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Mute Invocations
Apr. 16th, 2015 11:42 pmTerminus, Memorial Avenue. Waiting at the bus stop in front of the abandoned milk factory, chain-linked off with brick walls covered in graffiti. Road empty where the 21 should be, with nothing but commerce gray or spring green running along it. Feral blooms of wisteria dabbed down the avenue, hanging from rusted barbwire strands and power-line wires. Overcast sky eddies with shades of ashes stirred into warm milk, low clouds blot out the skyline reducing their towers into concrete stumps. Smell of storm heavy on the damp Monday afternoon air. Traffic light, with not a breath of wind to stir the humidity. In my arms the package groans a protest and I shoot an anxious stare down Memorial.
No cops, which was good.
No bus either, which was bad.
It all came down to which one would come rolling up on me first.
Life runs on Wrath of Khan Time where - "The minutes seem like hours."
I get fifteen of those minutes past when the 21 was supposed to arrive before it comes rumbling down the avenue, slows down out of an already slow crawl and pulls up in front of me with a shudder. The doors hiss and after a delayed moment swings open.
I get no more than one foot onboard when the driver looks over at me, gets rattled out of the job somnambulism with bulged eye horror and outrage.
"Sir, I can't let you on here with that thing." She all but shrieks at me
"Why?" I ask as the adult Mute Swan wrapped up in my leather jacket struggles to break free from my grip. It's pressed to my chest with a one armed hug and its beady black eyes swing around on a long white neck question-mark curved. It looks at the bus driver and hollers out with this noise resembling a kazoo with laryngitis.
"You're not allowed to bring a wild animal on the bus." She says and points to the abandoned factory behind me. "Now, sir... please... if you don't mind..."
"It's not a wild animal." I interrupt stepping completely into the bus with a polite but defiant smile. "It's an emotional support animal and one instrumental in helping me overcome a strain of pharmaceutical resistant depression that would otherwise leave me bedridden."
"What?" The driver says staring incredulously at the swan who is giving her what on a human face would be called 'the Stink Eye'.
"She's like a seeing-eye dog for people with psychological problems." I explain with a long sigh. "Only she's a swan."
"What?" The driver repeats staring at the beast waddled up in my jacket craning its neck so that its banana yellow beak is just inches from a nose-chomp of her nose.
"Her name's 'Lydia'." I offer widening my smile.
"Shit!" Yells a little old lady sitting at the back of the bus between two young men with prison tattoos inked along bulged muscles. "Just let that man on with his damn bird already. You might got nowhere to be but in a bus tonight, but some of us want to get home, get drunk and get laid."
The two young men flanking her do a double-take while the rest of us - myself, the driver and Lydia included - look on with slack jawed awe. But before the little old lady can protest again, the driver shoots me a real 'go fuck yourself' of a look. "Well, get on if you're getting on then."
I tap my MARTA card. It beeps and a fare is deducted. I take my seat as the bus fires back up. Lydia squirms in my jacket and I coo a - "Hush, girl. It's okay. It's okay. We're almost there."
***
"I distinctly recall telling you to bring a Trumpeter." She says standing with folded arms in front of the door while icily ignoring Lydia's struggles for freedom. "We, by which I mean you, will need one if you want to get the bastards attention."
"As often is the case with Fate, a Mute will serve herald to our efforts. " I answer, dripping wet from the rain having finally delivered on its two day past due promise to pour - which it did the moment I stepped off the bus.
She looks at me unimpressed, "Ever the poet."
I shrug with a goofy wannabe lover-boy grin. "Come on... a swan by any other name and all'a that good shit, right?"
"Ever the poet." She repeats with a roll of her eyes and steps aside giving a mock courtesy by ways as an invitation to come on in.
Her place is a different place every time I have visited. Sometimes it's an attic rented out from a house, sometimes it's a little shack in a backyard, sometimes it's a studio basement, sometimes it's in the heart of gentrified Terminus, sometimes it's in those parts of the city still designated - "NO GO" - after dark.
Thank Eris she's never changed her number over the many years we've known each other.
She leads me to a spacious bedroom that as always looks as if it had just been ransacked by burglars during a localized indoor tornado. She tells me to take a seat on an unmade bed with splayed open books and magazines mixed along the twisted sheets. The walls are covered with artwork and framed photographs - a few of them her own. Along the floors stacked into crooked towers are piles of books of every subject and size- again, a few of them her own. A single desk sits in the corner, cluttered with candles and a laptop with a cracked screen under the room's lone window.
She begins rummaging along the floor frantically, scooping up discarded clothes by the armful that she tosses into a closet overflowing with dirty laundry.
"Where did you get it?" She asks without looking at me plucking panties and t-shirts off what I am starting to realize are hardwood floors.
