs.

But I have this all set up for her if I can ever survive this theater, which I cannot do. Her wealthy family out in the boonies will take good care of her and the kids. Meanwhile, I have to keep the audience as distracted as humanly possible. She has got to handle the kids in a few moments.

Frowning summarily, while clenching his teeth against the pain, he decided to make his final announcement anyway. He had been listened to before in the early days of his movement, but now he was apparently getting old and slow. “Okay, I always have been completely one with “Stan” - the Devil White Man. I sold my immortal soul to all of your white Christian enemies millennia ago. I am Satan, and it is time for my public execution, which should be in keeping within the heavy rules of Koran order. I hereby commit the unforgivable sin of evil pride and renounce all ties to Islam whatsoever. I am obviously supposed to go straight to Hell itself for you. Wonderful, because that’s exactly what I’m going to do here tonight for all of you wonderful…Godly folks.”

In the original version of this, the event was supposed to hit the newspapers and cause political changes to happen, several of which may or may not occur in anyone’s real lifetime. Some people think they may, and some people think it may never happen. But in this instance, something had to go in an entirely other direction.

“Unfortunately, the entire Jewish race is not dead in a major forest fire yet. That is what the Hell in the Koran is about, up in the frozen north. That’s what is in the book in the portion preceding my death. That is supposed to happen before the Devil here can hit such a town as Hell. I have an associate who has slipped me this impertinent information. Would one of you guys in the audience like to tell me who it is?” He crossed his mostly African feeling business suited arms across his massive chest, which was heaving inwardly with the sighs of a lost paradise that he’d never truly obtained. Everyone in the audience seemed to be having a lot of a good time at his expense - as true universal cold enveloped his entire body. It felt excruciatingly good. Still, as he looked the thing over, he could not see anything out there that looked ripe for a kill. He needed about ten men with guns, he figured, to show up. Ten, twenty, four, whatever was there.

“Hey, friends, where are you? Please show up, now. I’ve come to give you milk and honey and all the images and all that. You know, guys with the guns. You must have about ten of you ready now, like my Roman numeral X, c’mon, lemma see those major firearms. I’ve been waiting for rifles all of my life - and you’ve all been keeping them out of reach. Please, pretty please, I beg you on the mercy of being a nigger, come show me your guns so I can see how pretty they are. There you go!”

As the paced out group of men in the middle section pulled out their handguns one at a time, they pointed summarily at his closed off chest, telling him to open up so they could begin the firing squad action they were set to do. He had already turned himself in for the petty crimes he had committed, and now it was time to be blasted away. He had fought with something like meager thousands of these before, and had suffered through some skirmishes, but as the coalescing group began to murmur about how long it was taking, the solution materialized in his own mind like an Egyptian pyramid. Meanwhile, it looked like about three of them.

Maybe it’s time to unleash brute force upon you people, Mur reasoned, but you can’t dive into an audience like they’re a swimming pool. How do I keep these guys busy, when my family is not going to leave the theater without me? Bette is the least realistic person I have ever met in my life, though she guides me to paradise in her own lost fashion. Still, this must be done. Perhaps keeping these other black “children” of mine distracted enough to ascertain their own political purposes and not bring in the other beings with weapons would help. I can keep both Moorish groups, the one that kicked me out and the one I formed up, at bay until something right comes of this situation - or something wrong.

The one I formed up is REALLY going to be pissed off at this. “You know,” said Murdoch as he unbuttoned his shirt collar, “It is getting so bloody hot in here, muggier than the deep south, and oh pardon me is that your ugly Mommy in the audience? Say, I am going now to open up my chest and front and get some air. It’s stuffy here at this A--hole Theater. You know, how about if I rip myself wide open, to make it easier for you? Maybe I can show you the right methodology of, say, dying in public. We seem to be getting better and better at that, lately, don’cha think?”

He daydreamed about an earlier obscene group of white men, easier to keep track of, called the Klutz Klux Klan, which had faded away into obscurity and become several black groups, all of which wanted the honor of disposing of his body in improper fashion. The Klan had been big on killing blacks, and so were all his present groups of people. There had been a splinter group that had attacked his parents’ house twice before he hit four years old, and those weirdoes would stop at nothing. Yet ironically, they were not in the audience tonight, apparently. Or, were they?

Whatever. I’m doing this…Brother Murdoch then slowly pulled apart the sticky remains of his reddened shirt and undershirt, ripping it all open as he went, baring his black and hairy muscular chest ever so carefully until he pulled it all away as far as he could get it open. He exposed himself as much as possible to the wall of guns that were steadily pointed at around his chest walls and stomach, peeling himself like he was a kind of overripe tomato. As he peeled, a mysterious change started to overcome him. He had to pick off parts of his brown skin and white shirt, tearing a goodly shred of it over one of the stab wounds. Then he finally grabbed everything he could scratch at with large hands, and pulled it all away. Now he felt his reddened and raw chest expand appreciably. It felt so lousy to take in lots of stale cigarette smoke laden air, so he wrenched his dying chest outwards, inwardly cursing out loud. Heaving back a single sob, he thrust out what he could feel moving.

“Here am I, crowd of strange African wonders. I love you all with my entire being, with all of my heart and soul. Here - I am a strange voodoo object of merriment and good times remembered, in the last fifteen seconds anyway.” He bent his head back and said, “I wish you could all be here instead of me. It’s such an enjoyable experience.”

Wilting inwardly, he began to realize he could croak before any of his persecutors bothered to fire. He thought: I must tell them exactly where to end this altogether, for it looks like the weather outside could tend to rain shortly, and there are those on foot who must leave this our major theater and walk home in the pounding rain. Therefore, I am going to have to sacrifice my family and friends. There is no other way out of the theater and into this movie. I honestly don’t know who is making a major production number out of this, but it’s for the media so far as I can tell. Perhaps the Mafia is here also. The cameras are steadily rolling over there, and every flash bulb is ready to be popped.

“Hey Rubes, would you believe I have a speech all prepared in your shaggy heads? It’s about how you need to shoot me right here, and aim at it really well. See the chest? It’s deep brown - for no apparent reason. It doesn’t light up that well, I guess. Please, lighting, go ahead and train the spotlights on it. Whoomph! There, that’s good. Now you can all see exactly where to aim. Wouldn’t want anyone in the audience to get hurt.”

Heaving harder, Mur stuck his manly breast out much further. The lights at the Apollo seemed to flicker momentarily, as though they would go out as he pushed himself open. “I’m crowing, world, I’ve done this before - and it is finally the time. Hey guys, how come none of you are human beings yet? I woke up and didn’t become one either. Here’s the blood, the meat and the wine and all that, here’s this strapping black bull and all, here’s what you have been coming to this theater to collect on an artificial altar and pray over and feast upon for hours. Where are the billions of gunshots? I’ve been waiting for this moment all of my life. Shoot Bette! My family is here; you might as well kill them after you kill me. Shoot them all!”

He had said this last thing to indicate to her she had better get their act in gear - and leave. But he also truly meant it, down to the bottom of his black hearted soul. He shouted, “If you shoot my wife first, shoot me next!” If anyone was a mind reader, they would think Mur was insatiably evil – yes, even Satanic.

As the hubbub died down, one large portly lady in the audience said, “What, boy?” There was a loud crashing sound in the back of the auditorium. No one however was coming through the doors in back. It seemed to be a distraction of some kind. As Mur overlooked the crowd, he could finally see the faces of some of the unusual beings with the guns as they began looking over to their right at his wife, who seemed to be putting her hand over her face. No, this is not the right way to have done this. I should have simply read my prepared speech, been shot in the middle of it and my chest, and died. A distraction was a bad idea, but it’s too late. Now I’ve doomed them. Well, so what; I bet we all will meet again, somewhere. I’m hoping for Madagascar in the mountains…oh, shut up, Mur.

“No, actually,” he cried, “I didn’t mean that. Say, look over here, why don’t you? I am here already. I just wanted to let you know that Satan makes a great shoot. Look, I’m ready to take down and all, meat on the table for you and everything. The cameras are sitting all around this beautiful goddamn auditorium training on my gorgeous existence and you all are here for the ride. Look, suckers, calm down. I’m ready for Hell here.”

Every move a serious politico makes is always questioned in great detail by the authorities, the petty ones or otherwise. Would this one work better for the cameras? Every cut hurts, every trait any man has is magnified if one is a bull well boy or something like that, every drop of blood screams for high pressure, every taunt is a welt, and every time someone must come up with something new, the question occurs.

He raised one eyebrow as the men with guns pulled away their attention from Bette, slowly spreading the guns out in a wave at the entire audience, as though they would begin to fire if there was so much as even another mild crashing sound. Then there were several little streaks of light filtering in from outside, cluttering up the windows. Murdoch X knew there was an odd chance of other groups occurring on the premises, ones which also wanted to kill him. Still, it felt as though something was controlling the premises. Maybe the sixteen other groups with rifles, machine guns and bombs were busy.

Still, Murdoch reflected, the “people” in this audience don’t seem to be getting any of my outer space messages. That’s pretty normal for them. I’m the leader of “us all” and that must be an influence on life, I guess.

“So it would,” he roared at the top of his bull stomach, “be most kind of all you s---s in the audience,” he smoothly squelched through his dying outthrust lungs, “to continue to point all them guns in my general direction, no, put them together a bit more, there you go. Are you almost there?”

The fetching group of silver automatics, each with one or more potential rounds, waved like tentacles from the octopus like group of faces behind them. “Do you think you can tell us what to do, when you’ve condemned us?” said one of them, not materializing from the crowd at all. “We were hired to blast traitors who don’t believe in the Nation of Chocolate Milk - to death. Our leader Allyah Muhammad has nothing to do with this.” Mur was getting fairly certain he saw about two dozen guns pointing at him.

“Yes, he told them all about Black Worldist Supremacy, but the problem is that I am not now nor have I ever been a Black Worldist. So I decided to die at them, so sue me. No, don’t. Put the guns back in place and point them straight at me, here’s the target and everything, right here. I love you. I love you all. I am a huge undying wall of blue meat here, I am going to die incredibly slowly - and I am waiting to be slaughtered, fools! Seriously, fire right into these major holes, or I’ll kill you. I’m Satan, I’m burnt ready, and here I am. C’mon, what took you so long?” Murdoch looked down at the unmoving guns and flinched inwardly. Now was the time of reckoning. All of this could go any way, or another.

If they would shoot him, he would not be there to make sure his family got safe home. Meanwhile, the theater ushers were starting to open the back doors as if to give him some air. This alone caused a great unutterable disappointment to rack his very being. He had tried, he figured, and now that he was about to faint dead on the floor he…oh…pardon Satan…that’s it he decided - summarily pitched forward and pointed at the open doors.

“Those who stay in their seats get an expensive prize for inadequacy if they move at all. I have sixteen open guns trained on all of you behind the stage doors - on either side of this auditorium. If you so much as move, I will have them all fire at you. Say, you jungle bunnies with the guns, is you ready? I am determined to not be the only cuss to die in this theater tonight. When I give the signal, all those guns are going to open fire.”

As the entire audience froze motionless, and the ushers alone rushed to shut the back doors, Murdoch sagged down. This was getting to be a dismal meeting for a night at the good old Apollo, one where he had summarily enjoyed nights out with friends on rare occasions. He’d even circulated a depraved underground flyer claiming he needed someone to kill someone else for him, for once, maybe a blond kid. Circumstances had forbid it ever being anyone but him. What was with Black America?

“Well, can you get back here with the guns? There you go.” Murdoch now had a clear field to see them get ready. He asked them inwardly if they were really subhuman enough to fire at nearly the one exact spot that was hurting the most. Then he asked them repeatedly if they were really subhuman. The guns bobbed up and down with a kind of silent laughter, then pointed steadily at various parts of his anatomy.

“That’s more like it, fools. Can you hear the sound of my voice? It’s in a mighty timorous majesty now, one which you’ve seldom encountered. I daresay tonight I can out shout Dr. Queen. Listen, you need to take aim right all over my body, or even my head. It’s there, just don’t be nervous. I see you’re not nervous. There you go. All over myself. You’re my children at last.” Murdoch waved over at Bette, trusting she was looking, and smiled. “Please plug this sucking crow right now, as soon as I give you the order to fire. We’re not going back to Africa except on vacation from now on and for the entire consecutive future…” He was motioning over to Bette, going to himself, I wonder how these folks will afford such vacations, he had to realize. We could, or at least her family can.

Murdoch heaved a sigh, knowing he was only himself and not Satan. He never had much thought as that stereotype, but it came together in a blinding flash that he would have to be one of the most Satanic caricatures for whites ever if he kept this up. He tightened himself, breathing slightly, and realized he was far, far away from his own dying process.

Coldly, he stood erect and eased back on the execution stage. He briefly recalled himself as a young man, but knew that everywhere he’d been, he had seen something unfamiliar at every turn. The supernatural could kick butt, he figured, but only if it was under my own particular command. I don’t want to do this, he suddenly decided.

He froze in a summary surprised gape. The guns were still trained on him, as though the beings behind him did not exist. And the beings in front of him began to pull him back to his human status. “I know I’ve been a bad daddy for all of you pukes who have been following me for so many years, for to have to live with this haunting imagery is the most pathetic attempt at a buck god of raw meat the world has usually seen. We have them on the run at last, I believe, those frozen white stones of the north. Do we not? And now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country. There. All of your guns are now aimed right at the center of my immortal soul.” He appreciated the fact. Here we go.

Hath, they are indeed. The strangely marine-like head of Murdoch X had come up with one number as the digit signifying his death and the deaths of many others, the “X” that signified ten. He’d always thought he had about ten black men to every thousand white men, anyway.

He centered his head over his manly body in a nearly perfect diametrical line. He froze up, thrusting his meaty chest out, making sure to pull back the last of his shredded black clothes, which were oozing in porous layers every drop of life and banal bit of “soul” left in him.

He looked over the huge audience, thinking he would have liked it if any of them had ever chanced to be real or human in any form. In a way, they were almost like his Bette. In another way, they were all Grendal from Beowulf, hideous monsters in underground caves who tore people’s arms off to eat them. Well, he’d eaten something himself back there, somewhere.

They still weren’t doing anything in his direction. Not just yet. Then out of nowhere, somebody switched on the music from “Carmen” - and it began playing sweetly and softly in the background. “Oui j’taime, oui j’taime…OUI, J’TAIME…”

“Red is for blood, black is for death, white is for all right, and pure yellow is for me. Meanwhile, are you ready? I doubt it. But you must take aim and fire. Point the guns now. Straight at me in perfect little lines. There. You are now ready.” If these cusses were Army, they’d be peeling potatoes.

I mutter as I mumble, methinks himself ah yes I am surely this at last. I would rather go to the permanent hell as a boy than see Bette and my children ever get shot, leave their home again, or go anywhere else but the shopping mall and to all the wonderful places I have seen in a distant dream as we packed going from house to house to evade their awesomely boring enemy. They had come through the walls too many times. Yes, this is surely scientific reality, and I will not get my death - as I am an utmost raw fearless coward. I am made out of s--t, excrement and pee, and that is where I must go.

Looking at the stage lights in their myriad crystalline colors, he begged God to let Allyah there go to the best possible place where a girl could make up for a strange difficulty. To the pages of a book serene, or perhaps a small field and a polluted stream. He smiled, smirking to himself as one silver point crossed his mind. None of this was fun. It seemed like the setup for kids that his life had streaked through, in a marvelous way.

He looked, feeling weirdly like himself one last time over at Bette and his children. She seemed to be staring at him with something like hatred but akin to respect lighting her features, as if at long last. He swung his head back to the beings awaiting his purple command in the audience. They still awaited it. I am a good little tin soldier, I am, he thought with the greatest swell of black pride he had ever felt in his life. It filled his whole being, overflowing into his soul as it finally dawned on him what was doing. He had figured the enemy was somewhat right about something, and this must be what it was. They had been evolving the form of the thing that opposes the sun, and he was still its primary victim, merely a man.

His children were human, and now on the proper path. Or were they? He fretted for them momentarily. They looked a little whiter than him. Were they inferior, or superior, to him? They had grown up with the surname “X,” which had been odd for them at school. Some people even called them the “X Men,” which made Mur wonder why he’d ever taken that surname.

Then he gazed up at the lighting, which was not the same way it had been before. Oh, my oath for a better Apollo. Take me, do not take my wife and kids, do what you will with me, but make it a better theater. Come to think of it, hadn’t this theater been named something else, something completely different than the Apollo? Perhaps I’m imagining this whole shebang.

Stuff it up my rear later - soon as can be - for a better reality for all the below, he thought to himself. “Oh and you suckers in the crowd, now is the time. Here are the simple commands for you to never follow again, ever again, in the future.” You don’t know that I am genuinely thinking that for you, and you don’t even care. You don’t know how ready I was to flay my soul itself completely to Hell for you, to serve all mankind. For I am only a father now, Allyah and Mosses incarnate, and I am also the supper. I am the only level God incarnate in this entire room. It is all that I ever wanted out of life, save death, but you still know that I am only a bugger. That means I want to only bug you into shooting me as painfully as possible. Please take your time and fire each bullet slowly.”

“What?” smirked one of the white male denizens with the guns. Each of the ten or more guns was pointed straight to the center of his chest, which was throbbing with a kind of sexual ecstasy. He couldn’t get past an enormous feeling of infinite endless love for all human and otherwise mankind, and the mostly sexual part of it was dribbling away rapidly. As he spread his bleeding, growing and bursting arms wide, and as each brutal shot rang out summarily spaced apart by exactly one century or more of time, or as each shot spaced itself farther and farther out into space, the slowly dancing rag doll prayed the event would matter somehow - and also that the crowd would not descend and feed upon him later, or that they surely finally would.

I must now keep this up, he figured out, to the last “me.” He also prayed that Bette and all of his real children would shortly vacate the theater, as they were getting nervous. He heard the doors of Hell open and close, and knew his wife was perhaps locked in there with him, but waited. Suddenly, the voice said they left summarily and were gone home. He could stop worrying about his family - for the first time in many years.

Still, the rag doll witlessly danced on the stage, absorbing each bullet but pushing them all finally out of his bursting open back.

He spread his demonic white boned winged shoulders back as one plunging black crow, still in his shabby macho body that was opening up to the center of his virile but exploding chest. A deep blue and black fissure was swiftly forming, exploding ever outward into an enormous blossom, the only flower of “a true Scot’s” manhood. He’d painted a picture of this very event, where he’d finally become “blue black” and no longer part white, as he had pictured being torn apart by a shotgun blast.
How erotic, smiled the handsome black gentleman to himself. Good enough for a former gay male escort, p--p and John, I guess, which he recalled he’d had to do for a living - to get ready for his role in the Black Underworld. As white people wouldn’t let him work for a living, he’d fallen back on being a “trick;” now he was really torn wide open to death.

As he fell over backwards, on his knees at last, all the red sap of a true Harlem sucker was oozing out of his sunken chest - and it felt weirdly cool. A round of studied applause came cascading over the rafters. Murdoch, slightly offended, loudly booed back in his head; he figured he’d won.

“Could be the best draw for tickets the Apollo will ever have. And this one time, I got to tell off the crowd the right way, although I cannot do it ever again. On the other hand, I’m now outside - and on a green knobby hill.”

He got up off his knees, and as he looked down, he saw he was wearing something odd. “I can’t possibly be wearing a skirt - it’s a kilt - with a clan tartan.” He reached down, smoothing it over his bared thighs, and noticed he was holding a short broadsword, with a bow and arrows slung over his backside. And he wasn’t alone, as the place was crawling with men.

“Where am I? Oh, my Allyah; I think I’m in Scotland!”

As someone who’d always looked like a member of the United States Marines, due to his near perfect rectangular head shape, Murdoch knew he was probably stuck in Moslamic Hell as he cocked his entire body to one side. Or was this potentially Moslamic Heaven, after all? At least he wasn’t white, although most of the men around him seemed to be that way.

He was well…on his feet…and the surrounding countryside was almost grotesquely lovely in its verdant vermilion and emerald green landscape, beautiful and spreading widely out in all unlimited directions. Yes, it was somewhere near Killdare, in ancient Scotland. It was broad daylight, and he and a large group of other men, most of whom were also wearing kilts, were strewn all over, up down and sideways, a series of small rolling fragments of wild grass covered hills. They were running amuck, up and down the sliding slick green wet and muddy sides of the rising hillocks, screaming their lungs out as they did battle to the death. You never saw a muddier, louder or more raucous group of death dealing and dying men as they bashed each other’s heads in with what looked like giant clubs.

