The Squeaky Floorboard.

Sit down and write a story. Don’t think about it, just write. Call it “The Squeaky Floorboard.” It’s about a woman who wakes up next to a man she occasionally sleeps with. She doesn’t like the fact that she sleeps with him. She wakes up early one morning and finds something under a floorboard in his bedroom.

The Squeaky Floorboard.

She wakes up at dawn, while he is still snoring. She tries not to make noise, but she knows there’s a squeaky floorboard next to the bed. She steps over it and goes to the kitchen to get some water. She accidentally steps on the floorboard on the way back, but the sound doesn’t wake him. She kneels down and pulls up the loose board. She finds a book there, wrapped in old newspaper.

No. Start again. It should have more detail. Start at the bar. Give her a name. Describe her hair. Describe why she goes home with him even though she knows she shouldn’t. Describe his stubble and the way his little bedroom looks like a cabin on a boat because of the white painted wood panels.

The Squeaky Floorboard.

Her name is Anna. She’s had too much to drink and when she’s had too much to drink he looks very handsome, with his salt and pepper hair and his well worn black suit.

They are at the bar they always go to, surrounded by friends. They have taken over most of the establishment.

She can tell he’s actively trying not to look at her. There is power in that and she likes it. He talks with his hands and everyone listens to what he has to say. She remembers the last time she let him touch her, how his hands were strong and at the same time delicate. As she looks down at the bright green slice of lime in her gin and tonic, she hears everyone laugh at his anecdote. She thinks about how bad she feels after she goes home with him. She thinks about how she leaves whatever bar they are at without him, then circles back so their friends won’t know, though she’s sure they have all figured it out.

No. It’s not right. Start again.

The Squeaky Floorboard.

He is older. Anna should know better. In the morning he looks dashing, with the blue light of the overcast sky coming in through the small window. How the white painted panels of his bedroom make it look like a cabin on a boat. How she feels bad when she goes home with him, but sometimes feeling bad is the only way she can come.

Her knees hurt because the old wood floor is splintered and uneven. There are little black heads of little black nails sticking up in places. She’s constantly getting runs in her stockings on that damn floor. She winces every time she steps on the squeaky floorboard.

She lifts the uneven board. She wonders if it’s his hiding place. She wonders if he keeps drugs or money there, even though she knows those things have set places in his elaborately organized drawers. She has seen them. Rolls of fifties and a sugar bowl of cocaine. It makes him seem like a criminal and not a doctor. It makes her feel provincial because they are commonplace to his friends and still frightening to her.

The way the board lifts slowly makes it seem like it has never been pulled up before.

She looks up at the bed. Only a sliver of his chiseled chin is visible. He is still snoring. He is handsome. She feels like a little girl doing something bad.

She is a little girl doing something bad. She went home with him again. The tears start in her chest and head to her throat where she swallows them down.

She is an adult and she can sleep with whomever she wants. What they do isn’t hurting anyone. She wants to believe that.

Under the board there are bits of rust brown wood and dust and one little crawly bug. It smells of mildew. The edge of something gray peaks out. A rectangle wrapped in paper, like a parcel. A book.

She hears something behind her.

No. Again.

The Squeaky Floorboard.

Her name is Anna. She is twenty-five. She has promised herself she wouldn’t go home with him perhaps one hundred times. She has successfully stayed away nintey times.

His name is Hugh. He is forty. He is very handsome. He is a doctor. Her mother told her she should marry a doctor. He is a doctor, but he will never marry her. He is a doctor, but he will never meet her mother.

He likes to fuck younger women who are very smart and a bit depressed. Anna’s best friend Leah calls him the “wounded bird collector.”

No. Start over. The Squeaky Floorboard.

Anna is confident he will not wake up until his alarm goes off. He never does. He snores lightly, but rests soundly. Like everything he does, he sleep diligently. He sleeps for the amount of time he has set aside for sleep. He doesn’t deviate from his schedule.

She wonders if he schedules fucking her. It seems unlikely that he wouldn’t calculate the extra few hours he would spend between her legs. He must know when she will follow him home. In her own way she is as predictable as he is.

He said he liked her large sad eyes and how she reads poetry before bed. Her friend Leah called him the “wounded bird collector.” He likes them in their twenties, well-educated, and longing.

At twenty-five, she is just a pretty thing he occasionally fucks. She knows that. He is nice enough to her, even kind and sweet, but when it is time for her to go home it’s always written in his eyes.

Yes, she can make them some coffee. Yes, she is welcome to take a shower.

He never really answered her other questions about his day. Vague comments about meetings and the gym. Nothing concrete, just the tightening of his lips.

“Where are you off to now?” he says with a smile that stops at his mouth.

Weighty words that make her stomach drop.

No. The Squeaky Floorboard.

The white painted wood paneling on the walls make the room look like a cabin on a boat. The blue light of the overcast sky hang in a triangle on the ceiling where the shutters on the window are open.

Unshaven, Hugh’s chiseled jaw takes on a blue tinge too. He is handsome. For a moment Anna understands exactly why she still goes home with him from time to time. Even if he is fifteen years older than her and mature in ways she can’t fathom. Because he is fifteen years older than her and a doctor and stronger and taller and frightening when he takes off his belt. Because she needs to be a little frightened for it to work.

He is a doctor. What is she? A law school dropout? A media something? A glorified personal assistant?

She slips from under his thin white covers and lands catlike on the rough wood floor. The grains of the warped, cracked, and splintered floor feel good on the smooth arches of her feet.

She tiptoes across the small bedroom, navigating around the squeaky floorboard.

In the living room there is the trail of their discarded clothes. It makes her smile. Her silky dress a puddle of red on the floor making the whole thing seem sordid and illicit.

The tiles in the kitchen are cold, but thankfully so is the water from the tap.

Back in his room she contemplates her next steps. She still has two hours before he wakes. She could just leave. She has done that before and he never mentions it, except for that one time she left her underwear.

He gave them back to her in a neat little padded manilla mailing envelope. It smelled like the laundry detergent the place he sent his clothes uses.

How could someone live with a squeaky floorboard, especially someone so fastidious? There is a little hole in the board and so when she kneels down next to it she is able to get a hold of the slightly rotting wood and pull it up. There is really only one black nail holding it down.

She feels a bit like a detective in that moment, or a spy. It feels good. She is a curious cat of a girl, constantly reading mysteries novels. Maybe the squeaky floorboard holds the mystery of Dr. Hugh and his unavailable heart.

Under the floorboard is a tiny world of dirt and dust and splintered wood. There is far too much dust for it to be something Hugh uses as a hiding place. Peeking out of the filth is the corner of something gray. She pulls out was is obviously a book wrapped in old newspaper.

“What are you doing down there?”

The Squeaky Floorboard.

Kneeling on his floor, Anna feels the weight of that night’s choices on her shoulders. She sniffles, tired of lying to herself. Tired of promising herself she wouldn’t fuck him and then giving in. Tired of ordering more gin and tonics even though she knew she was just getting herself drunk enough to go back to his apartment.

She looks up at the bed, at the handsome doctor who is so much older and smarter and cooler. She curses him under her breath and curses at his ability to sleep through anything but his stupid high-tech alarm clock.

She hates his beautiful bohemian apartment with its interesting art on the walls and its crooked elegance. She hates his charming little bedroom with the white painted wood paneling that made it look like a fucking cabin on a boat. She hates the splintering warped cracked floor and the stupid squeaky floor board. She hates being just another fucked up graduate student almost half his age. Just another sad girl for the “wounded bird collector.”

She pokes at the loose floorboard and her finger traces the small hole in the wood. She thinks about when she was a teenager, before she was a mess of lost jobs and lost loves. She thinks about when the world was trees to climb and innocent little mysteries to solve. Before she was a failed adult and disappointment to her father.

She swallows bile and the tears that are building.

She pulls up the board, not caring if it ruins the floor.

In the dust and splinters she sees a little book wrapped in newspaper.

She just wants something. Maybe some secret that will explain him to her. Maybe something that will make him hate her so he wouldn’t ask her to come back to his apartment anymore. Maybe she wants something really scary to happen. Maybe she wants to push him too far.

Is that what she really wants? Some way out of the cycle?

She pushes the board back down and looked up to see him turn.

“What are you doing down there?”

“Trying to fix this stupid board,” she says in a numb flat voice, hoping the icy tendrils of anxiety don’t make her words crack.

“Leave it, come back to bed.”

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The text came at around ten on a Saturday. A text from Margot. “You home?”

Vanessa nearly fell off the couch as she responded that she was, and in a few moments her door buzzed.

She waited, confused, with bated breath, until she heard the elevator ding outside of her apartment door. Through the peephole she saw a short woman in what seemed to be a red bellhop uniform.

“Are you Miss Vanessa Silva?” The chipper young woman asked. The woman’s presence and look were so incongruous with the reality of her dingy hallway, Vanessa was momentarily unable to speak. Eventually, she nodded and was handed a square white envelope. With that, the bellhop snapped to attention and left.

The means of delivery tripled Vanessa’s interest and halved her trepidation. Her heart nearly burst when she saw the roaring 20s style font proclaiming “We invite you to the Cabaret Delancey’s fifth performance. The theme being: The Rude Mechanicals.”

She gasped out loud. It was a reference many people might not get, even people who had seen the play it was referencing. To Vanessa, though, it was etched into her soul. A Midsummer Night’s Dream being by far her favorite Shakespeare play. The Rude Mechanicals. The silly little troupe of amateur actors in the little play within a play, Pyramus and Thisbe. They included Nick Bottom, who later has his head turned into a donkey’s head by Puck. The very character Vanessa had played once in high school.

The name alone brought so many ideas into Vanessa’s head. Meta narratives. Plays within plays. It was so ripe with both imagery and allusion.

She read on, feeling the toothsome texture of the cream-colored cardstock the invitation was printed on with her thumb.

“This secret performance will take place on the seventeenth day of March, in the Cabaret Delancey Theater. The show will begin promptly at ten in the evening. If you are not yet aware of the theater’s location, please ask whomever initially told you about our troupe, in person. Please do not discuss this on any digital medium. Please do not photograph this invitation. There will be absolutely no outside photography, audio recordings, or phones permitted at the performance. All devices will be stored in lockers on site. Please note, this invitation is for the admittance of one person only. Also note, this performance will include nudity, sexually explicit performances, and may include real or simulated violence.”

Vanessa reread the last few sentences a few times. Nudity? Well, sure, it was experimental theater. Sexually explicit performances? Did that mean burlesque, or something more? Real or simulated violence?

The warning crept through her with equal parts dread and fascination, neither one winning. She sat with both feelings for a moment, then texted Margot. “Hi! Can we meet for coffee or something? I have some information I think I need from you.”

She replied a few minutes later with a little winky emoji. “8 at The Cup and Bell.”

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Vanessa felt like something big was happening. She’d felt like that when she’d applied for college. She’d felt like that at her job interview at the firm. She’d felt it when she posted her first photos of the mirror. Some seismic shift. Some hand of fate.

She took the train downtown to the Lower East Side. It was her college stomping ground, and it still smelled the same, something between a laundromat and a bar, warm and a little sour and somehow comforting. She passed the bodega on Rivington where she used to buy scratch tickets she could never afford. The block where she once watched a man in a tuxedo get into a screaming argument with a pigeon at two in the morning. The corner she had kissed a boy for the first time in New York, her back against the scaffolding while the rain came down in sheets. By eight at night, the streets were full of drunk tourists and the locals who often preyed on them. The neighborhood had changed since college, but it still had its teeth.

The Bell and the Cup was a witchy-themed bar with bottles of murky potions behind the bar and candles everywhere. A woman read tarot on a little stage. Vanessa spotted Margot in the corner where they used to sit in their school days. She waved at her, and seemed a little more animated than in their prior meeting.

She sat and Margot leaned in conspiratorially. Margot smelled amazing, something floral and spicy that Vanessa knew you couldn’t buy at Sephora. She guessed it was some concoction made specifically for her. It made her jealous and made her want to kiss Margot’s neck.

“Okay, so you got the invite, right?” Vanessa nodded. Margot smiled brightly.

“The Cabaret is in this weird little building on Attorney Street.” She took out a pen from her purse and grabbed a square napkin. She wrote the address.

“It’s right under the Manhattan side of the Williamsburg Bridge. It’s kind of hard to find. Text me if you get lost and I can come out to get you.”

Vanessa took the napkin, slipping it into her pocketbook, between the pages of her schedule book. “Could we meet before for a drink?”

She let out a little laugh. “No, silly, I’m performing! I’m going to be getting ready. It’s only my second time and I’m super nervous.”

“What... what kind of performance are you doing?” Vanessa asked.

Margot smiled somewhat wickedly, which completely changed her angelic face into something alluring and vampiric. “I’m doing burlesque.”

Vanessa’s eyes widened and her cheeks reddened. “Burlesque, like striptease?”

Margot rolled her eyes and laughed. “Not really. They are very different art forms. There will be some nudity, though. Tasteful. Well, kind of tasteful.”

Vanessa looked at her friend. The particular way candlelight landed on her cheekbones. The loose strand of blonde hair she tucked behind her ear without thinking. She felt the familiar, useless pull of wanting. Margot on stage. Partially undressed. Vanessa tried to arrange her expression into something more like polite interest, and felt she was probably failing.

Margot flagged the waiter down and got them herbaceous gin and tonics. Vanessa noticed how Margot’s body had changed since college. She was slightly thicker, curvier, and it suited her.

Vanessa could tell Margot already had a drink or two. Her demeanor always changed when she was drinking. She became looser, more physical, and back then, very prone to go home with the tallest guy at the bar or party.

The idea of hitting on her flashed through Vanessa’s mind, quick and specific and then gone. She knew what she wanted to say. She even knew, more or less, how Margot would laugh and touch her arm and redirect the conversation gently, the way beautiful women who didn’t want to hurt you did. It wasn’t worth it. It wasn’t like that. Was it? Could it be? Her drink came and she drank it in three long pulls on the straw. The candlelight between them flickered and neither of them said anything for a moment.

Then Margot was looking at her phone.

“Oh my god! I’m late. I have to go in a minute. It was good to see you twice this week. I can’t wait to see you at the show. You’re going to fall in love with it. Then you’re going to be in it, I just know it.”

Vanessa smiled and nodded and hoped she was right. However, she couldn’t imagine being on the same kind of stage that would display Margot, nude or even semi-nude.

“Where are you off to?” She asked casually. However, when she saw Margot’s wicked grin reappear, her hope for some spicy bit of information grew.

“Well, that’s a funny story. There is this guy... I met him at one of the shows actually. He’s kind of a patron of the arts. He owns a gallery or something. He throws these little parties. In like, penthouse hotel rooms. Champagne and the most beautiful people you can imagine. Somehow I got an invite.”

Vanessa felt something shift at that. The world expanding around Margot, around all of this, in some direction she couldn’t quite name.

“Wow, that sounds amazing!” She wanted to know more, but Margot was already standing. She dropped a fifty on the table.

“Love you, Van, see you at the show!”

And just like that, she was gone. Vanessa sat for a moment, the gin still cold in her throat, the candle between their two empty seats still going. She caught her own face in the dark window beside her, flushed and watching, and looked quickly away.

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It was a little over a month later when David saw Mona again, though not in person. It was a Wednesday, ironically, when there was a knock at his door.

Something had changed inside of David after the whole Mona affair. He was jumpy. It was like he was waiting for something. For the other shoe to drop. It was like he was ready for some new part of his life to start, but nothing had happened.

Through the peephole, he saw a stranger in a black suit, with a vintage-looking overcoat, and black leather gloves. He was perhaps forty, white, dark-rimmed glasses, intellectual looking, short salt and pepper hair with a slight widow’s peak.

Against his better judgment, David opened the door.

“I’m sorry to bother you at home, but I’m afraid I didn’t have any other contact information for you. I was wondering if you could confirm that you took this picture,” he said, pulling an eight-by-ten out of a manilla envelope and holding it up.

Mona, on her knees, facing away. David’s familiar apartment a blur behind her. His heart stopped for a moment and his hands grew cold.

“Yes,” he said simply before he could think.

The man nodded and put the picture away.

“My name is Harold Roth, I’m a collector,” he said, as if that explained everything.

“David Lin.”

“I’m a fan of your work, especially this collection. I’d like to speak to you about a commission. I don’t want to take up any more of your personal time though, I was passing by this area and since, as I said, I didn’t have any contact information other than your address, I thought I would drop by. Here is my business card. Email or call if you like and we can set up a meeting,” he said simply, handing David a very stiff, very white card.

With that, he gave David a little bow and headed for the stairs, as opposed to the elevator.

David just stood there for a moment, the surrealness of his visit making him look around the hall for cameras or witnesses. He closed the door and sat down on his couch, the card in his hand and his heart still racing.

“Harold Roth, Collector. New York - London - Berlin,” read the card with a phone number and an email address.

That card sat on David’s desk for almost a week. He looked up at it many times, as he checked his email, as he ate his breakfast, it seemed to haunt him. Finally, one night after a few drinks, he dashed out an email.

“Mr. Roth. I’m the man who took the pictures of Mona. I would be happy to meet with you to discuss a commission. Those pictures are a bit of an anomaly for me. To see samples more representative of my work, please see my website, listed below. Thank you, David.”

The reply didn’t come for five days. David had almost forgotten about the strange hyper-formal man and the whole mystery as he started a large catalog job that took him out to Westchester every day for a week.

“Mr. Lin. I host theatrical experiences. Often I will construct elaborate tableaux that I would very much enjoy having professionally documented. Since these works are often intimate, discretion is of the utmost importance. I am willing to go to great lengths and expense to see that all of my needs are met. If this sounds intriguing to you, please let me know if you might be available to discuss.”

David sat and read the message over a few times. He chuckled at himself, because there was no real debate, he would do it of course. He wrote him as such. Roth’s reply was quick.

