[Slaughter] (per+alertness! HAIL KAHSEENO!)
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 7, 9, 10, 10 Re-rolls: 2
[Sorrow] The 12,000 block of North Larabee Street is quiet, modest brick buildings and quiet, shuttered shops are topped by slumping apartments that cater to the city’s lowest wage-earners, community college students, girls just out on their own, section 8 vouchers in hand, a baby on either hip and WIC certificates coming to them the first of every month because she’s pregnant again. The high-rise ghettos of the Housing Authority are a concrete block background, of course – a dozen blocks away – but the ruin of the neighborhood is still everywhere apparent. Like most such neighborhoods, North Larabee once had a thriving population, poor but never hopeless – working class, immigrants from Eastern Europe, or African-Americans moved up the from the south to work in the city’s sprawling industries, its abattoirs and its factories, its stockyards and railroads.
The jobs have gone, and so has most of the promise of renewal, a better life, something more than this bleak streetscape of concrete and crumbling brick, the modest prosperity of a former age slowly falling to ruin.
There are three for-profit businesses on the block – a bodega on the corner that sells cigarettes and cheap wine and cheaper beer and – cheapest of all – mouthwash that will, for a dollar a bottle – get you trashed if you actually swallow the swill. There is a check-n-go on the opposite corner, surrounded by forbidding iron bars. And, half-way down, a strange throwback to another age: Egglan’s Butchery, is etched into the concrete lintel over the door. This is the most solid building on the block, all brick, with two stories of living quarters above the shop for the family. There was once also a bakery and a greengrocer on the street, but they are all long gone, shuttered since the 1960s and Urban Renewal.
Egglan’s must have been closed at some point too, as there is a sign in the window that says: “REOPENED. COME IN.”
Little starbursts of construction paper announce the week’s specials – HOMEMADE BRATS. GROUND CHUCK $3.99/lb. SCRAPPLE. – in windows that seem dingy, somehow, despite a good cleaning earlier in the afternoon. Perhaps it is in the way that the arms of the stars are yellowing with age. YES! WE TAKE FOODSTAMPS! seems a necessary promise in a neighborhood like this one. Still: impossible to know how a place like this survives in a neighborhood whose largest employers are the methadone clinic and the illegal drug trade.
--
Nighttime, the street is quiet. The buildings here are commercial; were commercial. Most are shuttered and dark. The street’s residents have no personal stoops on which to sit and so much of the streetlife that marks a hot Chicago night is absent, drifted to the smaller streets lined with rowhouses or little clapboard homes that on either side.
There are some kids on the corner, outside the bodega. Drug dealers: by now, she knows every sign, how they look when the die. What tattoos to look for, to identify the particular gang. Otherwise: quiet, dark, the butcher’s shop is closed up tight, the lights off. There’s no suggestion of light from the windows in the living quarters above the shop, but a certain flatness – a sort of lack of dimension – to the background reminds Imogen of blackout curtains. There are iron bars that can be pulled down over the picture windows, but the owner hasn’t bothered to do so. The front door seems simple, and a side door opens onto a wooden stairwell tacked onto the side of the building, part-way up, at the second floor, the sort of make-shift entrances and exits added on to most of the street’s commercial buildings, to turn what once would have been family living quarters into a warren of cheap apartments that only a slum-lord could love.
There’s a service entrance out back, and greasy dumpster beside it. She knows that much. Her informant retrieved a human-like foot from the depths of the dumpster, when he had been hoping – simply for some hotdogs.
[Slaughter] She parked her car, a nondescript cheap and ancient Volvo well past its last legs, several blocks away. It is one of her many calculated risks.
Dangerous to walk far in this kind of neighbourhood, especially for a woman.
Worse still for someone to see her plates and remember them. To somehow trace it back to her, and begin to wonder why she might have been out here. Worse still for it to have been the wrong person with the wrong sympathies, who begins to connect the dots.
So she walks, her gun a comforting weight at her back, her jeans worn, her corduroy coat unmentionable. Her shoes are flat, treaded, the brand and price impossible to guess.
She avoids the boys on the corner - crossing the street half a block up. She remains half in the shadow of the buildings as she approaches, her gaze lifting upward to note the darkened inky windows. She takes in her surroundings, the street, the blocks surrounding it before stepping into the alleyway.