It was the year 1137, in the midst of a famous battle, one in which it had been later written for posterity and history’s sake, “We lost our dear leader, and sorely needed a new one.” Scotland wasn’t even officially Scotland yet, and was at war with the south and other parties. It was near the times of Braveheart, Robert the Bruce - and other such folklore legends. King Arthur had reigned in England but a mere century ago. And there were many smaller kings of kingdoms at war in Scotland, as unlike Brittany, those lands would not be tied together by a single king for centuries.

Sucking in his now unhurt - and somewhat fuller - bared hairy chest, Murdoch the Brave of Scotland sized up his situation, which seemed to have become exceedingly weird. Everything was wavy, nauseating, and incredibly painful. He was wearing only his clan tartan over a green kilt, leggings, and simple leather shoes, which were muddier than bricks. But then he remembered exactly where he was, and who’d he’d been.

He was truly Murdoch, a local king of the lands surrounding the Lochs of Killeen. His father had been King Malcolm the Wise, of the Culms of Killdeer. Their royal Moorish family had reigned in that general area for hundreds of years all told, and none had lost a major battle as yet, or ever. Murdoch held up his right hand, and in it was a short broadsword, encrusted with jewels, twin huge and bright rubies in its handle. One ruby represented Killeen, and the other stood for Killdeer.

It dawned on Murdoch that if he had ever lived in the future, yes, he was of Moorish descent. That was why he had been named Murdoch and kept that name in America, wherever that was. His sword gleamed in the sunlight. For one brief moment, Murdoch remembered and longed for a submachine gun, which would certainly handle this situation better. Then he crowed a loud and familiar battle cry, lifting his sword skyward, crying: “HA-HA!” - which was an ancient Roman battle cry, as he brought it down on an attacking white man enemy’s exposed neck. It neatly lopped his head off. It was a good sword, of Roman make, forged over two centuries ago.

He hefted it; it was pretty heavy for a short sword, but he’d wielded it well, and it was already well covered in the gore of others. In this case, ‘twas the thick and pungent blood of invaders from the Isle of Eire, who were associated with the Picts of England. These latter were blue blooded, white and pure looking, and they hated the Moorish descendants of Killeen and Killdeer. They would stop at nothing to win this battle.

Perhaps this wasn’t that likely of a prospect, as Murdoch the Brave had no peer whatsoever. But he and his father had always had to tell their men where to shoot at the enemy. They were all idiotic cowards, of two different clannish backgrounds, so slow and stupid. And instead of wielding guns, they were shooting arrows, which were equally deadly, though slower. They were much better at swinging clubs, although the shillelaghs were quite cumbersome - and slowed them down much. So Malcolm the Wise had introduced them to short swords recently. His father favored the flat Roman blades over the curved Moorish scimitars, simply in order to trade and consolidate relations with the powerful Roman Empire.

Both Kings - Malcolm and Murdoch - could wield either type of sword with ease, and Murdoch had become well known for his lopping off enemy’s heads, which he favored; he had a nickname of “the Kind King” for it. However, his men couldn’t see where to aim their broadswords as they slipped up and tumbled down the moistly grassy hills and dales. All of these clansmen would have to resort to a volley of arrows, aimed straight for their enemy’s bared chests, and they would have to aim at each other.

They were all not heavily mailed, and they did not wield any shields, as those things were far too heavy to bear on slippery slopes.

It was mid summer, and the battle raged especially hot. Most of these fighting Scotsmen were naked to the waist, and some were bare down below as well, wearing only loose leather belts and coverings bestrewn with feathers. Some also sported headbands, and a few wore Roman helmets. Many affected a clan’s dark-hued tartans, but they were not politically assembled well enough to have definitive clans. Their leaders were working hard on consolidating their many realms.

The young Scots king could barely tell the sides apart as they all raced past him. His side seemed to be browner than the other one. Murdoch the Brave of Scotland waved fiercely at the valiant but slow moving warriors, the ones which looked somewhat brown, to stand still and make ready.

He motioned them to line up on one side and fire their fletched brown arrows at the oncoming, ferociously charging white enemy. He was beginning to realize his men were not slow witted. The battle had been raging for a long time, all day in fact, and they had all grown weary.

Mur had figured out that he must do something, so he decided arrows should work. My kingdom for some guns; what are guns, he mused, as his formation lined up, ready to fire their brown fletched arrows at their enemy’s exposed and pale oncoming chests. At least it seemed the other side was tired too, as they were beginning to slow down, standing around as if waiting for Murdock’s side to attack.

Then they took aim, crouching down behind each other.

Out of nowhere, an impenetrable wall, dozens of death missiles, began cascading, arcing through the clear sky like thin birds. Mur could hear them whistling. They were tufted with the white dove’s feathers as they raced downwards. Mur’s men held no shields, and so began to die.

It had been a planned move. Malcolm is a Scottish name that means “white dove.” The enemy had marked white arrows specifically for his father, to make his family pay for previous casualties. His tired men fell down in droves with sickening thuds, as they’d not lined up behind each other.

His side would all die, if he didn’t move. Shocked - in the utmost living horror - he gave them his eternal orders:

“Ready…aim…fire!”

Office Politics - Excerpt of Adult Fiction

2007-11-02T11:30:00.000-07:00

Office Politics – Excerpt

By Karen Cole
Word Count: 500

Dina and Shinea huddled together and watched as Michael, the new office boy, grunted and groaned over the copy machine. “Damn thing always needs fixed,” he griped to the general air. Sweating, he began removing his shirt, revealing his muscular hot body. “He’s gorgeous,” Dina whispered into Shinea’s ear. “A dreamboat,” Shinea agreed.

Over in another corner of the office, Ruby was just finishing up the day’s reports. She had to rush home to pick out something elegant and get ready for the big office party that evening. It was the Boss’s birthday. Nobody was allowed to miss that shindig; everyone and their horniest dog would be there. Glancing with a sigh at her watch as she swept silently out of her cubicle, Ruby thought: perhaps I’ll make someone into my dog tonight!

Ruby sidled over to the two girls breathlessly eyeballing the cute office boy and hissed censoriously at both of them, “Sorry girls, he’s all mine.”

“I doubt that,” Shinea giggled. “There’s a new girl from Packaging and she’s already set her cap for him.” “What?” Ruby, though seldom nonplussed, was. She was the type to thoroughly analyze certain people, then move slowly into vivisecting their vibrating mental carcasses. If that was the fate they so happened to deserve. It usually was. Catching her by surprise was a very rare event.

“The new girl is Kathy Viatta, that Italian number. She’s almost a sylph, Ruby, but with an ass the size of Manhattan Island. Four years younger than you. And she’s as sweet, naïve and innocent as the day is long. Sorry, but you’ve lost our Michael,” Dina apologetically demurred. “He’s already asked her to the party!” The two ladies twittered like softly fluttering leaves, not meaning to laugh at their redheaded coworker. Ruby Dakota was the best and hardest worker Viceroy Inc. had ever hired.

“Almost a sylph? I’ll make short work of her,” breathed Ruby to herself. Her ample bosom rose and fell with a gathering storm of sensuous anger. “Will she be at the party tonight?” “Of course, she’s new, but everyone from our department has to be there. You know the Boss. Say, Ruby, why don’t you play one of your famous practical jokes on her? The Boss always loves a good laugh. Do something sexy!”

“Something sexy…” Ruby’s alabaster chest and throat, choked with rage, swelled, her perfectly round nipples swiftly hardening under her tight silver satiny blouse. It pulled threateningly at its genuine pearl buttons, revealing through its cracks an emerald green bra underneath. Her signature ruby choker almost popped off her taught and reddening neck. She took a straddling stance, suddenly dominating the entire office, and declared, “By the midnight hour, get ready for the sexiest, wildest, and cruelest practical joke that you’ve ever seen in public!”

Annie Chapman - Slightly Shorter Alternate Version

2007-11-02T11:02:00.000-07:00

Annie Chapman, Our Dead Lady of Whitechapel

By Karen Cole
Word Count: 28,000

An ordinary domestic dandelion is a beautiful, golden yellow weed that may gradually take over your house’s garden. It is up to you to decide if the people in this are dandelions. There is a young British woman who died long ago. Is she something that needs to be rooted out of a giant lawn, namely, London, England? Before she takes it over, ruling and dominating it with the world’s most lengthy and painful possible forms of death? Or is it Charles, a stranger in a strange land, who might seek his eternally lost soul, which he thought was in the future, who is the real dandelion Lastly, is it possibly the person or people you would most suspect of such a status – murderers? Some think death is something to be imitated, though it may be a weed in all of our gardens. And one of the world’s most famous killers, oft imitated, is a part of the following story.

“This will never be easy,” thought me to myself as I gazed out the filthy panes of the room I was renting. It was a beautiful day in our many districts of London, one of which inhabited England of the 1870’s. I knew, however, that I was special and different. I had been favored by the gods that be for some unusual purpose, or I was imagining things. Some unnatural thing had been telling me what to do for my life’s purposes.

For my name was Annie Chapman, born of two parents as all such usual people are, but I was definitely stuck now living in the Whitechapel area of a small but scattered parish of London, a city of multiple desires and random lost causes, but mostly punishment. In my time, it was well known - and all our mortal souls had to suffer its bitterest stings. So far as I could tell, women and children seemed to suffer most of these prejudices. The men had a hideous freedom to their causes widespread throughout Victorian England, in spite of the fact we were ruled by a queen. Feeling permanently depressed about this, I gazed out the window, looking at an autumn tree beginning to sprout its wondrous and small leaves. I recalled my father, a man of austerity and grace, who had been impoverished. The fact he was stuck presiding over an ant farm bothered me.

I sensed to myself, that although I was some colored and unfavoured, as I was not very coloured, I could perhaps get a job from the Jews down the street at one of their many small perfume, antique and trinket shoppes, a jewelry store, or perhaps a lasting slot as a flower girl in another district. Still, as my parents had told me to trust Jesus our Lord and Saviour, I was curious. I had found Whitechapel district, and it seemed to me that we were so overcrowded and under favoured in London of that time and place that it would be best to end my existence here. I did not much apply at the shoppes. I saw my looks to be somewhat freakish - and felt work for me was scarce in all known quarters.

I was not certain of suicide, but had taken to light drinking of the only local beverage that afforded me any substantial pleasure at all, which of course was small beer. I noticed these imported beers were oft German or Irish. As I was with the other local “girls” who inhabited the lodgings of our elderly female landlord, who winked at me and let me know that only pleasures of the evening or money could reconcile her duplicate balance sheets, which I was dead sure she was forced to keep, I was sad, for I knew my eventual end must come from intractable diseases. On the other hand, nightly I dreamed of a time when I could experience genuine sexual pleasure. This often involved fornication in broad daylight, which I only imagined. Sometimes I also envisioned a husband, who looked peculiarly like my father. He was finally killing me to get rid of enforced existence, and I hated this as much as anyone would in near same situation.

I loathed being only a girl in a men’s world, and did not want to be anything else. For to me, it would make no difference if I lived or died, as it seemed to be for all others in my time, but in some way I would have liked to lead an entire human existence.

My sole body was to be for the filthy old men - and the younger, equally filthy rogue, lordly and absurd - but well dressed middle aged gentleman of that era, and whatever else came my way, one which would only be stifled as far as ultimate heartbreak and pain needed to be hidden. I cheerfully went about my business, sometimes wondering if a time would come when I would meet my true lord and savior of the world, Jesus Christ. For I could not forsake the duty that God Himself had apparently handed me. I was surely to leave this world too soon. With the juxtaposition of a name like Annie Chapman with Whitechapel, I knew my end would not be pleasant, nor a good example. I understood my tale that was never told was not for your children, the god fearing, or the happy.

I often thought: the Word between me and Whitechapel was simply the word “chap,” almost a common word used in English at that time. There was a logical explanation for my concupiscent unstoppable fate. Perhaps our local, bitter deaths were supplying its greater usage. Yet after having applied at a dozen small shops, including apparently two Jewish ones, and after several episodes of being winked at, tormented by flies and insects, and smelling the street garbage, I felt something like a voice telling me where to go. I knew I was no such “chap.” I was a crappie and would never be a dowager. I had to learn that man is the dominant life form, and that woman was only a feeling appendage.

I headed for Whitechapel based upon this. There was simply nowhere else to go. But I wondered. Was there some other place for one like me, I thought as I looked down the length and breadth of my home’s glowering streets, wandering for the sake of exercise alone, during the day. I thought, it is time. I must gather my long skirts to myself, and reflect upon what I must do. It will not a good thing be. I must never gain too much weight, or I would lose the one job I had left my family early to access.

I will have to sell myself at night to these strange men, as I cannot seem to get another job. Yet, it is not so much because of my eerie skin color, I reflected. Surely, although I am “dirty,” and “filthy,” and all of those things, this could not be a pre-ordained fate. I am as much blonde and blue eyed I decided, as I am a lady of colour, although I am only one person, who must decide if she is a person. Surely a lady of the evening could never be let to be. Although at one time, I found myself at a veterinarian’s office, being told that the only living I could have was cleaning animal cages. I wondered to the man in charge if I could have any facial coverings for this. “No, chit, hurry up and clean those cages, or you are terminated from this job. Get over here, and when you are done, come in the back. I have a big surprise waiting for you, chippie.” He wanted it clearly for free. As I left, I told him, “Next time, supply the “chippie” with a mask of some kind.”

Needless to say, once outside this office, I realized what my definite fate would have to be. I had been too defiant in my own way of something I could not understand or relate my life about. I was rooming near the Whitechapel district at the time, in a rundown and filthy hovel, and I simply went to the office of the renting hostelry, talked to the manage, and was told I owed sixteen farthings for rent, even though I owed none. I knew I needed a certain amount of farthings to make my way in the world, and had oft lost count, as the varieties of pence and farthing, quid and crown danced through my growing mind. I had not met the level of souls who needed only pence, as that would come later.

I remember thinking, damn you, God in the highest. You are simply some concept dreamed up by man. I am going to live in Whitechapel district, alone, and away from you. But at night, I cannot even dream of a man. I must face down the British Empire beasts who think they are lions at night, one at a time, until “it” finally happens. And the unicorn can never help lasses who cannot see straight after two days of life. As the seal of the British Empire dictates, something is a lion, and something is a freak.

Therefore the first is a predator, it casts around for what to feed upon, and it must eat in order to survive. If this is its wife, its husband or its own land, it must make its statements, sign onto its “just” causes, and take on its own workloads. But these are always assigned to it by another force, one which subsumes it to cause its death.

Casting about for the dozen girls whom I was to work with, whom I had first met at a trade school, I found Cecilia, and Mary. I asked Mary if there was anyone else named same as her in Whitecap area. I immediate thought there ought to be two such Maries. “I should like to live in the same rooms with her,” I told Cecilia. “What, are you an invert? Do you like women? You don’t look dark or short enough. I’d think beer and some high life would be enough for you. I have a nice man who wants to see you. His name is Charles. He’s the cutest bloody bloke in England. Come back here.” She was indicating the deep interior of the tavern we congregated at, to speak between us.

I paused for a moment. “What, is Charles not lit up? Is he, ah, a drunkard, and perhaps not white or something?” I had been introduced for breeding purposes to many such. Having turned them all down as unsuitable, I had slept only with white men.

“Whatever would make you say that? He has a name and a pedigree. Don’t you think you would like to meet him? By the way, he wants to discuss an arrangement with you. He told me he wants to organize us ladies into sort of union. Can you imagine, Annie, we could work for decent wages for a change?” She giggled. “Really, he thinks he’s bonnie Prince Charlie, oh, he’s a rough but good hearted cuss. No, he’s out for blood.”

I had read in the newspapers, having been a schoolgirl and able to read, and having greatly enjoyed this period of time in my life, of things such as unions and also how men only took advantage of women. Still, I knew how men lived and died on the job. My father had perished away from our apartment, and we had never known what had happened. There had been a story in the papers out of Sussex about an industrial accident in the silver mines of Brazil. I wondered how my father had traversed the waters; maybe easily, maybe hard. In a ship, or in a slave boat? Such had begun my long slow slide downwards. I had taken to drinking and also carousing with the local men. But I had also contemplated drug abuse, especially cocaine, and had turned aside. I had thought of my education. But my mother ran out for our four other children, all younger than me, and I had to go work for my living. For a time, I had to suffer cocaine withdrawal, but we were tough girls at the time and no problem was had waiting out the shaking. You see, the elaborate clothing of our times dictated our existences almost completely. It took well nigh unto fifteen minutes to lace up one’s high button shoes, and they cramped one’s feet sufficiently to cause intolerable agony, although removal of them felt like surrender.

Most fortuitously, in Leeds I found a new style of shoes that were less ponderous. These simply laced up to the ankles and had become widespread in America. Made of patent leather, they were expensive but not impossible to buy with our wages.

Penny small pence for my thoughts, where I could ever head them, as my dark friend Cecilia, who was good at slipping in and out of the shadows and back alleys as she introduced me to the Life, dragged me to the back of the dingy tavern and I came across Charles. He was standing there, and sure enough, I had to think what I thought. He was indeed a Negro man, and he had on the most arcane African grin I had ever seen.

“Would you care to make more money at what you are bound to do?” Charles asked me, taking my hand quite gently and giving me an obviously acquisitive peck on the back of my hand. “I’ve never been treated so like a lady before, Charles. Is’t your real name?”

“Yes, but you are now to have a new name. I want to call you something else, but you may select it, my fair lady. What would’ a care to be called, now if you work for us?” He was a scant taller than me, but loomed larger than my desires could push him back.

I reflected upon how much I loved my Lord and Saviour, and how much Charles looked like the Devil. As he stood there, he resembled pictures of the Moors I had seen in my book. They were treated as the enemies of our England, and I wondered. Would this man help secure me better fortunes? No, there was no such thing as hope. He held my hand for the briefest of moments, and then released it as his gently slid downwards.

“I’m sorry, Charles, but I do so work alone. I will reside in Whitechapel, and, ah, I will await the coming of the one who will save me from my appointed task. Upon the coming of my Lord, I will then go home. Do you understand this, my Charlie?” I decided to give him his grin back, and smiled the smile of one I knew was quite uncertain. Perhaps this boyish man had something in mind along the lines of gathering up our monies. His hat was cut of the finest cloth, and his costume smacked of recent times and extremely well adjusted accouterment. He looked like a good “old boy” from say, Liverpool, where I understood the fine arts were gaining in attention, and there were nice museums. But I doubted he’d long attended school, from his overly active mannerisms. His frown was too like his smile; arduous, songlike, and full of evil implications.

“Ah, I understand. But would you like me to buy you a beer first?” The fellow stood there, looking at me proudly and far too arrogantly to be thinking he would be in any trouble for accosting me. I knew now what my prospective clients would also probably be. There would be no mercy whatsoever from the disease threat. I knew now beyond all certainty what I was going to be forced to become. And it might last longer than long. There were growing hospitals that could take me in, and the treatments there for disease were as medieval and arcane as any I had studied in my way at school.

I would be taking some of the men of England with me on this unpleasant Biblical Job like journey, I decided. If not many a long year would await my misfortune, I should be a slit throat. It would help make up for some of I and my girls’ lack of good circumstance. It was not the men folks’ fault; I could not see it any other way. And yet they all seemed to think that sex was something they owned or otherwise could throw away as some sort of ungodly machinelike contraption. I was sure I myself would turn out to be one.

“Charles, I need initiated into this. Could you buy me a beer, and could we step upwards into an upstairs bedroom, one last time, before I settle down into my life of prostitution?”

He snidely frowned, and said, “Look, young lady, I am definitely not liking your mood and would require some recompense for your time, if I was to be a fancy man for you. I have done this now for several years, and it is high time I became upwardly mobile. When do you want to go into an upstairs bedroom with me?” As he stood there, I saw that he would be rankled if I took anything like a sweet time with him. Also, I picked up a deep sense that he wanted something nice out of life which he could never obtain.

I took his two toned but silken left hand in one sudden motion. “I have sixteen pence in my pocket. If you must be such a small boy about this, I can certainly pay you for going through the motions with an aging and soiled dove such as me. It is my rent money, and it is all I have. Let us go upstairs, and for one hour, let us be a man and a woman together. You can show me the way. I will even lead the way upstairs for you. Do you want to beat on me? Do you have equipment, or is it as simple as it looks?”