“I’d prefer to speak in person about the details. Could you meet for lunch today? Perhaps at 1 pm at Balthazar? My treat, of course.” Again, no debate.

David had been to the restaurant before and it had always been one of his favorites. It was prohibitively expensive and a bit out of the way, so he didn’t go often, though he would occasionally stop by the small bakery connected to it for a baguette or a fancy donut.

It was a classic New York City style French brasserie. A vast room with huge aged mirrors on the walls, a marble bar, black and white tiled floor, and a well-dressed wait staff. Spotless white tablecloths and the buzz of a crowd of mostly affluent well-dressed cosmopolitan types. David’s favorite part, though, were the enormous mirrors that lined the walls and reached almost the ceiling.

David felt a bit out of place in jeans and a black t-shirt, but no one batted an eye. Mr. Roth seemed to be wearing the same suit. His dress shirt was a spotless white. His tie a simple black. At his wrist was a very expensive-looking gold watch.

“I took the liberty of getting us a bottle of red, I hope that suits you,” he said, standing to shake my hand before we sat.

It was good wine. He seemed very adept at making small talk without telling me anything about what he did for a living, or giving away any personal information. He mostly nodded and smiled. After we ordered, he got down to brass tacks.

“While I very much enjoy theater, there is an ephemeral nature to performances that I admit, has made me a bit frustrated. I’ve attempted to hire photographers before, but some of my guests are very concerned about anonymity and pictures getting out, so I’ve had to figure out a way to ensure total control of the photos. From what I understand, you only shoot on film and develop and enlarge your own prints?”

“I shoot digital as well, but I prefer film. I develope black and white as well as color. Though I often have to send color out.” Roth nodded at this.

“Well, I may want color. We will see. Let’s start with black and white. My idea is that you shoot the event with a specific quantity of film. All film canisters will be numbered and recorded in my ledger. I will have a darkroom set up to your specifications in the apartment next door to the theater. I can also provide an assistant. You develop and print there and neither the film nor the prints ever leave the premises. Does that sound reasonable?”

David nodded. “You’ll have access to the apartment next door for maybe three or four hours?”

Roth smiled. “I own the building and maintain all of the apartments on the second floor for my personal use. Does my plan seem like something you would consider?”

“Oh, yes. I can do that. I can even bring some of my equipment-”

“That won’t be necessary. Just give me a list of what you need and I will procure it. I’ll only ask that you use your camera and that you don’t bring any film of your own. In fact, I’ll have to insist on having your bags checked for film. This is for the safety of my guests.”

David considered that, and nodded. “I-um-I want to preface this question by saying it would not necessarily change my answer, but will I be recording anything illegal?”

Roth’s face broke into a wide smile very slowly. He slapped his knee and chuckled. “Nothing overtly illegal is planned. No one will be doing anything they haven’t consented to. Everyone there will be past the age of majority. Theoretically, there may be some drug use, but that’s something I would prefer didn’t make it into the photographs. I’m glad that your desire to participate in this project is not encumbered by such pedestrian matters though. It is good to be aware of such factors, of course.”

They ate steak frites and Roth quoted David a generous but not absurd rate. A touch above what he made on a catalog shoot. Roth was impressed when he was able to list the equipment and chemicals he would need, from the expensive enlarger to the specific developing trays to a filter he could get for a normal kitchen sink to control temperature and air bubbles.

“There is a performance coming up, which I’d like to invite you to. It will be too soon to shoot and I think it would make sense for you to see one of the shows before deciding.”

Roth took out an envelope with a beautifully printed invitation. The invitation had no location on it. “Would you say you have a good memory, Mr. Lin?”

David considered the question and the tone of their conversation. “I would say much of our discussion today would be difficult for me to forget.”

Roth smiled again, his eyes sparkling with appreciation. He was a man who liked it when people got into the spirit of what he put forth.

“The theater is located at 300 Attorney Street. I discourage people from writing this address down and insist people don’t record it digitally in any way.”

“300 Attorney Street. I got it.”

“If you’d like, you can stop by on Monday, before the show and see the space,” Roth offered. David agreed, feeling excitement rising. At first, he thought it was for the job, the money, the show, but he realized it was also because there might be a chance to see Mona again.

Roth gave him one more grin, then they shook hands and parted ways.

From the Brothers Grimm to Stephen King, everyone who pens a tale about magic feels the need to create some palatable metaphor which explains how the mystical arts are some kind of dodge or cheat that only seems powerful. These stories explain how spells and conjuring will never really give you what you want, that there are no tricks or shortcuts to success, and how hard work, honesty, and faith are the only ways to true happiness.

What the unenlightened don’t understand is that magic takes an enormous amount of work, plenty of painful honesty, and more faith than most can imagine.

The other truth they miss is that magic actually works, and it usually works without caveats. A death spell kills completely and a resurrection spell brings someone back to life; not as a zombie (unless that was the intention) but just as they were. If you give someone a love potion, they will fall in love. Not some fanatical love that will eventually turn on you, not some imitation of love where they will follow your every command until they stop eating because you didn’t tell them to or something. It will create true love, and that is a very difficult pill for the mortal world to swallow.

The love potion is a wonderful place to start to explain the modern complications of magic. It’s easy to summon the emotions and thought processes of love; anyone with a little training and the proper materials can make a love draught. The trouble is that most people fall in love all the time and ignore it. The modern mortal doesn’t trust themselves, nor do they trust their own feelings. They second-guess their instincts and feelings to the point that most simple love potions are useless. That’s what magic has taught me: You can trust magic, but you can’t trust people.

Magic is a way of influencing the world around you, and if it is done correctly, it works perfectly. People, on the other hand, are unpredictable, complicated, and flawed.

Magic is the art and science of controlling the invisible forces that bind the universe together. Magic encompasses the skills of elemental control, spiritual manipulation, the amplification of one’s senses and abilities, and the tapping of the primordial and otherworldly energies beyond the perception of mortals.

Don’t get me wrong, though, magic is no panacea. Every spell, potion, and evocation has a cost. It’s a cost not everyone will understand and ironically only those who won’t miss that thing that fuels magic can never really use magic properly. It costs energy and heart and most certainly a massive amount of time. I’ve seen it cost people’s sanity, their lives, even their very souls.

Still, like the mathematician who spends his life figuring out the riddle of numbers, the painter who drives away lovers and friends to get her emotions out on the canvas, or the strategist who plays match after match of chess until he realizes his life has been spent pushing around pawns, most wizards know the costs, and we are willing, if not glad, to pay it.

For magic is the greatest of all arts, of all sciences, of all worldly or other-worldly pursuits. As you open this book, you step forth into the great gauntlet and attempt to take your place among the great magic users of the world. As you read the words ahead you will attempt to wrestle the very powers that gods and demons channel.

Make no doubt, in embarking on this study you put yourself in the greatest peril. I tell you the final truth, that there are no amateur wizards. You will learn to control the powers foretold in the coming pages, or you will die, painfully, trying.

- Introduction to The New World Grimoire, Henry Dufraisne

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The idea was like a lover. A new flirtatious obsession. The cabaret. A secret theater. Vanessa was so spellbound, she almost walked into traffic.

New York had a way of keeping you on your toes. Even after four years of college and three years working in Midtown, Vanessa was still prone to stopping in the middle of the sidewalk to look up at something, only to be bumped into and cursed at by the locals.

She had to remind herself to keep moving. That was the primary law of the city. Just keep moving. You can take in the sights, the little chaotic tableaux, the oddities that were everywhere, as long as you kept your awe to yourself and for God’s sake, just kept walking.

That feeling of being an outsider could be disheartening sometimes, but it also kept things electric and new. There was something wild about the city, like every building could hold some secret, every corner could lead to some adventure, every quiet stranger could be part of some mystery.

Considering that made her cheeks flush. Considering that she had a few secrets. She had the mirror, the pictures, her little audience online. She would sit in meetings and wonder who else had secrets, what were they?

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Those questions usually went unanswered, but occasionally she got a glimpse behind the curtain. She wondered if the cabaret might be one of those opportunities.

She was on her lunch break, hunting for the cafe she was supposed to meet Margot at and thinking about the date she had that night. Her date with the older man that made her squirm with flirting and threats of rather shocking things over text.

The cafe was a tiny place, a plate glass window with the name in gold foil letters. She made her way in and saw her old classmate sitting with a latte, looking far more put together and beautiful than Vanessa felt she could ever manage.

Margot didn’t see her right away and Vanessa took a moment to breathe, slow her racing heart, and let the blush fade from her cheeks. Margot with her stylish pixie cut blonde hair, her high cheekbones, her fair skin. Margot in her beautiful chunky knit sweater dress and boots.

They studied drama together, and dance, and music. Unlike Vanessa though, Margot actually got work in those fields. At least tangentially. She worked for a talent agency, while Vanessa had to crawl from theater into the dark arms of marketing. Still, at least it paid well.

“Margot!” Vanessa called and she seemed to shake herself out of that thoughtful reverie pretty people seemed to fall into in cafes. And she was pretty.

She was one of those porcelain-skinned blondes, who seemed completely unaware of the fact that she was a goddess. Vanessa was pretty much attracted to all women on some level, but Margot’s looks and her soft kind soul really made her swoon. She got stupid around her. Proving that to herself, she tripped and nearly fell into Margot as she walked to her table.

Margot smiled brightly and caught her. “Oh! Watch out, Van!”

Vanessa blushed and was generally mortified. She sat down next to her old friend and tried to banish the shame.

Margot didn’t care. She hugged her and Vanessa was enveloped in the sweet smell of her perfume. Something fresh, sweet, almost candy-like. The scent of an ingénue.

They fell into the usual catch up conversation. Margot went on about her family back in Connecticut. Vanessa talked about bad dates and good books. They fell into comfortable chatter that made Vanessa miss college, miss Margot.

“So… the experimental theater thing?” Vanessa asked, acting like it wasn’t the thing she had been thinking about all night.

“Right! So I was just talking about you the other day with Marcy Johnson. Do you remember her?”

Vanessa nodded, though she didn’t. She was too pleased that Margot was talking about her. It made Vanessa’s cheeks heat up.

“I was telling her about your photo project. I showed it to her on my phone and she loved it.”

Vanessa almost choked on her drink. She’d almost forgotten that she told Margot about the blog months ago over text. The knowledge that Margot had seen those pictures flashed across Vanessa’s mind. A flush of shame and a spark of pride. She decided to embrace the pride.

“Wow. That’s nice to hear. I’ve been working on it for almost two years now,” Vanessa said, almost surprised at the confident tone her voice took on. Her body felt activated as she looked for Margot’s reaction, which was as pleasant as if Vanessa said she still played tennis.

“That’s great! It made us think about this project we’ve been working on. Like I said, it’s sort of experimental theater and we thought you might be a good fit. I remembered how happy you were the last time we went to Marie’s Crisis. You seemed like your old self, belting out show tunes leaning against a piano. You were always the curvy sultry one. Not like us ballet girls,” Margot said with a demure laugh.

It was indeed Vanessa’s most natural state. She again felt flushed.

“So... they sing show tunes in this theater?”

Margot let out one loud laugh. “Well, no, not exactly. We do lots of things. It’s cabaret, performance art, burlesque. And it’s a secret. It’s in this little... well, I’m actually not even supposed to say what neighborhood it’s in. Anyway, I’ve done it a few times and it’s like being part of something... an art community. Marcy does a lot of the stage managing. Nina does a lot of the costumes, but I’m not sure you’ve met Nina.”

The word burlesque triggered some kind of alert in Vanessa’s brain, though she wasn’t sure exactly what kind of alert. The word secret definitely made her sit up straighter.

“It sounds amazing. Do I, like, audition?”

Margot giggled. “No, it’s not that kind of thing. You start out by just going to one of the performances. See if it’s something you like. If you are interested, you just think up a performance piece and tell the troupe about it. If it seems like a good fit, then you go for it. It’s all sort of organic. You might want to start with backup singing or something. You really just have to experience it.”

Vanessa’s mind filled with images of the movie Cabaret. A dark smoky club, flashes of bare legs, laughing, flirting, martini glasses clinking, wild times being had. Margot was part of that and thought of her!

“I’m definitely in. Text me the details?”

Margot smiled mischievously at that. “Well, that’s the thing. The troupe tries very hard to keep every aspect of this offline. So text me your home address and they messenger you a printed invitation. Don’t take any pictures of it and don’t tell anyone. It will all make sense once you see one of the performances.”

Vanessa swallowed. It was like everything Margot was saying was checking off some list in her subconscious. Secret art performance with beautiful people. Hand delivered invitations. She felt herself numbly nodding and typing out her information to Margot.

The rest of the conversation was a bit of a blur. Eating overpriced Niçoise salads and reminiscing about improv classes.

An hour later, back in the office, she switched into Corporate Vanessa. Pleasant, bubbly, but not too chatty. Talking only when appropriate. Not spouting the puns and lyrics that filled her head every moment. Not correcting people when they used idioms incorrectly. Not standing up for herself when superiors talked over her.

In her mind, though, she was already on stage. The secret stage. Invited behind the real and metaphorical curtains. She licked her lips as she considered this new seduction.

Click to read all chapters.

The apartment in Spanish Harlem had come to David by chance. After his five-year relationship with Anne ended suddenly, a friend of a friend got a job in LA and needed someone to take over their lease. The rent was unbelievably cheap, so David made the somewhat foreign trek uptown on the 6, then walked east, almost to the river.

Without much debate, he moved in and converted the larger bedroom into a darkroom, something he’d wanted to do for years but never had the space, money, or freedom to. After the chaos of the breakup, he had found a new kind of happiness there, away from the claustrophobia of downtown. The solitude of inconvenience.

Like many people living in a New York City apartment, David didn’t know his neighbors. He’d run into the nice couple above him once or twice, as the two men often walked their dog when David was leaving for a photoshoot or coming home from one.

At some point, someone moved in next door. David only knew that because of the music.

It was a Wednesday, around nine at night, the first time David heard the music through his wall. He was hanging eight by ten prints to dry on a long line he had strung from the two far corners of his living room. He enjoyed the process. It was one of the many reasons he still shot on film. The tactile sensations of a physical medium.

As he hung them, a low bass line started on the other side of the western wall. He’d never heard music from any apartment in his building. He knew the walls were pretty thick.

The song was not one he knew, but it was familiar somehow. A walking bass line, like jazz but more contemporary. As he listened, he heard a little cry. A moan and then the rhythmic pounding that was not music, so to speak.

He moved closer to the wall, his mind puzzling together images of the sounds he heard. Words that were too muffled to make out. Furniture scraping against the floor. The sharp sound of a smack. Then the moans again, the pounding.

David backed away from the wall, realizing he had been pressing his ear to the cool paint. He shook his head, trying to break the spell the sudden eavesdropping had put him under. He swallowed and tried to ignore it, but he was alone and the sound was there. There was no one to judge him for listening, no one to stop him.

That was the first wicked Wednesday. He didn’t know then or even the next time that it would become a weekly affair. That second time he didn’t even realize it was the same day.

It was after the fifth wicked Wednesday that David finally met his neighbor. He was carrying about a hundred pounds of equipment the short distance from the elevator to his front door. When he got off the elevator, the door of his neighbor’s apartment was open.

She appeared there, turning from the kitchen and smiling, “I hope you’re hungry... oh!” She stopped, just as surprised as he was.

David smiled back at her and there was a moment of silence.

“Sorry, I thought you were someone else,” she said, waiting for him to react. “I didn’t make enough for everyone in the building unfortunately.”

David forced out a chuckle. “That’s okay, I just had a hotdog. I’m David, I’m in 2B.”

She wiped her hand on her jeans and came out to shake his hand, but he was holding bags and his suitcase. Her eyes widened. “Oh, do you need help?”

He shook his head. “No, no, it’s fine. I do this a lot.” He passed her door and got to his own. He awkwardly fished out his keys. He felt her walk towards him and his heart pounded.

She was beautiful. In a strange and almost uncomfortable way, she was what he imagined. Tall, curvy, almost R. Crumb-ian field hockey stature. A choppy artfully messy mop of black hair. Olive skin. The tattoos were everywhere, thick black lines, red details. Nautical stars, swallows, anchors, pinup girls in bikinis, handcuffs.

She picked up his bag of stands from him and gave him another smile. “Mona, 2A.”

She followed him into his apartment and seemed to have a similar reaction to what he had a moment before. His apartment was colder, but more complete. The walls covered in framed photos, the floors in rugs, the bookshelves overflowing. Across the living room, a row of prints drying.

“Wild guess, you’re a photographer.”

David reached for something witty to say but only smiled. She put down his bag a little harder than he liked.

“Well, it’s good to meet you, David. This building is kind of... intimidatingly private. I mean, except for Tim and Lawrence upstairs.”

David put his things down and nodded. “Yeah, I only know them as Arlo’s two dads.”

Just then the buzzing of her intercom came from the wall between their apartments. They both looked at the white wall.

“That must be my friends. Thin wall, huh?” She said with a chuckle. “Nice to meet you, David the photographer.”

“Nice to meet you, Mona the cook.”

And with that, she was gone.

Knowing what she looked like, the sparkle in her honey brown eyes, the way her ribbed tank top clung to her buxom form, showing a little sliver of her belly, made the next Wednesday both more intense and more shameful. The fog of mystery lifted slightly. Her fat lips open in an O in his mind’s eye as she moaned. The swell of her wide hips and thick thighs as the rhythmic pounding rang through the wall.

His commercial work, catalogs mostly and the occasional ad, funded his real passion: film photography, the archaic and anachronistic art. A money pit that captured his heart in college and became his driving fascination.

He came home drunk one night and stumbled out of the elevator right into Mona.

“David the photographer,” she said with a grin. Her lips were matte red. She had a silver loop through the center of her bottom lip.