She carries gloves in her jacket pocket; it is not often she has the time for this forethought, and in a small way, she relishes it. The control.
The latex deadens her sense of touch, but it is a familiar sensation for her.
The greasy dumpster is her first stop, though she glances at the side door. She lifts the lid carefully, her nose pinching to the smell of garbage, rotted food before taking a look inside.
[Sorrow] The alley is strewn with filth. The dumpsters here are old, battered and rusting. The contracts are up for several, and they overflow with household trash, tossed there by the unfortunate residents of the upstairs apartments or dragged there by someone who doesn’t want to pay the city’s sanitation fee, who elects to transport and abandon his garbage rather than carry it the curb and pay for a sticker affixed to the garage door or telephone pole. This one, though – the dumpster behind the butchery – is not even half-full. It is newer than the rest; even in the dim, dull light that spills more from the sky than from streetlights, the constant, ugly glow of the living city reflected back from the raw orange clouds, that much is clear.
A year, or two old – more or less – and moved into place rather more recently than that, if the sharp grooves in the long-neglected asphalt are any indication. It is smaller, too. Small enough that Imogen needs only a single step up to look inside. There’s a loop for a lock, she sees, to keep the contents closed, but the metal there has been sheered off – by the neighborhood’s homeless, no doubt, the better to access the contents.
Blood: she knows that smell, even when it has gone over, gone off, rotted and grotesque. She finds blood, butcher-block paper, viscera and fat, glistening strips of it, strips of skin peeled back from the meat beneath like wrapping paper, like ribbon stripped with the blade of a scissors until it curls back on itself, an undifferentiated pile.
Sorting through the leavings, carefully gloved, breathing as she has learned to breathe through her mouth rather than her nose – though the smell insinuates itself anyway, back of the throat – she finds underneath the superficial layer of cheesy fat and stripped epidermis loops of hacked viscera, half a liver. The top joint of a small finger, the nail intact, chipped enamel still evident – painted crimson.
The night is quiet around here, the alley dark and empty. Just the roar of traffic, the call and response of a baseball announcer on the radio.
[Slaughter] Her contact left a cinder block out, at the base of the dumpster. This made her smirk, nearly smile as she stepped up to it, stepped onto it, leaning in to peer into the open lid and into the hideous refuse of the butcher.
She does not express disgust very often. Not about this. The remains of a human body no matter how abused or dismembered it is, no matter how decayed.
She's become inured to it. Numb to it. It barely even registers.
Her gloves are quickly smeared with blood and half digested food. She carefully sorts through loops of intestine, moving some to the side, coiling the rest together. The liver she studies briefly, feeling its surface for the pebbly hints of hyper tension, checking its fatty residue, the colour of it, the health of it.
The finger she studies a little longer, turning it between two fingers. This she bags, and pockets. Her gloves she removes, bagging and pocketing as well. Another set of gloves retrieved and pulled on before shutting the dumpster lid, closing it slowly to minimize the noise. She steps off the cinder block, leaning down to pull it away from the dumpster and against the wall. The concrete scrapes against asphalt, loud to her ears.
Next the door, listening at it for sound, her eyes running over it to study the lock, the apparent security.
[Sorrow] There are no clothes. Nothing precisely like clothing. There is butcher paper, there are reams of butcher paper and a length of bloodspattered white sheets; an old apron, crumpled, a bottle of Tide and another bottle of bleach, both empty. There are wadded up towels, both paper and cloth.
There is a singular paper hat, of the sort one expects to see perched on the head of a laughing shopkeeper in a Norman Rockwell original rather than anywhere in the present day.
She finds and shuffles aside today’s newspaper. Someone read it, took it apart into its constituent sections, turned them over. Left the classifieds open, a handful torn out. The help wanted ads are entirely intact, as are the cars for sale, and the services offered. It’s just the lonely hearts ads that are missing, and the “rent a room” section above the apartment listings. Difficult to be that precise when you are standing on a cinder block, leaning over a small dumpster full of offal – but she is given to precision; she looks for the flaw, the thing cut out. Sometimes, she finds it.
