MICKEY SLIM ● THE HEAD DANCER ● CLOSED
❝ Oh, that one? I remember when she came in. A real hot mess, if you ask me. She came out of fuckin’ nowhere but I still found something out, and well: I’d hate to be part of a dead man’s tale. ❞
THE SINNER. TW: ABUSE, MURDER
PROLOGUE. Fade in. Exterior. Desert. The last strangled breaths of twilight. Red-rock hills and sand are left cold and abandoned by the receding midday heat, and at this hour the angels have gone inside and locked their doors, pulled down their blinds. They have turned on their televisions in the sky, causing a blue-black to lay over the scene, everything turning the colour of morning glories and bruises from a hateful lover.
A car idles with its lights on, black and sleek but matted by the dust it has disturbed on the drive into nothingness. Like guilt, the sand rises and sticks at first touch; like guilt, it will only be wiped off by attention of another hand. It’s quiet, aside from the rumbling of the car engine and the repetitive noise of metal hitting soil and pitching it forth.
A girl shovels in the distance, highlighted by the vehicle’s headlights. A pile, vague and pyramidesque, grows at her feet. The sound of the metal hitting the gravel is consistent, hard, like a fist to the chest. It sounds like breaking a lock. She works meticulously and quickly, unbothered by the swaying dark, until a scrambling noise snaps her head up like a marionette moving the wrong way.
In the dark a shadow becomes a thing of outline and body. A snake emerges from behind the tires and traverses the space between them because nature knows no kings, curling over the hip of the body sprawled in front of her.
The girl moves slowly. Her shovel is still pitched into the dirt, locked in by tension and gravel, and the serpent’s investigative tongue flicks over the purple-pale digits of an unmoving hand. She can’t get it free. The uncouth sound of a metal mouth grinded into dirt sets the animal’s eyes on her. Her wrist snaps to one side and she raises the shovel.
The snake’s tail rattles in warning. A single strike in one flash. A thud. Silence.
If I told you a flower grew in the dark,
She throws the head and the tail of the snake in the hole first. The body follows.
Would you trust it?
I. And the story without a beginning begins like this:
She’s born and passed off in quick succession. The cautionary tale that would be recited to her later was that her mother had been a teenage delinquent, an unmarried slut with ripped pantyhose around her ankles and a nose bloodied from all the coke she had been sniffing up until dropping her off at the gates of Mount Providence. Largely this was only just a rumour, but the nuns had a habit of turning gossip into gospel. Years later, she would look back on this half-formulated thing of a memory on her birth mother, and smile in fondness. She had no way of knowing if the account had been true, but it didn’t matter. The truth rarely matters in a story. But she liked to think that she had been spawned by someone as no good, rotten, dirty and desperate as they can come.
It had always been a matter of amusement to the girl that there had never been any tie-in edition of the story of her father: her mother was branded a Jezebel, but for all that her father was not named or mentioned, he might not have existed. A man’s trespass could be forgotten, but a woman’s could never be forgiven. The nuns of Providence, a small and underfunded Catholic orphanage in Montreal, seemed then to miss the irony of naming the small child Mary, tying her to the woman who conceived Christ by way of immaculate conception. So: both Mary’s would know life without a corporeal sperm donor, and instead live with only strange wonder and rage.
The architecture of the city itself was fairytale like – silver gates like spider webs on a wet May morning, cobblestone streets, wet-black wood entrances – but the poverty within the gates of Mount Providence Orphanage caused everything to look overripe; an otherwise perfect fruit with a rotted spot so deep and dark your thumb could press all the way to the core. Her years here were slow and troubled, perhaps because the nuns resented her for the image she preserved of her harlot mother and sought to punish her in her stead, or perhaps because the girl truly emulated the difficulty and dilemma of the woman proceeding her.
There was rage everywhere in the dank halls. From what Mary would learn of god in that place, he was a hate-mongering deity that reigned in pestilence and punishment, sending down terrible wracking coughs to the girls laying next to her, covered only by thin sheets. He commanded that terrible violence be enacted in his honour, demanding blood in place of wine like the Gods of old, telling his disciples in their black robes and habits to penalize mere children for both their wrongdoings and natural desires.
It was either that, or he was not there at all.
And she had asked, sometimes, for his aid; questioned his existence and begged for a sign of good faith. A little raven-haired girl with shaking hands and bitten red lips, bent over the edge of her worn mattress, praying for salvation.
She learned then that this is what happens when you ask god for something: Nothing. So this is what she learned instead: how to take.
II. Labelled a problem child and beaten for her thieving habits and passionate tongue, Mary was a feral thing, to be sure – but all things with wild hearts are. She passed through numerous prospective families, each returning her after breaths of time for various circumstances, but generally otherwise unpleasing to the potential parents with desire for easy assimilation and no work. As she aged, the adoptions became further and farther apart, and the youth prepared to age out of the system: she took her beatings without giving the satisfaction of crying, learned how to best store and ration out her food, and befriended those with brave bones like her.