“I’ve been looking for you, actually,” she said, and in his half drunk state he couldn’t do anything but blink, wide eyed at that, stuttering as he tried to figure out a response.

“I’ve been wanting some pictures. I’m an actress...” She said, looking down for the first time. The little break in her confidence speaking volumes.

“Headshots?” His mind raced with ideas, with lust, with memories of the sounds he had heard through the wall. “I... I might be able to do some headshots for you. Maybe a trade. I’d love to shoot some of your tattoos. I’m working on a collection of tattoo photos,” he made up on the spot. He also decided it was a great idea.

“Okay,” she said, thinking about it. “So headshots for pictures of my tattoos. I can do that. Though... I think I might want something... risqué. Would that be okay?”

David swallowed and pushed the desire out of his voice. “I think I’m comfortable shooting whatever you’d like.”

He realized he looked her in the eye when he was bullshitting and she looked down when she was lying.

She smiled, looking a bit sheepish suddenly. “When I say I’m an actress, that’s really sort of aspirational. I think, maybe, I just want some photos for my boyfriend.”

“Boyfriend.” The word seemed to cause a short circuit somewhere in his head. He shrugged and then forced a smile.

“Listen Mona, you live next door to me. All my equipment is here. I think you have a really interesting look and I’d love to shoot some photos of you. You can do whatever you want with them, it’s really none of my business. In return, I’ll get some photos for my own work. That kind of trade is pretty common in my business.”

Talking business helped. David knew how to communicate in that mode a lot more than any other mode. Mona’s eyebrows raised as she seemed to notice the shift in him.

“Right. Okay. Cool. So, let’s do that sometime.”

Days later he saw her in the hall again. She looked a bit tipsy and she smiled wide when she saw him.

Her body moved differently drunk, somehow more youthful and dangerous. Her grin was a crooked, daring thing. “David the photographer. Is it time for our photoshoot?” She asked, leaning against the wall.

She was dressed in denim shorts with black fishnets under them. A white t-shirt. Her black bra was visible through the thin cotton, as were the shadows of her tattoos.

He was exhausted, his back hurt from hauling his stuff from the taxi, and he had to be up early. “Yeah, let’s do it,” he said, opening his door.

Mona was suddenly in his apartment, in his space. She looked around with that same crooked grin. She walked to the white backdrop he had out against one wall and she put her hands on her hips. “So what do I do?”

David swallowed, putting down his gear and getting his Leica out with a 50mm lens. He slipped in a roll of film and brought over a softbox. He shined the defused light on her and angled a reflector. It was all muscle memory. It was all his body moving while his mind reeled. She was in his apartment. She was in his sights.

“Just loosen up. Shake the day off,” he said. His directorial voice was detached, sort of generically positive. “Why don’t you... slip your thumbs in your belt loops and look down, like you’re waiting for a date to show up,” he said with a performative chuckle.

She laughed at the specificity of the instructions. She made a comic frown and kicked an imaginary rock.

He focused on the snarl of her matte red lips. The anchor tattoo on her forearm. The sliver of belly exposed by her cropped t-shirt.

“Head up, looking at the ceiling, thinking, ‘what have I gotten myself into?’” David said with another chuckle.

She snorted, but then got serious. She put her hands in her pockets and looked up. Her eyes went sad and far away. “What have I gotten myself into?” She asked the ceiling in a whisper.

She bit her lip and looked right into his lens. Through it, right at him. He swallowed and backed up a little. Snap, snap, went the shutter. She suddenly pulled at her shirt and pulled it off in one motion, tossing it away and standing in a black bra.

Without a shirt, she looked far more serious and stunning. Her tattoos were all black or red. Nautical stars, little pin up girls, birds, and knives. She tilted her head to the side and walked a little closer. He backed up. Her crooked grin came back.

“You keep backing up,” she said, her eyes narrowing.

“Gotta keep you in frame,” he said back, trying to keep the fear and lust out of his voice. Failing.

She turned around and he saw two thick jet black marks, like the f-stops on a cello. Like the Man Ray’s Le Violon d’Ingres only bigger. He let out a little groan he hoped she didn’t hear.

She peeled off her shorts next, kicking them. Somewhere in the corner of his apartment he heard something crash, but he didn’t look away. Like a sniper, he reloaded. He wound the film, popped it out, and put in a new roll.

She was bent over, holding her ankles. He captured the seams of her fishnets. Red panties under them. Her wide hips and round ass stretching net and silk taut. As taut as his nerves.

She turned to him and her eyes were startling. Narrowed, predatory, focused. She stopped and took a deep breath. “Now what?”

“Unhook your bra, but hold it there,” he said without really thinking. She paused and tilted her head again, studying him. Then she reached back and did it.

It was a classic burlesque move, which suited her. He wondered if she’d ever been on stage. She certainly belonged on one. He saw her breath had become shallow, a little shaking in her hands as she closed her eyes.

After a moment, she dropped her bra. She reached up and touched her lips, eyes still closed. It was vulnerable and surreal. The silver hoop in her lip glittering along with the silver loop in one nipple. A bruise on her other breast, the side of a thumb print.

The room felt hot, suddenly stifling. Her hands went down to her fishnets. Thumbs in the waistband. Suddenly there was a sound from the wall between their apartments. Her phone. She turned and looked at the spot he had listened to her so many times.

“Thin walls,” she laughed.

She grabbed her shirt and slipped it back on. She picked up her bra. She hunted for her shorts.

“When can I get prints?” She asked, flustered and red faced.

“It will take a while, I develop them myself. Maybe... next Wednesday?” He said. Her face snapped up at that. “Wednesdays are... no good for me. I need them soon. I thought, like tomorrow!”

David wound the film. Three rolls. He’d have to make contact sheets, then pick the best shots, then touch them up, print them. “I... I can probably get you a few tomorrow, but the whole thing will take time.”

She calmed and nodded. “Okay, try and get a few tomorrow. You can just slip them under my door. I won’t be home until late,” she said.

The power of the shoot had died and left them both awkward and uncomfortable. She eyed the door. David put down his camera and looked around. “Okay, I will. Um, thanks.”

She nodded and left.

It wasn’t really for her that he rushed. He wanted to see what he had. He pulled an all nighter, the way he did back at art school.

At dawn, she dangled on that line across his living room. He fell asleep under her, looking up as she danced in the cool autumn breeze.

He slipped the dozen prints under her door on his way to that day’s job. He groggily did a catalog shoot on autopilot, wondering what would happen when he got home.

The answer was nothing. No Wednesday sounds. No thanks or even awkward conversation. He didn’t see Mona that week and then he was off to Miami for a few days.

When he returned, the door to her apartment was open and a man was painting it. The furniture, if she had any, was gone. The old Polish landlord glared at him.

“She didn’t pay rent, four months. Just left in the middle of the night.”

David went back to his apartment and sat down in front of his collection of photos of her, wondering if that was the last he would ever see of Mona.

It only took three weeks for him to see her again, although it was only her picture, one of the ones he’d taken, held in the well manicured hand of the Collector.

Wednesday meant a racing heart. Thursday through Tuesday meant long nights of writing, erasing, ripping up papers, and trying desperately to find the right words.

Sophia wrote a poem every week. She finished them on Wednesdays, usually in the morning before work. She wrote them out by hand and didn’t make any copies. She ripped any drafts into tiny pieces and put them down the garbage chute of her apartment building.

She would beam all through the day on Wednesday, letting her hand slip into her pocket to finger the thick paper she had folded neatly there. Pride and joy and desire. Desire that made her cheeks burn.

After work, she would take the A train as far north as it would go and walk five blocks through Inwood to the top of the island of Manhattan, where the Columbia University crew team rowed. It was quiet and smelled of flowers and the river. As she did, she worried about touching her poem because her sweaty, nervous fingers might smudge the ink or wrinkle the paper.

Diane’s house was Tudor Revival, with all sorts of charming details. A rare thing to find in Manhattan. Dark gray with black trim making an array of triangles that outlined the two-story structure. It had a little cobblestone path to the front door and a mailbox with a little red flag on it.

As always, Sophia’s throat was dry when she rang the bell. It always took a moment for Diane to answer the door, and Sophia was sure she waited on purpose. The thought of her lover making her wait outside made her swoon for some reason.

Diane was tall and beautiful, and she did not often smile but instead had the eyes of a strict schoolteacher. She gave Sophia her cheek to kiss, and Sophia lingered there, lips to her skin, taking in the scent of her perfume. Something like incense and rose petals and spices.

There would be fans and ice-cold lemonade in the summer, but in the cold months, there would be the fireplace and tea. There would always be candles, usually in large ornate brass candelabras. The candles and fire would often be the only light in the big sitting room where they would engage in their Wednesday ritual.

In front of the fireplace were two oversized high-backed chairs, plush and embroidered, red and gold and black. Between them, a lacquered table, where the candelabras were set. Diane sat on the left, Sophia on the rug at her feet.

“I hope you brought me something again this visit,” Diane would say, each time sounding both imposing and hopeful. Sophia had never come empty-handed.

With pride brimming, she would hand Diane the poem. Diane would get her glasses from the table and put them on, unfolding the paper slowly.

“And this is the only copy?” She would ask.

“Yes, ma’am,” Sophia would answer.

“So this is for my eyes only?” She would ask.

“Yes, ma’am,” Sophia would whisper, nodding her head emphatically.

For that, she was gifted a small grin. “Good.”

It was embarrassing on some level to hear her poem read out loud, even if it was one she was proud of. That was just the way of things. There was always fear about the quality of her art. There was always the worry it would not please Diane.

Diane was a thoughtful reader. She often paused and mouthed the words before reading them aloud, ensuring she understood any rhymes, meters, or phrasing. She often read the poems aloud twice. Then she would sigh deeply and reread it silently.

The next part was always different, but Diane always said something very thoughtful about the work. She often noticed things about the poems Sophia herself missed. Then she would hand the poem back to Sophia and nod once.

In the summer, Sophia would use the candles, but in the winter she would go to the fireplace. She would hold her precious paper up to the flame and watch her hard work burn.

It always hurt. It always made her a little dizzy, the sacrifice, the gift, the transaction, the ceremony. It made her face hot, her head light, and her body tingle and fidget.

When she looked back, Diane would often give her the gift of a full wide toothy smile. Diane had sharp canines, and Sophia often dreamed of Diane’s teeth sinking into her skin.

“Very good,” Diane would say, and Sophia would return to the rug and lean her head on Diane’s lap.

There was no place on Earth like the rug next to Diane. Sophia’s head on Diane’s lap and Diane’s perfectly lacquered nails stroking her hair. It was worth the fear and the hard work and the sacrifice.

They would stay like that for a long time, until Diane stood and asked, “Shall we have dinner?” Sophia, as always, would nod and smile for her.

On the train home the next morning, Sophia would already be starting notes for the next poem.

End.

After my First Communion, things started to get tricky. I started asking a lot of questions in Sunday School/CCD. Specifically about dinosaurs and the various miracles. In the beginning, I wanted to know how these things all fit, but a few nuns really didn’t appreciate my tone and after a few heated “conversations,” my young mind switched and they became an obstacle.

Then there was Narnia. I was down for all of that. Portals to another world? Talking animals? Kids getting swords? Magic? But by the time we got to The Last Battle, the apologist metaphors started to seem pretty transparent. And then there was Susan. She became a young woman and was more interested in “lipstick and invitations,” and holy shit did that set me off. I mean, really. To this day I can’t remember being as angry about a piece of literature.

By twelve, I started reading about world religions and history and by then I wasn’t even asking questions anymore in classes and eventually I asked to stop going to religious training. I was also getting very into “the occult.”

“But what about your Confirmation? Don’t you want the gifts?”

I told my parents I didn’t believe in God. They rolled their eyes, but eventually said I didn’t have to go anymore if I really didn’t want to. In their eyes it seemed to be more about laziness than lake of faith.

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I remember a cousin asking why I didn’t have to go to Sunday School anymore and I said, “I don’t believe in God.” His reply? “What does that have to do with anything?”

I’m going to skip over my teen years, because as many who know teenage atheists can tell you, we can be really fucking annoying. College me was even more so, with a little philosophy under my belt and the radical strain of New Atheism in the air, I was ready to debate. I had talking points.

Eventually, New Atheism gave way to Rationalism, and even I could see that was about as toxic as intellectualism can get.

Back when I was getting into “the occult,” I remember finding the Man, Myth & Magic: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Supernatural in the library and the glossy black books captured my imagination immediately. An Encyclopedia of the Occult?

From there, I moved to the sort of flavor of the time when it came to the late 90s: Wicca. Neo-Paganism and the sort of general Gardnerian traditions. All of which led me to Aleister Crowley, which all occult roads seem to lead to.

Ceremonial Magic rubbed me the wrong way immediately, though. While I found it intriguing, I also found it too close to organized religion. I also felt it sort of plucked ideas out of Egyptian iconography, Hebrew/Kabbalah thought, Sufi mysticism, and generally things I would eventually know to be cultural appropriation and even theft of culture by dominantly colonizer cultures.

I also dated a lot of witches. Tarot reading, pentagram wearing, spooky girls, goths, etc. There was a feeling, in fact, that magic was sort of the domain of the divine feminine, which left me wondering what my own spirituality looked like.

And then, life sort of got in the way of any sort of spiritual journey. Because my twenties were way too rough and my thirties were way too fun.

In the last ten years, though, I’ve moved into my own cobbled together tradition. Taking something from Wicca/European witchcraft ideas, a lot from Chaos Magic, then just things that feel right, I started keeping an altar and doing somewhat frequent tarot readings for myself.

My altar is a mirrored platter that my grandfather got from somewhere in Europe. Not much information, but I sort of like it that way. I never met my paternal grandfather. He died when my father was a boy, but I’ve amassed more items of his than any other family member. He was Jack, like me. I’ve always felt a magic in that mirror.

I’ve always felt a connection to Dionysus. There are always some bits of him on my altar. Three doubloons from the Krewe of Bacchus from a Mardi Gras years ago. Similarly, I always keep peacock feathers and symbols on there. To remind me that boys can be pretty too. Various crystals given to me over the years. A stone I got from the ground in front of Oscar Wilde’s grave in Paris. A Turkish Mosaic Lamp. One of my most prized possessions, my Orrery. Mementoes, champagne corks from parties, fragments of things long past I want to remember.

I often put various things on my altar to “charge” them. Including rings I often wear and cufflinks. Sometimes decks of tarot cards. Sometimes pictures of people.

Do I believe in magic? At one time I might say the altar is about setting intentions. It’s about giving me a focus. It’s about tradition. But no, it’s magic. It’s all those other things too, but it’s the magic I have found after looking for a long time and it works. It’s also beautiful and that’s part of the magic.

I’ve been working on a novella that is a “portal story.” That is, it’s about someone from this world finding a magical doorway into a fantastical “other” world. Multiple other worlds, actually. I’ve always loved those kinds of stories. One of the first books I ever read was A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain, which captured my imagination and never let go.

Then there was Narnia, which broke my heart and I don’t want to talk about. Then there was the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon, which I do want to talk about, but not right now. And Sliders! And eventually The Magicians, which I loved.

In this latest dive back into portal fiction (or Isekai, the Japanese brand of these stories), I’ve looked all over for recommendations and found these two books popping up again and again.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke was subtle and claustrophobic and beautifully written. The main character was sweet and fragile, and I felt immediately protective of him. The book is told from his perspective through his thorough journals.

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Piranesi is a man living in a labyrinth of sorts. Hundreds of stone chambers, many of which are filled with statues, and which occasionally flood. He believes he is only one of two people who exist. The story unfolds from there and unfolds again and again.

I was lukewarm on Clarke’s first novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which I know is beloved by many. I enjoyed it, but I found it just a bit too long to get comfortable with. Piranesi, on the other hand, I binged in a weekend and felt completely immersed in.

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow is vast and sprawling, though also partly told in journal and research paper form. Similarly, it had some mysterious identities, but where Piranesi seemed to have one portal, TTTDoJ, somewhat expectedly, had many.

Also similar to Piranesi, TTTDoJ was beautifully, often poetically written with a very different but equally intriguing main character.

Where Piranesi gave me a very complete picture, with every inch of the world seemingly explored and explained, TTTDoJ left so much unexplored. I wanted more. I wanted to know about every world and every door and every character.

I’m still grappling with whether that lack of information is a good thing or a bad thing. Or maybe just a thing. There was a story to be told and it was told well. There were often huge sub-stories waved away with a line or two, and I wanted desperately to know more about those mini-adventures.

I can’t wait to dive into Harrow’s other work, which all looks right up my alley.

As for my own portal story, it leans more toward Harrow’s novel, though the mystery is far less complex and the other worlds are the things I want to explore the most. We’ll see how I do.

This was one of my first full on photo shoots where I really felt like I was able to capture what I was looking to capture. The softness of the model’s form, the richness of her clothes and apartment, the beauty of golden hour light.

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There it was again, the tightening in her chest, the fear of what the night might bring, closing in around her, tunneling her vision, squeezing her throat.

Elle had taken the train to Brooklyn. She’d followed the instructions from the little encrypted messaging app. She’d walked out into the middle of nowhere, past the Navy Yards, under the BQE, turning when she got to an enormous self-storage facility.

Social situations always came with some measure of anxiety for Elle, but going to a meeting of the Secret Readers, and knowing they knew so much about her, tended to be the worst.

When she got to an empty block of factories, she leaned against a streetlamp and concentrated on breathing. She had studied ways to calm herself. She’s taken her pills, but it was only the excitement that let her keep the fear in check. She focused on her need until her pounding heart relented.

She looked at her phone again. The password to the messenger app was long, but she’d memorized it. Encrypted messages, burner phones, and even code words whispered through slits in doors. Things she never thought she could handle, but somehow she figured them all out. The curiosity trumped all of her shortcomings and failings and fear, eventually. Sometimes she just had to stop and wait for the anxiety to pass.