“No,” said Charles, casting his eyes away. “I do, but actually, I will take your sixteen pence and get you out of here. Let us go buy you one beer, and be done with you. Come on now, such a choppy; let us go buy you a glass of wine. Come on now, Dove.”

So he led me over to where I and my friends congregated, and was the only one of his kind there as we settled in to what would be one of my few last glasses of heavy and dark brew. I sat and tired watched its aged traces swirl in the glass. The piano player was fetching a good tune out of the wooden instrument, and several of the girls were dancing merrily, pulling their skirts up aways, sometimes doing what we thought of as the stage dancing which I had seen growing up, down in another district, one which the rich were known to haunt and which had many a festive ballroom hall dance going in it. Some journeymen, carpenters and tradesmen, were dancing about, as the tavern was not as small as it looked from the outside, and it was a good time being had by all. Even me. I was surprised as I looked around, happy for a moment at the lack of Christian antipathy. The men whirled their girls around, dipping them, sometimes dancing erratically. I began tapping my shod foot rapid time to the music, and clapping my hands.

“Chuck - my bonnie lad,” I tittered suddenly into my feminine hand, which had beautiful red nail polish on each nail - but of the nailpolish was starting to chip around the edges. “Charlie my darling, let us get up and dance.” As I gazed down the bar, I could see the Jewish owner of the tavern, or so I thought of him, wiping all the glasses with one towel, and dreamed briefly of securing a job as a tavern girl. Charles seemed to flinch. I thought, would the tavern owner hire him? Perhaps he would not work there. I wanted to reach out and grab him by the waistcoat and haul him - slowly - upstairs with me.

“Wait. I have to go dance with the ladies who work for me. Wait here.” He left me, his grey tailcoats swirling around in mock protest. Then one of what I assumed now were his girls handed me a newspaper. It was a headline on that grabbed my attention. As I read it, my heart sank, although it was nothing unexpected and I had been looking for it.

It read, “Ladies of the Evening Disappearing in Whitechapel.” As I read the story, it turned out they were doing anything but disappearing. Our bodies were being found in strange and peculiar places, splayed out like carpetbags, in odd positions. And I felt chilled to the bone when I found other Mary indeed. It was a young girl I knew who had gone to a separate school than mine, once I had met her at a coffee shop, and we had shared dreams of working as writers, musicians, waitresses and artists, and she had been found in an alley with her throat ripped wide open and her abdominal cavity also gutted through her heavy clothing, in a position which began to sink deeply into me.

Sitting with my head spinning out of control, I happenstance saw a street at night. It was one of many - with dead bodies upon it. I also viewed an absolute picture of what had happened. As the grey cold swirls of a thick London negotiable fog gathered around both the victim and the oppressor, I saw who it was. He wore a long black cloak and a broad grey brimmed hat. He knew what he was doing, too good of a job at it. If it was one person, it was an unlined medical doctor. I read other articles, and there was some attempt to blame the entire local Jewish population. It finally centered on a butcher named Leather Apron, and there was talk of arresting this Jew. I knew for a cold hard fact that it was not him, but a cadaverer who lived and worked near the vicinity.

And I next saw a sepia toned picture of what the “vultures” that gather and make money off of us had done to her “pretty” corse. She was so dark and mysterious, and had lovely long black hair. They had sewed her body all up to pose her both as a new thing called pornography - and as a medical item. I had to think, I somewhat minded the porno, but was happy about the medical aspect. Then it dawned on me. This would lead to the widespread abuse of women. However, it seemed a new way to make money, one that might get some of us away from the horrendous sweatshops, where in crowds you could only work until you dropped, were out on the streets and got yours. And the growing photography arena must of course have something strange to take on. I thought, Charles should try taking pictures of us, but perhaps he has not such knowledge as that.

I was sure of a sudden that it had all been a necessity, and that it had happed before, but had not been reported on by the newspapers so frequently. Please if there be a God, I briefly prayed: do not take enormous photographs of my dead naked body. And what if this attitude spread out, engulfed the other citizens of London, and destroyed her?

“Excuse me. I have to go see a doctor now, everyone. Oh, I have to get out of here.” Being medium height but of slight build, yet a little paunchy round the middle, it took quite a lot of lifting my skirts and pushing to get the crowd aside and to leave the large room of a tavern. God was telling me where next to go. I cruised lightly down the street, giving a glance to the left of me every time, seeing the beautiful shops of the Jews and others gleaming in the broad daylight. It looked like a nice home for real people, the sort that could wish you a taught day and hand you the proper portion of goods. I looked, and there was someone who looked like Charles working in the back part of grocers. It turned out to be an island woman from Haiti who was sweet on white men, the likes of whom gave her three children, but had deserted her each time for someone else. Every time I needed fresh fruit, I would ask her to give me an extra portion for the others. But she finally stated that her billet was too long to give us any further. Her name was Hattie, and I almost asked grocers if they would hire me instead of her. Grocers was white mostly, but Hattie had been so nice to us I could not bear to hurt her and ruin her life.

I sighed, adjusting my bonnet and retying the strings alongside my glowing cheeks. In autumn in London town, there were many bustling down the sidewalks, heading places all unknown to me, many of which I had already been. I knew the shop of the doctor was down the street about two more blocks. I shifted my skirts about my leggings, and began padding like I was some sort of panther - or perhaps another cat of my own - a bit further. As my eyesight was perilously obscure, I could make out the sign above the door. It had been hand painted, but I had been told long ago that only menfolk painted signs.

“Dr. Jack Rinehart,” it seemed to proudly proclaim, “Mortician, barber, necrologist, and exterminator.” As I lingered over the last word, I seemed to hear a macabre song in my head, one about cockroaches and the plague. I shuddered as the wind whipped around my bonnet, and as I looked over at a greenly growing oak tree in a planter, it sent some leaves over to me. They slicked across my eyes - and then I took one - and peeled it off. It was the only way I could be a “peeler.” That was a member of the authorities, such as Scotland Yard, or the local bobby police. The job of a policewoman was rare indeed. All of our girls made the lowest possible wages, and were easy to take advantage of, but so were most of the men, I supposed. I had dreamed of taking the train to Stratford of Avon on Sea, but had no relatives out there whom I could stay with while I found work. I hoofed it to the chap’s office, thinking that if enough of us were dead, they would eventually catch the miscreant. Still, considering what we were doing, it seemed all right to me either way. Surely, the population of England could use some lowering.

I paused at the door of his office, wondering if it was also his residence. It was so crowded in downtown London that it probably was also his place of abode. There was at least one set of rooms above the office, and a gaslight flickering in one of them. In those days, you see, we had no electric light everywhere and relied on flame lights.

But the chap was a medical doctor. As I walked into his office, I gasped in horror. There were various undone girls on the tables, and quite a few boys. Dead boys, everywhere. Corpses were openly spread to see, obviously to be examined in spurious and hideous manners. As I wheeled around, seeing the dead for the first time in my life, I gulped and gasped. I drew a hand to my throat, putting it away, and stared at the man with a kind of hatred. Something real was telling me this was our persecutor, and not a good man.

“Are…you a mortician? Is this where you take their lives, or save them?” He looked slowly over his pince nez, taking his spectacles off, rubbing them on his bloody sleeve. I looked into what appeared to be a Teutonic face, one which I had never seen before. It was white but red with a kind of age, and looked furrowed above the brows. His hair was uncombed, and his cloth apron as blood soaked as I had ever seen on a cattle butcher. And his entire body was shot through with disease, especially most of his face.

“Miss, I presume you want to speak with me? Come have a seat over here. Would you like to get up on a table, so I can examine you?” His lips curled into a kind of vicious snarl, as he began to reach behind me, perhaps to close the door at my back. I inched myself backwards, holding the door’s handle grasped firmly, ready to swing it open, but had nowhere really to go at this point in time.

“Nooooooooooo,” I scattered through my loose teeth, thinking this could be the occasion I had been waiting for right here in his office. “Do you, that is, are you Jack Rinehart, and would you come up with me to my rooms now - and we could have a good time?” I wondered if trying to make him into a customer would settle his hash. But it was more than obvious he had something utmost lifelong in mind that I couldn’t approach. “Do you think you and I could go up the street to a lovely restaurant, and eat?”

Women are the xx chromosome and the eternal optimist. Men are an xy chromosome. They are far more ready to kill than to be optimistic. Eating is out of the question when you are the thing that needs to be eaten. What makes you think my name is Jack?

I thought to myself that is the most inane thing I have ever heard. “Do tell,” rang out the hollowest voice I had ever heard in a man speaking that way. “Are you ready for me now, little whore? I am certainly ready for you. Come, lie down.” He was about medium height, and for one moment, I daydreamed about describing him to Scotland Yard. He had a brush of brown hair on top, and his bluish green eyes danced with foul wickedness. Yet I was finally confronting my male self. He was as diseased as he could possibly be. I had never seen a white man or anyone else look that far along when it came to dying. His voice began echoing in my head for awhile, like a ringing declaration of the bottomless pits of hell. I knew he could have no wife, no lover, and no children. I wondered if he cerebrally loved men. I finally decided he had been having at those corpses indeed. What an extremely courageous…man. No, he wanted us to fare far worse than him. Did he actually need to be doing what he was doing, and what was it for? And I knew his total lack of mercy must be sustained for our lives. He had been plotted by the forces of chaos for infinity before he was even born. At this I knew, right now I had only freckles. It was almost as if I had seen my “other” at last, where I was putting my possible victims and most significantly, myself. And I know how I accidentally looked at him. The wonder that crossed my face, combined with devastating loneliness, spread ample across it.

For an instant of time, we looked at each other, I with love, and he with hatred.
And in return, the lust for blood or something else took over his own once fine and elegantly alabaster features, twisting them into a sort of malevolent farfetched grin. “You know me. Come on, and let me tell you what I’m doing here, you idiot whore. I won’t hurt you; I promise this. You only need to climb up, and tell me your troubles. I will treat you like a father. Here is the place, babe, and old child of the night. I will save you much pain - and take no long time with you.” He motioned in a Londonian way towards an empty vivisection table, with a pure white cloth spread perfectly over it.

His suit under the apron was impeccable, with a brown vest buttoned across his muscular chest. I could see him as a young and vital man, and he was ungodly handsome.

“I won’t kill you, honestly, as I promise you. Simply perch on this table, pretty bird. You need your health checked into, and you need regular medical care. Isn’t that what we’re here for, to help you? I have decades of experience working with whores. It won’t hurt you all one micron.” His grin turned friendly, and he looked so normal and polite as he did not reach for me. Letting me stand there, I contemplated only the silver slab.

I saw my shallow death, only about five feet away from where I stood. It would involve much blood letting, and an agony he would not want to cause here. My screams would carry, so he must be somehow mentally gone. I knew how it had to happen, and I felt so disappointed, and not afraid. A kind of disgust appeared as well. I could not really see his medical instruments, and a few of them began to gleam at me, vacillating in the autumn heat as they loomed larger. I had seen pictures in books of Inquisition tortures.

For a moment, I wished he would use a smaller such implement upon me instead. Then I realized what that would entail, and closed my eyes for ten seconds. The idea occurred that perhaps hundreds of children had fallen to this maniac. A ping in my head, and I felt as though it told me many more virgins would in the future. Or was it only we “whores” should these “maniacs” have their practices? Yet, as I eased the door behind me back and forth, I did not say anything and looked, to see if any of the “bodies” moved. One did, and twitched. I dreamed of childhood prostitution leading to the sale of body parts. One day in third world countries, these would be harvested, to be sewn into the others.

Why would a man named Jack Rinehart be held accountable for world evil? It was a British and German born name. It flashed through my mind that he had been writing letters to the newspaper, boasting flagrantly of his many crimes. Perhaps he was simply the “very first” murderer to seek such widespread publicity. He had left his “lady” corpses as widespread indeed as humanly possible, with slit vaginas open wide for the public to view, in as nauseating of final poses as could abuse fragile senses. As I found later, so much doubt would be held about them. No one knew if he had committed four or twenty such murders, and all supposedly of London prostitutes. One source settled on nine, stating that was the apparent number of such deaths in his vicinity. And so many other crimes were committed that were similar to his, by other “people” at that time. People placed on fires in crowded hovels, people left to die in the gutter. Our overcrowded city was why, and it took awhile for me to collect my mind.

He had been German, and something had sent him to “our” country. His name meant River Heart. I thought, when he is done, he will throw himself into the Thames. It was a splendid yet now polluted river winding its way through the heart of London, which of course had nothing of the sort but the Strand region. Right in downtown London, they sold popular magazines for those who could take the time to read them. I often had nothing but time on my ladylike hands. I liked to read the publications which were housed in that area, and once I had bought something new. It was a tale of a pair of learned sophisticates who roomed together, named Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. It was said the author, Arthur Conan Doyle, had based them on a doctor he respected and himself. I had a feeling the stories were a distant attempt to solve our murders. The real life doctor could tell where you were from anywhere in England by examining you. I chuckled, thinking he certainly at least knew where our Charles was from.

They were something new called private detectives, and they wanted to help mankind – howsoever, only in a fictive way. The writer was an optometrist who had friends in the medical profession, and I had a feeling one of them was probably the “gentleman” before me, well protected by his lifelong cohorts. They would never do anything about him, only boasting and bragging about their abilities to save us, be like us, or some other way steal our stories from us - and otherwise pretend to help us without ever doing so. The entirety of London was abuzz with what was happening to us, and what to do about it.

“You are a good man, Dr. Jack Rinehart,” I stumbled out. “I am not trying to save myself. Not anymore. But would you give me some time to be sure of where I am located? I am Annie Chapman, and this is most assuredly Whitechapel District of England. Is it not, and oh, I would like so to lie down, but I must hurry back as I never finished my beer. Also, I should enjoy it much if you would take me out to lunch, once, as I have never been escorted to luncheon by a real man before. Would you do such honors to a lady of the evening as I am now? I was once a good girl, much like…”

It occurred to me of the strong Jewish presence about this district of town. Lately, there had been some reports of doing something about “the Juwes menace.” I felt sad, thinking somehow perhaps we were possibly to blame for their woes. Then I realized the “good doctor” was tapping my knee with a rubber instrument. I had not read of our “menace” by far, although there was talk of running us out of the districts. We were too “needed” by the local insatiable gentry to think of ruining the Victorian English “male” life. And I had thought it proper to live such a life in its way, but had finally run into our deaths. I knew that women, men and children were being used in obscene and furtive manners. It could only be our overcrowded city’s living conditions, and lack of jobs.

“Hah. Lie down, whore, and I will get the instruments of torture. There you go.” He seemed to gesticulate in the general direction of the table. Being quite fast on my feet, I was already out the door, and knew who “Jack the Ripper” was…now. I thought, his instruments of torture are the medical devices we currently have to use.

As I hurriedly passed by everyone who must have missionary position to get pregnant and all of whom “Knew” women were somehow smutty whores, or that somehow certain ladies were all right and being such judges of character as I, I smiled. The lot of them seemed to have someplace to go, perhaps home to a hearth and fire. I watched a carriage pull up to someone elegant and she got in with a man and their three children. “Dear God, Allah, Mary…whomever,” I thought to myself, when will they ever learn to stop? I figured me probably - and all whom I knew - could find pregnancy on our own.

Stop what, I deemed to myself. But as a sewer rat, white as a sheet and larger than a cat lurked in an alley ten steps from where I trod, I took myself down another side street to make my way “home” and pack swiftly enough to leave. I still had my sixteen farthings. And I highed myself over to Whitechapel District, on the other side of where I had lived before, earnestly endeavouring to look as harried and impromptu as I possibly could. I thought to the crowd, see me, feel me, touch me, reel me in - and peel me. Peel me, it dawned on me for the first time, peel me like an onion. Diaries, I twittered, coughing into my hand, a head cold that felt like pneumonia. Again that time of year, as I pulled my blue shawl about my neck and dreamed of such a death. Well, now that I have met the murdered, it is probably only a matter of time before he comes. How will he know which rooming house I am lodging at? I must enquire there to see if I can elude him, or if the police would be intrigued enough to settle this incident of mine.

“’allow,” I breezed to the night manager of the lodgings, who was a short and settled unkempt Indian man, probably a Hindu landed immigrant, keeping his books behind a complicated hand carved antique desk in the lodgings. The desk was not Victorian, like our Queen, and was something particularly beautiful and exquisitely fashioned from his own nativity. “What’s your name?” I leapt forward with, anxiously searching him.

“If you think you are going to make a lay instead of paying me money outright, upfront for your rooms, each paid every week you stay here, until you are gone for good, you are wrong. Would you care for room 221 A? There is a girl staying there, but it is a private room. We have another one available for two people, but of course, chippie, you will want a private room. Or would you like something more expensive?”

“Ah, I have but sixpenny farthing.”

“Sixteen will bring you recompense and a good night’s sleep, for a time.”

“I have sixpenny farthing.”

“Here’s the key and there’s a good girl. Go downstairs and to your left,” he said, and I complied immediately. It was good enough that I had an honest man for a manage and I didn’t mind his attitude, but he could change on me any time. I dared think his kind might steal from me if I owned anything, but I wasn’t planning on it. Maybe if I lasted, I would slowly gather some few cheap items for my room, such as I could buy at local shops. I had trouble inserting the key in the lock, and it nearly bent twain - although it was made of a thick iron. Finally, I jimmied the door open.

There’s your room. Put the key down on the filthy table. Now you can see what you are. Look in the mirror. See what used to be your pretty face? Now it will be gone for a long time. Look at the bed? See the stains. It used to be a bed, and it is still pleasurable. Now, lie down upon it. There’s a dear. Ready for a good time? The bed is not as bad as those “the slaves” used to not own, but you are already exposed to mildew. And now, I thought, what would I be exposed to? I had seen bloodless hookers who seemed normal. When Allen had first suggested I try Whitechapel, he had said, “Do not fear the diseases.” I had tested out well in school - but did not think my abilities were sufficient for the sweatshops; however, I had applied at them and been told to go away. I had waited in a line for over twelve hours, and Allen the shop steward had brought me a jug of pure water to drink. The sweat had soaked my entire two sets of clothes, and the water was a stream straight from Jesus. I downed half of it and said, “Here, you have some.”

I had thought those were the longest half day of hours I had spent in my life. Little did I know that a half day must repeat itself, even though the first one had been arduous. It had involved noise and a feeling I could not handle a life of severe work without any breaks. I was sure they let you attend a lavatory and at least have time for a sitting down.

No, I have to wash up and get ready for tonight. I have to go out and collect my rent money. And I have to be sex in any position any man wants outside, even in the pouring rain. I have to do this in spite of a good Christian upbringing, and being as sturdy as I am from running in the woods outside of Leeds, to compete with the other girls at school, I must not retire, truly, ever again. Also, whoever you are, I am not a man. Nor am I an invert, nor an object of worship. I daresay I sham not ever get a proper grave.

Oh, but you shall, my deario cheerio, you shall. And there will be colour pictures, and such wakeful and “new” celebrity. All English women whatsoever, no matter what their birthright, will come to fear your attackers. You will be photographed repeatedly in various odd positions. Also, the photographs will improve over time until you are making money hand over fist, you and all such beings of worship everywhere. There, see yourself in the mirror? See how pretty you are? Ah, you think yourself an ordinary girl of the streets. The grave will be equally pretty, over one hundred and one years from now. Forsworn, you all had told me that I, Annie Chapman, must live life in the 1870s as best I can, and it will not last long. For what is life if it is so dominated by perversity?

I am going to leave your heart laid out on a pillow, the voice of Jack said arch deeply into my head. I have gone mad indeed, I reflected as the voices continued. Perhaps smart I had an overactive imagination. Once a teacher said “we” could imagine anything you want, and it would happen to you. Now, lie down on the bed. There’s a girl. I am going to come soon, no, don’t get up. I will send Charles if you don’t listen to me, and he will not be happy with you as you are not helping him earn his keep. He’s such a caged up little spoiled bratty monster. I trust you would not wait for him? He is my own male Negro.

“Thanks none, and now I have no volition of my own.” I looked out the dusty window at the street traffic, and realized to my happy surprise and painful downfall simultaneously that the avenue or whatever it was outside obscured all street noises coming in. The rattling carriages and push carts could be heard by me no longer. I was trapped, decided I was insane for “knowing” what Jack Rinehart was, and lay down to relax on my bed. Oddly, for a moment I almost felt a kind of luxury. I looked up at the cracked ceiling, and at the tiny bedroom I now inhabited, probably for life. I thought, I never knew I could live in such a space as this. It was plenty for me, and I felt a deep relief.