--
Then she steps down from the dumpster, stowing away a small finger in a small bag, pulls her step away from the dumpster, which is loud – and maybe she’s still then, listening, waiting to see if anything inside has heard it. That’s a human instinct, split-second. Maybe she has trained it out of her body. Maybe it was never hers, even if she recognizes it in strangers.
The service entrance: double-doors, made of forged metal and old. There’s nothing to suggest that the place has a modern security system superimposed over the old one – iron and iron. When she glances up, she sees that there are iron bars here, too – that can be pulled down for extra security when locking up at night. No one’s bothered to do that. There’s just the lock, the deadbolt.
From here: only silence.
[Slaughter] She is not quite accustomed to this. The steps she is taking, the way she is seeking out rather than simply waiting. It does not fit against her skin quite yet. It is an imperfect fit.
So, perhaps, she stands there longer than is strictly necessary. She contemplates her options for longer than she needs to. She allows precious seconds to pass by.
After a moment, she steps away from the door, steps back from it, her jaw tightening, easing and then tightening again. She'll head back to her car and move it in front of the alleyway, despite her earlier qualms. A shift in priorities.
Disposal of the body, and its damning marks. Before someone else decides to look for a hot dog.
[Sorrow] This isn't right. Here she is on the threshold, alone. Here she is in an alley, a weapon at the small of her back, gloves on her hands. Someone's finger in her pocket. Here she is - in the quiet dark of a quiet alley - straining at the door for sounds of something within. Ready to -
- what?
She lingers longer than necessary; her priorities shift and become familiar. Dismembered corpses in a dumpster in an alley. Human flesh beginning to rot, a murder, a corpse. Before she edges away from the service entrance, though, she hears what sounds to be the scratch of a phonograph - the needle shifting over grooves - and the faint strains of an old country song inside.
--
The rest of the work is uneventful; it fits over her skin the way the gloves do, familiar. Perhaps it deadens her sense of touch just a bit. This is what she does. When she's leaving, though, she sees one of the upstairs windows open.
Like the lonely prairie - while a cowboy dreams...
- and hears that record again, as if it had been playing over and over and over and over while she worked.
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 7, 9, 10, 10 Re-rolls: 2
[Sorrow] The 12,000 block of North Larabee Street is quiet, modest brick buildings and quiet, shuttered shops are topped by slumping apartments that cater to the city’s lowest wage-earners, community college students, girls just out on their own, section 8 vouchers in hand, a baby on either hip and WIC certificates coming to them the first of every month because she’s pregnant again. The high-rise ghettos of the Housing Authority are a concrete block background, of course – a dozen blocks away – but the ruin of the neighborhood is still everywhere apparent. Like most such neighborhoods, North Larabee once had a thriving population, poor but never hopeless – working class, immigrants from Eastern Europe, or African-Americans moved up the from the south to work in the city’s sprawling industries, its abattoirs and its factories, its stockyards and railroads.
The jobs have gone, and so has most of the promise of renewal, a better life, something more than this bleak streetscape of concrete and crumbling brick, the modest prosperity of a former age slowly falling to ruin.
There are three for-profit businesses on the block – a bodega on the corner that sells cigarettes and cheap wine and cheaper beer and – cheapest of all – mouthwash that will, for a dollar a bottle – get you trashed if you actually swallow the swill. There is a check-n-go on the opposite corner, surrounded by forbidding iron bars. And, half-way down, a strange throwback to another age: Egglan’s Butchery, is etched into the concrete lintel over the door. This is the most solid building on the block, all brick, with two stories of living quarters above the shop for the family. There was once also a bakery and a greengrocer on the street, but they are all long gone, shuttered since the 1960s and Urban Renewal.
Egglan’s must have been closed at some point too, as there is a sign in the window that says: “REOPENED. COME IN.”
Little starbursts of construction paper announce the week’s specials – HOMEMADE BRATS. GROUND CHUCK $3.99/lb. SCRAPPLE. – in windows that seem dingy, somehow, despite a good cleaning earlier in the afternoon. Perhaps it is in the way that the arms of the stars are yellowing with age. YES! WE TAKE FOODSTAMPS! seems a necessary promise in a neighborhood like this one. Still: impossible to know how a place like this survives in a neighborhood whose largest employers are the methadone clinic and the illegal drug trade.