Her Mamulya would arrive on the doorstep shortly before her twelfth birthday, clad in a dark black dress, heavy scarf, and sunglasses like she was attending a funeral. Perhaps it was the death of all the girls Mary might have been before her.
The stranger took her home despite the nuns warning of her stubbornness and foolhardy nature, looking over at the scrawny child with matted hair and staring intently from behind tinted lenses as if she might read something on her. The contracts were signed that day. Mary left with the tall, wide-hipped Slavic woman, who chain smoked on the car ride to her apartment and taught her the Russian word for mother, Mamulya, while stressing that she despised the English variants of Mommy. She would be addressed in Russian or by her birth name, Oksana, but never anything else.
What’s your name? The woman asks, blowing smoke out the window and eyeing her new child calmly. Mary, she answers. The other laughs, guttural and deep. It almost sounds like a witch would, if they choked out their lungs with chemicals. Mary, she repeats. How godawful. I will call you Masha.
They return to the apartment, and she learns not to unpack her small suitcase as they will be leaving before the month’s end to return to Oksana’s homebase of Toronto.
Mamulya has a man to marry.
III. She does it all from behind a computer screen.
Masha now, Mary forgotten, watches her Mamulya stir solyanka with one hand and hold the phone to her ear with the other, observes as she coos love poems without a single spark in her eyes. Oksana is a mail order bride that perpetually forgets to lick the stamp and press it to a sharp white edge, promising arrival without ever so much as sealing the envelope. Gifted with an attractive face and silicone breasts, her mother steals the hearts of the lonely and the stupid from behind the profiles of innumerous holed-up websites, making poetry and proclamation via email. Though she cannot watch them from the grass like a predator, Masha watches as how mamulya learns the signs of weakness regardless: how she knows they have grafted themselves onto her so thoroughly, they cannot bear to be torn apart. That’s when tragedy, like a bell and rainfall and bad omen, strikes on schedule. A sick mother, a sicker daughter, fraud, debt, violence – anything that requires monetary aid, she requests and the lovesick answer. And then she leaves. It isn’t pretty. But the viper does not stop to think if its venom sings sweet when it has its teeth in meat.
And there’s no glory in this con, this back-logged virtual arena for the pretty girls that could have but never did. Her Mamulya is among them, a failed actress with more face than talent and legs longer than her career, and on the nights she moves from wine-tipsy to vodka-drunk she pets her daughter’s face and tells her about all the things that almost were, waxes about the things that might’ve been. In this way, Masha learns how easy loss is - it happens when you’re not paying attention, and even when you are. You have no say in the things you never earn.
Be like me, she says, with drowned dreams and asphyxiated goals – Let me teach you what I can, the secrets the rest of the world don’t know. She rarely goes to school, but has a home-bred education taught between the morning and matinee shows. She learns the states by memorizing the accents of her neighbours, teaches herself to tell time by when the automated fountains goes off. And most importantly, she is taken into the pink-tight cult of womanhood and, teaching her about life and all the things a young girl should not know:
Never chase a man, and never cry after one either.
Always drink the good wine.
Go to bed clean, naked, and perfumed.
Don’t ever, for for any reason, under any circumstances, leave the house without mascara, a pocketknife, and a fresh change of underwear.
III. It’s her own fault, it’s their fault, it’s no one’s fault that she’s so damned pretty. She grows, and even without the sequins and hairspray back at home, she’s got a face like a shipwreck and a body like a loveboat, and everybody wants her. But she’s heard the stories of all her Mamulya, and the Aunties that come over once a week (the ones that like her were once young and beautiful), and knows where only beauty and an appreciation for it gets you. She’s embittered by all the lives she’s never lived, the women she’ll never been, and so all the pretty tanned boys she sneaks to the park with past midnight get sent home with lipstick behind their ear and her phone number removed from their pocket.
The girl learned pain and how to bear it in her first life, and in her second she learned love and how to snatch it, like picking burrs from a bleeding palm with your teeth. This makes her dangerous and quick handed, coming into womanhood with too many traumas laced onto her back, and it effects how she interacts with the world. Young and reckless and desperate to feel, she parades her body through a line up of heartbreaks, sealing herself to those that are full of enough beautiful glare and sharp edges to be interesting to her. She flits from heart to heart, devastating others and at times herself. To those that know her, she bares a warning label.
CAUTION: SHARP EDGES.
IV. She moves out too young because she thinks she knows everything, the Girl that wanted to be God, and she thinks wrong a second time, imagining she’s in love. His name is J.D., and he looks and fucks like a religion, and they fight like rebellion, but it isn’t so bad at first. They love each other, after all.
Know this: she is wrong. This is how he loves her, with fists and knees and her spine up against the wall, tremlbing. This is how he loves her, with –
[ REDACTED.