The little map started to make sense. Landmarks instead of street names and numbers. Less chance of someone figuring out where they were meeting. The secrecy was important, certainly, though sometimes it seemed a little much. What they were doing wasn’t strictly illegal. However, she tried not to think about where people got the diaries.

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Her obsession, what had her out on a dark street looking for secret doors, started in a very common way. The first diary she ever read was one she was one many people have read. Often the only diary most people will ever read; The Diary of Anne Frank.

Sad, wise, informative, historical, but hardly scintillating by any stretch of the imagination. Still, something about it struck her. Something clicked. Reading someone’s personal writing. Reading words not meant to be shared. Imagining the writer furiously scribbling and then hiding their words. It captured Elle’s imagination.

Then at around fifteen, she found Anaïs Nin, who had published many volumes of her journals. Journals about living in Paris and New York, and Cuba. Journals of an artist and an adulteress. Elle bought a few of them at a time, usually from used bookstores. She stole a few from the library, too embarrassed to check out the somewhat risqué books. She read them over and over again, reveling in Nin’s secret life.

It was when she had run out of Nin’s words that she reached out, looking for more.

Autobiographies did nothing for her. It had to be written without the author knowing it would be published. There were a few books available in the mainstream that hit her buttons, but she always wanted more. She always wanted secret things, things no one else could read. She often dreamt of lifting up someone’s mattress and finding pretty little tomes. Stealing their most personal secrets.

Eventually, she started going to yard sales and estate sales. She searched eBay. She found rumors of the Dark Web, but she wasn’t savvy enough to really investigate them. Eventually, she found The Secret Readers.

The Secret Readers were, most simply, an online forum where people traded pictures and scans of diaries—all kinds of diaries and journals. From the angsty scribblings of teenagers, to the dramas of married adults, to the last words of death row inmates, the secret confessions of nuns, the rantings of people in asylums, from everywhere.

It wasn’t just diaries. There were small factions that collected love letters,

Dear John letters, unpublished poetry never meant for strangers’ eyes, even the seemingly benign, like shopping lists and doodles.

For a while, Elle had been fascinated by photos of the notebooks of homeless men. Their conspiracy theories and mad ramblings had a certain angry chaotic charm.

There was a hierarchy to the forums. Elle had to comment and post things and make herself known for almost a year before she got invited to the real threads. Outside of the simple superficial conversations where people posted the same twenty or thirty diaries that everyone knew about online. It took two years until she got invited to the local group.

The New York group was a splinter of the larger forum and was by invitation only and vigorously moderated. There were less than a hundred active members at any time. Most importantly, the New York group was not just an online entity, they had in-person meetings and in person readings.

The whole online thing was just a means to an end for Ell all along. She never much enjoyed text chats and discussion threads. She just wanted the physical secrets. She wanted to hear the inner narratives. She wanted to see the yellowed paper and touch the scratched-up covers. She wanted to smell those diaries.

That got her walking again, looking for a very particular landmark. The directions said, “Monkey with a hat.” Turning around in a circle, she saw another old factory building, but this one had faded paint on the brick façade. Some kind of mechanic, the information mostly faded, but a smiling chimp with a blue baseball hat pointed to the sky with a wrench.

She walked to that building. There was a flier taped to the door. “NYSR Journalism Study Group, Fifth Floor, Studio 58b.”

It was a long walk up the five flights of stairs, and she stopped to catch her breath when she got to the fourth floor. When she got to the fifth, she pushed open the large door that was propped half-open with a two-by-four. She found herself in a long empty hallway that was the same gray as the stairway, floor to ceiling.

She passed doors. Some were marked with simple placards noting “Jay Bird’s Tattoos,” and “New Urban Photography,” some completely anonymous, and still others elaborately covered with colorful signs, artwork, posters, and bumper stickers. Marijuana leaves, peace signs, graffiti.

Studio 58b was the last door at the end of the hall. The door was painted a muted rust red with a small hand-painted sign on a piece of cardboard that said: “By appointment only.” She heard some talking inside. She considered knocking, but decided just to enter.

There was a rush of fresh night air, incense, and the smell of wine. It took her eyes a moment to adjust to all the colors. The studio was surprisingly large, with a tall ceiling. Three of the studio’s walls were covered in bolts of gold, orange, and red fabric. The south wall was made entirely of windows, split into perhaps forty square panes, framed in chipped green painted metal. Many of the windows were open. The view was of the desolate industrial buildings around them and, in the distance, a tiny Manhattan skyline.

There were seven people in the studio. They all looked at her when she entered but turned back to what they were doing a moment later. Somewhat chaotic avant-garde jazz played lightly from unseen speakers.

In the center of the room were four rows of folding chairs, five per row. In front of the chairs was a battered and scraped-up wooden lectern draped with more gold and terracotta-colored fabric, which gave it the look of an altar. That look was emphasized by the two large candles atop it. It was obviously the place where people would read.

Two of the seven people in the room were sitting in folding chairs waiting, and five conversed around a table laden with food and drink. There were small but elaborately laid out cheese plates, sweating bottles of prosecco, jugs of water, and a few assorted bottles of whiskey.

Since the readings moved around quite a bit, there were often very different atmospheres and tones to each gathering. The last place was a somewhat sterile white-walled gallery with hummus, carrots, and a box of white wine. Before that, it was a community center basement, with an ancient coffee urn and donuts.

The group did a pretty good job of weeding out the truly scary, but the shared fetish of the group meant everyone had some level of creepiness. It was something she had to accept quickly when socializing with the New York group. Of the seven people in the room, she knew four by name, two by face, one was a stranger.

Tom from Jersey. In his late fifties, tall, balding, eyes that were far too intense, he had a low growl of a voice. There was a stoutness to him that frightened her a little, like some kind of old sideshow strong man. He liked journals of closeted men, which were not the rarest, but weren’t all that common.

Gordon was small and thin and wore very cheap black suits that made him look like a child at a funeral, though he was in his forties. He liked affairs, especially if he could get some love letters or pieces from both parties. His needs seemed complicated and exhausting to Elle.

Margot was the oldest of them, fragile and impeccably dressed. An Upper West Side dame, in pearls and giant broaches. She liked guilt, mourning, and misfortune. She liked stuff about class and money, neither of which interested Elle much.

Finally, there was Goldberg. She never knew his first name, though it was debatable if any of them used their real names. She went by Elle, but that wasn’t her name. In his late thirties, Goldberg had a large expressive mouth and wore nothing but tweed. Elle didn’t like him, on a very primal level. Perhaps it was because he liked the same things she liked; forbidden relationships. Those who pined for teachers or married friends or cousins. Diaries about secret taboo desires.

The host was pretty, petite, in her late twenties, only a few years younger Elle’s thirty. The host wore paint-splattered black overalls, and it seemed like she wasn’t wearing anything under them. Every move she made gave small electric glimpses of the sides of her breasts. Elle guessed she was the owner of the studio. She was drawn to her immediately.

Elle liked somewhat masculine women and effeminate men, usually. Perhaps she nestled between the two identities, born a woman, but doing her best to dress like Oscar Wilde. Or she would if she had the money. Okay, on a good day, it was more of an Annie Hall impersonation.

She nodded at those who nodded at her as she picked at the cheeses and olives, pouring herself a small but merciful glass of whiskey. It seemed like they were waiting for a few more people. In the meantime, she took a seat and tried once more to steady her racing heart.

As she sat, she felt in her pocket for the book she had brought. She swallowed, hoping her luck would continue and she wouldn’t have to read. Still, she would do what she had to. She was willing to do a lot for her obsession.

There were many rules in the group. One of them was that no one asked where people got the diaries. There was certainly gossip, rumors, stories of holy grail finds in yard sales, illicit deals, and even whispers of elaborate heists.

Another rule was that everyone had to attend a meeting ready to read. Each meeting started with a roll call and then a random selection of three readers. Once, it was done by fortune cookies. Once, everyone drew a tarot card. Once, they all had to roll some strange multi-sided dice.

Looking around, she saw that there was a large spherical brass cage at the end of the buffet table. In it were white balls for Bingo.

Elle had never had much luck finding diaries, which was one of the reasons the Secret Readers were so important to her. Still, she knew she might have to read, so she brought the only thing she could think to bring—her own teenage diary.

It was not one of her five pink childhood diaries with their little heart-shaped locks. Nor was it one of the three purple diaries with shining gold engraved stars that she wrote in through middle school and early high school. She brought one of the four black leather-bound volumes she wrote in during the end of high school and the start of college.

She had it in the big pocket of her oversized black slacks, and occasionally she touched her pocket to make sure it was still there. A comforting rectangle of memories. She hoped she wouldn’t have to use it, she wouldn’t have to share it, but if she did, it would be a small price to pay.

Each reading she had been to was aesthetically very different, but emotionally very similar. The big secret in her life, the thing it was difficult to even explain, was all around her in those reading rooms. The thing she hid from the world was out in the open. In fact, she often felt like the least deviant person in the room during readings.

There was such an overwhelming sense of freedom and belonging. Knowing she wasn’t alone in her desires. Seeing the desperation in the eyes of others that she thought only existed in the mirror. All at once familiar, repulsive, and arousing.

Malloy and Levi came in together. Two handsomely disheveled men in their twenties, one dark-skinned with a Caribbean patois, the other a high-cheekboned Filipino. They always traveled together and didn’t seem to have particular themes to their readings. They just liked secrets.

Harp followed soon after, their de facto leader, though they had other leaders in the time Elle had been in the group. Harp was tall, vaguely Eastern European, and androgynous. As usual, they wore an off-white suit, looking a bit like Bowie in his Pale White Duke phase. They spoke very little, but seemed to command rooms when they did.

Some others trickled in. Elle knew she must have met them online, but she couldn’t put screen names to real faces. When there were fifteen of them, Harp went up to the lectern and cleared their throat.

“Under your seats, you will find a card with a number,” Harp said just loud enough to be heard by all. There were murmurs and chairs scraping as they all got their cards. Elle’s real “eleven.”

“Our host has offered to do us the honor,” they said, motioning to the overall-wearing painter. She curtsied, which might have looked awkward if someone less charming did it.

She turned the handle on the bingo cage, and the room was filled with the sound of clattering wooden balls. Elle wondered what the host’s connection was to The Secret Readers. Was she a member? A facilitator? A fan? When the clattering stopped, she reached in and pulled out three balls.

“Four, eleven, and nine,” she said simply. She had a New England accent, perhaps Maine. Elle’s stomach silently dropped. Her hands were instantly sweaty. For a moment, she couldn’t hear.

She saw the other two hold up their cards, so she did the same. It wavered in the air as her hand shook. Goldberg, a woman Elle didn’t know, and her. Goldberg turned and smiled at her. Anger tried to swell but was no match for the fear.

“If there are no comments from the group, I invite Mr. Goldberg up to read first,” Harp said, nodding to him and then taking a seat in the front row.

Goldberg was in brown and yellow herringbone tweed. His suit looked old, but not shabby, just well worn, most certainly vintage. His hair was salt and pepper. His shirt was light blue, and his tie was navy.

He brought up a tiny but thick notebook. It was hardcover, bound in red fabric. The corners were bent. It looked like it had been roughed up, maybe even found in the garbage.

He cleared his throat and looked over the crowd from the pulpit. Elle wondered if it was only her imagination telling her his gaze hovered on her before he opened the book.

Goldberg read.

June 29th - I’m grateful to be in the back seat alone. We ended up being too many people even for the station wagon, so we took three cars. So here we are, driving back upstate for the summer.

The Morgensterns will be at their cabin next door, and so our two families will have joint cookouts and so on, as usual. I’m dreading Lisa Morgenstern’s arrival, but apparently, we’ll have a few weeks before she gets there to annoy me and bat her big cow eyes.

In a shocking turn of events, cousin Anthony is coming with us. It’s Anthony now that he is in college. He dreads Tony, apparently, as much as I hate Mikey. It’s bad enough we can’t pick our names, must they give us nicknames as well?

July 2nd - A constant tension has been laid over the big summer house like a fog. It’s everywhere, touching everything. I feel it from the moment I wake up until I fall asleep. I feel it most acutely when I’m in bed but also when we are all in the big parlor together.

Summer in the Hudson Valley is calm, warm, and humid, but the big house is kept cool. Every morning, Dad reads his paper, Mom reads her romance novels, Peggy knits, the boys play with their toy trains on the floor, and I sit as far from Cousin Anthony as I can.

He is very good at not getting caught watching me, but I feel his eyes on my bare legs, on my neck, on my body. I sit by the window, writing in this diary, and he examines me from across the room. Sometimes I wonder if he knows I’m gay. Other times it seems absurd that he wouldn’t know. I never really know what I look like to people. In the mirror, it’s obvious. In my father’s eyes, it’s impossible.

I feel like eventually I will be taught the rules. How to find the others like me. The signals, the handshake, whatever it was. They don’t seem to teach that at Croton Prep.

I feel like there has always been this shadow between Anthony and me. His two faces, the one he puts on for everyone else and the one he shows me, secretly, over his shoulder.

Nothing has ever happened. We’ve never talked about it. But it’s always been there. Now that I’m eighteen and he’s twenty-two, it somehow seems more straightforward. Somehow it feels darker, more threatening, and simultaneously more real, more possible.

I hate it. And I hate that it is comforting. Like no matter how ugly I feel or how much of an outcast, there is this dark shadow that wants me, in whatever possessive perverted way.

I remember when I first figured out my body, at night, in bed. It wasn’t the hunky jock boys at school I thought about or even the preppy popular ones. It wasn’t someone in drama. It wasn’t even movie stars. It was always ugly people. It was mean people. Even if I tried to jerk off thinking about Tom Cruise, the fantasy would shift, and he would become a distorted shadow figure.

Scarred faces and big hairy hands. Tall cruel men who reach out to cover my mouth. Anthony, with his face drawn down, looking at me through his thick eyelashes, smiling at my discomfort. He wasn’t ugly on the outside, but his insides made me squirm.

July 5th - Last night, before the fireworks, with the sweetness of the margarita I stole swimming in my mouth, I met Anthony’s gaze with a wink instead of an eye roll. I thought he would be surprised, but he wasn’t. He was aggressive.

With the younger boys splashing in the pool and my parents busy with Gin Rummy, we found ourselves at the other end of the backyard following the little stone path to the tool shed.

He came up from behind me and pushed me against the small wooden shed. His bare chest against my bare back. I put my hands on the warm wood, the flaking paint. I didn’t look back.

“Tell me to stop,” he whispered in my ear, his hands on my bare stomach. I wore nothing but my swim trunks. I didn’t tell him to stop.

His fingers were greedy for my skin, my chest, slipping under my wet swimsuit. He let out little growls when he touched me. My body itched for his strong hands, and his eager attention.

There were a few new first times to check off my list. I don’t know how to celebrate them. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do while he knelt in front of me, so I rested my hands on his head, in his hair. It felt like swimming in hot water.

After all of the various doings, we walked back as if nothing had happened. I felt the smile on my face when we were back with everyone else. It was so strange that no one noticed my blush because my face felt like it was on fire.

Then, this morning he was gone without a word. My father told me over bacon and eggs that Anthony was up with the sun and on the first train back to the city.

I walked to the beach with my hurt. He texted me later that I was “too pretty” and that he “couldn’t control himself around me.” It was the first time anyone had ever called me pretty. There is something potent in that word, far beyond handsome. That made it easy to romanticize the loss of him. It made me feel like a siren. It made me feel like a treasure men might die for. I liked that.

Back at the big house, I moped and read poetry and contemplated what to do with another two weeks.

The Morgensterns will be here soon, and with them, the torture of Lisa’s endless prattling. Still, her brother will be here too, and I haven’t seen him for three years. He’s been at college, like me, and I wonder if it did to him what it did to Anthony. Perhaps the tool shed will need another visit. Perhaps I’ll become the slut of the little summer village up here.

The gardeners and townies can all take a turn after I run through my cousins and the older brothers of my friends. I’m horrible, but at least I can make myself laugh. Time for a swim.

With that, Goldberg closed the book. There was scattered, somewhat awkward applause. Looking around, Elle saw some red cheeks and some crossed legs. Their host got up for water. Elle wanted some as well, but couldn’t get her legs to move.

As always, it pressed Elle’s buttons in a way that made her mute and unable to move. Gears turning in her head. The bit about fantasies, ugly faces, and mean people. So on the nose for her, it could have been a page from her own diary. She thought about the phrase “too pretty,” the uncontrollable desire of men. The frightening potency of an older man. How it was repulsive and alluring.

“It made me feel like a siren. It made me feel like a treasure men might die for.”

She closed her eyes briefly and let the thrill fill her. All those secrets. All those details. That last bit, that dirty bit. Potent.

“Sebastian,” Harp said from their seat, and Elle turned to see a woman she had never met get up to read next. She was tall with light brown skin, liberally peppered with freckles. Her hair was a short afro.

She stood in front of the group with the confidence of someone used to speaking in public. She had a small crooked grin.

Sebastian read.

I see him once a year. Well, sometimes we bump into each other around the city, but really I only see him once a year on purpose. Every year on my birthday. It’s a very special day, sacred and frightening. There aren’t many things I consider sacred in this world. Honestly, there aren’t many things I consider truly frightening, either. I’ve seen too much. Still, every birthday, I risk my life as a tradition. As a sacrament.

He’s a horrible person, Benjamin. I know that. He’s hurt people I know, people I love. It’s part of the reason I go out of my way not to engage with him the rest of the year. It’s also the reason I see him that day. He’s the only one who I can do it with, and I need someone there.

I get a room for us at the Chelsea Hotel. It’s a pain in the ass to book, but worth it. We need the chaotic energy of that place. We need the ghosts and the memories.