--
Nighttime, the street is quiet. The buildings here are commercial; were commercial. Most are shuttered and dark. The street’s residents have no personal stoops on which to sit and so much of the streetlife that marks a hot Chicago night is absent, drifted to the smaller streets lined with rowhouses or little clapboard homes that on either side.
There are some kids on the corner, outside the bodega. Drug dealers: by now, she knows every sign, how they look when the die. What tattoos to look for, to identify the particular gang. Otherwise: quiet, dark, the butcher’s shop is closed up tight, the lights off. There’s no suggestion of light from the windows in the living quarters above the shop, but a certain flatness – a sort of lack of dimension – to the background reminds Imogen of blackout curtains. There are iron bars that can be pulled down over the picture windows, but the owner hasn’t bothered to do so. The front door seems simple, and a side door opens onto a wooden stairwell tacked onto the side of the building, part-way up, at the second floor, the sort of make-shift entrances and exits added on to most of the street’s commercial buildings, to turn what once would have been family living quarters into a warren of cheap apartments that only a slum-lord could love.
There’s a service entrance out back, and greasy dumpster beside it. She knows that much. Her informant retrieved a human-like foot from the depths of the dumpster, when he had been hoping – simply for some hotdogs.
[Slaughter] She parked her car, a nondescript cheap and ancient Volvo well past its last legs, several blocks away. It is one of her many calculated risks.
Dangerous to walk far in this kind of neighbourhood, especially for a woman.
Worse still for someone to see her plates and remember them. To somehow trace it back to her, and begin to wonder why she might have been out here. Worse still for it to have been the wrong person with the wrong sympathies, who begins to connect the dots.
So she walks, her gun a comforting weight at her back, her jeans worn, her corduroy coat unmentionable. Her shoes are flat, treaded, the brand and price impossible to guess.
She avoids the boys on the corner - crossing the street half a block up. She remains half in the shadow of the buildings as she approaches, her gaze lifting upward to note the darkened inky windows. She takes in her surroundings, the street, the blocks surrounding it before stepping into the alleyway.
She carries gloves in her jacket pocket; it is not often she has the time for this forethought, and in a small way, she relishes it. The control.
The latex deadens her sense of touch, but it is a familiar sensation for her.
The greasy dumpster is her first stop, though she glances at the side door. She lifts the lid carefully, her nose pinching to the smell of garbage, rotted food before taking a look inside.
[Sorrow] The alley is strewn with filth. The dumpsters here are old, battered and rusting. The contracts are up for several, and they overflow with household trash, tossed there by the unfortunate residents of the upstairs apartments or dragged there by someone who doesn’t want to pay the city’s sanitation fee, who elects to transport and abandon his garbage rather than carry it the curb and pay for a sticker affixed to the garage door or telephone pole. This one, though – the dumpster behind the butchery – is not even half-full. It is newer than the rest; even in the dim, dull light that spills more from the sky than from streetlights, the constant, ugly glow of the living city reflected back from the raw orange clouds, that much is clear.
A year, or two old – more or less – and moved into place rather more recently than that, if the sharp grooves in the long-neglected asphalt are any indication. It is smaller, too. Small enough that Imogen needs only a single step up to look inside. There’s a loop for a lock, she sees, to keep the contents closed, but the metal there has been sheered off – by the neighborhood’s homeless, no doubt, the better to access the contents.
Blood: she knows that smell, even when it has gone over, gone off, rotted and grotesque. She finds blood, butcher-block paper, viscera and fat, glistening strips of it, strips of skin peeled back from the meat beneath like wrapping paper, like ribbon stripped with the blade of a scissors until it curls back on itself, an undifferentiated pile.
Sorting through the leavings, carefully gloved, breathing as she has learned to breathe through her mouth rather than her nose – though the smell insinuates itself anyway, back of the throat – she finds underneath the superficial layer of cheesy fat and stripped epidermis loops of hacked viscera, half a liver. The top joint of a small finger, the nail intact, chipped enamel still evident – painted crimson.
The night is quiet around here, the alley dark and empty. Just the roar of traffic, the call and response of a baseball announcer on the radio.