THIS CHAPTER OF HER TALE WILL BE OMITTED, BECAUSE IT IS A WAR STORY THAT IS NOT FIT TO BE REPEATED. WE SHALL PRETEND THIS PART HS BEEN WORN AWAY BY TIME, WORDS POLISHED OFF OF STONE BY RUBBING SAND. IF THERE ARE SMALL HALF-FRAGMENTS OF SENTENCES LEFT ON THAT STONE, THEY WOULD SAY THIS:
When she sees clearly, there is blood covering her sight. ]
V. She had planned her extraction, a final exit to the months of pain she had been enduring with meticulously and labyrinthine thought. She had no force to exert against him, so she would use cunning in its place. A road trip, all her accounts liquidated and hid at the bottom of her back, a motel and a map to the nearest car dealership which would accept cash and no ID for a shitty ride.
It had been planned, it had been perfected.
It had been ruined.
There is no kind way to say this. This is a war story, and you should put your hands over the ears of your heart so as not to feel the oncoming shrapnel too deeply. She is young and he is vicious and there is a parade of brilliance in the room beside them, with only a thin wall between. The one he has her pressed to. The one that bangs every time she slams her foot into its core, like a hurricane. Her high heel breaks, and on the ground it looks like a discarded silver arrow. Somewhere, Artemis weeps. He finds her cash and he guesses the rest, so he goes for the throat. It is him or her, and she chooses –
with a guttural sound, one last press for freedom, an unplugged extension cord into the neck.
It is him or her, and she chooses.
VI. Fade in. Exterior. Desert. The last strangled breaths of twilight. Red-rock hills and sand are left cold and abandoned by the receding midday heat, and at this hour the angels have gone inside and locked their doors, pulled down their blinds. They have turned on their televisions in the sky, causing a blue-black to lay over the scene, everything turning the colour of morning glories and bruises from a hateful lover.
A snake head and a dead man.
If I told you a flower grew in the dark, would you trust it?
VII. She takes all the money, and she drives.
By now she’s learned how to endure pain; how to swallow a man’s heart; how to escape. So she puts it to good use: she blows through towns and small hustles, dancing for cash and hustling pool for favours. She takes hearts when she can and the watches left on the bedside every time, leaving only fake names and the vague imprint of her perfume on the pillow. And then she keeps going, putting more and more distance between herself and the corpse buried in the Nevada desert.
She drives, and she drives, and she drives, until she meets someone.
They’re at opposite sides of a gas station. They look like shit. They both want to get to fucking Nowhere.
So they do.
THE FACTS.
Mickey – as she’s known now – sought out Dertosa because she wanted to hide in the grime it offered. Having known about the city’s impeccably high crime rate, there seemed no greater area to reach anonymity with by swathing herself in the cover of other’s sins in the infamous Toxic City. Her run in with Frenchie had been entirely coincidental, but much like the earlier stages with of her life, this chance interaction with an individual would shape the mold for the life she would enter.
Barely eighteen at arrival but with a body and an attitude that lied for her, Mickey’s endurance for poverty and pain had run out by the time she reached the Forbidden Vices’s door. She would take back from the world what it had stolen from her and smashed over its knee, and she would make sure that nobody ever touched her again without losing their hands.
While some would assume clubs like Forbidden Vices are where women go when they have no other options – removing their clothes on stage when society won’t give them enough of a break to earn money with them on – they’re wrong. Mickey chose her career willfully, dictated her profession with purpose. With a body that could topple empires and a mind that works miracles, so why not make hundreds with a swing of her hips if the typing of her fingers only gets her dozens? The job is easy when you’ve got a working set of legs and a working girl pair of tits, and Mickey has gotten economical. Having invested six years in the growth of the club, the place is now an iconic spot – and her name household.
But for all the effort she has extended into aiding the Forbidden Vices grow, double this has gone into the cultivation of her image. Calculated from the very moment she entered the city, Mickey has created a very purposeful mythology of mystery and desire around herself. To converse with her is to open oneself up onto a riddle as sharp as a knife. Always cutting in her casual repose, she leans back and blows smoke into the face of those that address her, witty and salacious in her conversations. She is overtly flirtatious, outright sexual even, and challenges individuals on any topic she sees fit – simply to make someone uncomfortable, to watch them reevaluate their traditions or ideologies. Vague in her commitments and linked only to the Forbidden Vices club by a tenuous chain of loyalty, it’s clear that the woman has one priority above all: herself.
And Mickey is entirely aware of what anybody thinks about her at any given time – her perception is what she has worked so tirelessly to control. She allows for the spreading of mismatching, outlandish rumours about her origin, all while never commenting on any piece of her past life or youth to ensure that nobody is ever sure who or what her truth is. She fucks married men and tells their wives to instill the fear of god into man, and turns down high figures of offers for sexual favours and asks for more only to deny it once again – simply to ensure the gossip of her expense is circulated. She wears dark glasses at night and thigh high boots during the day and never allows anyone to know what she is thinking.
THE MUN.
☾ Taryn | PST | She/Her