I cast my white arms to either side of me, feeling the soft nature of the smelly old bedding, relaxing myself solely for the purpose of readying my body for what must soon take place. I would have to go out beyond, out in the alleys of the district, which wound and twisted in the deep nightly fog of industrial Great Britain, so polluted with the tars of factories that tended to hire men alone and some women, and listen for the tomes of Old Ben, the biggest standing clock tower in the world, to tell me when to come home. I would have to stand and wait, as the odd “rich” men of London came to while me away, taking their time, as I insisted on pay in advance for each opportunity they took.

In a few hours, I must begin the process of somehow dying for and against Great Britain. I would feed the birds and insects soon, the rats and cats and dogs of the streets, or perhaps only be carried away to the morgue to await perhaps a notch longer fate. I had often seen indications of the Catholic Hell, and perhaps it would be eternal, as I was uncertain if I had somehow chosen this. I recall coming through Leeds where I was borne on a train, and seeing the scrawling of a madman or two on the train depot walls. It said, “Blame us your problems then lengthy kill yourself.” And underneath, I had seen the words, “Annie will light the way for no one’s life.” As I got off the train, a professional looking man pushed into me, stating, “I have been waiting for you, and you come across my way when you least expect it. Then you will be our great stupid whore for life.”

However, as a schoolgirl should, I shuddered to myself as a surge of pleasure tackled my parts below. I would never feel fulfilled by a man, I reasoned; I would have to tolerate a kind of abstract torture indeed. This my hideous master had so informed me. But eventually, I also believed, he would have to share similar fate to all of his victims. If nothing else, he would have to work especially hard for his living. And surely he would have to be as my real father, who had gone somewhere. Perhaps I could even get him to give up, trust me, love me, and marry me. Lastly, as the pleasure checked by me went off, I made my way into the train station.

But as I was searching for the public loo, a feeling assaulted me in the center of my clothed but parted bosom. It seemed to be proclaiming what a “heart” I had, and how it would be of some use. I did not want to touch my own bodice over this. I shuddered, as for the first time I thought I had felt the “passion” of Christ. It was not a good feeling, felt like having sex with myself alone, and I put it right away. I flashed on somehow it would involve the slow removal of my living heart from my dying body.

As life is unfair to all, I gathered myself up, smiling, and pulled my brush and comb out of my traveling bag. I had done this at the train station, and now in my final room in Whitechapel. It was a large carpet bag, dotted with flowers, and I opened it carefully, pulling the brush through my long hair that was brown and shone with some other colors. It made straightway as I pinned my hair back and put on my choice bonnet. I was bathed and dressed, due to the water closet right there at my disposal. I had thought it would be down the hall and to be shared with the other girls, but for an unknown reason, it was right there next my room. I wondered briefly what a long fall “death” would be.

I stalked like a true whore out of my room, gathering my courage and smoothing my long dress. As I entered the darkening of the nighttime, I took small steps, spacing each apart, my high button shoes clicking lightly on the pavement. What a thing being a detective would be, I mused; what a life that would have been, under other circumstances. Peering over my spectacles, if I could have afforded them, I would be looking all around for clues, in order to tell the authorities what to do to solve these awful “crimes.” But I was a criminal, an illegal person called a prostitute, and I had to do what I was doing. For half a distracting second, I thought I saw a brief glimpse of someone. He was standing there in the fog. As I moved towards him, he disappeared, quite out of sight.

I followed him. “Oh sir, kind sir, would you like to come see my lodgings? I live up four blocks, in Whitechapel district, and need you to share my wares. Would you like to be with me for a brief while, and spend my time or perhaps dinner with me?”

“No, stranger, I am busy. Perhaps you are seeking some other gentleman to take your time with and find another pastime which you can overcome with greater ease. Say, would you like to stroll down this alley with me? I find that the night air allows some other beings of an evening to make their choice appearance, oh say in a dark manner, that might need such a lovely girl as you,” said this man new to me as he grasped my arm so lightly and then harder as we went down an available alley, making me think he must believe he is nearer to God than I, and an obvious conclusion to that, as we strolled past a Bobbie, the local London police. The bobby looked away. I winked at him as we walked past, quite a couple of chips floating along the avenue, like a kind of steered boat. I noticed the man was doing all of the steering. I trembled, but said nothing.

I somewhat wondered if this gentleman’s god was a man named Charles. As I had studied somewhat that people came from either Jerusalem or Africa, I had to figure so. I was being silly, but he was grasping my arm quite hard and pinching it. I sighed, reflecting on oops he does seem to be pinching me. “I believe you are a bobby at this rate.”

“What? Are you talking to me, whore? I am not pinching you.” To pinch someone at the time was a London expression for arresting them. Of course I was in danger of this.

“Well, where would you like,” I whispered, “to stop and get our business done? I must take payment in advance, and I must know what you can afford to pay me. I would take at least ten quid for a standing up, and at least twenty-five quid for lying down.”

“That is way too much money for a good girl like you. I will tell you what. Go over there, and stand up. Then I will give you a real treat. You will like what I am doing so much, that you will beg me over and over for more. First, I will take of your behind.”

As he squeezed my buttocks, a silence passed over and within the steady fog. I heard the clanging of the bells far away signaling the passing of the boats through the locks. They had always been musical to me, letting me know life held at least one good in it.

“No, actually, I have to make my rent money, and I need you to pay me in advance,” I declared, wrenching painfully away from his tight grasp. But I was still held. So I said, “Look, young sir, I need payment for anything I am going to do here.”

He released me. “You like what I am going to do to you.”

“I do, and indeed, you are such a fine young gentleman. But I require minor recompense for my actions on your behalf. I tell you what; five quid is enough for a standing.”

“A standing what? Surely you want to wrap your fine,” here he put his hand under my chin and stroked my face so fetchingly that I wanted to wretch up my dinner, which I had not had that evening, “Mouth around my wonderful loins and suckle like a babe.”

“No, but I will do that for you if you pay me ten quid and five farthings in advance. I must have the money first, or I will refuse to do anything for you whatsoever.”

“Then I will hit you repeatedly, my dear,” he said, drawing me over to the alley wall. I wrenched away, and backed up. As he started towards me, I screamed at him, “Save me!” to see if the bobby would arrest me or what he would do. Then I ran, raising my skirts. “Idiot chit, I would have pleasured you! Stop, I will not run after you!”

Scared, I wondered at this, as the event had seemed not to make sense. Would I make any money at this, with such discouragement? Perhaps I had best find my friends again and discuss matters with this Charles. Was there some way to make a better arrangement? I strode over to my new abode, trying to hide myself, and then it dawned on me. I would have to go out again, this same even, and try to find someone else who would pay.

I decided to cast around and see if Charles or any of my female friends were in the vicinity. As I walked casually through the London fog, I sneezed. I took out my Becky box and a pinch of snuff, applied it to my nostrils and felt good about not being too scared to sneeze in public. Snuff was common for colds back then, although it cured nothing. I looked for shapes in the fog as I took the opposite way from my first “customer,” who was obviously recalcitrant about payment.

Noticing I was heading out of Whitechapel and into outer downtown London proper, not far from where I could go to the Strand, get a nice cup of tea and a paper to read, and while thinking perhaps of buying me the Strand Magazine to read the further adventures of the two detectives, who fascinated me for a reason I could not fathom, I cast around. There were too many persons of interest in this district truly to make a customer. Bobbies lurked around every other corner, and I could barely see. Whistling for a taxi, I pulled over a carriage and boarded it. I had plenty enough money.

“Take me out to the waterfront. I have payment, and need to view the ocean for my health. And thank you,” I told the carriage as he helped me step into the vehicle, and he took his seat and the horses’ reins. As we traveled, I began to hear a voice. It said that some day, such carriages would be without drivers, and would involve an internal combustion engine. Fancy that, I chortled. I tilted my bonnet, which had a nice but fairly unkempt hat perched upon it, back over my mildly sweating head. I did not wear makeup, although whores of the time did, as my features were pleasant and passable.

Big Ben began its nightly chimes, sounding that the hour was two am. There are three victims of Jack before you, said the voice. I thought, now I know I will end up in Charing Cross, on the mental wards. I had best tell no one of this, although that would be one way out, and I thought this would have to do as the way out. I dreamed of drowning myself once we got to the water. But I deduced the thing to do was take a long stroll, paying no attention to anyone, until some man approached me. Surely such would then have the money to pay for my business, which I planned to work at.

I debarked the carriage, paid the driver, wished him a good even, and took myself down to the waterfront’s edge, pushing through the fog with a light air. It parted before me, and I heard the voices of men fishing off the docks, all of whom looked strangely Asiatic. I thought, these are the Chinese, the chinamen who fish out here beyond most public reach. I had heard they might be good for some conversation from my girlfriends. Approaching shyly and tentatively, I came behind one who was pulling bait from his hook.

For a moment, I recalled the British habit of dropping articles such as “the” and “a” and “an” when speaking, especially in the poorer districts, among the lower classes.

“Any luck catching worthwhile garby? I hear they flock down here…droves.”

“Who, me? No speak you. You not lady. Go away. Aw, such unhappy face. Don’t cry. No, stay. I show you how to fish. You look like work hard.”

I leaned across the wooden railing of the deck, not understanding the tears. Then I registered that he’d said, “Work hard.” It seemed to jar something inside me.

Really, I inwardly squealed! And then he did it. He actually baited a hook for me. “Here you go. Now, when fish nibble on line, pull up. You wait for jerk on line. I jerk, ha. You jerk, now you go down in line and pull up when fish bites.”

I stood there, ready to fish until I died. I had found a nice man. But he was not a paying customer. Nonetheless, I let the gentlemen there show me how to fish for the next three hours, listening carefully to the chimes of Big Ben letting me know when I should make my way back. I had the best night of my entire life fishing with the chinamen. And after one and a half hours, I had caught me the finest groupie that ever had cleaned the waters of the Thames in our backwaters. Then I caught another, and another.

“You done now, Lady? We go fish and keep ourselves now. You go home.”

Wanting to hug this man like he was my Saviour, I held back fresh tears. Then I said, “Yes, I must be toddling off to my rooms - and you get a night’s or a day’s rest. There is so much I have to finish tomorrow. By the by of this river, do you happen to know where I can find male clients? Do you have the business around the docks?”

“Nah - that is not nice girl. You should get work. Tell you what. You come back here tomalley night, and I think maybe find job for you shelling clams and oysters. You likee? Wife and I love have you cook dinner for us. I own a big inn on these docks. We have food and serve liquor drinks.” I marveled at this simple man’s ironic honesty.

I paused. This man was not a Christian, but was offering me a job. I had heard the poisoned waters of the Thames made the shellfish unpalatable, and knew British shops refused to sell them to their regular customers. Looking away, I said, “Thank you very much for your kind concern. But I have to do business as I should. Thank you. I hope you and your families prosper and never have any more problems.” I knew the industrial pollution being pumped into the Thames would last for possibly centuries. The rest of the entire world would have to suffer from our horrific practices, and perhaps die.

Gathering my long skirts again, I headed off in the direction of the street, where the regular carriages gathered in a long row, waiting for gentlemen. And also ladies. I had not ascertained that any such clients were in the vicinity of this whereabouts, but the carriages were obviously waiting for them. I approached the lead carriage, a silky black in the pale moonlight, and asked the driver pardon. “Could you tell me, is there any place a girl can work “the business” around here? Are there any other prostitutes in this vicinity?” My boldness shocked me, as if I thought I had found a way to have others at my beck and call.

“Yes, there are those Chine whores who go down back the buildings. Maybe you should go over there and talk to them. They have a good time down there, and you can check at the local tavern…or the opium den as to how they would expect you to…perform.” For once, I dreamed of the lure of strong opium, recalling my stint with cocaine. But the Chinese charge you for using their dens, and I had no money. They would probably demand payment for entering the seedy drug havens, built mostly for men, but not the taverns. I wanted to go back and fish with my “friend” forever. I needed something more. There were real folks around these parts of the sea, who had good souls.

“Perform what? You mean like in a play? Do they have plays and arts down here?”

“No, not for a girl like you I don’t think, although I suppose you could ask.” The man was white, and I felt like I noticed this for the first time in my life. He was friendly, and smiling at me. But he had the same aura of an uncertainty I could strictly feel.

There will be horseless carriages someday, I had heard the voices in my head speak, and as I had now insanity, I did not suddenly want to pollute the troubled Chinamen of this good district. They had their germs they were born with, and I mine. Even though Charles seemed so well and not to mind his trade, which was obviously not in his best interests. I was sure there were rougher Chinese than the good man who had helped me fish, but he obviously wanted to pull me in. I thought, perhaps he only wants a cook, and the wages do tend to be rather low. I will go die alone.

As I left, I saw a somewhat Occidental Chine looking girl pass by, obviously diseased. She glanced at me as though she could love no one, and I immediately swayed. As she passed, I longingly glanced in her direction. Shamed, I hurried on and took the second closest carriage back to the district I had decided I would be working from until I found out whether the voices were correct in their assumptions. I saw a gathering of Asian girls, all chines looking, clustered around a tavern as I left the area. What a splendid place. I saw the lettering of the Chinese and obviously the Nipponese or others begin to magically appear in the gaining twilight. It must be about five o’clock morn. I had found the Occidental district of London - at last. There was lettering on the shops I would never see again, and I could almost read it in the gaslight. I wished I could stop and get one of their newspapers and read all about what their “doings” were, and how they fared. But they only used whores here too, and the streets were perhaps lined with them.

I called out as I passed, “What is the name of this sweet district?” The crowd of Chinese people looked at my carriage with narrow and staring eyes. I fancied the neat pigtails on the menfolk, and the pertly drawn black hair of their women. They towed their children along, holding their tiny hands. Not knowing what it would be like to be an ethnic group for a change, I yelled, “I mean - what it is in Chinese?”

“The Waterfront,” said one lady, “and you go away now, you white whore.”

Pulling up to the kerb, the carriage let me out, and I felt the chill begin to grip me. It was the end of autumn, and winter’s awesome grasp began to clutch at everyone around me. The day labourers and their present accompaniments such as street clearances surrounded me. I felt rather trapped, like a person perilously close to realizing the total authority of nature in a large metropolitan city. I began to wonder if it was possible to seek male clients during the day, perhaps in a guarded back alley of some kind. Then it dawned on me. Seek out Charles. It wasn’t a voice in my head; it was my mind, calling me to understand that I would have to use a male authority figure to collect my prostitution monies. Surely, if I went back to the tavern in the other district, I could find “our” Charles, or someone like him. I wandered through the streets, being pushed aside by people repeatedly until I wound my way through them, and came to the tavern where I had initially began my search as to where to live to become a street lady.

“’Allow, governor, where’s the bloke who runs our racket around here?”

“What d’you mean?” said the tavern keeper. It was the same bloke as before, and he seemed no greyer or older than when I’d last set eyes upon him, but he acted as though he had never seen me before in his life. I strolled up to the long, shiny and flat brown bar between us, the zone delineated and marked by that which kept the customers away from the professionals. It was meant both to be sat at and as a wall of separation.

“I need bonnie Charles the…what is it called? The union of prostitute’s organizer. Could you tell me, kind sir, where I can find him nowadays?”

He looked at me to punish me again for having said the word most awful. Then he coolly turned to continue putting glasses away and straighten out the various drinks and bottles behind the bar. I sat myself down on the wooden chair pulled up by me, and asked him, “Dare you listen to me at all? Is there someone else around?”

“If you think that is it, you are sadly mistaken. I only tolerate your kind when there is the lot of you, and no other time, mollycoddle. I will ring the authorities if you pester me.” He turned to me with a look on his face which shot through my entire beginning to come down with influenza, but yes I was a sturdy girl, and he said, “Go straight to Hell.”

“No,” I said, “I need to talk to Bonnie Prince Charlie, my one true love. Where is he, oh barkeep, that I may talk to him and treasure him and treat him as my husband?” There was a long pause. The barkeep stepped back one pace as if to ram his fist down my throat, but then he sighed and paused. “I don’t know. He usually hangs out at the pool hall down three blocks apace, turn left, saunter down that avenue, and turn right.”

That was it and so I bought a glass of beer to thank the keep and paid for it with what was left of my sixpenny happence, and you don’t need to know how much I had on me. Turning to leave, I left a halfpenny on the bar as tip, and said thanks to the god again.

Following the directions, I found the pool hall, and many a fine swarthy fellow and some girls were hanging about in the smoke filled atmosphere, some with glasses of beer, wine and liquor, others smoking pipes and some simply playing billiards. I sauntered up to one table and was told to lie low, so I went quickly over to another and watched their game. Two men, obvious in their teens, were trying to figure out their routine and how to gamble, and having a right time by gauging a scoring system hanging as a giant sign of something perverse overhead. Before I watched the game, I looked at the scoring system. It was pretty, made of multiple colors. I thought on how Charles was not pretty, nor made of multiple colors, as the twosome playing the game bestowed before me were having. One of them sudden looked at me and said as in reply to my twisted thinking, “Would you like to play the winner, sparrow? I’ve got this right down to brass tacks and only need to shove in three balls.” He came over and showed me slowly how one plays the game of billiards. One uses the laws of averages, and computes the many angles of knocking the rainbow coloured balls into the six pockets of the enormous green table. There are now ten balls to knock in, and it is so fascinatingly tricky. “I’m Bob McKenzie, and you are lovely, my dear.” He held my arms as I learned the tricks of the pool trade, for the next two hours, and we made the loveliest music together as we danced. The entire time, as I was stuck looking for Charlie and had to call him my love, my mind turned evil. It seemed the right thing. I decided to peach on him and thus kill him.

“I am going to arrange something of an intrigue for you, Mr. McKenzie. Oh, that’s best, tuck your arm under my bodice, no, put it over there, oh you did, and let me hold the stick myself now. Why, I can line up the shot perfectly. Let me do this, Bob! I will arrange a neat demise of my supposed “suitor” over this incident.” I looked at him with a lust for murdering Charlie that must have illuminated my youthful visage well. “All you need do is turn authorities and order the death of…” I was swift interrupted.

“What? I would like to die for you, my lady, if you would come lie down with me. I should not die there, but will do a job servicing…” His voice trailed off. “Actually, I tend to let out my spleen playing pool during the day, mostly, and I do brickwork around these districts plus out in the country occasionally.” His look at me made my jaw drop. Oh dear God, no, not that sort of man and he is one. “Uh, hi. Are you eligible for marriage?”

Laughter, heard all around the room, raucous and loud, prolonged and proud. Bob put his stick up, motioned to grind chalk into it, and then stopped. He looked at me as if seeing me for the first time in my life. “Nah, I don’t make anything financially sound naught to get a wife, but you know, I should certainly think about that. Say, do you live around here somewhere?” The laughter had been coming from the surrounding crowd. “Bob, you’ve got a pretty girl fascinated by you. And as you are, it’s again and again.”

“Lucky man! Hey chaps, Bob’s found a sucker! Chit, you’re a street whore or no, aren’t you?” And other such calls began to sound out. However, Bob sudden put a hand about my waist and stated, “Any further men calls this lady anything but,” and then he bounded onto the pool table with the pool cue, “Shall feel the wrath of the billiards champion!” He towered over the crowd, a thin figure with great wits and learning about him. He slowly twirled the pool cue in a kind of figure eight motion, taking up his entire frontal space. “And if you think I don’t mean it, I have a switchblade on me.”

“Awww,” said a girl several tables away, “C’mon Bob, you’re everyone’s love, admit it, don’t fool the poor girl, there’s a love and come down.” The manage assistant at the hall yelled, “If you don’t get off the table, you are out of here forever, Bobbers.”

“I’m a copper and I’m arresting you all for impersonating a lady. Come up, here, Annie. Daresay I know your name. Why do I know your name, Annie, when you didn’t.…come up here - there’s a love.” I was up on the table with him in one second flat. “Awww, you silly twits, you don’t know a real man when you see one. I like this one. Come here and give me a kiss, Bob, and make it deep and last forever….” I was rather cut off by the kiss, one of passion and great splendour. “Let me die defending you, Annie Chapman. Please, let me do it now, and not to you.” He heaved a heavy but too menacing sigh as he swept the pool stick out, encompassing the crowd. “Let me take on each one of these until I am cut entirely to long and bleeding ribbons. You can watch, and cheer me on.”