[Slaughter] Her contact left a cinder block out, at the base of the dumpster. This made her smirk, nearly smile as she stepped up to it, stepped onto it, leaning in to peer into the open lid and into the hideous refuse of the butcher.
She does not express disgust very often. Not about this. The remains of a human body no matter how abused or dismembered it is, no matter how decayed.
She's become inured to it. Numb to it. It barely even registers.
Her gloves are quickly smeared with blood and half digested food. She carefully sorts through loops of intestine, moving some to the side, coiling the rest together. The liver she studies briefly, feeling its surface for the pebbly hints of hyper tension, checking its fatty residue, the colour of it, the health of it.
The finger she studies a little longer, turning it between two fingers. This she bags, and pockets. Her gloves she removes, bagging and pocketing as well. Another set of gloves retrieved and pulled on before shutting the dumpster lid, closing it slowly to minimize the noise. She steps off the cinder block, leaning down to pull it away from the dumpster and against the wall. The concrete scrapes against asphalt, loud to her ears.
Next the door, listening at it for sound, her eyes running over it to study the lock, the apparent security.
[Sorrow] There are no clothes. Nothing precisely like clothing. There is butcher paper, there are reams of butcher paper and a length of bloodspattered white sheets; an old apron, crumpled, a bottle of Tide and another bottle of bleach, both empty. There are wadded up towels, both paper and cloth.
There is a singular paper hat, of the sort one expects to see perched on the head of a laughing shopkeeper in a Norman Rockwell original rather than anywhere in the present day.
She finds and shuffles aside today’s newspaper. Someone read it, took it apart into its constituent sections, turned them over. Left the classifieds open, a handful torn out. The help wanted ads are entirely intact, as are the cars for sale, and the services offered. It’s just the lonely hearts ads that are missing, and the “rent a room” section above the apartment listings. Difficult to be that precise when you are standing on a cinder block, leaning over a small dumpster full of offal – but she is given to precision; she looks for the flaw, the thing cut out. Sometimes, she finds it.
--
Then she steps down from the dumpster, stowing away a small finger in a small bag, pulls her step away from the dumpster, which is loud – and maybe she’s still then, listening, waiting to see if anything inside has heard it. That’s a human instinct, split-second. Maybe she has trained it out of her body. Maybe it was never hers, even if she recognizes it in strangers.
The service entrance: double-doors, made of forged metal and old. There’s nothing to suggest that the place has a modern security system superimposed over the old one – iron and iron. When she glances up, she sees that there are iron bars here, too – that can be pulled down for extra security when locking up at night. No one’s bothered to do that. There’s just the lock, the deadbolt.
From here: only silence.
[Slaughter] She is not quite accustomed to this. The steps she is taking, the way she is seeking out rather than simply waiting. It does not fit against her skin quite yet. It is an imperfect fit.
So, perhaps, she stands there longer than is strictly necessary. She contemplates her options for longer than she needs to. She allows precious seconds to pass by.
After a moment, she steps away from the door, steps back from it, her jaw tightening, easing and then tightening again. She'll head back to her car and move it in front of the alleyway, despite her earlier qualms. A shift in priorities.
Disposal of the body, and its damning marks. Before someone else decides to look for a hot dog.
[Sorrow] This isn't right. Here she is on the threshold, alone. Here she is in an alley, a weapon at the small of her back, gloves on her hands. Someone's finger in her pocket. Here she is - in the quiet dark of a quiet alley - straining at the door for sounds of something within. Ready to -
- what?
She lingers longer than necessary; her priorities shift and become familiar. Dismembered corpses in a dumpster in an alley. Human flesh beginning to rot, a murder, a corpse. Before she edges away from the service entrance, though, she hears what sounds to be the scratch of a phonograph - the needle shifting over grooves - and the faint strains of an old country song inside.
--
The rest of the work is uneventful; it fits over her skin the way the gloves do, familiar. Perhaps it deadens her sense of touch just a bit. This is what she does. When she's leaving, though, she sees one of the upstairs windows open.
Like the lonely prairie - while a cowboy dreams...
- and hears that record again, as if it had been playing over and over and over and over while she worked.
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