We meet at the bar across the street. I buy him his bourbon. We catch up in a very perfunctory way. I don’t really want to know about his life, and honestly, I don’t want to tell him about mine. Eventually, I ask if he has “it,” and he gives me a crooked cocky smile and nods.

We go back to the room, and for one time a year, that one day I see him, I revisit another old friend.

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He has his lucky spoon with him and cooks in the bathroom. Powder swirling in water, bubbling, and that very particular smell. Light, almost vinegary. I tie myself off and wait. He smiles at me as he prepares my shot.

I know I’ll get sick. The fact that he usually doesn’t tells me it’s not as infrequent an act for him. The pleasure waves are tidal, crashing with memories of another life. The pull of it. The desperation that once ruled everything in my world. The singular gravitational center of my universe. That Black Hole I somehow escaped. The purity of the pleasure is always startling.

Every birthday I spend in that hotel. Where the muses haunt every bathroom, and I tempt fate. Just to see. Just to fuck with myself. Just to revisit an old friend who is an asshole in the place where poets and rockstars and gods have done the same thing a thousand times before us.

And for a while, I talk to him like he is actually still my friend. He’s good at being on drugs in a way a lot of other people aren’t. We hold each other sometimes. We help each other get through it. Then we sleep.

Then in the morning, the spell is over. His banter is back to being annoying, and I pay for his coffee and bagel and escape as quickly as possible. I go back to my life, but every year it does something to me. It centers me. It makes sure I don’t get too big-headed or cocky or maybe even too jaded.

It’s stupid, but I think of la petite mort. Every birthday, I will not settle for the little death. I want to touch something bigger, something stronger, something genuinely deadly.

Then I spend a year happy that I lived through it, never sure if I’ll go through it again.

She closed the book. The room was silent. The energy was so dramatically different from the first reading that no one seemed to know how to process it.

Elle stayed in the moment as long as she could. The images of the story in her head. The darkness. The fear. The smell. The desperation. As much as she wanted to enjoy the way the story swirled complexly in her head, the knowledge that she would have to read next was there, like a train in the distance. Its approach undeniable, inescapable.

Sebastian sat, and Elle knew she should stand, but once more, her legs didn’t seem to function.

“Elle?” she heard Harp ask, as if from a great distance. There was a beat. She swallowed. Somehow she was standing, walking sideways to get past the other chairs, her legs jelly. Then she was at the podium.

Her hand went to her pocket, slipped in, felt the hard corner of her diary. She took it out and placed it on the podium. It opened to where she had placed a bookmark. The bookmark was from The Strand. She felt very numb and cold.

She read.

September 30th - I have a hundred prospective lovers at this college, and all I can think of are the ones I can’t have. The ones I shouldn’t have. The problem is I think I could have them if I really tried—my untested powers of seduction.

It seems like the mere suggestion of taboo is enough to get me started. An RA isn’t strictly off limits, but Meredith, with her lanyard-butch charm, makes me blush just passing her in the halls.

I’ve come thinking of her warning me about being too loud. Covering my mouth. Tell me all the rules I’m breaking. Telling me she can smell the pot I’m hiding under my mattress. Telling me she knows I sneak out to go clubbing. Telling me I’m a bad girl and she’s going to spank me until I’m obedient.

She’s good fantasy fodder, because the idea of professors is too intense to even play with. I try desperately not to think of them that way. If I let my mind play with them too much, I won’t be able to look at them in class without blushing.

I wonder how they do it. All that attention pointed at them all day. Most of them don’t even seem to notice. That makes it worse for me, because I just want them more. The colder they are, the better. The meaner, the more exacting, the more grumpy and curmudgeonly, the more I want to be the one that takes me.

The chipper ones are useless to me. Make me earn it. Make me work for it. I want to be the one who makes them break their rules.

I listen to the gossip. There is always someone fucking a professor. I can live vicariously. It doesn’t make me jealous. If they did it with someone else, I didn’t want them. I had to be the one who pushed them over the edge. I had to be the one who made them break the rules.

October 10th - It’s finally getting cold, and it makes the world electric and real. The summer is a fog, and everything is soggy and limp. In the crisp autumn air, my brain just works better.

In statistics, I made a list of all the ways sex could be forbidden. I made a list of people it would be inappropriate to fuck. I numbered that list. Tonight when I get home, I’m going to roll dice and force myself to masturbate thinking of whoever matches the number—emotional Russian roulette.

October 12th - I’m alone in my dorm room, and my heart is racing, and I don’t know what to do with my hands. Dr. Carlson’s hand was on my knee one hour ago. A completely inappropriate place for his hand to be. A completely inappropriate thing to have happened.

I went to his office because he wrote a note to do so on one of my papers. I was nervous I had done something wrong, forgotten some requirement for class. I was scared I was failing, which is ridiculous. I’m an A student. When I got to his office, he just narrowed his beady eyes at me and told me to close the door and have a seat.

On his desk was my list. Eighteen names on a piece of graph paper. “People It Would Be Very Very Wrong To Fuck,” was written on top of it. His name was number twelve, just under my step-sister and just above my best friend’s boyfriend.

Dr. Carlson got up and picked up the list, bringing it over to me. He sat down next to me and handed it to me. “I don’t know if I should be flattered or insulted. Is it a good list to be on or a bad one?” He chuckled, putting his hand on my bare knee, my skirt riding up a little as I sat up straighter. His pinky moved up slightly, moving up my inner thigh. My legs opened instinctively.

He laughed as he stood up. I felt humiliated by my desire, which, in many ways, was ideal for me. I saw him straighten his trousers, similarly affected.

“Please be more careful with your personal writings. Someone else on that list, like your roommate, might not be as understanding,” he said, going back behind his desk and sitting down.

I don’t even remember leaving. It was like I blacked out. It was like time dilated. I just remember being back in my dorm room, locking the bathroom door, and furiously getting myself off.

Elle’s hands were numb as she finished. Her ears were ringing. She found her seat and was dimly aware of scattered applause. She groped around for her glass of whiskey and downed it, looking vaguely at the table and wondering when her legs would work enough for her to get another.

When her eyes were able to focus again, she sighed at the sight of Goldberg, holding a full cup of whiskey out for her. “You seemed like you needed it,” he said with a little chuckle.

She took it, though she loathed him even more after his reading connected with her so profoundly. For some reason, the thought of him enjoying the bit of her life she shared made her uncomfortable in a new and profound way.

Looking around, she saw the usual post-reading mingling. In some ways, it was even better than the reading. People were able to touch and leaf through the diaries that had been read. People mingled and talked about their shared “hobby.” She swallowed, wondering who might want to examine hers. Examine her.

Goldberg waited for her to look at him again. She realized he would be the first, of course. She took the book out of her pocket again and handed it to him, trying hard to be detached, to dissociate enough to look like she didn’t care. He was so intent on looking at the book, she doubted he even noticed her grimace.

There was a common rote checklist they did when looking at a diary. Like watch dealers or antiquers or any other hobbyist/fetishist. Look at the spine, go over the covers with your fingers, open the book, and see if there are any inscriptions or notations. Any dates, any names, any clues.

Goldberg, like many others, was obsessed with locks. Almost all of the little locks on diaries were simple and mostly cosmetic. Still, many collectors liked to keep them intact, and make replicas of the original keys.

Elle had blacked out her name in her diary. She had left the date. She had gone over that book page by page a hundred times and ripped out any entries that had any personal facts. She’d crossed out a few names. She’d sanitized it of details, but left all of the truths.

He nodded sagely at the numbers. His fingers traced ballpoint pen drawings of crows and bare-limbed trees. He found the bookmark she had left and read over the entries she had just read. Then he looked up at her.

His whisper was low and conspiratorial. “I’ll give five hundred,” he said, looking around, knowing it was uncouth to talk about a purchase at a reading. She simply shook her head, no.

“I can’t go any higher than seven,” he said, paging through to the end.

“It’s not for sale. I don’t have a large collection. This is one of my only pieces,” she said, stumbling a little over the lie. He looked at her. He might have thought her hesitation was some negotiation tactic. He nodded, almost impressed.

“Perhaps a rental or a trade? One month with mine for a month with yours? And a c-note to sweeten the deal?”

She swallowed and closed her eyes, and took a deep breath. “I don’t want to make a deal with you, Goldberg. I don’t like you,” she said, the words making her cold and strong.

His back straightened. He closed the book and held it out to her. “Fine. Bitch,” he said, almost under his breath.

Others came to see her book, but she was less uncomfortable with their attention. She didn’t look at any of the other diaries. Goldberg’s was the only one she wanted to see, but that was ruined. She had another whiskey and then another, only to remember how little she had eaten that day.

As the evening went on, the vibe changed. People paired off. Partaking in their secret activity made many of them amorous. Malloy and Levi made out against a wall.

The host, in her artfully paint splattered clothes, watched everyone with cool amusement. Her eyes fell on Elle, and she felt a little flutter. If she wasn’t in a panic spiral, she would happily do whatever the host told her to do. Unfortunately, she felt like she was going to throw up.

Elle had only partaken in this aspect of the group once, with Harp. The first reading. Of course she went home with the leader. The one that had the only real forbidden quality. The sex was good, though Elle wasn’t able to relax enough to come.

Elle considered that she may have really fucked things up for herself. Pissing off Goldberg might get her banned or uninvited from the next reading. He was one of the most prolific posters.

When he returned to her all smiles, holding his coat and briefcase, she wondered if it was to twist the dagger. He put his things down next to her, awkwardly, and straightened his tie.

“Sorry if I was pushy. No hard feelings. I always enjoy your insight on the forum. Good to see you, Elle,” he said, and she gave him a tight-lipped smile.

“It’s fine,” she said and hated herself for it. He grinned with his eyes.

“Take my memory and leave, you bastard,” she thought.

He put on his coat, picked up his things, and left.

She got her coat, almost falling over as she stood up. The room swam, but it felt good. It made the anxiety dull and distant. She said goodbye to no one. She carefully walked down five flights and then walked five blocks and got a taxi from an app on her phone. Technically they weren’t supposed to, but she couldn’t even wrap her head around trying to find the subway.

It wasn’t until she got home that she realized her diary was gone.

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Low temperature and slightly fine (for pour over) helped draw out the cherry notes in these naturally processed Ethiopian beans. A very rich cup with very pleasant sour acidity bursting through at the start and then a syrupy finish.

This is one of my favorite shots I’ve ever taken. On the pier in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. There was a slip in my shutter and a third of the frame is black. Two teenagers canoodling.

Shot on a Canon AE-1, FD 50 1.4 lens, Kodak Tri-X 400 film.

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That huge keyboard left its mark on me. The guts of the computer were in the keyboard. It made such solid clacky sounds when you typed.

In 1990 typing became Word Processing and in came Mavis Beacon.

Computers weren’t particularly a thing in my family at that point, but I was the eccentric somewhat gifted child, so I was given some leeway. I found a PC case in a dumpster behind a small local law firm. This was in Bayside, Queens, NY. For Christmas my mother took me to Radio Shack and I somehow got my hands on a 386 processor and some RAM.

Voilà, I had a very slow and very loud and huge computer. With a tiny Hercules monitor. Black and white. Well, more like black and sort of yellow.

I played text based games and fiddled around and even started writing stories and saving them on floppy disks.

A few years later, I got a Pentium processor. I installed my first version of Windows. 3.2! Eventually in high school I started working at Staples. Just as I graduated I installed Windows 95 with about eleven 3.5” disks.

After Staples, I moved to Kinko’s and after a long and rather depressing string of college starts and stops I ended up at Parsons School of Design and got my first Mac. The big bubble butt iMac. Graphite. Though I’d been using a PowerPC at work already.

I moved to a print shop in Manhattan and became the plate maker, résumé designer, IT guy, and general digital person.

Fast forward thirty years and there is this pandemic.

Pre-pandemic I had already started getting curious about mechanical keyboards, which already had a thriving, but somewhat underground following. At least in America. I got the sort of default starter board, a Keychron K1.

It was fun, it was noisy, it felt so much like those old keyboards I remembered. But… it wasn’t perfect. There were issues with it. I hated the little seams on the corners. I read there were other, better keyboards that let you remap keys to whatever you want, record macros, change the switches. There were even boards that were completely made of aluminum!

So I got on Reddit. I figured out what Discord was. I started planning. I got used boards, Frankensteined together things on the cheap, waiting for my perfect board. My “Endgame,” as they say. I thought I found it. A beautiful sleek 70% board. A little unusual and very cool.

In two months I was board of it. I started learning how to solder. I started taking apart and lubing my switches. I started changing the springs inside the switches. All to get the perfect feel, the perfect sound, as well as the perfect look.

Now, here we are, five years into the hobby and I have settled down a bit. Mostly because I just couldn’t stomach spending so much money on these toys. I started selling off my older pieces. I started being more practical and prudent.

My current board is a Neo80. What they call a TKL. Ten-keyless. Meaning it has all the keys of a full sized board, except for the number pad. I have a separate number pad. A ZoomPad.

In both I have the rather niche Momoka Shark switches. Which are very tactile, meaning they have a noticeable bump when you type and a sharp falloff. They make a somewhat low “thocky” sound. A deep pop with every key press. And the relatively new MTNU 800 keycaps, which are based on the Atari 800 keyboard from the early 1980s and aren’t too far from the Commodore 64, which started this mess.

I’m deeply in love with this keyboard. And keyboards in general. And god forbid you bring up keyboards in a conversation with me. You will hear this whole post out loud.

Click to read all chapters.

Vanessa never meant to seduce the mirror.

It came from her Great Aunt Joan. A woman she hardly knew, but was the only family she had in Manhattan. The rich widow sister of her grandmother who her family always complained never came to Thanksgiving.

It was a massive thing, the mirror. Far too large for Vanessa’s junior one-bedroom up in Spanish Harlem.

There was something about the mirror, though. The expensive sheen of it. How the reflection seemed so much crisper than the cheap plastic framed mirror in her childhood bedroom. The decadence of having something so large and expensive in her little apartment. The wooden frame, covered in gold foil, reminding her of her visit to Versailles as a teenager. All that garish gilded opulence.

At first, it had been unnerving. The company of her reflection. Seeing it when she woke up and before she went to bed. She took to putting a robe on after her shower so as not to be confronted by her body first thing in the morning. She didn’t like the swell of her belly, how her breasts were uneven and imperfect.

In time, though, she got used to the mirror. She even found solace in it. Slowly, it helped her get more comfortable with herself.

The mirror became a constant in Vanessa’s life. Through changing jobs and bad dates, she always came home to her reflection. In time she even started to show off for it. Pausing before bed. Batting her eyelashes at herself. Letting her robe hang off her shoulders and finally fall with a burlesque flourish.

The married couple were much easier to seduce. He was handsome and his wife was gorgeous. Will was forty and Emily was thirty-five, a decade older than Vanessa. They worked in the financial district and had a beautiful apartment on the Upper East Side.

It was cliché. Literally a “We saw you across the bar” type of thing, but that evening, that’s exactly what Vanessa needed. Two smart, well-dressed, elegant people that were entranced by her. Their eyes were like her mirror and she felt beautiful in their reflection.

Vanessa found herself looking in her mirror before dates. Testing different smiles. Seeing at what angle her blouse dipped open. Deciding if that would be a good thing or a bad thing.

Her time with Will and Emily was full of dimly lit bars with elaborate cocktails. Delicious meals where Vanessa never even saw the bill. Then the extravagance of their king-sized bed.

It was so different from the fumblings of college boys or even college girls. Two confident adults. Being shared by them, being teased, being the focus of all that desire. All those hands. All those mouths. All that want.

Then leaving it all behind. For them to discuss and process and clean up. No plates or sheets to wash, no feelings to process. Back to her quiet apartment and the comfort of her mirror.

But those sorts of things only lasted so long. The drama came after only two months. Each of them pulling her aside to tell her about the problems they thought bringing her in would fix. Then silence.

The camera was the next seduction, and the most intentional.

Another gift from her Great Aunt. A late Christmas present in a heavy box. A block of matte black metal that was far too complicated. A round solid lens that felt as dense as a gun, or at least what she imagined a gun would feel like.

It sat in that box for a few months until Vanessa got the flu and spent a week reading the manual and getting inspired. She set the camera up on a little tripod next to her desk. She faced the lens towards her mirror.

There was a remote that fit in her hand like a little bird and when she clicked it she saw a complicated tableau.

The wide-angle lens capturing everything. Her mirror along with the reflection of her bed, her desk, the camera itself. A sliver of her bathroom, a sliver of her window. A sliver of her life.

It took her a while to get the settings right. The ISO, the aperture, the speed, the white balance. Words she hazily remembered from her brief introduction to photography at school.

Once it was set, though, she never touched those settings again. It became a static eye. Aperture priority. Comfort priority.

For a while the photos were just for her, like a photo diary. Capturing those moments only the mirror had been privy to. She’d never had much luck remembering to write in the various paper journals she bought through the years, but the click of the little remote seemed to call to her.

The pictures went right from the camera to her laptop. She did very little to edit them. Lined up, they could even be a little stop-motion movie of her life.

At brunch with Margot, her college roommate and the only one of her friends who actually got a job in theater, Vanessa offhandedly mentioned the project. It was the first time she called it that, as she struggled to find a word that described what she was doing.

“Oh! Let me see!” Margot said. The comfort Vanessa had found ebbed as she looked at Margot, with her perfect skin and dancer’s body. Vanessa had grown thicker after college. Something she struggled with but had begun to revel in. The mirror and the couple had both worshiped those curves.

She took out her phone before the anxiety could stop her. She had a little gallery of her favorite shots.

Margot’s smile faded as she scrolled through them.