I stroked his fine and extremely handsome ruddy Irish face. “Betimes, I would let you, but I have another idea in mind. Would you like to find me a man named Charles, who is our current boss?” I and he gazed across a distance greater than that between Scotland and the South Pole, as I took his hand. “Here come the coppers you two, get off the table and run for it, the lead rang up and there’s bobbies at the door out the back!” We leapt off the table, I nearly tripping and falling in a mass of clothing that tore under my shoe and I followed him out the back through a winding alley at top speed as we ran demons.

“Bob, I should think we heading back to my place or yours pant oh I haven’t run like this since division school when I did cocaine and lost my two sisters…no dear I have a flat up the street here’s the way in come on Dove let’s go in there by the way, you’re mine now,” and he turned to me and said, “Now, shall you come in with me? Or no?”

Breathless, I caught myself and spurted out with, “Let us not tarry about anything!” And we walked up the steps of the brownstone building, which I assumed was an apartment somewhere outside the districts surrounding Whitechapel, and we made our way up a narrow dark stairway to Bob’s rooms. “Oops, I forgot, I’d best go downstairs first. I have to talk to our landlady about this. Please come back down with me.”

“No, I shall await your return.” I watched as he leapt down the stairs as lightly as a feather and raced off to go talk to his manage about something unknown. I really gulped as I knew it might mean my getting kicked out of the building permanently. And the cops or bobbies or whatever they were waited outside - thus to arrest only me. Bob had at least a good chance at life, and could travel wherever he damned well pleased.

Waiting, I then saw a heavy hearted Bob come shamefaced up the stairs. He glanced at me once, and said, “I don’t need to live here anymore. Would you let me take you to my room? I don’t want anything. Whatever you would like.” He came up the stairs, looking far too much like something I had waited my whole life to achieve, and I said, “No.”

“I have a job and can rent elsewhere. What makes you think I don’t?”

“You need the reference to get another apartment, and I won’t let you.”

“I can live off the streets as I choose, and even be you as well as this Charles. It doesn’t matter to me one single whit.” He came up the stairs and took my hand and kissed it fully. “And for that matter, if you tell me to drown myself in the Thames, I will instant. But first, you need to be taken out to dinner with the last of my pocket money.”

He smiled up at me, a grin that implied another face I had previous seen. I trembled with an anger beyond the scorning of women. “You only fear the weather, and how badly you will chill each season with pneumonia. I don’t care a brass farthing for your petty courage. You will be taken away from me shortly, and you don’t count for a thing.”

He looked down over the railing. “Ask me to jump off these legs first up there, and I will do so. But pardon me, I had rather stay about and tell you where to go if you think I would not, beautiful Annie. But first, tell me why I know your name?” He flared with an arch grimace up at me. “You are meant and bound for elsewhere, are you not? I know now what I must do to. I shall suicide first in the Thames. You are not for here. I love you. Now tell me what I must do.” Trembling, I realized he was dead serious.

“Before you suicide,” I said with an iron look crossing my face that I had never known before, “You must arrange an arrest with Charles. You must have that what is it a pimp called arrested for extorting money from us prostitutes while claiming he is trying to form up a union for us. It is a false precept and he needs to be arrested for it. You need to inform the papers of a black man wearing…” and I gave him the remainder of the details about Charles, whose last name I could not recall, fearing that nothing would happen. But I had decided that “his kind” needed to be trounced out of England.

More’s the pity; I chuckled to myself as we took to downstairs slowly. I lifted my skirts over a restaurant’s threshold for the first time in it seemed three years and we had a most pleasant dinner out. “This wine is called which name, my gentleman Bob? Is it a merlot, or a rose? I have it between my thighs. I am a wine most seductive myself, don’t you think?” To which he replied, “I have not a life and you have guessed me, but nobody else here does, and they all strive to defend it. I have never understood why. Will you come up to my flat with me? I did not want to deride our landlord, as she is a lady.”

He looked at me so archly with his bushy eyebrows, as he raised his glass. I thought how men such as him were called “Archie’s.” It was the usual invert label for them. “But if you think you are the first I have, you are mistaken, although I do love you. Toura loura loura, my sweet, do toura loura lie. Say you love me as well. Or I will kill you.”

The Irishmen of that era were almost always part English and other things, and they boasted of not fitting in to our society as beings I could not believe in - forever.

“In which case, you do not, although you would die for a woman of any stripe. I am not impressed.” I put my wineglass out, the type of which he had not told me. “Let us clink these stems together and salute the Queen.”

He laughed, and the restaurant suddenly rang with his Irish laughter. “Do tell. Long live Queen Victoria, the Dowager Slut of England! I have a lady with me tonight, but no.” He clinked with me in a swift motion and we set them both down. “You receive no toast. Oh look,” he said, reaching down to the floor. “The thing has landed butter side up. Let me show you what to do about that.” He stomped the floor with one foot, smiling to himself about something I could not see. Everything as usual was blurry over there. “Now we are married. And if you don’t away with me, as I seek better work, I shall die.”

“So what?”

This seemed to present a pickle to Bob. I reflected on how nothing I meant to this man, in all probability. He had a long string of harlots at his pool halls and life of Riley, and I asked him what else he did than sleep around with harlots or men.

“Mean of you little lady, but I am trying to organize some unions around here and I’m involved with the bunch trying to get better pay for the brick workers. It’s Chapter 89 of the United Kingdom Brick Workers Association, and I am attempting to move up in the ranks. Say, did you ever see a real riot, where people might get bashed, or hurt each other,” and here he hung over the table with a kind of high born expectancy, “Or do anything along those lines? I keep expecting something evil to break out and be. The bosses are all English, some of us are English, and we have a few of you in membership. They are all inverts I think, but I’m seventeen years old, and dropped out, so I’m as ignorant as they come around here. Oh, and you need your mouth wiped.”

Bob reached out and dabbed daintily at the sides of my mouth, as I brushed his hand away. “No, I have work to do, and don’t want to see you contesting for greater social position as you vainly attempt to get ahead in these crowded rooms. What is the use, McKenzie, as you will never find your way to conquering the world?’

“Don’t want to. And I can help organize our union, but as for you, I will go find this Charles and filet him outright. How long do you want him to suffer? Do you want me to use a knife on him? I think that would be best, although I should like to get a few of my boys and show him his cowardice. We can all use pocket knives and I know where I can get scalpels from a friend. Also, we can have his almighty purple muster stuffed and mounted by a taxidermist friend of mine.”

He meant what had been harming me. I was not a virgin. I grew as aghast as a God fearing Christian woman had, namely my mother, when confronted with such an enormity of an undertaking. “Right, you can kill him later. I want you to simply have Scotland Yard organize a search party for a wanted fugitive, get it how it prolongs his agony, and have him arrested for the crime of organizing women of the evening. There is no such thing - and can never be as that. I cannot believe a Negro is innovative in such a light, although I could be wrong, but no one else could either. Therefore, before the manage of this has us arrested, please make arrangements toward this with your buddies, and go find him. I know he is trying solely to make his keep off us, and has no other options in life I suppose, but he could be working else wise. Please stop him - and this practice of his leaching off us ladies and young men, as he is simply a madam.”

“You ought to be one,” Bob heavily breathed at me. “If you require his manhood at your disposal, you must want it in some other way indeed. Leave him and it alone and let him rot somewhere in the jail system. It is the only alternative that makes sense.” I leveled as firm of a gaze as I could at my suitor, who was only one of many and I was only one of many, as I surest knew, and supposed he would attempt to follow my command. In the British jail system, you were presumed guilty until proven innocent, which in Charles case could happen or no, but only after extreme and heated debate.

“Queen Vickie, at your humble disposal, your servant, Sherlock Holmes. Say, do you read those? They are getting so popular lately. I keep thinking everyone thinks I am insane for wanting to like those, but the two gents in it and everyone else is so bloody inspiring. I should like to do such work as comes in myself, like the detective in the story, as he chooses what work he does by which clients he cares to take on, but I have to go soon to work for those I cannot chose. Let us leave for your place, and make the music I was meant to make with you together.”

“Let’s,” I breathed into his ear as we stalked simply out the door, me scared because no one had accosted me for what I had proposed as we took ourselves into the carriage, rattling through the many districts surrounding downtown London proper and settled in for a long ride while we held hands and kissed many times. “You think you are my brother and you kiss like a girl. I hope you are better when we are in my rooms.”

I noticed how cool Bob was to the touch, as if he were a fairy from the north of Scotland, and I had to wonder about our Charles. I was sure love with him would have been spicy hot, and I dreamed of him the entire time I and my temporary Irishman made love. It was simultaneous cool and warm, so chary and fairy and temporary, and as I looked in the mirror at us, never had I seen a man so handsome and so boyish looking. I was twenty, and we were the same size and wore the same looks as we cajoled and frolicked. All the time, I was thinking, this bed is meant for customers, and I need to invite the boys in here. They are simply too unsophisticated to get chance taking down. Unlike Bob, they had nothing material in mind when it came to escorting a whore. I could only figure each man had his own plans, something like the good doctor, whom I would probably not meet again. Each one needed to be guided by me to a place where aging I could show each one of them how to handle a woman sexually, how to do it right, and how to have his own way without unnecessarily blaming me for our universal undertaking.

Wishing Bob farewell in the morning, I washed up, deciding to never see him again, and as I looked in the mirror, I thought I saw something on my face. It seemed to be a ripped tearing across both my cheeks, one which split my face down the middle in red. I looked again, and the voice said, “Don’t worry; the Dahlia is not due to your actions. As you think, this is a bad situation all in all. You are not the world’s only hooker. Or, perhaps you are. Do you suppose you are responsible for all of these horrendous crimes?” Then as I told the mirror I didn’t care if my face went back to normal, it did.

I finished washing in the metal basin and dressed, preparing for a day of killing time by hanging out around the Strand area, as Bob had given me a week’s wages out of our special night, and I certainly had both time and money to kill now. It saddened me that he was only a customer in the end, that our love could never be, and that I was having him kill a man or perchance a partial man for me. He would probably find our Charles. As I strolled the long walk to the Strand’s tea parlors, coffee shops, candy stores, and places where I could now buy some new clothing, I reflected upon Charles’ life. Like me, like Bob, he had no such toy to play with, but seemed to think he had. Poor little bear of a man, but now I have arranged to take what circumstances he had completely away and stuff them down his dark African throat for the next unknown time period. Well, when he gets out of our jail system, he can certainly find me and do whatever he wants. There is no such justice for the likes of me far above the likes of him. Or perhaps, I deigned to imply without speaking as I bought my clothes, poking through the flower children’s wares, there’s a nice boy and thank you for that here’s three pence, and I strolled through the milling crowd over to have coffee at the French pastry shop.

Charles ilk or lot in life, I could not tell which, as I sipped some excellent java from Spain, grown in the finest outlying forests, while eating a cheese sandwich and having a glass of unreported milk that had the cream mixed in it, mind you, he could come here too, but then again I see not his kind again anywhere. I don’t suppose they chase them off? Then again, I see someone down at the other end of this café area, and she looks lonelier than I have seen woman before. Then others sat down with her, black like her so far as I can see, and settle into their food and unknown way of life. They look like us, but I know of something wrong. Yet it is strictly invisible at all times to me.

I am afraid that to me, they do not resemble people. Such plug noses, and such an air of authority they do not have in this country. Charles and I would never have got on, such an idea, he was only there to take advantage of us, why would I think he knew anything right, oh thank you for taking my plates away - and here’s a quid. It’s a young red haired girl who looks vaguely like someone from another country, or is one of us. “My name is Karen, and you might talk to me later. Don’t feel bad about your Charlie.” It’s hard to tell when all is a blur, and I thought of going to the spectacular’s. Maybe I could buy myself an eyepiece or perhaps a monocle and attain the silly authority old ladies had, or even a pince nez. Like Jack’s. He’s around here somewhere, and eventually he will spot and force me back to my hovel, I suppose. There is simply nowhere to go in all of London, or he is keeping busy. He looked busy with “bursting” others, indeed. Yet I have checked the papers, and there are only three murders so far reported. Do the rest go unheeded? It is a long wait to become the fourth victim of Jack the Ripper.

In Victorian England, I sighed to myself, I suppose all things are possible. Most of them seem to be evil possibilities. It is only a matter of time before I die of either diseases, going into Charing Cross or a local lunatic ward, or die of the knife. I saw in my mind Jack approach my window, leer into it with his overwhelming grin, and grew dismal. He was sizing up as to when he was going to come in with me and take his time.

If photographs are taken of me after he is done with me, I reasoned, there would be a move to do more of the same. I thought, I shall pray to Jesus that mine is not the best stepping stone for subsequent murders, and that like my name, there be something most special about it. My mind reeled for a moment at how that would have to make my murder be much more prominent, and then it dawned on me. Two kinds of people in the world. Maybe I didn’t have much life choices, or left, but someone else might.

Send this message to my lover Jack, oh Jesus, oh there you are Jesus, now I see, and I do have to start work for real tonight and let me skirts up all the way as they act like boys, no, I am going to lure them into my room, but wait, there is not the way to do that because of the manage who is too conservative as he’s from India, oh no, I have to do the street routine still, even though I have a perfectly good room, sigh, I knew Dove you would have to do it that way, I dared dream for an instant of something else.

Ten nights later, and after I had learned several hellish ways of finding roughly two clients per night, and several of which had banged my head against the brick walls, thrown me down upon the back alley pavements, insisted upon all the wrong orifices of my body and otherwise had “their way” with me, which had assumed a turn in the direction solely of punishing me for being a whore and nothing else, as I had assumed, but which was growing to be an unspeakable experience beyond words I barely handled or should take, I found the article in the paper. They had executed Charles.

I prayed to Jesus, God and Allah that I would never meet him again, and that he was gone forever, not because I hated him, but because I wanted to see him safe from any harm. In my inner being, beyond all reach, was a longing for the unattainable him. For one prolonged moment, I wanted him safe with his mother, somehow encompassed within. But I knew his execution had been tepid, beneath his dignity, and still malevolent, of the nature I had deeply hoped for; he was revealed as a raw coward at the last moments. Somewhere else, where he knew himself, he would be the bravest man alive.

With an anger beyond all mentioning, as I feared forsaken his life, I read on. No, they had only decided he was a new Cause Celebre, as he had been trying to organize more than one union after all, which I read with a kind of perverse glee and longing, and there was much talk of parties attempting to lynch him. I had never heard of such a thing before. They were keeping him in jail in the county area and talked of shuttling him around, but the discussion largely centered on whether Negroes in England had any such social rights or justice, or turned toward discussion of what to do with the Juwes who were supposedly also “making trouble” and causing a general stir. None of these people seemed to have enough to do with each other, and all of them appeared out for each other’s blood, but at a distance where it looked to me like they were all showing off to imaginary women, children or circumstances all of them could never truly obtain. I pitied Charles, as he and his kind were rather alone in this, as all the discussion finally proved to be about them and not by them, but I pitied him more for not taking a job at the newspaper. I have no idea why he needed to be a leach off us instead, I thought, and then realized what a leach off of men I had become indeed. What else in life is there but being a leech?

We are a society of ants in Great Britain, I’ll warrant, each keeping the other’s truest measure beyond all reach, and pretending that by doing nothing but contesting or working against each other, we shall someday work our single ways up. It is all we have at present in the late 18th century, and as all animals are competitive, I think it is all we will ever have. I vacillated between reading the newspaper stories to kill time during the day, or the fiction stories, some of which were being written by women and children who were way ahead of me in the brains category, and I especially loved Sherlock Holmes.

If only there were a ways to stop fools from dreaming, or otherwise to go on living in some house out in the country, from the city where all overbuilt monstrosities of lovely but bloody brownstone and multi storied buildings were going up, I would like it. But you know, as fast as the brinkmen and carpenters lay them down, and as seldom as they fall or are razed, you would suppose it were less crowded around here. My father wants to see me in Heaven, I supposed, but that is where he is. He said once about the traffic around Stratford on the Sea, “They must have opened up the gates of Hell.” That’s when I decided life was too crowded for me to be a good girl or ever have a life.

He would pat me on the head and send me out the door to buy at grocers. A good and handsome man of excellent British stock, and some other, he had a handlebar mustache and a walking cane, but he was too lower classes to get a proper education. He kept us well and we had our family, but he disappeared out of here so long ago. And I of course have not spoken with my mother or sisters since I undertook this life of utmost shame and complete utter degradation. I wonder if work in a steel mill is anything like this? They often fall off of bridges as they build them, and the rest line up to complete the work. And as the paper mills and smoke stacks create a smell worse than the odor of dead bodies, they die too. I suppose the work of creating dead bodies must exude such a smell really as awful, and you would think it would not, if we are a lot that is so condemned.

I have done what Jesus did, to deserve my death somewhat, and imprisoned Charles. I know he would not have helped us any, but as I read the papers, they claimed he had been trying to, and I thought they but threw a sop to his race. The stories eventually ended and centered on other things, but I finally told God, “If you are sending me these voices, please end it with bonnie Charlie. Have them haul him out and finish him off.” I knew he was reveling in his chance to somehow take on the entirety of England by himself.

The next day, I hit the Strand, and was going to reach for the latest magazine installment of several wonderful earthy stories about many English and worldwide locales such as America and apparently most of the rest of our cosmos, which humanity was only beginning to uncover, and I reached for “The London Times” which had one summary headline halfway down the page, front page though. They had taken, “A Negro, Black as Our Spades, Out to His Scaffold.” For a moment, I thought Scaffold was a town. His name turned out to be Charles Augustus Murphy, of Essex, and a local university as well, which he had actually graduated from to my surprise, with more than one degree, and they had done him in anyway. What a fool to never have found his career.

An illegal lynch mob. Now some of them were in trouble with the authorities. My goodness, I have done something fierce but I warrant it under this sky I suppose. It has nothing to do with justice, as we are all blind fools who must live out our lives. Mine was now a satanic misery on the face of the planet, and deep in my heart, I wanted to believe that I had my Bonne’s kind to blame for it. Chocolate is so acid when you eat it and you have to take on every germ in the vicinity, including all tropical ones, but who cares. On the other hand, I could only pretend to enjoy myself during the day, and await my inevitable one of several potential death sentences at night.

I lay in bed one night to take it off, having made enough wages of sin indeed to pay off the rent, buy some canned food I could keep in my rooms, plan ahead for extra clothing, and have a Chinese silken fan tucked away in one corner that I could look at occasionally and dream of other people, other places, where they had lives and houses and children and grandchildren, polar explorers found my attentions the most. And the women’s movement of England was pledging to an eternal fight for the right to vote. I thought, it’s time I did something completely different with my body for a change.

“’Allow, I’m Annie Chapman. Is this the office of Women’s Suffrage?”

The tall woman at the desk as I had strolled up to the flat above stairs in my best clothes frowned at me. “Are you a street girl? We don’t take those when it comes to our campaigning. If you need help with domestic issues or violence, or abuse and neglect, welcome, as we are striving forward in these directions, but we cannot help you.”

“Why not?” Of a sudden, I asked God to retract my question. I kept it to myself, thinking I had nothing of the sort said. “Of course, I am a lady brick worker. I have a friend I could refer over to you who could sign verity to my job.” The author of the Sherlock Holmes series himself worked for women’s rights, but not for us, only for working women. He never wanted it for us or for housewives, I think. “So you could have your friend sign and verify you are a brick worker? If you can do so, have him come in.”

“Is there a reason I need a man to do such a thing for me?” I was rudely interrupted by a short woman who looked eerily familiar bursting in through the door. I had seen her gracing the local papers recently. “They are beginning to arrest our suffragettes outside the dockets of the prison, and they are mishandling them. I had the papers lined up and there are photos being taken. It’s a whole new world when it comes to publicity. Alice and whoever you are, come, let’s go and get arrested! We need to add bodies to the stack! They might do anything, including shooting into the crowd.”

I serious doubted this, but thought they might tell us to quietly disperse and go home.

I was racing out the door when the tall lady grabbed me from behind. “Not you, chippie, you have to go get the signature and come back. We’ll take care of this for you and your kind, but you will have to do that ere any of us can help you. Ophelia, look to the stairs.” They both ran down it, slowing to a sedate pace as others glanced out of offices at them. I decided I had enough of attempting to be a suffragette, winked at myself, and took off after them. I joined them as they attempted to board a carriage.

