“One of Our Girls is in Trouble” by LC von Hessen

One of our girls is in trouble.

Oh, it seems normal, doesn’t it? Safe, even. In that little apartment of hers. Lightly faded floral prints and autumn-hued neutral tones for a madhouse dayroom simulacrum of calm. A wall-to-wall shag carpet to muffle any sounds of domestic discord from the other tenants. Unbroken by turquoise and fuschia, Memphis-style slashes, grids, chaotic angles. A good girl’s home.

(You have been good, haven’t you?)

Yet it’s marked by a conspicuous absence. And a note in an unknown hand:

If you ever want to see him again, come tonight. And come alone.

Chasing the address in her car, under curtain of dark. The road narrows, a bridal canopy of enfolded branches all washed out flat, a paparazzo’s flashbulb.

An abandoned warehouse opens for her. And out of the shadows step Mister 

One, 

Two, 

Three. 

One wears leather, one wears velvet, one wears tweed. Gold chains, tie clips, malachite signet rings. Circling her with their little knives. Buck knife, jackknife, gravity knife.  

Surely Mister One is the most fearsome. 

“I’ll putcha in the movies, girl, if you don’t SHUT THE FUCK UP.” He bites the words off with tobacco-tarred teeth. Flicker of a projection reel beyond him in the dark.

But surely Mister Two is the most fearsome. 

“And if thine eye offendeth thee . . . pluck it out!” A dry rasping laugh and a sleight of hand: plunging the knife towards his own sneer, he pulls back a sow’s eye impaled on his switchblade. “It’s good for business, girlie, ‘cause I can’t cryyy anymore!”

But surely Mister Three is the most fearsome. 

“Don’t even think about it, girl, don’t even think, don’t try to run, don’t try to forget, you’ll never find him, but we will always, we will always find you if it takes a million years, we’ll cut you in a million pieces, the woods will reclaim you, the pavement will swallow you, the chainlink will stake you, deep in the river where they’ll never dredge you out, down to Owl Creek and through the tall trees—”

But surely she is the most fearsome. Surely our girl is the most fearsome. Surely, coiled up somewhere, when they cram her into that little sportscar to the nightclub off the highway.

“We got ourselves a li’l canary, boys!” says Mister One behind the wheel.

“We gonna make her sing?” says Mister Two, tracing her ear. 

“Oh, you have to see her sing,” says Mister Three, caressing her knee.

The club’s windows pulse with its neon innards. A dive through flamingo pink and electric blue, down to the deep end a sumptuous red / and blue / and red / and blue, floating inside a police siren, but there’s no law left for you here, girl; all the angels have gone home.

(And where is he, the one she came to save? The one who waits to save her?)

Mister One smacks the jukebox for his dime back. Mister Two breaks the rack at the billiards table, hip cocked at a slutty angle. Mister Three manspreads at the bar, pinning her in place with an unblinking stare as he downs half his beer in a viper’s gulp. “Don’t you go thinking you can run off now.” Punting a bottle cap across the counter with his thumb and middle finger. 

The opening act is a man, Lord Fortuno, painted graveworm-pale, stitched into snakeskin. He can croon mournfully as Pagliacci to the bleat of the noir jazz trumpet. He can tell your future, or worse yet, your present. 

Even yours, our girl.

There’s a needlepoint-prick in the pits of his eyes . . . that says 

You are going to die tonight. 

Write this in the fibers of your corpus callosum where the lobotomist’s icepick can’t reach. 

Someone laughs, faceless, in the dark, because what is reason to a mad world? A world that has chosen madness. What is left but the allure of the lost mind, the gallery of one’s own failures, the romance of the gun, the lover’s strike, the languid dance, the whorl of laughing gas? 

It could have been so beautiful.

One of our girls is in serious, serious trouble, and nobody knows where she is. 

Does he know? Can he save her?

There! Through the window. Out back by the woods. A glowing ember, a trail of smoke in the darkness. There’s him, her man, her savior, lit like a rentboy, high-contrast from a streetlight above, one leg bent, propped against the pole. And he flashes that cruising peripheral glance that threatens to drop his eye out like Mister Two’s. 

He is as dangerous as any one of those three. But not to you. Not like that. 

Please, not like that.

She comes to in a hotel room, or is it her apartment? And so quiet she can hear the wind billowing the curtains like ghost-shrouds. Waking up beside one of the Messrs Three. 

(But which one gave her the bruises? Which one gave her the rapture?)

“You can never dye your hair,” says the Mister. “Only blonde girls make the news.” But he tells this only to the girl in the mirror. The girl in the dark satin robe, hair and makeup disheveled, a smear of a person. 

The Mister rolls out of bed for a piss.

Below and beyond, a car door slams, gravel crunches underfoot. 

And it’s Him! It’s Him! 

But it isn’t him, darling. And your Mister has disappeared with all the little knives.

He’s up the staircase—

—he’s in the hallway—

—he’s fumbling with the doorknob—

—and she steps through the mirror—

And is back in the nightclub.

One of our girls is in terrible, terrible trouble, and everyone is watching.

The curtains part. She’s pushed onstage to sing, painted, coiled, and piano-wired into an avatar of the woman she can never be. 

Yes, she remembers. He could be watching. 

In the grey murk of audience past the floodlights, three men at a table surround a girl, our girl. Their metals flash as they grin.

Yes, girl. Sing. Sing for your life. 

He’s watching. 

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