Vanessa looking out the window in a nearly transparent vintage chemise. The moonlight outlining her silhouette. Vanessa on the bed, on all fours, naked. Moving just enough that her face and breasts were only blurs of soft tan. Vanessa sitting on the bed, brushing her hair, face turned down. Vanessa closer to the mirror, so both her back and the reflection of her face were captured. In black bra and panties taking off one of her false eyelashes, lipstick smudged, eyes red from crying.

“Oh, Van,” Margot said and Vanessa braced. “These are amazing. These are really wonderful. They’re so intimate and beautiful. Oh, Van, you need to do something with this!”

Vanessa laughed it off, rolling her eyes, but she was touched. Margot had an eye. She trusted Margot’s taste.

Vanessa had gone to school for performance. Dance, acting, singing. In college she focused on drama. It was one of the many reasons she moved to Manhattan. Initially she had auditions, bit parts, hopes, but after a few months the bills forced her to get a full-time job. Since then, she hadn’t had an audience. She hadn’t had a stage. She longed for it and Margot’s little comment reignited a fire in her. To be seen.

The next weeks were filled with hunting for an outlet. Twitter? A webpage? OnlyFans? She settled on Tumblr and decided not to post anything too scandalous.

Sometimes the shots were sweet. Holding her fluffy little cat, Penelope, and sitting on the floor in a slouchy sweater, leaning against her bed. Other times they were aesthetic, a blur of movement, her face out of focus, or her body covered in flowers. Then, there were the erotic. Her cheeks flushed, her breasts barely covered, her mouth hungry, her hand a soft blur between her legs.

She slowly built a following. Luckily there were far more explicit photos on the site than hers, so her audience was usually not aggressively creepy. Though when the creeps did appear, she blocked them, she ignored them, she sometimes posted their lewd comments for people to make fun of.

Her favorite commenters were from other models, other artists. They were usually women, but also gay men and the occasional couple, who had similar blogs. The community of the somewhat hidden artist. Their joyous praise and playful flirtation kept her going. Hyping each other up and egging each other on. Giving each other prompts and inspiration.

A year passed like that and then two. Her desire to take pictures and post pictures waxed and waned, but she took comfort knowing it was there. Her new mirror. She even took comfort in the little reminders, people poking her, asking when she would come back.

It was only when she got her job in the marketing firm that she really started reconsidering the project. She didn’t stop it, nor did she take down any photos, but the drive had lessened as she was creatively challenged at work for the first time.

She missed it. There was a pang of sadness sometimes, when she came home and saw her camera there. There even came a point when she considered moving it, but instead, she draped a silk scarf over it for a time, just to keep it out of mind.

In two years, Margot had found some fame. Still young enough to play the ingénue, she had wowed in an avant garde Romeo and Juliet, then shocked as Nina in The Seagull.

“Those last photos you posted were divine!” Margot gushed, and Vanessa was surprised she still followed the project. She felt a flush thinking of her old friend looking at her in such a sexual space.

“It reminded me, I might have something you’d be interested in.” Margot, who usually kept conversations pretty light, had a certain excitement in her eyes that Vanessa hadn’t seen since their college days, drunk and out at a club.

“I’ve been completely obsessed with this new project. A secret project,” Margot leaned in and whispered. Vanessa felt the heat of her friend’s body and breathed in the expensive perfume Margot had started to wear.

“What is it?” Vanessa whispered, wondering if it was some movie Margot wasn’t supposed to talk about.

“It’s this... art project. I guess you could call it experimental theater. Maybe even performance art,” Margot said, taking a sip of her martini and sighing, trying to find the right word.

“It’s a cabaret, but a secret one. Sort of like a contemporary take on a vaudeville show. In this old theater downtown. We’re not even supposed to write down where it is, it’s word of mouth only,” Margot said, grabbing Vanessa’s hand. “Oh, Van, I haven’t been so excited about something since school.”

A secret cabaret? Vanessa’s mind swam with images of smoky speak easies, the Moulin Rouge, Bob Fosse, burlesque. Margot squeezed her hand and broke the spell for a moment. “And I think you would be perfect for it!”

Vanessa’s heart raced. She felt something seismic shift, or maybe something astrological. Some alignment. Knowing almost nothing about it, she felt a siren call to Margot’s project.

“I want in.”

For Chapter 02, see Negatives

In an effort to be more directly pro-union, pro-worker, anti-capitalist, anti-monopoly, anti-billionaire, and anti-oligarch, I’ve been reducing my use of major tech services, specifically the “big five”: Amazon, Alphabet (Google), Apple, Meta (Facebook), and Microsoft.

Amazon proved easiest to leave. After my Prime membership expired, I haven’t purchased anything from Amazon, Audible, or their subsidiaries for almost a year. With the exception of a few things at work, I’m happy that I’ve been able to get my office to reduce Amazon use significantly and got them completely off ULINE.

I’ve shifted to local purchasing whenever possible and found eBay invaluable. This transition has prompted me to buy less, repair more, and question consumption habits that previously required just a few taps.

I switched from Goodreads (which is owned by Amazon now) to StoryGraph and now source books from the three NYC library systems, local bookstores, bookshop.org, and various small ebook and audiobook sellers.

Google presented greater challenges. As a writer who relied on Google Docs and has been a Gmail user since its beta phase, I was deeply embedded in their ecosystem. My first step was moving my primary email to Proton, which offers encryption and comes from a relatively small company. While their political record isn’t perfect, not putting all my digital eggs in one basket feels like a good step.

For writing, I initially transitioned to Notion, which revitalized my creative process with its design, feel, and customization options. But as I went along, they started pushing their AI much more, and I started testing lots of other things. I settled on LibreOffice for daily writing and, as always, I move things to Scrivener when projects get larger.

I’ve adopted the Brave browser and multiple search engines, primarily DuckDuckGo. Though Brave has cryptocurrency connections, most features can be disabled. Extensions and scripts, combined with Proton’s VPN, help eliminate ads and tracking.

With Apple, I’m keeping my iPhone until it fails, as purchasing another tech giant’s phone seems counterproductive. I’ve canceled Apple TV and all app subscriptions except two essential ones.

These changes feel empowering and provide greater flexibility. My old Gmail accounts remain active, forwarding to my Proton email. I’ve downloaded and archived all my Google data and am working to remove what I can from their servers.

Meta is next, though maintaining connections currently takes precedence over principle. Meanwhile, I avoid paying them, block ads, disable tracking settings, and turn off what AI features I can.

The reality is that avoiding tech giants means accepting some inconvenience and higher costs. These companies gain advantages by mistreating workers and busting unions. Billionaires destroy economies to control markets. Still, reclaiming my data and refusing to feed their algorithms and AI systems feels like a meaningful step.

I read thirty-five books in 2025. More than I’ve read in a few decades. I’m trying to get that up to fifty-two in 2026. Most of them were contemporary, some classics, and a lot more nonfiction than I’ve read in a long time.

Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It by Cory Doctorow

I’ve been on a mission over the last year to stop using a lot of the services that make up the core complaints of this book: Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Twitter. Oh Twitter, how I miss your early days. Oh Amazon, you’ve been a real pain in the ass to escape. Oh Apple, you still have your claws in me, I say as I type this on a Mac Mini, but I’m trying.

Doctorow is brilliant, as always. I heard him speak about this book at a Brooklyn Public Library talk and immediately devoured it. I didn’t learn a whole lot of new information, but the mechanism of what has been happening was written out in a much clearer way, and it was a good read.

The Uncool: A Memoir by Cameron Crowe

I found myself thinking about Elvis Costello’s memoir I read a few years ago, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, as I read Cameron Crowe’s. There are similar threads and similar tones. Both men love music, met a lot of their heroes, went through some hardships, but generally everything worked out fine. In both, the hardships are a bit glossed over and the triumphs are listed as no big deal.

One anecdote in The Uncool keeps rattling around in my head. Basically, an awkward and “uncool” teenage Crowe asks the hottest girl in school out to a concert and she says no. He writes his reaction as basically “I was sad, but glad I asked!” And then wastes no more ink on the thought. Brief, but unfulfilling.

Still, it was a quick fun read and a trip down memory lane. Specifically the background of Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which I mostly knew but was interesting to see through his eyes.

Most importantly this book reminded me to pick up some Joan Didion…

Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

A masterpiece. Perfect vibes, thoughtful prose, wit, and verve.

I’d dabbled in Didion, but this was my first time diving into her nonfiction. The fact that Crowe idolizes her makes perfect sense, but she has less of his innocent sentimentality.

It’s funny that she writes so much about California and leaving New York, because she reads as pure Gotham to me. The next coming of Dorothy Parker.

“On Keeping a Notebook” was a high point for me, to the degree that I immediately found the text online and sent it to friends and muses. “John Wayne: A Love Song” was like Hemingway if he used adjectives properly. “On Going Home” and “Goodbye to All That” really got to the heart of things in a profound and beautiful way.

It left me with the best feeling a book can give me: the need to immediately write something. Specifically about being a native New Yorker and watching the dreamers come here to either thrive or dash themselves on the rocks of the East River.

How To Fuck Like A Girl: Vera Blossom’s Sex Diary by Vera Blossom

I read this around the same time as Luster and there is something tied together in me. Still, Vera Blossom’s memoir(?) is part diary, part poem, part blog post, part rant, and I’m here for it.

My own queerness has been one of the defining discoveries of my life and yet as a white, relatively straight-passing person (when I want/need to be), I’ve always been surrounded by people with far more intense struggles. Specifically queer people of color, trans people, and sex workers. All of which are explored in this book.

I found it most profound when it was at its most poetic and most raw. Both of which happen often.

Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer

As someone who grew up loving Woody Allen’s movies, and his few books, and listing some of Roman Polanski’s works as my top favorites, this book tackled lots of things I’ve been grappling with for a few decades now.

The bad news is, it doesn’t give many answers. The good news is it picks apart the questions pretty well.

I don’t think it helped me figure out if and how to separate the art from the artist, but it gave me some new tools for that work.

This Is Not a Book About Benedict Cumberbatch: The Joy of Loving Something--Anything--Like Your Life Depends On It by Tabitha Carvan

I love fandom. I love fan fiction. My love of writing started early, but didn’t seem to gel until I found fandoms. The X-Files, specifically, though I just missed the Star Trek ships. Then Buffy. It was all a good reminder that writing is a worthy endeavor and a way of creating that shouldn’t be limited to publication and monetization.

We tell stories, sing, dance, cook, all for the joy of those things.

But that’s not really what this book is about. This book is about obsession. I like the premise, the honesty, the horniness, though I didn’t feel any of those things went far enough for my liking. At times it felt too academic for something casually read and not at all academic enough for something intellectually read. The middle is an odd place to sit with this kind of work. Still, I get it and I liked it.

Katabasis by R.F. Kuang

2025 was the first time I went to ALA, the American Library Association conference. Context: I have worked for Brooklyn Public Library for ten years, but I am not a librarian, sadly. I do marketing, production, all kinds of stuff. So going to ALA was really helpful to understand what other systems are doing. Also, ALA is one of the happiest conferences I’ve ever been to because it’s a huge building full of librarians being given free books. Free unreleased books!

Thus it was a place where Katabasis was being talked about a lot. I hadn’t read any Kuang, but the taglines of this book had me very intrigued. Basically two magic students going to hell to find their dead professor, mostly because he promised them letters of recommendation.

I devoured this book. The snark, the sexual tension, the trauma! The unique magic system and the literary hellscape. It made me immediately read Babel, which I liked even more, but it seemed appropriate to put Katabasis on this list.

Really a wonderful read and I wanted to bask in this work a little more, though at the same time I was very pleased to have a full narrative and not the standard set up for a trilogy.

A Game in Yellow by Hailey Piper

Stopping by The Nonbinarian Bookstore a few blocks away from my house, I picked up this bit of strange queer horror. I love when people subvert HP Lovecraft, who certainly deserves to be subverted, perverted, and reclaimed.

I’ve loved the concept of The King in Yellow for years. That love was stoked by True Detective. This fictional play is a dominant character in A Game in Yellow and I thought it wonderful as both a MacGuffin and a metaphor for drugs/kinks/obsession.

The book did drag a bit in the middle, with the ideas losing steam. I wanted the mythology to be explored a bit more, but I enjoyed the writing, the characters, and the world. Two women in a non-monogamous BDSM relationship. Realistic power dynamics mixed with fantastical horror elements is a winning combination.

Butcher & Blackbird by Brynne Weaver

One of my partners (I have two, I’m sure I’ll write something about that here at some point) read 100 books in 2025! They read a lot more Romance and Romantasy than I do, so I’ve been trying to understand the genres a little more. As someone who grew up on 90s sci-fi, where a happy ending was the worst thing you could have, it’s been difficult getting into the headspace.

That’s why it’s fun to find romance like this. Weird, freaky, dark. Basically two serial-killers-who-only-kill-bad-people who fall in love. It was a lot of fun, with some nods to Hannibal and other stories I love. I heard the rest of the series has diminishing returns, but I enjoyed this a lot.

Luster by Raven Leilani

A queer graphic designer in a poly relationship living in Brooklyn? Throughout the book I found so many similarities to my life, yet the main character was wildly different in so many other ways.

Luster is a book about race, about love, about the complicated alchemy of being an adult and an artist, a human, a lover, a complex individual.

As someone for whom not having a child is a big part of my identity these days, so much of this struck me and messed with me. Being inserted into a married couple’s life seems really bizarre at times and the novel never backs away from the strangeness and curiosity of that.

Audition by Katie Kitamura

It’s funny how I romanticize my love for postmodern literature and the literary concept of “play” and breaking rules, but when faced with something actually weird I sometimes recoil. It’s okay though. I got over the recoil and enjoyed this very strange book.

Is it a dream? Is it an alternate reality? Is it a play? Parts of it reminded me of one of my favorite bits of postmodern lit, The Body Artist by Don DeLillo, which was a remarkably odd novella about a woman living with… a ghost? A memory made flesh? Who knows.

Both left me with more questions than answers and sometimes that is perfect. It’s one of those book I initially came away from disappointed, but have liked more as I thought about it more.

Little Mysteries by Sara Gran

A while back, I read a book that really changed me. Sara Gran’s The Book of the Most Precious Substance was so vivid and mesmerizing and exactly the kind of book I want to publish. Part The Club Dumas, part Eyes Wide Shut, part Rosemary’s Baby. It sent me down a rabbit hole where I read all of Gran’s books in short order. This small anthology of mysteries, all orbiting around Gran’s all-too-real-feeling detective, Claire DeWitt, was not as satisfying as her novels, but full of amazing moments, images, and ideas that kept me fascinated and amazed.

I’ve been waiting for Gran’s next work and no matter what it is, I’m certainly going to devour it.

If I learned one thing in life it’s this: never turn your back on someone who cheats at cards. There are a lot of things I can stomach, but all my life I’ve had a secret and overwhelming respect for playing cards. Maybe there’s a mystery of them, like their ancestry to the tarot, strange fingers of history and fiction tying them all the way to Egypt. Wherever it came from, I respected the game of poker, and so when I saw Tommy Knuckles dealing from the bottom of the deck, I knew it was going to be a long night.

Sometimes you step too deep into somebody else’s mess. You go from bystander to liability in a heartbeat. It isn’t a fun place to be. You sit down at a table knowing the stakes are way too high, but there’s a knife in your back telling you to push on. Sometimes that knife is called love. Then again, what do I know about love?

The blonde by the door of the smoky backroom was about three inches too tall and about three miles out of my league. That didn’t explain why she’d been giving me the eye for the last hour. I had to temper my vision by glancing at the other side of the door every couple of minutes, where the big bruiser named “Mug” stood making sure the game stayed “clean.”

Mug was about six-foot-thirteen and strong for his height. He looked like a bulldog, only not half as pretty. He brought my head back into the game. Looking at that dame too long started doing funny things to my sight and made my pants uncomfortable.

Tommy laid down three queens again. I’d watched him produce the same hand twice already tonight. My chips were dwindling, but something told me to stay seated. Maybe it was Mug, whose muscles bulged almost as much as the obvious revolver at his hip. Then again, maybe it was the leggy blonde with the sparkling green eyes and the dress cut so low only faith was keeping it on her chest. This room didn’t have much faith.

“Hey, Pete... you gonna stop eye-balling my girl long enough to bet?”

Tommy Knuckles. A shrunken husk of an L.A. loan shark. He came to Chicago two years ago thinking he’d make a name for himself in backdoor poker. He ran games all over the city, letting anybody in who didn’t look like a hustler. I guess I didn’t look like a hustler. Full of surprises, that’s me.

There wasn’t much I could do about losing, and Tommy didn’t take kindly to people leaving mid-game. He liked to shake down his “friends” thoroughly before sending them back to the cold Chicago night.

So why was I here? Did I like getting hustled? Did I like having some no-neck wannabe wiseguy from the coast take my money?

No. I was on a case. A big case. A case for the very same leggy blonde who kept smiling at me from across the room.

Her name was Catherine Prince. She walked into my office about two weeks ago with a sad story and two big green eyes full of tears. Tommy always called her Princess. She told me to call her Cat. This kitten had me wrapped around her finger the minute she walked in. She knew it and so did I. The funny thing is, when a woman like that has you in her clutches, you don’t mind being wrapped around her finger. Hell, you don’t mind being wrapped around any part of her.

She wanted me to off her boyfriend. When I told her that wasn’t my game, she said she’d settle for getting out of the little arrangement he’d forced her into. The arrangement was simple: she was his sex toy and occasional punching bag, and in return, he didn’t kill her.

When she dropped three grand in my lap, I told her I’d see what I could do.

Two weeks later I’m surrounded by four of the ugliest, scariest, gun-toting mobsters in the Windy City playing a dangerous game. And I’m not talking about seven-card stud.

I dressed in a thick brown wool suit from the back of my closet, padded myself with a couple of sweaters, and slapped an old wig on my head with a hat over it. Pete the Greek, I called myself. This bunch was so drunk they wouldn’t know a Greek from a belly dancer.