“I’m paying for this and you can’t stop me. I’m paying all the way, all the time. By the way, my name is Annie Chapman. I’m boarding this thing invented by men first.” I then barked onto the carriage, slamming the door in front of the two ladies’ faces. “I am faster than any wind you have ever met in your banal lives. Do you want aboard?”

“Ah, I think she means it. Gloria or whoever you are in there, please ape the door and let us in. We are the local leaders of this chapter and you must let us get to the protest.”

“Maybe.” I breathed to myself heavily, whooping air out of me in a whoosh, and paused with my hand on the door handle. “You must pledge to let ladies of the evening get the vote before I will ever let you into our carriage. This carriage is now for us.”

There was the strangest minute of silence on the other side of the carriage door. As I sat there, burning more with pneumonia I thought than the other diseases, and still looking a young lady although I now had quite some facial acne, I also said, “If you are thinking what we are doing is a choice, you are sadly mistaken Christian old farts who mean nothing in this life. You are waiting for “you” Jesus to rescue you from inversion. I am not. You are going to stand there forever until I let you into this taxi cab. I am doing this for the Chinese, for Negroes, for so called white people, and everyone on Earth.”

“We are going to call the CC mental wards and have they come take you off.”

“Those are the Catholics and their hideous medieval tortures. You two are men forever and traitors to our cause. I am sitting here and thinking about what I will do to you. You are rats in a pack who only can oppose one person. I am not.”

It came to me the entire human race is but descendants of the amoeba, which surrounds its food as a particle and then eats it. I would be long slow eaten indeed. Where, I did not know, and it would be a long process of wondering why there had been so many indications of Hell. I would have faith in something else for other people. And I am a suffragette against this vixen. I dreamed of my nonexistent friends, and laughed. Charles and Bob and everyone else, whom I dared pretend to represent. There would never be such a thing as the vote for women. I looked at the front of the carriage, and called out, “Driver, be off with you, and take me to where those ladies were going.”

“Absolutely, and this ride is completely free for Annie; horses, I lash you and away with you.” I thought I was speaking his words for him, it was so strange. We were off, and had left the invert or those who hated inverts couple behind. I sudden knew the driver was a woman. “How are you, Shirley, no that’s not your name is it?”

“No,” called out this booming but not quite masculine voice, “And I’ve been pretending to be a man for years and not gotten caught at it, but I’m joining you at this.”

We arrived at the rally, and I had to stand through the most boring presentation by men and women that I had seen and there was a crowd of protestors marching, but it was quite small as we had suspected. “Shirley” - who may have been man or woman - strode with me as we walked nonviolently through the ringing mob about us, shouting things like, “How can you believe you need when none of you take political office, and women are too weak minded to govern,” and such nonsense as that. Then the bully boy cops, who were huge, showed up to wind at us and rub our sex parts. They also hit us with their sturdy clubs, but there was not much screaming. Only about three dozen or so were on parade in public for this, although as I could not see, it may have been more or less. For a moment, caught by surprise, I realized I had been expecting something else, but it was not too much of a surprise. They were aiming the guns upon us. I could not tell if anyone else was being handled, but as one giant copper had my skirts up and was severely pinching my parts - until I screamed in direst agony, my friend reached to lay him low with one single punch. He stood over the man for a second merely to crow, which due to my friend’s size was an incredibly loud sound that silenced some of our crowd.

“No problem,” he growled, for I thought of her that way, “And you will return me the favor, but not in a way I can ever understand or appreciate. By the way, I’m really a man, I’m not into women, but you are getting out of here before they arrest you all. Hey, let’s go over there,” said my now unknown assailant, grabbing my arm in a firm but gentle way as he pulled me over to the side of the street. “You don’t need arrested, sweetie,” he said in the most welcome unfamiliar womanly voice I had ever heard. “You are one of them!” I cried aloud, “You do have dark hair and look foreign, but you’re so tall.”

“Well, I try to be, sweetie. You are one of us if you want to be. Anyway, I’m going to hug you, and see if they get any messages. Sure enough,” he whispered in such a high falsetto in my ear, “Now don’t think it’s how I’m large sized. See, they are going after all the alone ones to teach them a lesson. My kind will never get married or is a family or anything but homosexual perverts for a long time to come. Let’s get out of here!”

“Who ARE you?” I squealed as he and I raced away, him not dragging me at all now, and we slowed to a walk. I had been willing to get arrested, but only was manhandled. “Ah love, I’m a charmer but I have had more boys than you can ever see, and you know what has probably happened to them all. If they are not in the Thames, they have sought graves in many other places. Thay, would a like an American bear hug?” He gave me such a nice squeeze, and we traversed over to where the photographers were. “My name is Alvin and I have a “friend” named, ohhh, Oscar Wilde – you should see his wordy portrait - who has the most fantastic salon around here, ah yes, it’s about one mile south of Lancaster, here’s the carriage, Righteous Dove, and let’s pile in. Oh, and I’d like to introduce you to all of our satanic familiars. We’re witches. And I can’t stand the idea of being sent to jail to be stuffed up the bum, as I have and never done that to others.”

The carriage was stuffed full of men dressed as women. Full makeup, clothes, and clear attitude problems from being sent to boys’ school for all their lives. I had gone to an all girls’ school and hated it, which set me to wandering and chasing men. These were the faggots of England truly. I was so freaked out at this I could not be angry anymore. They were teenagers and grown men mostly, and as we took to the streets in broad daylight, the arrogance and lack of same of these jesters made me laugh so loud I was feeling free again for the first time in my life. We felt for each other and only hugged and kissed lightly as we sped along in our bumpy, rocky coach, where over every rough spot in the roadway, it bounced and went up our rears. Most carriage rides were like that for everyone back then, when the road was rough. “So you are the Jokers of London.”

“Darling, we are the Ladies of the Day and Night - and Forever Mourning.” Meeting the boys who laughed at death all the time was most refreshing to all my senses. “Would you like to meet the ‘Gentlemen’ Who Satisfy Nobodies? I think not. But you will hear some of them speak for you.” I decided they meant the lesbian inverts, as I figured they must have an active fantasy life, not much else.

“Did you take it up the bum? Ooooh, Charlie and Freddie, you are the bums I like.” I pulled the two of them over to me, as they had rescued me from the perverted cops! We caroused like lovers who had known each other time immemorial all along the way.

“Say, chick, come to America with us after we show you the best salon and the best homo pervert and lover of boys in all of London. You are such a grand lady next to his sickened and lost soul, you don’t know yourself. You need a permanent wave and some brand new fetching bodices and you know what? You need a new district entirely to work in. That Whitechapel thing is SO inappropriate for you, Turtle Dove. Come with us and we’ll fix you up so you are a beauty princess, next to that ugly old doggie Queer of ours, and you’ll eat with us if you want to and we have plenty of drugs if you’d like and we can show you our special little world. Now, don’t mind the young boys; they’re all mental retards, but they love our Oscar and he tells them all the literary realities and detailed fictional fantasies they want. Now, stop jouncing the carriage like that, Oscar! Say, have you read those ridiculous little gay stories in the Strand? Sher and Doc, ohhh, such a couple. We’re waiting to see them break down and go after Professor Moriarty and have a major three way. Look, Alice in Wonderland, there’s the Kasbah!”

I now knew I was among the best and finest fancy men I had ever seen in my life. We bailed out of the carriage and I tripped all over my long skirts to their incredibly girlish and unseemly laughter as we joined their party. “Look, Alice, there’s the caterpillar and his hookah, oy gevaldt such a long snout it has, hey, gang, let’s ignore that and hear Oscar do a reading.” What’s a reading, I thought to myself.

“You know how you used to like the arts and want to get involved? We have a whole French poetry society going here, and the best literary lions of Europe gather around us just to see a bunch of peer farts – it’s insatiable, darling! And we host them. Tonight we have Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, all three Bronte sisters, Emily Dickenson who is such a feminist, and you.” Needless to say, I decided they must mean they had imposters who took the roles of said notables.

I entered a room where we all slowed down and I finally saw the other side of Victorian London. There was a huge hall where the social types and others were gathered for literary readings and poetry. It had a supremely festive atmosphere, which had obviously been supplied by the entire local invert community, and gaily festooned every wall with gorgeous artwork. I was crying and tears were streaming down my checkered face freely. I was no longer in hell; I was in literary, not pervert heaven. There were all kinds of real people, everywhere, so far as I could tell maybe Britishers, French, Americans, my God them too, oh look Asians, and we were taking our seats and listening to some speakers.

“Ladies and gentleman, as a special treat tonight, high mathematician Charles Dodgeson is going to give a reading of his award winning book of numerical poesies, limericks, puzzles, creative brain teasers, mysteries, children’s fantasies, riddles, especially for bright little girls,” and here I had to sigh and wonder what that meant, “intellectual spoofs and jokes, and by the way, I was molested repeatedly as a child and withstand you, but I’m here, and for your elucidation and enjoyment you know me as Lewis Carroll. I wrote strictly to get in with the queen and her society and achieve knighthood. This never really occurred, not in time, and I could never be such a thing as a crusader.

“In Detective Comics of America in the twentieth century, I will be known as the Riddler. It had to do with the Inquisition. The question always was, “Is a Raven like a Writing Desk?” So they took the title of a show from the Black Crow Shakespeare and me. Could you look into the future? Do you think life will be a breeze? I decided, being of a mathematical mind, that black girls needed their formal education, nothing I was allowed to affect or change in England, but they do receive education there.

“Yes, I also dreamed of going to Hell for you girls. Never rate down certain Americans again, unless they beg you for it. Thanks to American television, the answer is now “yes.” We now have Raven the Anti-heroine. In the audience there is one special young lady, and although I named Alice as the heroine of my series of books, she bears no mention in them. I will only write two books in honor of our Annie Chapman. I have borne the insult all of my life and announce it now, and forever more will not mention it. But I have taken photos of living women, to show the world girls are not ashamed of being naked, and they are not. I could only handle the public embarrassment none.

“This young lady will have to be photographed, ah, some other way, and now I have to do the reading. I have chosen a poem you find popular and consequential called “Jabberwocky” - in which I invented several new panjandrum words which will find dictionary status, thus rendering me immortal in an insignificant way. Our Annie is about to become immortal in a significant way, one which she will never understand or know. It has to do with the Pacific North West of the United States. The event transpiring in the future involves nothing she is to be credited or blamed for, and indeed no one else is either. It is because all events are already past, and there can be neither time nor future forevermore. Moreover, here are the “sick and sadistic ravings” as many have said of a man gone mad who likes children and you:

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves,
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe,
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Beware the jabberwork, my son,
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch,
Beware the jubjub bird and shun,
The frumious bandersnatch.

He took his vorpal sword in hand,
Long time the manxome foe he sought,
Then rested he by the tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And as in uffish thought he stood,
The jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling throught the tulgy wood,
And burbled as it came.

One two, one two, and through and through,
The vorpal blade went snicker snack.
He left it dead and with its head,
He went galumphing back.

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
Oh frabjous day, callou, callay,
He chortled in his joy.

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves,
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe.
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.”

Did all girls get jealous of this part of his book, where he favoured boys? It was about going to war, and fighting. Lewis Carroll, author of “Alice in Wonderland” and “Alice through the Looking Glass,” who made one think of someone going through a plate window and breaking a glass ceiling, but perhaps it was not a wage earning thing, finished up with some poetry - and left and right winged his way home.

When Emily Dickenson came on, she read the poetry we have never found. It was far better than the earlier poetry, but still involved the impossible longing for a man. The audience asked her why she couldn’t write of other things than sex, and she said, “Ask Dorothy Parker. She always had trouble finding carfare home from the Algonquin Round Table, and although she had a ready wit and a sharp tongue, she was still hanged. Probably had a lot to do with being a Native American who could never exist.”

Then there were many others, but the final entrant in what was to be a contest of wits as they joked around and carried on, was Oscar Wilde. “Here comes the Wild Ass Man!”

“I can’t be you ladies; I’m an attempt to keep you from troubles. It will never happen, nor be there a world where troubles are swept from those who don’t seek them, never find them, and become Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde. You may think I was simply “Batman’s” Oswald Chesterfield Cobble pot. I am too huge to be a penguin - and that is an insult to short boys and men. I certainly may or may not have done what you think I did, but on the other hand, I was trapped in England and what else is there to do but eliminate as many people as I could reach while fearing the dockets. As I am going to be arrested for the crime of inversion shortly, with minor boys who were willing but I am not, I have to give a final speech and say this: I did love but indecently, and there are no tape recorders in this room. I am a coward, and did love once the sword but no more. All things must turn to a reckoning, and I plan to hold them off while finally giving up to the law as soon as I possibly can. Then I suppose the rotting of my flesh will not be great, but my reputation may or may not allay such friendships as I cannot obtain here. I go before the insanely unjust and illiberal dockets as a dark, huge bear of a man who does not want to bring on sex with children, but worked as a pioneer for gay rights. I will swear one more time that all of the boys I had were willing, and not coerced by me. Meanwhile, my Annie, I would have loved to have twelve boys and twenty girls with you, but that is no longer possible, and you would not have survived the first child due to the fact I am well over six foot eight inches tall. My dear, I am your ‘batman’ for the moment, when it comes to playing cricket, but you are destined for the worst possible one. I would sooner die than hurt you, but cannot help you, and must face the law in my own way. If it takes homosexuality to do something about our problems, it is the least violent method.

“Annie Chapman, could you come up to this hideous stage, based on nothing but public executions of your friends, and read me some of your poetry?” Oscar looked me up and down with an expectancy not quite of sexual longing, hovering on the brown edges of each dying leaf like a tired freak with no received human understanding had to say. I knew it was still autumn, but winter was nearly here. He was the Gentle Giant that I had envisioned, a soul who needed love in his life and had absolutely none. He did give it, such as in his work, “The Portrait of Dorian Grey.” He was rotting from lack of love. I had deucedly known this - as I had read all his works.

I said, “Your woes are nothing next to mine, and I have turned the man I originally loved over to the unknown. Some day he may end up in the deepest dungeons of Spain, and for no reason whatsoever. When you are shuffled around, you don’t know where you go. But he shall not get out of jail in time to injure me. His woes are nothing next to mine, I must suppose. I must go home now, and tidy up. Then I must apologize to you, and say I understand your moral dilemma.”

“Come read us your poetry, Annie Chapman, who forever resides in Whitechapel. Come, predestined girl ‘whore’ of the ages, please tell us about what you feel, and how slime must slide throughout your entire body. Tell us how you can never feel clean, no matter how oft you bathe, and how your death is not one any of the rest of us can experience. Or, recalling you are on the dockets by being on the stage, say anything. Perhaps you could mention you should have fought the urge to follow your name and live there.”

“It can’t possibly be the worst life and death in all of human history.” I felt a baited expectancy seize me coldly, wanting me to heave all of my lunch out. I threw myself out into the aisles, racing and tripping over my long dresses as I sought the lavatory. When I got there, my headache roared through my bursting head and I threw up all the food for the past two weeks, which was not much, into the pull chain toilet. I lifted up, and saw how others in a day with no way to say it must die a long, slow death from the ancient life forms that cause both disease and illness. They must face the worst hospital deaths in all of their histories, each to his or her own, and they would suffer them. Why should not ladies of the evening be treated for disease? AIDS was treatment for them in Africa. It probably only ended their lives, and put them in drug agonies. Then I reflected upon those with no such hospital and longed to be them. Would there ever be a time when science was not out to make its “money” off of victims? There was no cure for what I’d come down with, and acne was the tip of a mysterious iceberg. But the legal head of state of England, a land that avoided the Nazi tyrants’ bloodshed for a long time by being nonviolent and resistive, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and many others had suffered such arcane and incurable diseases, and had children who recovered and were normal, and who subsequently had other normal children. In spite of Winston having venereal diseases, he has had great grandchildren and they still live in England.

Do you really think Annie Chapman needed to be heartlessly slaughtered?

Wiping my face myself as I always had, I gazed upon my acne, which was increasing. I was nothing but food, and as I lowered my head in extreme shame, racing somehow to the past to remake every decision I had made in my entire life, the room reeled and bobbed as I grew sick and had to fight with myself, perhaps for all infinity.

Do you believe it would be a good idea to seek cures for venereal diseases?

“No, infinity is not the same as eternity, and you must go to seek timelessness. It is out there beyond London, way beyond the Moon, far beyond Antares, and isn’t that the most idiotic thing you have ever thought, little whore? You are so unimportant. I am so important, that I am a man. I am Jack the Ripper. Do you know what I have started to do for you? I have to treat you to the way of life you already know, and you are naïve and know nothing. Meanwhile, do you not feel a thrill somewhere in the vicinity of your chest? It is an artificial lion - and you know it is falsity which dooms Moslem boys to never-ending battle. Not to mention their people and it is a vengeance that will kill them some day. What they believe comes from their Allah; they know it must be the other side of life. I am a German and I seek vengeance for some known reasons.”

Annie thought, I believe Israel could win someday, and make peace there happen.

“Some people never realize how important some things are. You must take your carriage out of here and go home. Run, run home at your top panic and rest in your room. Relax, lay back, and let the good doctor take care of you.” I whewed, now feeling I knew who this was. But all my life I did not know why I was a babe, a girl, a woman, and never to be an old curmudgeon. I would not have minded being a grandmother and would not be a mother under such overcrowded living conditions. And now Satan was in direct contact with me, pretending to be Jesus Christ the White Man and deliver me. But he would, I thought, to what? To a moonlit walk up the beach? Given the vast misfortunes of my life, I could only hope to be delivered to death. I said to the mirror, “Charles is more a man than you will ever be, and he is a stupid, arrogant, omnipresent lout. He thinks he is you, you think you are him, and the two of you will never awaken.”

“Then how am I a stupid lout? I have an education and am fully accepted in England. We are not ex-slaves with axes to grind, and we know what your place is here.”

“I know members of your kind who are good people who want to help us. They don’t feel they can under these present conditions.”

Malevolent chuckling emanated from the mirror. I said to the reflective glass, “There will be real doctors oh you know someday I suppose, perhaps on another planet, and you and your ilk will be reduced obviously to the same fortunes you think you are bestowing upon me. I suppose you simply want your mother to hurt over you.” Recalling what I had thought earlier about Charlie, I winced.

“Idiotic whore, whose mind is now as composed of yeast shit as mine, don’t despair. Come back, and let a man who can handle a brain full of excrement from millions of sources show you the clear light of day. Why would I make you hurt worse than me? I am a charitable man, a medical doctor, and cannot harm you as you say. Why, as you know, I plan to find out the lay of this land by drowning myself in the biggest local river. Why would you think you would die an equal death to mine? Or even lead an equal life? Did you not have fun and interesting but dreggy time in your existence, as I worked and slaved away on my divine mission from Satan? Or was it God? Or your Mary?

“Do you really think you matter to me? You do. I am a medical doctor, and I must tell you, oh, you know, just come back. I set out to serve mankind, stupid whore. Where else would you go, dearie?” I thought, I should find any other “doctor” at all.

“I have listened to a mathematician tonight, and it all sounded alike to me.”

“Come home.” As I looked at the mirror, I only saw scientific reality. It felt like a magical burden had lifted from my entire mind, and that I knew I could go back to my simple rooms. I gagged on what this probably meant, and went over to the toilet, sticking my fingers down my blue clad throat and loosening my widow’s collar. I thought, it would be nice to have something like dignity as I died. Who knew if I would?

He was going to have to tie a gag into my mouth, to stifle the screams. I was sure he’d stuff it right in there. It had been “right” to be brave and await mine end in a small room away from the street, if being reclusive was the right thing to do in this shocking situation. Also, I could get drunk every day, and that might take out some of the pain. I thought, I should get drunk as I pleased, and not bother. Finally, he was going to have to tie me to the bedposts or otherwise enchain me, splay me out as Jesus on the Cross, which must have happened to multiple people, and begin eviscerating me. This heroic tale was not heroic because of the need for the missionary position, which makes women pregnant. Anyway, in future I dreamed, others would devise new ways to make women pregnant. We would however never be free. And thus neither would anyone else.

