“Excuse me sir.” She pulls a map from her pocketbook. It’s been folded and refolded then finally balled up. A bright red mouth makes her look as though she’s been kissing a freshly fed vampire.
The color has bled into the little smoker’s lines around her lips. It is disturbing to me.
“Did you fart?” I ask polite as I can since I can’t understand why she would ask my forgiveness.
“W-what? I need directions to the museum.” She un-balls the twisted map a bit.
“The museum.” I feel my head start to bob up and down. “Yes. The place where they house the things ripped from artist’s souls. I know it well. You know they allow that willingly to be done to them. It’s a horrific thing.”
“What an interesting perspective of art,” she says. “Did you study formally?”
“Formally?” The red bleeds more, making tiny rivers of blood on her face. “No, but it’s not hard to see how they suffer. Their souls fed off by vultures.”
Her head begins to bob along with mine. “I spent many years suffering over my paintings only to be left misunderstood.”
I feel that twitch develop under my eye. She smells of flowers and bowel. She disturbs me. “Who are you again?”
She laughs. It is more a cackle, like a crow laughing at finding a piece of carrion. “That’s right, who are any of us?”
“Us. Were we together?” I could not remember.
The woman giggles as if she were one of the young women I watch in the park. The noise grates against my skin. She is old and unappetizing. Her skin is lax, transparent.
“Is that your way of asking to accompany me to the museum?” She touches my hand with long snakelike fingers.
“I don’t like you.”
“Oh.” Her face, powdered and drawn-on, flushes red. “I guess I misunderstood you.” She smoothes the map. The blood spreads. Her hair reaches toward me. I step back.
“Don’t touch me. You need to not touch me.”
“I wasn’t. I just need to know where exactly I am and where the museum is-”
“What makes you think I know where you are? How would I know that?” I grab the map and tear it up, my hands working completely on their own. “You could be anywhere.”
“I’ll ask someone else. I…” She steps back as if I were growing toward her. “I’m sorry to have bothered you.”
“You can’t ask anyone else. Who will know?”
“Sir, please. I don’t want any trouble.”
“But who will know?” I hear my voice grow larger. Her eyes match it. They swirl with color. “You have to find yourself before they do.”
“What? You’re crazy.” She turns her back to me and starts to walk. “Why does this always happen to me? I always talk to the strange ones.”
“Didn’t you need to know where the museum was? It’s on Lancaster north of Seventeenth. Turn left.” I smile, knowing I saved her.