Around the thirteenth hand, I started getting itchy in my getup. The wig scratched at my hairline. The padding made me sweat. If I was going to make my move, it had to be soon.

“Listen, uh, Tommy,” I started, speaking low, hoping my voice didn’t sound too fake.

“I’m getting tired of this nickel-and-dime crap. How about a real game?”

The table went quiet. Tommy eyed me from across the felt, sizing me up, calculating how much he could bleed me for. I didn’t look like much. So I did what I always do in situations like this—I bullshitted.

“Listen, Tommy. Couple weeks ago, me and my cousin got two brand-new Mercedes in a sweet deal over in Newark. What would you say if I put those babies on the table?”

Tommy’s right hand clenched and unclenched. He fingered his gold ring, that little tell he had whenever greed got the better of him.

“Two brand-new stolen Benzes...” He leaned back. “I’ll put up four grand against that.”

One of the other players—Big Apple Bob Matenzo—laughed a little.

“Listen, Tommy. I was thinking about something else... something...” I let my gaze drift over to the door, to where she stood. She looked lazily to her left, pretending to be disinterested.

Tommy’s eyebrows furrowed. He thought about it. Then I could almost see the moment he remembered he could still cheat. A sick smile spread across that ugly face.

“You got yourself a bet, Greek.”

The other guys stood up after a minute and drifted over to the bar. I could hear them mumbling about the high stakes, about how “Princess” was beautiful and all, but two brand-new Mercedes were a whole other story.

As Tommy dealt the cards, I wiped the sweat off my forehead.

“If I lose, my cousin’s gonna kill me,” I muttered.

The weight of the situation settled on me as the last card fell. If I got caught in this play, I’d be sleeping in the lake by midnight.

Tommy took two cards. So did I. He thought he had it all perfectly planned. What he didn’t know was that I’d spent three years dealing blackjack in Vegas. I knew more tricks than Tommy could dream of. When you watch cards eight hours a day, you learn to read a mechanic’s work. I’d spotted his cold deck within the first hour.

“You want to up the stakes a little?” Tommy’s face was awash with greed and the image of shiny new cars.

“Hell no. I think I’m in enough trouble as it is.” Amazing how real a lie sounds when you’re just redirecting one fear into another.

He laid down three queens with two eights alongside them. His backup hand, the one he saved for when he really needed ammunition.

He was halfway out of his seat, already bragging, when he saw my kings. Four of them.

I stammered. I did the whole act—wide eyes, shaking hands, the works. Tommy sat back down, fuming, while the boys slapped me on the back and offered cigars and drinks.

I played it tight. Made like I’d just burned through a lifetime of luck and wanted to cash out. Because let’s face it, my luck was used up and it was definitely time to move on.

Cat didn’t say a word. She just followed me out.

We walked out of the alley and into the street with those slow steps you take when you’re trying desperately not to run.

Tommy wasn’t going to let her go easy. But when you’re a gambler, you have to look like you pay your debts or you lose face. Tommy knew that as well as I did. Still, I wasn’t naive. He’d come for us eventually. Just not tonight.

We were almost to my car when I saw the light in the alley. Mug, getting ready to take me down. He shuffled out and headed for a big van across the street.

Cat hopped in my car the same time I did. Just like always, the engine started on the first try and purred like a kitten on your lap. I smiled. Mug wouldn’t be hearing the same sound. Before the card game, I’d snuck around that clumsy van and slashed the tires. I’d also stuffed wet newspaper in his exhaust. He wasn’t going anywhere.

As we sped off, Cat watched me drive. She looked at ease for the first time since I’d met her. Her happiness mixed with a certain hunger I’d only wished for.

“You look good in a suit, tough guy,” she purred, sweeter than my engine.

She pulled off my hat and wig and threw them in the back seat. She took my hair out of the tight little bun I’d wound it into and sat back to look at me again.

“So where are you taking me?” Eyes smiling, those beautiful lips matching.

“We’re going to L.A. Tommy’s got too many enemies in that town to follow us. Plus I know a couple of clubs where you and I can dance without being gawked at.” I tried not to look over at her. Any self-control I had left would melt away if I did.

“I don’t have a say in this?” Still smiling. Still teasing.

“I won you fair and square. You’re mine now.” I tried not to let the huge smile welling up in my chest overtake me. After all, I had to stay tough.

“I guess I am yours then... forever?” Her voice still had that sexy tone, but touched now with something I could only hope was—hope itself.

“Forever’s a long time. But we’ll see.”

And we drove off, right into forever.

The End

I had my photo taken at the portrait studio set up by Hunter Abrams and Sam Lee in front of the hand-painted backdrop created by my partner Jenny Jeski.

The event was lovely and it felt like a return to form for Jenny and me. Hobnobbing with socialites and fashionistas of all kinds.

I got this bespoke suit made in Bankok this summer at Jhasper Fashion. My beautiful scarf/bow is from Logandria. Bespoke shirt from AMBFA. Boots from Thursday. Vintage cufflinks and ring.

I’d gotten a bespoke suit once before from Indochino, but this was a very different situation. Picking the fabric, the lapel, the cut, everything. It was wonderful and I love how it came out. A blue plaid that isn’t so wild I can’t wear it out, but also not at all boring.

And I’ve always coveted Logandria’s silks and this cravat is amazing. It’s from the Abortifacients collection where $5 from each scarf sold will be donated to a fund that splits donations equally among nearly 100 abortion funds across America.

Katherine had been looking for a cure since Chicago. She had been chasing the man in the gray suit since Hungary.

She’d been sent to meet with a violet-eyed, white-haired witch in Budapest who told her of an impeccably dressed man, usually wearing gray, who held some great but vague power.

“He was one of the few that could do that which you needed to be done,” she said.

She had been introduced to a soothsayer in Calgary, a shriveled man seated in a strange majestic throne in the back of a laundromat. He said that the man with the purple tie and the silver ring was the only one that could help her. Katherine had heard the throne had once belonged to Cassius the Seer, an ancient Roman oracle.

Five countries, thousands of dollars, and a dozen clandestine meetings later, Katherine sat in a beautiful bar in the Lower East Side of Manhattan holding a crisp white card with a few simple but elegant lines of text.

“Henry Dufresne, Order of the Key & the Ring. New York, Paris, Hell.”

On the other side of the card was a phone number, an email address, and two strange symbols, unlike any language she had ever seen.

Katherine nervously looked around the bar for the gray suited man. She didn’t know much else about him. She had heard he wore glasses. It had been rumored he carried a cane. His age had never been confirmed.

The bar was very old and very clean, with a floor of tiny black and white checkered tiles and a ceiling of stamped copper. It smelled antiseptic clean, with only the faintest undertones of stale beer. The only person in the place was the white bearded bartender, who has been rubbing the same glass with a rag since she entered.

As per Dufresne’s instructions, she had gotten to the bar at eight and given the bartender an envelope with $4,000 cash in it. He took it without saying a word.

The twisted smile of the old bartender was unsettling. He wore a white dress shirt with a black vest and slacks. He had a black tie that was tucked into his shirt at the third button. His white beard was yellowed around the corners of his mouth. His teeth looked like cracked ivory. His eyes were watery blue circled with red. His muscular arms were covered in faded tattoos of anchors and mermaids and profanity.

She was watching him so intently, she didn’t notice the door open. She turned as she saw a splash of purple and a man in a gray glen plaid suit walk to the bar. She knew instantly he was the one she had been searching for.

He wasn’t very tall, though he had a somewhat large frame. Somewhat chubby, with a soft face and bit of belly, though he looked spry enough. His suit was impeccably cut and he wore silver rings on both of his ring fingers. He looked perhaps thirty.

“Argen, you brought me all the way back to New York? You know I am in the middle of some very tricky business right now,” the man said with a disappointed sigh.

He had the slight accent of someone from Manhattan or some other large city.

The bartender held up his hand, showing a ring similar to the on the man’s right hand.

“Yes, yes, it is your right, just make it quick. And give me the Glenfarclas,” he said, leaning against the bar.

The bartender, named Argen apparently, got a dusty bottle from behind the bar and poured them each two fingers.

“What do we do?” the bartender croaked, in some ceremonial tone.

The other man smelled the whiskey and contemplated the question.

“We bargain,” he replied, somewhat defeatedly, taking a sip and savoring it.

The bartender nodded over to the Katherine.

“What does she have to offer?” the man asked the bartender.

The bartender went back to cleaning the glass and shrugged.

“She has a curse,” the bartender said very quietly.

Katherine stood and went over to them.

“Mr. Dufresne?” she said, clutching her purse and shaking a bit.

He looked at her for a moment, then looked back at the bartender.

“That’s not something I want. What does she have to offer?” he said again to the bartender.

“Money?” the bartender offered.

Henry scoffed.

“She is very beautiful-” the bartender said with a crude smile.

Henry rolled his eyes.

“I’m standing right here,” Katherine said with a stomp of her foot.

Henry turned to her and the bartender walked to the other end of the bar.

“I’m Katherine Tanco,” she said, trying to stay forceful but loosing steam as she was confronted with the wry smile of the well-dressed man.

He turned to her, leaning against the bar and taking a sip of his whiskey. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

“So you are,” he said before he opened his eyes.

“I have, I mean, I’ve been told I have a curse. I was-” she started but he cut her off with a raised hand.

“Let’s not start on the wrong foot. I don’t want my thoughts biased by someone else’s opinions. I’ll see what you have and then we can see if it is something I might be interested in providing my services for.”

He motioned for her to sit back down and he followed her to the table and sat across from her.

He held himself, in some strange way, like a stage magician. He had a flourish to his gesticulations. He finished his drink just as the bartender came to the table with a black satin bag.

From the bag, the man in the gray suit pulled out a mirror the size and shape of a dinner plate. He placed it on the table with the mirror facing up. He then reached into his jacket and pulled a knife out of some little leather holster he had around his shoulder. The knife looked silver and was very beautiful, like something one might find in a museum.

“I need to prick your finger. A drop of blood. Will you give me that of your free will?” he asked in a serious but somewhat bored sounding voice.

She wanted to laugh a little, make a joke, but instead, she nodded.

“Please respond verbally,” he specified.

“Yes. You may have a drop of my blood,” she choked out.

She gave him her hand. He took it almost tenderly. The point of the blade flashes as he touched it to her thumb. A little prick, less than even a needle’s pinch, then a fat red drop of blood formed on her skin.

He turned her hand and the blood dripped onto the mirror with a splatter.

He cleaned the blade with a handkerchief he took from his jacket and then he raised his hand over the mirror and spread his fingers wide.

Something happened. She couldn’t explain it much more than that, but something definitely happened. It was like the lights dimmed for a moment or a cloud passed over the sun or her heart stopped for a second.

The man in the suit, Henry Dufresne, dragged his knife along the surface of the mirror. He used the knife like a fountain pen and made a little symbol with her blood. As she watched, the blood seemed to disappear, absorbed into the mirror.

Henry let out a deep sigh and then “hm.”

“You made a relatively benign demon very angry,” he said with a little spark of interest.

“I don’t believe-” she started, but he glared at her.

“If you want to rattle off the things that you don’t believe exist, you can do so while leaving. I find closed minds very boring. I’m sure you didn’t believe in curses until you received one. That tends to be how these things work.”

She opened her mouth to reply, but said nothing. He looked at her and with a frown seemed to be contemplating something.

He took from his jacket a vial made of yellow glass. He popped the cork and poured the contents on the mirror. It smelled of honey and spices. Like the blood he made symbols with the liquid and then it vanished.

“You took possession of a building, a home, a brownstone. You found some kind of altar in the basement. It disturbed you. You had bad dreams. You had a construction crew gut the basement. You wouldn’t even destroy the thing yourself. This altar had a long and complicated history, but suffice to say, its destruction caused a great deal of turmoil,” he said, his eyes a bit unfocused as he looked vaguely into the mirror.

“The entity that dwelled in the altar took vengeance. Since it no longer had a home, neither would you.”

A tear rolled down her cheek.

“If I sleep anywhere for more than one night, bad things happen. There was a fire. The roof collapsed at a hotel. Horrible things. Rats. Insects. It’s always something different. So I have to keep moving. I have to keep going. I can’t sleep in the same place twice,” she explained between tears and sniffles.

Henry nodded.

“I have, well, I had a lot of money. My father-actually both of my parents died and left me a great deal, then I had a business I sold, then the buildings I flipped. Life was going so well. Now I’m burning through a fortune, traveling the world. Going from hotel to hotel. Talking to scientists first, then shrinks, then witch doctors, who knows what. They led me to you.”

Henry nodded again. He cleaned off his knife and the mirror. He put the mirror back in the bag.

“Where is this brownstone?”

She swallowed. Her eyes seemed hopeful.

“Brooklyn. Park Slope. I was going to fix it up and then sell it.”

“Do you own it outright?” He asked with a raised eyebrow.

“Yes.”

“Do you own other property in the city?”

“Yes.”

He nodded again. He tapped on the table with his ring and considered all the facts. Then he took a deep breath and with formality in his voice he said: “ I will help you escape this curse and you will sell me the house for one dollar. That is my offer.”

She was confused. She looked, for some reason, at the bartender.

“It’s-I mean, it’s worth millions of dollars. It was left to me and I was going to gut renovate it and-”

“If I don’t release you from this curse, you don’t give me anything,” he added, staring at her.

“Unless you like hotels and travel. Perhaps it might not be that bad. Have you tried camping?”

She looked down at the table, sighing deeply. She nodded slowly.

“You will need to reply verbally. I’m a bit of a stickler about the rules.”

“Yes. I agree. If you cure me of this curse, I will sell you the brownstone for one dollar.”

Henry smiled for the first time and knocked on the table once, startling Katherine.

“So mote it be,” he said, almost under his breath.

And from behind him, the bartender echoed it, knocking on the bar once and repeating the phrase.

“So mote it be.”

Henry looked at his pocket watch and seemed to weigh options.

“It’s not very late. Let’s go and take a look at where the altar was, why don’t we.”

She nodded, unsure but glad to be doing something that might work towards the end of her pains.

The stood and he nodded to the bartender and then let Katherine out into the street.

Henry walked quickly. Considering Katherine was taller with longer legs it seemed odd that she had to rush to keep up. He knew the city well and turned corners without looking at the street signs.

“Are we going to the subway?” She asked hesitantly.

He scoffed.

They turned another corner and she saw the familiar streets near NYU, where she had spent much of her early twenties. She held in her questions, sure that she wouldn’t get many answers. She focused on keeping up.

They came to Washington Square Park and he smiled.

“What’s going to happen next is going to be-” he considered his next word, “odd.”

“It’s important that you act natural though. I assure you no one will notice anything strange unless you act strangely.”

He smiled and took her arm, the way her father would guide her grandmother when they went out on the town.

They walked to the Washington Square Arch, the iconic structure based on the Arc de Triomphe, which she had marveled at when she visited Paris as a teen. Henry’s grip tightened on her arm and she felt anxiety well up inside of her, though she wasn’t sure why.

The air went out of her suddenly and the world went dark for a moment and then where there were tourists and street musicians there was suddenly green grass and three statues and a fountain.

She held on to Henry’s arm and tried not to pass out.

“Time is of the essence and I don’t care to be underground unless I have to,” he explained.

They were in Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn, walking through the arch there, the Soldiers and Sailors Arch.

And with that, she knew that there was real magic in the world. She knew she wasn’t crazy. She knew the curse was real and she had found someone who might actually be able to do something about it. As they walked, she broke down a little, tears streaming down the sides of her face.

Henry handed her a handkerchief, it smelled of some expensive complex cologne that Katherine found strangely arousing, an emotion that was very unwelcome in the moment.

They walked the quarter mile to her old house, the place where all of her troubles had begun.

“When things first started, I mean, after I started construction in the basement, there was a small fire. I stayed in a hotel and then my hotel room got flooded. I didn’t connect things, not for a while. I went back and tried to sleep in the house again and that’s when the-” she shivered, “that’s when the insects came.”

Henry nodded, looking around.

“How long ago was that?”

She thought about it. “Maybe ten months.”

The brownstone was on a very quaint street near Prospect Park. The street was tree lined, remarkably clean, and each brownstone on the block has its own character. Katherine’s was, perhaps, the most elegant of them all. Three stories, light gray stone with slightly darker brick around the windows and small gargoyles at each corner.

Henry stood out front and looked up at the building for a moment. He nodded.

“That’s fine,” he said, and then walked up the stairs to the front door.

She showed him around. There was still a faint trace of the smell of smoke. Finally Katherine led him down to the basement. A sturdy slatted wood staircase leading to a large square room with concrete walls and floor. In one corner was what looked like the beginning of some construction. The floor torn up, some markers spray painted on the perimeter, and some tools left by the hole.

Henry took off his coat and hung it on the stairway’s simple railing. He rolled up his sleeves and went over to the construction site. He picked up a rock and moved it to a little pile. With a grunt he picked up another. As he continued, he looked over to Katherine.

“The thing about demons is there are actually a lot of them and their whole thing is being tricky. The first thing you must do in any interaction is figure out which demon you are dealing with. If you know their name, you have a lot more power in any negotiation,” Henry explained, grunting between words as he liften stones and bricks and various debris.

“Negotiate?” She croaked. “How, I mean, why would we negotiate? It cursed me, I thought you would like, kill it or something.”

Henry stood up and laughed. She was a little confused by that because the laugh seemed to break his unflappable demeanor.

“Killing a demon is a wildly complicated thing with a remarkable number of ramifications. All you did was destroy an altar and look how much pain you’ve been dealt. Negotiation is the key to dealing with demons. With most supernatural being, actually. Demons, like angels, are bound by contracts they make in this world.”

Katherine leaned against the wall, wide eyed, wrestling with what he just said as he went on moving bricks.