If one were “free,” I chuckled; they would all Christian think they’re me. And many will subsequently do this when they find the corse – they will get jealous. I feel sorriest for the Jews, or the Juwes, who own those nice shops I almost took work at. Oh dear God, they will come to get them. Please do not flee; Juwes of England; take a brave stand at them. You know, everyone else must make their living at photography. I am now a mother goddess who will be discounted at all times because I spread diseases. I will start truly only one industry, known as pornography, and perhaps it is because I did not trust Charles. But his viewpoint is to lionize our prostitution, and sneakily degrade our England as an act of vicarious vengeance. He could have gotten a job, or no. I could have done the same, or no. Such questions can never be settled, by perverts who could have gotten a job. And all of us our working our jobs. We are the sea of army ants.

I loved this planet, and the turning of it. I wish I could make things better, as I like people. But there is no way to do it, and yet evolution may make certain that such better ways of life will at least occur for some. I looked in the mirror one more time, and thought I saw a beautiful young lady. Having never seen myself that way before at all, I wondered where my desiccated corpse would end up. I thought I would somehow tolerate all of the pain along the way. Jesus was a sick joke by sillies like Bob, who wanted us to have a good time. It was only human. The pain would be incredible, and perhaps I would go straight to Hell, simply because it is there. I had seen so many indications of this. And none of the religious theories including this one held water for a feeling animal, a partially white woman such as I. I had seen the other women with their perfect spiritual lives, and their essences smacked of what I could never fathom. Human perfection. Maybe they would all go to a perfect heaven. I never wanted or sought to join them there. Nonetheless, I had best be hurrying home, to await my hideous tormentor.

It would take only a few hours at most, I was thinking, but then as I boarded the new train back in order to speed things up, a few thoughts occurred to me. I put aside the ones about fleeing almost immediately. I would simply stay in the rooms and probably I would have to go out and work some while waiting. As some of my life was good, it probably meant that there would be a long fall as I descended into extreme pain. There would be an end to the pain, in all likelihood. It would be like a major surgery. Yes, he was probably going to use his instruments. All those silver clad implements, all designed for me. Jack was my gold, and I was his silver, I suppose. I should somehow take the blame for it all, but refused to do so. I would disown this Hell if I should ever have to face it.

“And you can destroy me, but I will not leave. I will haunt this place somehow through my death, until one such as me or someone else or several someone elses do something about these problems. I shall stick around, and wait, or perhaps, sigh, it is too late. Even Dr. Jack Rinehart had something in mind to help people originally, I should guess. I feel like you are listening to me and judging my character. I will see you there, and say nothing until you move. Then I will do something again that takes care of you. No, I don’t know what I am going to do. There, that’s the building rooms. I am going to see the manage. “Hello, sir, is your name Gandhi?”

“I don’t know why you ladies torment me when I rent to you. Where is it?” I had been building up quite a rap sheet with him, and owed him over four month’s rent. “Sir, I can only pay you when I get the money, and you always charge me on a schedule.”

I cheerfully paid the manage all of the owed money. “Because we are afraid you will overcharge us.” He smiled at me in that peculiar way the ex-inhabitants of “our” erstwhile India have, and said, “I think you are not Sherlock Holmes, Annie. Come back around here, and have a spot of coffee with me. No, I am not a Mahatma. I have something to show you, if you want to look at it. I own several pieces of antique Indian furniture that was designed by the British overseers of our land, the Raj. You would like to see these pieces I am sure, so come back here with me.”

The man was too old and looked about eighty to do anything to me back there, and I certainly didn’t care anymore. We went through a parted glass bead curtain, and the back of the manage’s area was revealed at last as the loveliest little living room with curtains and some strategically placed sofa pillows, which were hand stitched in the most elaborate Hindu fashion. They were so beautiful and seemed to be made out of millions of tiny threads with the greatest of care taken to make the most heavenly pictures of white fleshed people intertwined with other people that I have seen and I will never see it again. Then I looked at his carvings collection. “Does your wife do or own any of this?”

“Yes, she carved that elephant, and I carved that piece with the lion and the tiger and the three insects that represent peace, prosperity, and long life. Welcome to Cabalistic Hindu. Seriously, we’re Jewish and Hindu, and you know, my kind thinks it rules the universe. It thinks we thought up all of the world’s religions, thoughts and belief systems. My wife has always reassured me that we are not immortal, nor anything but old. Say, Geneva, would you go ahead and fetch us a tea cozy, the one with the hand painted bone china service and the gold and copper edging? I think that one will do for the young lady.”

I was angry and didn’t want to hold back any more tears. “Why?”

“We don’t know these things, but if you want to look at what we used to have, go ahead. This was all for a passing period of time, for a limited time only, you might say.”

“Honey, show her the telephone. Oh miss, look here it’s such a device technology you can dial this and guess what, you can call your friends from far away, maybe across the world in a few years. See, when you ring them up, it’s not to make them come over. You can talk to them, and I understand someday there will newer forms of communication.”

“Can I ever ring up Sherlock Holmes and ask him to solve my murder case? The man involved is so hot to be evil he might slaughter all of England pretending to look for just me. You too. Maybe he will find you and kill you. Please don’t call the cops on me. Understand? I’m not asking you to save me, but please, tell them and save yourselves.”

The two brown skinned and English looking couple glared at each other, than me. “We don’t mind so much, as we’re so old. Really,” said the old lady, “I wish I could take your place. I would hurt a lot less, but you are young and it will be so painful. He’s going to take over twelve hours, or maybe longer, to slowly slice you a half inch at a time with a small but razor sharp scalpel. Really, he doesn’t have all day, so he’ll have to leave.”

“So…he’s going to make a series of extremely small cuts until I’m quite opened out?” I thought clinically, he was going to make a series of incisions - and keep going. For a moment, I leapt into the future, and didn’t like what I saw.

I saw a young woman who looked a lot like me being splayed out all over the Seattle Center Fountain sometime in the 20th Century. It was in Washington State, and her boyfriend had decided that because she was not the marrying kind, he had to kill her exceedingly slowly and leave her “lengthy” guts trailed all along a fountain. Seems he needed the Virgin Mary approach to living to even so much as draw breath.

I whispered to the Goddess, kill a “black” man instead of her. They will both use the same maneuver of turning their backs to the enemy. Hmmm, the black man is a phony medical doctor who used tactics on his enemies to serve mankind. How better than Jack. It seems his name was Michael King, he turned his back on his enemy, and he got shot. Then the young woman, the Goddess told me, will be saved by turning her back on her enemy. They will then both get up and leave the Seattle Center, and she will put her enemy on a bus and see him again later. Then he will help Dr. King through the X-Men. Meanwhile, the young lady in the future will never get the sick joke. As I envisioned this, I realized the young woman was being saved for the purpose I had seen earlier. She was to return the favor to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. by saving the lives of a black family and their tormentors, who thought for some reason they had to be Dr. Jack Rinehart.

I asked God and the Goddess and someone else’s if I would get to see this when it happened. It said many people would, several of whom were victims of something odd called the Holocaust, another odd thing called the Green River Murders, including the murderer, and that it was all being televised and shown to a being named Alfred Pennyworth and another being called Aunt Harriet who resided on Earth One. Then I saw a strange American man, a descendant of Sherlock Holmes’ called The Batman, and he explained to me that in a completely unlimited universe, all things are possible.

“I thought you would only be a detective.” But I am also Jewish. The Juwes wanted to save you, Annie Chapman, and instead they saved a young American lady. You see, once you were dead, they were blamed for your murders, and they came to get them. Years later, they did get them, in Rinehart’s Germany, on the Night of the Long Knives.

Because my secret name is Outer Space, and you are entering me tonight.

Omigod, I thought; that was Satan. No, I’m the Phantom of the Opera. Black Canary was the lady who sang for me, when I wore a mask, when she needed to be free. And the Juwes are now in Israel, being helped by George W. Bush, who was us once. It can’t last, but someday, maybe we will figure out a way to end world war and not overpopulate. Meanwhile, there are concentration camps again, and yes, they are death camps.

“Yes, that’s all we can figure. Your Jesus is not going to save you, and you are going “straight” to Hell forever, but would you like a lovely cup of yellow tea? It’s the finest tea we have available. Did you wonder what we were doing being stereotypes of your culture and ours, and not people? We were supposed to be ordinary folks like we looked, but we know all about you in advance, and so were have been brought here to say this.”

Too many white writers have been ignorant, which is normal human behaviour.

Then the old man looked at me. “I had a feeling this was going to happen. Shoot, I have to go get the beef in the oven. Hold fast; this is being explained to us as we go. I have a feeling it’s to punish you for those other hookers in England while they die. Good grief, you are not to blame for that. Anyway, here’s your tea, and I have to go get the roast.”

“Can I stay for some roast beef?” They harrumphed an of course as I eased myself into their absolutely gorgeous couch. I was so happy. Now I knew exactly what was going to happen. It was so mysteriously lovely, and involved the infinite eternal universe and omigoodness all things beyond what I could ever imagine or begin to understand.

“You are made out of solid matter, and you are entering outer space tonight. Along the way, you will not be wondering what is going on anymore. Instead, you will be in Hell itself for approximately the length of time it would take you to sneeze if you hadn’t a kerchief, the sneeze caught in your throat, and remember the line you had to stand in to wait for a job at the sweat shops? What do you think, maybe it beats the diseases.”

That was George Bernard Shaw, creator of man and Superman. Something had been named Clark Kent, and was sitting next me. “You see, we had been looking into this Hell fixation for quite some time, but don’t worry. It won’t take overlong.” Then he vanished. GB Shaw had been English, and had written a play called Pygmalion that had been made into My Fair Lady, which I now knew was all about me and our girls. Fancy that!!!!

“I have diseases, and now they have caught up with me. I am having hallucinations.” Everything vanished, and I saw the Indian manage and his fair lady. They were laying into their beefsteak, and then one of them said, “Oh, I forgot, here’s your plate.” It was the other manage. She handed me the plate with a vegetable and potato and some beef on it. I wondered which Earth I was on suddenly, but it felt like solid ground.

You have to go home after you eat your dinner and then go home again.

I hear you and I am finishing my dinner now, give me some time you absolute weirdo. Are you a bastard like my father was? Why are you impatient with me? Because I am impatient with you too. There, the steak is finished, and I don’t need much else. That’s a good potato; please sit there while I eat you. And some lovely broccoli. “Would you like some desert?” I said I’d take a piece of chocolate cake, and they served it to me. It wasn’t any cake I had ever eaten; it had ginger in it, and such a familiar flavor from long ago. But I had never tasted it before, and then I remembered. My mother had given me some Indian cake from a shop up the street, and it had ginger in it too. I was eight years old. I saw myself in an odd picture, and someone named Bruce Wayne was trying to escort me somewhere. I was in a place called Gotham City, instead of London town.

I thought, I’m daydreaming that incredibly handsome Oscar Wilde has reincarnated as someone else. It’s very Hindu to believe in reincarnation for a moment before you die.

Imagine if Oscar was Batman and he finally found his boy Robins at last. And maybe instead of having sex with each other like blind fools, they fought crime. What a strange idea. On some other planet. “Would you like to visit us sometime, Annie Chapman?”

“No, that’s okay. Lois Lane can come visit us, and try to stop our Jack, and all, but I would really like it if you could slow down your birth rate, stop oppressing hookers and do all that, but I don’t tell you what to do. I’m going home and going to bed.”

Would you believe you were still a virgin when you went upstairs and we portrayed you as a little brown girl in a movie called “Monsters, Inc.” and that’s how we got Jewish revenge against, you, Annie Chapman? That’s what gave Karen Cole-Peralta and all those other names we Internet bums are stuck with like Dr. King and all were? That’s what Karen saw in a John Goodman and Billy Crystal movie for children. There was a definite hanging reference against Dr. Martin King in it - about the big blue dude. Jews do think children need rather exposed to something peculiar. That will change.

You saved one woman named Karen in the 1980s. You thus saved about over one hundred people’s lives in the future, and Karen still hopes to go on living. She feels bad because some naïve serial murders happened due to “something she did.” Mostly, she lazed around her living room watching television, and then serial murders happened. Her Dad seems to have accidentally ordered her execution because he had gone wacko, and then she refused to get in the guy’s car, and thanks to that, there are whole black and other families alive today because she studied martial arts and learned how to save lives.

She’s married to a brown Philippino-American-Canadian man who had to run around a war torn country trying to die rescuing people. He wasn’t “trying to die” - he was straining to get there and do the job right. However, he was so lonely he didn’t have a lot of motivation to go on living. Those two have saved plenty of lives, they are ex-unpaid civil rights workers of Dr. Martin Luther King Junior’s civil rights movement, which he didn’t own, but he saved her life. Also, he got her to marry her Remigio - and “Reggie” had a daughter Angela Cristina Peralta with her, and they are trying to do the move north.

A white guy named Farley Mowat told her to go live in Saskatchewan, Canada, and there’s no other place on Earth like it. It almost has room for the entire United States there, but not everyone can move there. You look up where to move on the Internet.

Really? I’m tired, and I want to go to bed and lie down now. And I miss Charles and Bob. I also miss those dead ladies. Where are they? And why did I have no career?

Anybody else? Maybe, said the voice. Go upstairs, and wait, woman person. He’s coming for you, and he thinks he’s the world’s most evil man. He even wants to be him. Wait, and bide your time. He’s just a little lost German with Hell on his conscience, and he doesn’t take all that long to kill people. He’s going to take a long time with you because he had fallen deeply in love with you from a great distance away.

Therefore I must go up to my room now. All you people are “smashing” and all, but I am the most tired young whore I have met and need to get some rest.

There. I am on my bed and am waiting. It is old Ben that I use for comfort as it rings outside. It chimes every hour on the hour. I counted to five bells. Time to go to Dr. Jack’s office and try to lure him down to where I live. Or perhaps I should simply stalk the streets. I will put on my fresh bonnet after I wash up and change my two sets of clothes, I will put on my new laced shoes from America and stop these depraved fantasies.

I am not dying to save anyone else. I am only another whore of England who lives in a small rooming house and I must die my painful but uneventful death. I was dreaming about all those celebrating my demise like it was something important. I am overripe with disease and must be shortly slaughtered like a rude pigeon, or I shall have to haunt these streets at night forever, looking for men to torment me with what I am doing. And when I am dead, the newspapers will use the terrible photograph of what Jack Rinehart did to me to accidentally and uncaringly begin a wave of serial murders that will heartbreakingly sweep the world. It will be so bad; it will affect major aspects of Dr. King’s civil rights movement of the later century. A man named Ralph Ellison, a Negro, will write of this in his book “Invisible Man” - and then Karen Cole will read it. She is not a Negro. She is someone her own family accidentally slotted as being black, or something. She has always wanted to write, and now she has helped write over 200 books for other people. But she has a book based on IM that she wants to get out to a lot of people to read. It’s unlikely that it will go far in life as it is not a particularly needed book.

I wonder if there are any of those nowadays. Must be some other type of book.

This is not important when it comes to reading books, but sometimes it is important when it comes to time periods, being selected for fame, and the writing of books. So her first reaction to Mr. Ellison’s book was, “He got published, and I never will!” She doesn’t know how lucky she is that she’s alive, because something is tormenting her.

Nor does she stand a snowball’s chance of getting her book published, and if it is published, she will have to arrange all promotional activity, or perhaps if she reluctantly agrees, she will get it commercially published in spite of her exhaustion. Ralph’s IM book was originally a 1500 page book, but perhaps he was not exhausted at the time. Me, I’m not Annie Chapman, I wrote this tribute story, and it’s only Fanfiction. It’s to draw people in so I can ghost write their books or copy edit them or otherwise work on them for $2000-8000 per book, depending on the work involved. I’m Karen Cole-Peralta, primarily a science fiction and humor but other kinds of genres writer, and hi there.

Yes, she will read it, because something good told her to. Or something good told her not to. She will read books and get somewhere and she will write this epitaph for me, for Annie Chapman’s grave. Dr. King did not understand what we had been through, but Ralph Ellison did. Ralph was not shot in the back for what happened to us, and Dr. King apparently was shot in the back at some point in time that is now forever dead. The date of that time keeps shifting, as does all human history. I was not stabbed in the back is the odd truth of it; it would have been far worse for me than it was for him, perhaps.

Considering what he was trying to do, which involved racially desegregating hospitals worldwide, so that everyone could go to them, and the fact that people do not know this including me, it seems like he is forever Charles as locked within this story. When I went to college in 1978, they attempted to teach me about racial desegregation and how bad it was in the before times. I now still think I should like to avoid hospitals, but I would like my botox injections instead. I sort of need some medical treatment for my spasms. They are not bad enough that I cannot write; but they may rack my left side. My arm and neck hurt as I type, and I continue typing through it, with no problems.

In which case, I suppose Mr. King gets his “revenge” for being shot instead of stabbed, for being a man instead of a woman, for having a crowd when I was alone. Do I thus get something for going on living, and for reaping the benefits of what he bestowed? He does not reap the benefits of what I bestowed – not that I know of. Or unfortunately or not, perhaps he does. The man was “only” another human maniac like me. He has looked to be many when I am few, namely one. Or is even that so? I take too much time doing this, and should make a sweeping generalization: I am not famous yet. I want to get my book published and out, and I feel there is not enough ability for this to happen.

But considering the overall situation, if I am right about what I “fear the most” in my soul, I am a man and he was a girl. It has to do with how well off one is in this life. This is neither a good thing nor anything but reprehensible, nor can I do anything about it. But somehow I have managed to do something, and it may be with the help of black ghosts. This makes no sense to me at all, and I seem to have been aided by the ghost of Malcolm Shabazz X to save a lady from a Jack the Ripper attack. This is not that meaningful. Also, if I am a man and “he” was a girl, I have moved beyond him – good!!!!!!!!

I’m afraid those are our birthrights and are not something any of us can take credit for, and I am afraid of strange and known people who do that. I do not understand any of these things, really. Surely he’d rather have been shot for his purposes of desegregation than I getting stabbed for no good reason at all, getting my guts splayed all along the Seattle Center Fountain. But it may be that now I shall have to wade through major head cold after more major head colds etc, ad infinitum. The diseases I have are now catching up with me. My original conclusion about the Ripper murders was perhaps the evil doctor should have treated the victims, which might have soothed their souls and even killed them - but not intentionally - and somehow medically experimented on them. I think they would have approved. But instead, because of “Omigod - you’re a whore” we now have serial murders. Well, as I said, I like to think it was overpopulation - in the cities.

And the people aren’t people. They “know it all,” as children do. I do not do this, but am impatient with others in an attempt to speed us up. It seems something has spotted that I am “not a good Christian” and has something in mind that is incredibly childish. And every day I hear on the TV how half the human race is no longer human beings. I do not care to judge others’ characters, and have a feeling things are meant to be. Why we suddenly once again need half of us to not be human – I am not following it. My stepdaughter says - perhaps - it has to do with judging people who do need judged.

I assume that half of the human race is well represented by Hillary Clinton.

Maybe my life was saved by a lot of people. Different kinds of people. Therefore, all those different kinds of people shall also kill me. However, we shall never know if this is what truly happed - or what occurrence it actually was. I keep thinking it might be exactly what he wanted. What who wanted in the end, I do not know.

Epitaph for Annie Chapman, who now has her new grave after much effort by others on her behalf, somewhere in England that is right and proper to bury a young woman:

It will never be seen by other human eyes than hers. It will only be seen by I and I. Annie Chapman and Karen Peralta will see these words together, and someone will think I wish I had done a better job portraying the most exploited white woman in the world, but I think there have been other such people, a googolplex number of them, indeed. They all wanted to do something about the “World’s Worst Murder,” really they did. Well, there have been worse deaths, the on the field soldier Nazis notably died quite a few of them, as they were oft large individuals and it took them some time to kick off, and so forth. And of course your own death has to always be the worst of all. You have to suffer through that eventually, it will vary from person to person, and who knows?

Do not try to get someone else to die for you. They never will be able to do that, and unfortunately, in a world full of ideas, some fools and dreamers will try to do something like that. For the world has its parallel coincidences, and to die for someone else will always be – strangely enough – one of them. Jesus Christ cannot die your death for you, someone else might die to save you at some point in time, and now you know. It’s strange, but we’re stuck always doing that for each other, here on our worldwide and non imitative, exotic, quixotic, and altogether sometimes unpleasant ant farm.