“Ah, here is something,” he said, dusting off a large flat stone.

“This was the base of the altar. It was set into the foundation of the house, so it couldn’t be destroyed, just built over,” he explained, while rummaging through a large leather satchel.

“Where-where did you get that bag?” Katherine said, jumping back in surprise. She was sure he didn’t have it when they had met.

Henry didn’t answer, he just sort of rolled his eyes and kept looking. He took out a book, a large ancient looking book that was bound in black leather with metal hinges and a lock.

Opening the book he paged through humming a little and mouthing some passages.

“Ah, right, I should have known. This part of Brooklyn, a nice house, sure. Chax,” he said, the name sounding odd on his tongue and the sound immediately making Katherine uncomfortable.

Henry looked at Katherine.

“So, what do you have to offer? What bargain can be made?” He asked her.

She looked tired and confused.

“I-I am giving you a house. That’s millions of dollars. What more could you want?”

Henry laughed.

“That was your deal with me. Not your deal with the demon. I’m going to summon Chax and he is going to be quite angry, I assume. He will want remuneration. He will want blood, or something. What will you offer him?”

Katherine swallowed.

“I don’t know, I haven’t slept well-almost a year. My life is quickly turning to ashes. What does he want, do you think?”

Henry turned and looked at the stone once more, then to his book.

“Well first, you apologize. A good apology, that is heartfelt. Apologize for destroying his profane site and then say you will rebuild his altar. Not here, obviously, because this will be my house, but somewhere. And give a time frame. Say, in one month. I can help you source the materials. Do you have a place where you might be able to do that?”

She lowered her red eyes to the dirty concrete ground.

“Yes, I suppose, I have a place in the Upper East Side that is, well, legally it’s mine. I may have to kick someone out.”

Henry considered.

“Is it the kind of place you could build a stone altar?”

She let out a snort. The ridiculousness of the situation overcoming her.

“Well, it’s a classic six, so there is a servant’s quarters in the back. We use it as a laundry room.”

“Best not mention the ‘servant’s’ part, but certainly that should do. So offer him that. And then, I’m sorry but this may take some effort on your part, you will need to offer him worship.”

“Worship?”

Henry nodded.

“Someone built this shrine and knelt at it every few days and probably poured honey in a little bowl and told a marquis of Hell that his is strong and brilliant and so on. And who knows, after he has forgiven you, he might grant you favors.”

She let out a little sob.

“I have to worship a demon?”

Henry’s face hardened.

“You don’t have to do anything. You have an option you didn’t have yesterday. You can go on never sleeping in the same bed twice until you die or you can build an altar and spend fifteen minutes saying nice things to a weird being that looks like a flaming stork and have a happy life. It’s up to you.”

She nodded.

“Do you think that would work?”

Henry rocked his head side to side a little.

“I’d say 75% yes.”

“What would be the 25%?”

“He will ask you to do all of that and to kill someone.”

She seemed to look in his eyes for humor, but didn’t find any.

“Do it,” she said, before taking a deep breath.

“We will need whiskey,” Henry said with a smile.

“Fuck yeah we will.”

Henry went out and bought fat pastrami sandwiches and a few bottles of Scotch. He had a large bag from an art store and a few pages of handwritten notes.

After they ate, Katherine painted a circle on the ground in the basement the way Henry had instructed. She had a few pieces of looseleaf paper with notes in front of her and her knees ached as she worked on the various lines and patterns.

She watched Henry, one of the strangest men she had ever met, roll up the sleeves to draw various symbols and wards on the walls around them. On his vest was a broach; a small golden hand pointing up with one finger. Then there was the gold chain that held his pocket watch. His buttons shined like rubies. He just seemed to have so many little delicate details.

They worked until late in the night.

As she washed chalk and paint off her hands, Henry typed on his phone.

“We have a bed for the night. An AirBNB that’s only a few blocks away. You can walk,” he said, showing her his phone and writing down the address and information.

“Go in the side door, there will be a door code you type in. You won’t be bothered.”

She looked at the information and then looked at him confused.

“Are you-I mean, will we-” she started, but he put his hand up to stop her.

“I’m sleeping here. I have some more work to do. Can you meet me at the cafe across the street at eight tomorrow?”

She frowned, suddenly fearful of being out of his sight. It had been months since she had been back in Brooklyn, back to where it all started.

She looked at Henry and nodded.

The next morning, she was red eyed and fragile. She sat in the café waiting and at eight on the nose Henry walked in, a slightly different gray suit on and a wide smile.

“Hungry?”

She nodded.

“Coffee and breakfast will be to go. We have to take a quick ride,” he said, walking to the counter and ordering.

“W-where are we going?” She whispered as they waited.

“Yonkers,” he said with a mysterious glint in his eye.

They got croissants and coffee and were met by a sleek black Town Car with a young woman driver. She was short and trim, with slicked back blonde hair. She wore a classic chauffeur uniform, complete with leather driving gloves and hat. She looked in her early twenties. She opened the door for Henry and glared at Katherine.

“This is my apprentice, Aleph. Don’t mind her glower, she doesn’t like humans,” Henry explained.

Katherine met the woman’s eyes in the rear view mirror for a moment and saw some flare of hate.

Henry murmured something in some language Katherine didn’t recognize and Aleph looked forward and started the engine.

In the comfort of the soft leather seats Henry sighed and tore a piece of his croissant off, nibbling it greedily.

“Not bad. Not Paris, by a long shot, but better than most you get in London,” he said with a chuckle.

“Why are we going to Yonkers at seven in the morning?” Katherine asked, sitting nervously at the edge of her seat, her breakfast untouched.

“Well,” Henry started with a sigh.

“The thing about summoning, especially a demon, is that it is dirty work. You need blood and you need a reason, if you want to do it right. We have a pretty good reason, so we are set there. You seem to me like the squeamish sort, so I didn’t mention the blood at first-”

She stopped him.

“Are we-I mean-are you talking about killing someone?” She asked with her face growing pale.

He laughed again, nibbling some more pastry.

“No, no, not a person, a goat. Nothing more than goat. Nothing less either, I suspect,” he said rather thoughtfully.

Katherine looked both horrified and somehow relieved. She sat back and looked out the window as Henry fished out a second croissant. The scenery went by in a blur, with Brooklyn turning into Queens, then the Bronx, then going green as they left the city.

The farm was small, but pretty. A little stand by the fence sold jams, fruit, and vegetables. Katherine stayed in the car while Henry and his chauffeur/student walked up the muddy path to the farm house.

In the car Katherine felt cold and hollow. The world had been shaken up and turned around. What would it mean if the whole thing worked? What would it mean if it didn’t work? She had no recourse. She had no advocate. She was in a world of magic and demons and it all still seemed completely unbelievable.

What wasn’t unbelievable was the curse. She remembered all the times, in the beginning, when she thought it was all just chance. The fire in the brownstone, even the insects, the breakin at the hotel, the flood in the motel. Always on the second night. Always just as she fell asleep.

She shivered and then looked up to see Henry carrying something in a sheet. Something moving.

Aleph opened the back door and Henry pushed the thing into the back seat next to Katherine and then sat down himself.

“Katherine, this is Bonkers,” Henry said in a soothing voice, pulling back the sheet to show a gray furred goat and meekly bleated.

Katherine frowned at the somewhat adorable animal.

“Bonkers is usually a very boisterous kid, but the good farmer Haskins gave him a very large cannabis biscuit and so he is feeling very calm and happy this morning,” Henry said with a chuckle.

“Aleph, Park Slope,” he commanded, and they were off.

For lunch, Henry prepared Parisian ham and some kind of fancy butter on baguettes. Katherine watched him in her old kitchen. He seemed to take the same pride and interest in food and drink as he did his magical workings. The sandwiches were cut in perfect 45 degree slices and were served with cold brew coffee so strong it made Katherine feel like she was vibrating.

The dark work was to begin at sundown.

Katherine rested on the couch, but Henry shook her before she fell asleep.

“I’m afraid you can’t nap in the house, we best take a walk or listen to some nice music.”

She agreed and kept busy for the hour until the sun went down.

In the basement, the circles and symbols were complete. Candles lined the basement and in the center of the room was the goat, still stoned.

“I bleed this gift of cloven hoof and call the corners and kneel. I honor the promises made and the ways of the fallen ones. I call into the darkness. I call the marquis. I call he who rules over seven legions of demons. I call forth the fallen one the marquis Chax.”

What came next sounded to Katherine like a poem in another language, a strange language unlike any she had heard. The word seemed to crawl In her head.

Then sound seemed to stop. Light faded from the candles and then flared suddenly. The smell of woodsmoke and meat seemed to fill the room.

There was a rush of air, something coming fast, like a rock song when they step on the guitar petal and it goes from sweet to hard.

The candles flames tripled in size and the shadows grew and moved. One shadow spoke.

“Speak your cunt words deal maker. We know your fucking ways,” hissed the shadows.

One shadow whispered “give us the book,” and then it was drowned out in the guttural chorus.

Henry seemed unimpressed. He cleared his throat.

“A deal you want, a deal you will have,” he started, standing up straight.

“A great misdeed was wrought here in the dark and tainted place. The altar of the fallen was disturbed-“

“Destroyed!” Corrected a shadow voice I raspy scream.

“Indeed, destroyed. And so it shall be rebuilt. Rebuilt by she who caused its destruction,” he continued.

“It is not so easy to satisfy us!” Cried the shadows.

“Of course. Only the beginning. She shall rebuilt your shrine on more fertile ground. Across the river. Where the shadows are many. In Manhattan she will build a new shrine and she herself will kneel before it.”

There was laughter.

“She’s been on her knees before the slut. Look at her. We know. Her sins are great. We have seen. Slut. Whore. Sodomite. Temptress. I can smell her from here. From the shadows her wet-”

“Who better to serve your dark needs?” Henry said, his voice raised above their bickering curses and filth.

“For one year,” Henry said simply.

“At least once a fortnight. On her knees. Gifts of wine and blood and honey. For you. To honor you,” he said with a smile.

Katherine looked at him then. A year? She imagined longer. He made it seem like perhaps forever. She could kneel on some altar for a year.

“Skyclad with her legs open to us. A knife wet with her blood. Richest honey, darkest wine,” one voice said over the others. That voice made fear creep up Katherine’s spin.

“She will begin before the moon is dark,” Henry added, his voice calm and even taking on a seductive tone.

“And how could she not be naked before you? Legs parted, wet as her knife,” Henry added with a single dark chuckle.

“By your word?” The shadow asked.

Henry laughed. It was a real laugh, loud and abrupt. It worried Katherine.

“By her word and her blood alone. I am deal maker, not an oath maker.”

The darkness laughed again, crackling like a fire.

“Then make the slut say the fucking words,” it growled.

Henry turned to Katherine and look in her eyes. His eyes were a gray blue almost seeming silver incandescent in the light.

“Do you, Katherine Tanco, swear this oath, to build an altar to the fallen lord, Chax, on the island of Manhattan, before the new moon?”

She swallowed and nodded, then remembering what he had said before cleared her throat.

“I swear it.”

“And at that altar you shall kneel, legs open to him, skyclad, with gifts of wine and honey, and worship, once a fortnight?”

She, honestly, didn’t understand all of what he said, but she swore to it.

“And you shall do this for one year from when the altar is built?”

“I swear it.”

Henry faced the shadows and took a deep breath.

“Chax, I call upon you,” he said in a loud clear voice.

The shadows buzzed and murmured.

“Do you now?” Said one voice. The voice that had made Katherine’s head ache.

“Do you accept this bargain?” Henry asked.

The darkness seemed to think about it.

“Does she have anything else to say?” The darkness asked.

Henry looked at her expectantly.

“M-mighty Chax, marquis of hell, I am humbled before you. I did not know it was your shrine and I apologize for disturbing your-“ she tried to remember the words.

“I apologize for disturbing your profane altar.”

The darkness swelled and the candles flickered.

“If you swear to do these things, I will lift my curse, I suppose. And if you break this blood pact,” the shadows said, voices building.

“Your soul is forfeit.”

And she knew it to be true.

“So mote it be,” said Henry.

“So mote it be,” said Katherine.

After a long pause that made Katherine’s heart pound in her chest, “so mote it be,” said the shadows.

The air seemed to go out of the room then, the candles were snuffed out and the sound of a chair falling the ground, a glass breaking, their ears popping. Then a strange cold light in a single beam. Henry’s phone?

“Ah, always very dramatic these demons,” he said as he looked around.

Katherine shook with fear as she watched the light bob as Henry walked to the wall and found the light switch. The overhead bulb was harsh and startling.

She looked at Henry, two black smudges on the knees of his gray slacks. His hair messed and his face sweaty.

“And so I’ve done my part. It’s up to you now,” he said somberly.

She felt tears welling up.

“Will, will I be able to sleep here tonight?” She asked.

He nodded.

“The bargain has been made, the curse is lifted. I’ll stay here tonight to make sure, but what you’ve offered is pleasing to a demon such as Chax. A pact is a pact. They do not break them easily.”

She felt faint. She walked to Henry and leaned on the wall.

“Traditionally after this sort of work, pizza is in order,” he said with a wry smile.

She tried to swallow tears and let out a weak laugh.

“Can you magic one up super fast, because I’m starving,” she said, turning to the stairs.

He smiled somewhat mischievous and they heard the doorbell.

Her eyes opened wide in awe.

“I ordered ahead online,” he said with a smirk.

An hour later she sat, immobile, on her couch and considered a fourth slice. Henry had gotten two spectacular pies, piled with rich dried meats and mushrooms. She watched as he savored each bite, sipping a red wine he had brought in his mysterious leather satchel.

“So what now?” Katherine asked, looking at her strange companion in his more casual outfit of dark gray herringbone slacks, lilac dress shirt, and purple argyle sweater vest.

Henry raised an eyebrow.

“Well, I think we’ve laid out quite specifically what your next steps are. I’ll put together a little folder for you. Specifications for the altar. It’s simple, I’ll give you the number for a stonemason who can sell you the piece. I’ll also give you a little rundown of what an appropriate prayer would be. Shouldn’t take more than half an hour. Every two weeks. It’s vitally important that you remember.”

She nodded.

“And, um, skyclad, that means naked, I assume?”

“Yes. Completely. Don’t forget your socks and underthings. Legs open. There will be a diagram with the paperwork,” he said with a chuckle, picking a piece of prosciutto off one of the remaining slices.

Katherine watched him. He was such an odd man. Certainly not her type. She liked men tall and fit, but there was something strangely charming about it.

He looked back at her and seemed to read her mind. He didn’t seem particularly interested. He stood and wiped his hands on a napkin.

“Well, I saw there was a guest bedroom, so I’ll be off. If anything does happen in the night, I’ll be nearby so just scream or something and I’ll be right there.”

“Henry, um, thank you. It’s like a huge weight lifted off me. I feel like I might be able to put my life back together because of you,” she said, standing, unsure if hugging him would be appropriate.

He gave her a tight lipped smile.

“Katherine, I’m glad. I’ll also have a lawyer get in touch with a sales contract. I assume you have a lawyer?”

She frowned and nodded.

“Yes, I’ll give you her card in the morning.”

“Excellent! Here is to a good night’s sleep!” He said, draining his wine glass.

And with that, Katherine retired to her own bed and in comfort that made her weep, drifted off to sleep, finally.

Weeks later, in her apartment in Manhattan, Katherine steadied herself before opening the door to what had been the small servant’s bedroom in the space behind the kitchen. She wondered what it was like for Esmerelda, the nanny who had helped raise her, who slept there, next to the washer and dryer.

Those feelings of guilt mingled with the fear that always came when she saw the little altar. A two foot by three-foot slab of granite that looked a bit like a tombstone with a smaller block on top of that and a circle of marble on top of that. The marble was covered in dried candle wax, and a few symbols etched deep into the stone and filled with ash, as she was instructed.

As was the bargain, she slipped off the t-shirt she had worn to bed. She glanced at the small window, making sure the curtain was drawn.

The apartment was her parents,’ and it had been bequeathed to her, but she had been letting her cousin and her family stay there. The whole thing had blown up a bit when Katherine kicked them out. She gave them some money to rent a place, but her lack of explanation had made everyone in the family confused and angry. They had already thought she was crazy, traveling the world and blowing through her inheritance the year before.

Still, all of that was dulled by her joy at the simplicity of sleeping in the same bed at night. That and her new hobbies. Her new work. Her exposure to Henry Dufresne and his world had made it impossible to go back to thinking the world was just computer startups and the occasional gala.

Standing nude in front of the altar, she lit the candles and filled the little copper bowls with wine and honey. The wine was one she preferred with steak, a big Tuscan, juicy and rich. The honey was a rare very dark wildflower from upstate.

She pricked her finger with a little tool diabetics used to test their blood sugar. She hardly felt it, and it gave her a nice drop of blood on her thumb she could anoint the altar with.

She knelt on the little pillow she kept in front of the altar, red silk and overstuffed.

As was her bargain, she opened her legs. Henry had sent her some rather graphic photos of women in the “Nadu” or slave position.

Sitting in front of the altar was a strange thing. She was alone, but she felt watched. She felt exposed, and even a little leered at. It set in motion a cycle of complicated feelings or shame and something like lust.

She looked at the clock she put up near the door, took a deep breath, and went through the prayer. Having seen some shadow of the entity, she was worshiping made the endeavor very different than her nightly childhood Lord’s Prayer and Hail Marys. As was knowing that some aspect of the demon looked upon her naked body.

So she closed her eyes and recited the words Henry had given her, and she felt darkness like satin caress her body.

When she opened her eyes, she saw new words on the stone, formed in ash and wax.

“For such a pretty thing, there are more bargains to be had. You need only ask.”

Fear and greed warred in her mind as she wondered what she had to offer and what she had to gain.

End

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