Annie Chapman - Short Beginning Excerpt

2007-11-02T11:01:00.000-07:00

Annie Chapman, Our Dead Lady of Whitechapel

By Karen Cole
Word Count: 5,000

An ordinary domestic dandelion is a beautiful, golden yellow weed that may gradually take over your house’s garden. It is up to you to decide if the people in this are dandelions. There is a young British woman who died long ago. Is she something that needs to be rooted out of a giant lawn, namely, London, England? Before she takes it over, ruling and dominating it with the world’s most lengthy and painful possible forms of death? Or is it Charles, a stranger in a strange land, who might seek his eternally lost soul, which he thought was in the future, who is the real dandelion? Lastly, is it possibly the person or people you would most suspect of such a status – murderers? Some think death is something to be imitated, though it may be a weed in all of our gardens. And one of the world’s most famous killers, oft imitated, is a part of the following story.

“This will never be easy,” thought me to myself as I gazed out the filthy panes of the room I was renting. It was a beautiful day in our many districts of London, one of which inhabited England of the 1870’s. I knew, however, that I was special and different. I had been favored by the gods that be for some unusual purpose, or I was imagining things. Some unnatural thing had been telling me what to do for my life’s purposes.

For my name was Annie Chapman, born of two parents as all such usual people are, but I was definitely stuck now living in the Whitechapel area of a small but scattered parish of London, a city of multiple desires and random lost causes, but mostly punishment. In my time, it was well known - and all our mortal souls had to suffer its bitterest stings. So far as I could tell, women and children seemed to suffer most of these prejudices. The men had a hideous freedom to their causes widespread throughout Victorian England, in spite of the fact we were ruled by a queen. Feeling permanently depressed about this, I gazed out the window, looking at an autumn tree beginning to sprout its wondrous and small leaves. I recalled my father, a man of austerity and grace, who had been impoverished. The fact he was stuck presiding over an ant farm bothered me.

I sensed to myself, that although I was some colored and unfavoured, as I was not very coloured, I could perhaps get a job from the Jews down the street at one of their many small perfume, antique and trinket shoppes, a jewelry store, or perhaps a lasting slot as a flower girl in another district. Still, as my parents had told me to trust Jesus our Lord and Saviour, I was curious. I had found Whitechapel district, and it seemed to me that we were so overcrowded and under favoured in London of that time and place that it would be best to end my existence here. I did not much apply at the shoppes. I saw my looks to be somewhat freakish - and felt work for me was scarce in all known quarters.

I was not certain of suicide, but had taken to light drinking of the only local beverage that afforded me any substantial pleasure at all, which of course was small beer. I noticed these imported beers were oft German or Irish. As I was with the other local “girls” who inhabited the lodgings of our elderly female landlord, who winked at me and let me know that only pleasures of the evening or money could reconcile her duplicate balance sheets, which I was dead sure she was forced to keep, I was sad, for I knew my eventual end must come from intractable diseases. On the other hand, nightly I dreamed of a time when I could experience genuine sexual pleasure. This often involved fornication in broad daylight, which I only imagined. Sometimes I also envisioned a husband, who looked peculiarly like my father. He was finally killing me to get rid of enforced existence, and I hated this as much as anyone would in near same situation.

I loathed being only a girl in a men’s world, and did not want to be anything else. For to me, it would make no difference if I lived or died, as it seemed to be for all others in my time, but in some way I would have liked to lead an entire human existence.

My sole body was to be for the filthy old men - and the younger, equally filthy rogue, lordly and absurd - but well dressed middle aged gentleman of that era, and whatever else came my way, one which would only be stifled as far as ultimate heartbreak and pain needed to be hidden. I cheerfully went about my business, sometimes wondering if a time would come when I would meet my true lord and savior of the world, Jesus Christ. For I could not forsake the duty that God Himself had apparently handed me. I was surely to leave this world too soon. With the juxtaposition of a name like Annie Chapman with Whitechapel, I knew my end would not be pleasant, nor a good example. I understood my tale that was never told was not for your children, the god fearing, or the happy.

I often thought: the Word between me and Whitechapel was simply the word “chap,” almost a common word used in English at that time. There was a logical explanation for my concupiscent unstoppable fate. Perhaps our local, bitter deaths were supplying its greater usage. Yet after having applied at a dozen small shops, including apparently two Jewish ones, and after several episodes of being winked at, tormented by flies and insects, and smelling the street garbage, I felt something like a voice telling me where to go. I knew I was no such “chap.” I was a crappie and would never be a dowager. I had to learn that man is the dominant life form, and that woman was only a feeling appendage.

I headed for Whitechapel based upon this. There was simply nowhere else to go. But I wondered. Was there some other place for one like me, I thought as I looked down the length and breadth of my home’s glowering streets, wandering for the sake of exercise alone, during the day. I thought, it is time. I must gather my long skirts to myself, and reflect upon what I must do. It will not a good thing be. I must never gain too much weight, or I would lose the one job I had left my family early to access.

I will have to sell myself at night to these strange men, as I cannot seem to get another job. Yet, it is not so much because of my eerie skin color, I reflected. Surely, although I am “dirty,” and “filthy,” and all of those things, this could not be a pre-ordained fate. I am as much blonde and blue eyed I decided, as I am a lady of colour, although I am only one person, who must decide if she is a person. Surely a lady of the evening could never be let to be. Although at one time, I found myself at a veterinarian’s office, being told that the only living I could have was cleaning animal cages. I wondered to the man in charge if I could have any facial coverings for this. “No, chit, hurry up and clean those cages, or you are terminated from this job. Get over here, and when you are done, come in the back. I have a big surprise waiting for you, chippie.” He wanted it clearly for free. As I left, I told him, “Next time, supply the “chippie” with a mask of some kind.”

Needless to say, once outside this office, I realized what my definite fate would have to be. I had been too defiant in my own way of something I could not understand or relate my life about. I was rooming near the Whitechapel district at the time, in a rundown and filthy hovel, and I simply went to the office of the renting hostelry, talked to the manage, and was told I owed sixteen farthings for rent, even though I owed none. I knew I needed a certain amount of farthings to make my way in the world, and had oft lost count, as the varieties of pence and farthing, quid and crown danced through my growing mind. I had not met the level of souls who needed only pence, as that would come later.

I remember thinking, damn you, God in the highest. You are simply some concept dreamed up by man. I am going to live in Whitechapel district, alone, and away from you. But at night, I cannot even dream of a man. I must face down the British Empire beasts who think they are lions at night, one at a time, until “it” finally happens. And the unicorn can never help lasses who cannot see straight after two days of life. As the seal of the British Empire dictates, something is a lion, and something is a freak.

Therefore the first is a predator, it casts around for what to feed upon, and it must eat in order to survive. If this is its wife, its husband or its own land, it must make its statements, sign onto its “just” causes, and take on its own workloads. But these are always assigned to it by another force, one which subsumes it to cause its death.

Casting about for the dozen girls whom I was to work with, whom I had first met at a trade school, I found Cecilia, and Mary. I asked Mary if there was anyone else named same as her in Whitecap area. I immediate thought there ought to be two such Maries. “I should like to live in the same rooms with her,” I told Cecilia. “What, are you an invert? Do you like women? You don’t look dark or short enough. I’d think beer and some high life would be enough for you. I have a nice man who wants to see you. His name is Charles. He’s the cutest bloody bloke in England. Come back here.” She was indicating the deep interior of the tavern we congregated at, to speak between us.

I paused for a moment. “What, is Charles not lit up? Is he, ah, a drunkard, and perhaps not white or something?” I had been introduced for breeding purposes to many such. Having turned them all down as unsuitable, I had slept only with white men.

“Whatever would make you say that? He has a name and a pedigree. Don’t you think you would like to meet him? By the way, he wants to discuss an arrangement with you. He told me he wants to organize us ladies into sort of union. Can you imagine, Annie, we could work for decent wages for a change?” She giggled. “Really, he thinks he’s bonnie Prince Charlie, oh, he’s a rough but good hearted cuss. No, he’s out for blood.”

I had read in the newspapers, having been a schoolgirl and able to read, and having greatly enjoyed this period of time in my life, of things such as unions and also how men only took advantage of women. Still, I knew how men lived and died on the job. My father had perished away from our apartment, and we had never known what had happened. There had been a story in the papers out of Sussex about an industrial accident in the silver mines of Brazil. I wondered how my father had traversed the waters; maybe easily, maybe hard. In a ship, or in a slave boat? Such had begun my long slow slide downwards. I had taken to drinking and also carousing with the local men. But I had also contemplated drug abuse, especially cocaine, and had turned aside. I had thought of my education. But my mother ran out for our four other children, all younger than me, and I had to go work for my living. For a time, I had to suffer cocaine withdrawal, but we were tough girls at the time and no problem was had waiting out the shaking. You see, the elaborate clothing of our times dictated our existences almost completely. It took well nigh unto fifteen minutes to lace up one’s high button shoes, and they cramped one’s feet sufficiently to cause intolerable agony, although removal of them felt like surrender.

Most fortuitously, in Leeds I found a new style of shoes that were less ponderous. These simply laced up to the ankles and had become widespread in America. Made of patent leather, they were expensive but not impossible to buy with our wages.

Penny small pence for my thoughts, where I could ever head them, as my dark friend Cecilia, who was good at slipping in and out of the shadows and back alleys as she introduced me to the Life, dragged me to the back of the dingy tavern and I came across Charles. He was standing there, and sure enough, I had to think what I thought. He was indeed a Negro man, and he had on the most arcane African grin I had ever seen.

“Would you care to make more money at what you are bound to do?” Charles asked me, taking my hand quite gently and giving me an obviously acquisitive peck on the back of my hand. “I’ve never been treated so like a lady before, Charles. Is’t your real name?”

“Yes, but you are now to have a new name. I want to call you something else, but you may select it, my fair lady. What would’ a care to be called, now if you work for us?” He was a scant taller than me, but loomed larger than my desires could push him back.

I reflected upon how much I loved my Lord and Saviour, and how much Charles looked like the Devil. As he stood there, he resembled pictures of the Moors I had seen in my book. They were treated as the enemies of our England, and I wondered. Would this man help secure me better fortunes? No, there was no such thing as hope. He held my hand for the briefest of moments, and then released it as his gently slid downwards.

“I’m sorry, Charles, but I do so work alone. I will reside in Whitechapel, and, ah, I will await the coming of the one who will save me from my appointed task. Upon the coming of my Lord, I will then go home. Do you understand this, my Charlie?” I decided to give him his grin back, and smiled the smile of one I knew was quite uncertain. Perhaps this boyish man had something in mind along the lines of gathering up our monies. His hat was cut of the finest cloth, and his costume smacked of recent times and extremely well adjusted accouterment. He looked like a good “old boy” from say, Liverpool, where I understood the fine arts were gaining in attention, and there were nice museums. But I doubted he’d long attended school, from his overly active mannerisms. His frown was too like his smile; arduous, songlike, and full of evil implications.

“Ah, I understand. But would you like me to buy you a beer first?” The fellow stood there, looking at me proudly and far too arrogantly to be thinking he would be in any trouble for accosting me. I knew now what my prospective clients would also probably be. There would be no mercy whatsoever from the disease threat. I knew now beyond all certainty what I was going to be forced to become. And it might last longer than long. There were growing hospitals that could take me in, and the treatments there for disease were as medieval and arcane as any I had studied in my way at school.

I would be taking some of the men of England with me on this unpleasant Biblical Job like journey, I decided. If not many a long year would await my misfortune, I should be a slit throat. It would help make up for some of I and my girls’ lack of good circumstance. It was not the men folks’ fault; I could not see it any other way. And yet they all seemed to think that sex was something they owned or otherwise could throw away as some sort of ungodly machinelike contraption. I was sure I myself would turn out to be one.

“Charles, I need initiated into this. Could you buy me a beer, and could we step upwards into an upstairs bedroom, one last time, before I settle down into my life of prostitution?”

He snidely frowned, and said, “Look, young lady, I am definitely not liking your mood and would require some recompense for your time, if I was to be a fancy man for you. I have done this now for several years, and it is high time I became upwardly mobile. When do you want to go into an upstairs bedroom with me?” As he stood there, I saw that he would be rankled if I took anything like a sweet time with him. Also, I picked up a deep sense that he wanted something nice out of life which he could never obtain.

I took his two toned but silken left hand in one sudden motion. “I have sixteen pence in my pocket. If you must be such a small boy about this, I can certainly pay you for going through the motions with an aging and soiled dove such as me. It is my rent money, and it is all I have. Let us go upstairs, and for one hour, let us be a man and a woman together. You can show me the way. I will even lead the way upstairs for you. Do you want to beat on me? Do you have equipment, or is it as simple as it looks?”

“No,” said Charles, casting his eyes away. “I do, but actually, I will take your sixteen pence and get you out of here. Let us go buy you one beer, and be done with you. Come on now, such a choppy; let us go buy you a glass of wine. Come on now, Dove.”

So he led me over to where I and my friends congregated, and was the only one of his kind there as we settled in to what would be one of my few last glasses of heavy and dark brew. I sat and tired watched its aged traces swirl in the glass. The piano player was fetching a good tune out of the wooden instrument, and several of the girls were dancing merrily, pulling their skirts up aways, sometimes doing what we thought of as the stage dancing which I had seen growing up, down in another district, one which the rich were known to haunt and which had many a festive ballroom hall dance going in it. Some journeymen, carpenters and tradesmen, were dancing about, as the tavern was not as small as it looked from the outside, and it was a good time being had by all. Even me. I was surprised as I looked around, happy for a moment at the lack of Christian antipathy. The men whirled their girls around, dipping them, sometimes dancing erratically. I began tapping my shod foot rapid time to the music, and clapping my hands.

“Chuck - my bonnie lad,” I tittered suddenly into my feminine hand, which had beautiful red nail polish on each nail - but of the nailpolish was starting to chip around the edges. “Charlie my darling, let us get up and dance.” As I gazed down the bar, I could see the Jewish owner of the tavern, or so I thought of him, wiping all the glasses with one towel, and dreamed briefly of securing a job as a tavern girl. Charles seemed to flinch. I thought, would the tavern owner hire him? Perhaps he would not work there. I wanted to reach out and grab him by the waistcoat and haul him - slowly - upstairs with me.

“Wait. I have to go dance with the ladies who work for me. Wait here.” He left me, his grey tailcoats swirling around in mock protest. Then one of what I assumed now were his girls handed me a newspaper. It was a headline on that grabbed my attention. As I read it, my heart sank, although it was nothing unexpected and I had been looking for it.

It read, “Ladies of the Evening Disappearing in Whitechapel.” As I read the story, it turned out they were doing anything but disappearing. Our bodies were being found in strange and peculiar places, splayed out like carpetbags, in odd positions. And I felt chilled to the bone when I found other Mary indeed. It was a young girl I knew who had gone to a separate school than mine, once I had met her at a coffee shop, and we had shared dreams of working as writers, musicians, waitresses and artists, and she had been found in an alley with her throat ripped wide open and her abdominal cavity also gutted through her heavy clothing, in a position which began to sink deeply into me.

Sitting with my head spinning out of control, I happenstance saw a street at night. It was one of many - with dead bodies upon it. I also viewed an absolute picture of what had happened. As the grey cold swirls of a thick London negotiable fog gathered around both the victim and the oppressor, I saw who it was. He wore a long black cloak and a broad grey brimmed hat. He knew what he was doing, too good of a job at it. If it was one person, it was an unlined medical doctor. I read other articles, and there was some attempt to blame the entire local Jewish population. It finally centered on a butcher named Leather Apron, and there was talk of arresting this Jew. I knew for a cold hard fact that it was not him, but a cadaverer who lived and worked near the vicinity.

And I next saw a sepia toned picture of what the “vultures” that gather and make money off of us had done to her “pretty” corse. She was so dark and mysterious, and had lovely long black hair. They had sewed her body all up to pose her both as a new thing called pornography - and as a medical item. I had to think, I somewhat minded the porno, but was happy about the medical aspect. Then it dawned on me. This would lead to the widespread abuse of women. However, it seemed a new way to make money, one that might get some of us away from the horrendous sweatshops, where in crowds you could only work until you dropped, were out on the streets and got yours. And the growing photography arena must of course have something strange to take on. I thought, Charles should try taking pictures of us, but perhaps he has not such knowledge as that.

I was sure of a sudden that it had all been a necessity, and that it had happed before, but had not been reported on by the newspapers so frequently. Please if there be a God, I briefly prayed: do not take enormous photographs of my dead naked body. And what if this attitude spread out, engulfed the other citizens of London, and destroyed her?

“Excuse me. I have to go see a doctor now, everyone. Oh, I have to get out of here.” Being medium height but of slight build, yet a little paunchy round the middle, it took quite a lot of lifting my skirts and pushing to get the crowd aside and to leave the large room of a tavern. God was telling me where next to go. I cruised lightly down the street, giving a glance to the left of me every time, seeing the beautiful shops of the Jews and others gleaming in the broad daylight. It looked like a nice home for real people, the sort that could wish you a taught day and hand you the proper portion of goods. I looked, and there was someone who looked like Charles working in the back part of grocers. It turned out to be an island woman from Haiti who was sweet on white men, the likes of whom gave her three children, but had deserted her each time for someone else. Every time I needed fresh fruit, I would ask her to give me an extra portion for the others. But she finally stated that her billet was too long to give us any further. Her name was Hattie, and I almost asked grocers if they would hire me instead of her. Grocers was white mostly, but Hattie had been so nice to us I could not bear to hurt her and ruin her life.

I sighed, adjusting my bonnet and retying the strings alongside my glowing cheeks. In autumn in London town, there were many bustling down the sidewalks, heading places all unknown to me, many of which I had already been. I knew the shop of the doctor was down the street about two more blocks. I shifted my skirts about my leggings, and began padding like I was some sort of panther - or perhaps another cat of my own - a bit further. As my eyesight was perilously obscure, I could make out the sign above the door. It had been hand painted, but I had been told long ago that only menfolk painted signs.

“Dr. Jack Rinehart,” it seemed to proudly proclaim, “Mortician, barber, necrologist, and exterminator.” As I lingered over the last word, I seemed to hear a macabre song in my head, one about cockroaches and the plague. I shuddered as the wind whipped around my bonnet, and as I looked over at a greenly growing oak tree in a planter, it sent some leaves over to me. They slicked across my eyes - and then I took one - and peeled it off. It was the only way I could be a “peeler.” That was a member of the authorities, such as Scotland Yard, or the local bobby police. The job of a policewoman was rare indeed. All of our girls made the lowest possible wages, and were easy to take advantage of, but so were most of the men, I supposed. I had dreamed of taking the train to Stratford of Avon on Sea, but had no relatives out there whom I could stay with while I found work. I hoofed it to the chap’s office, thinking that if enough of us were dead, they would eventually catch the miscreant. Still, considering what we were doing, it seemed all right to me either way. Surely, the population of England could use some lowering.

I paused at the door of his office, wondering if it was also his residence. It was so crowded in downtown London that it probably was also his place of abode. There was at least one set of rooms above the office, and a gaslight flickering in one of them. In those days, you see, we had no electric light everywhere and relied on flame lights.

But the chap was a medical doctor. As I walked into his office, I gasped in horror. There were various undone girls on the tables, and quite a few boys. Dead boys, everywhere. Corpses were openly spread to see, obviously to be examined in spurious and hideous manners. As I wheeled around, seeing the dead for the first time in my life, I gulped and gasped. I drew a hand to my throat, putting it away, and stared at the man with a kind of hatred. Something real was telling me this was our persecutor, and not a good man.

“Are…you a mortician? Is this where you take their lives, or save them?” He looked slowly over his pince nez, taking his spectacles off, rubbing them on his bloody sleeve. I looked into what appeared to be a Teutonic face, one which I had never seen before. It was white but red with a kind of age, and looked furrowed above the brows. His hair was uncombed, and his cloth apron as blood soaked as I had ever seen on a cattle butcher. And his entire body was shot through with disease, especially most of his face.

“Miss, I presume you want to speak with me? Come have a seat over here. Would you like to get up on a table, so I can examine you?” His lips curled into a kind of vicious snarl, as he began to reach behind me, perhaps to close the door at my back. I inched myself backwards, holding the door’s handle grasped firmly, ready to swing it open, but had nowhere really to go at this point in time.

“Nooooooooooo,” I scattered through my loose teeth, thinking this could be the occasion I had been waiting for right here in his office. “Do you, that is, are you Jack Rinehart, and would you come up with me to my rooms now - and we could have a good time?” I wondered if trying to make him into a customer would settle his hash. But it was more than obvious he had something utmost lifelong in mind that I couldn’t approach. “Do you think you and I could go up the street to a lovely restaurant, and eat?”

End of Installment One