"What...you mean the swan?"
She stops, mid-crouch and looks over at me with blank unimpressed eyes.
"I got her... well, at least I think it's a her... but uh, yeah, I got her from one of those new townhomes they got popping up everywhere. It had a pond in the backyard along with a playground and a patio for grilling. No one was around and I didn't see any cameras, so I think the coast is clear."
Lydia gives a kazoo wheeze of a honk.
"Uh-huh." She says and tosses the last bit of clothes towards the avalanche splattered closet.
"I call her Lydia." I smile puppy eyed and give my leather bundled Mute a big old hug.
"Of course you do." She says and shakes her head studying the clearing on which she stands, she spots a stray high-heeled boot that she kicks under the bed.
Look at her. Dirty bare feet and a white wife-beater under some denim overalls. She's aged well over the years, not by her reckoning of course but we are always our own worst judge, or at least anyone worth knowing seems to be. The weight she's gained looks good on her, probably gives that right-hook I remember so well some real momentum. Only the dark bags under the eyes give hint to those sleepless nights of bad habits conquered yet still occasionally indulged. There are a few wrinkles to the wisp of a perpetual half-smile curled with unspoken wisdom. She wears her hair short now, dyed bangs from beneath which her cinder stare watches the world around her with detached amusement.
She rifles through the pockets of paint-splattered and curry-stained overalls before retrieving a stub of white chalk tucked behind her ear.
In that patch of freshly cleared hardwood floor before the bed upon which I sit, my hostess draws a wide circle in one motion involving a slow, crouched pivot. She then draws a second circle within the first just inches shy of the original's circumference. Inside the space between the two circles she begins scrawling angelic sigils and infernal runes appropriate to the cardinal direction they have been designated dominion over. In the middle she draws a seven pointed star. I don't say a word, neither does Lydia, we both know, even if only intuitively the silence that her actions demand.
Without looking at me, at us counting Lydia the Mute, she steps to the desk, grabs a candle off the desk along with the battered office chair tucked under it. She rolls it directly over the seven pointed star and with lighter fished from pocket lights up the candle before setting down between the wheeled legs of the chair.
My hostess then shuts the door, closes the blinds on the lone window, kills the lights and stepping back into the circle to face me, begins stripping out of her overalls. The lone flame of the candle gives off enough light to separate her silhouette from the rooms darkness. Shadowed arms unhook one button, then another and her overalls drop to a puddle at her feet. She gives them a kick and they land in my arms and over Lydia's face.
Next she tugs herself free of the wife-beater, curves of belly and breasts accented by the faint orange glow flickering beneath. She gives the wife-beater a toss that lands in a veil over my head. When I pull it free from my I find my hostess seated, facing me on the chair in the circle, shadowed thighs spread open and yearning arms beckoning me forward.
Breath caught in the throat, chest tightens as a sour need churns in the gut, nerves electrified - my balls tingle as someone or something steps over their grave. The next move is clear. I rise from the bed, from the masks of choice and under the angel of my will's wings approach with a single step before collapsing to a single knee before her throne.
She leans forward and the silhouette recedes under the faint candle glow to reveal her gray eyes shining with bemused pity with a smile you give to a funeral anecdote. She leans closer and I can begin to feel my heart race as I swallow back the panicked breath lodged in throat. Her lips hover a treasonous whisper's distance from my own, I close my eyes and find it is not enough to blind me to her face. Her face as when we first met. 1990-Never, us after after-party hook-up casualties staggering into the realms of bedroom improv magick. We astral cosplayed rebel gods and trickster goddesses, LOA limboed deep within broken into cars, before finding ourselves arguing dead philosophies and nascent ideas in the Waffle House dawn.
Sometimes she would like the way I would rant to the windows or mutter misquoted Rilke to the morning and reward me by leaning over quickly emptied plates to lay a kiss on me. Those were some of the best damn kisses, this ex-squid and struggling poet had ever tasted.
I open my lips here in the now ready to meet her own again and in return she only takes from my arms a trembling Lydia the Mute before receding back into silhouette.
Knowing what must be done, I open my eyes.
The white mute struggles in the black shadows of my hostess, the candle flickers and reach out before me. Hands find the straps of her panties. I slide down them her legs to the ankles, to small steps of her feet nowhere allows me to slip them free and I toss them over the shoulder.
Somewhere around us in the room death smiles invisible and Lydia gives a scream as white fingers flutter helpless against her silhouette which is when I dive into my hostess's lap. My frustrated kiss finally finds home on a different pair lips. Gentle licks, a blind little girl tasting ice-cream for the first time, curious at first and then slowly building into rapturous hunger. The hair around her sex shaved, in its place a series of seven tattooed triangles forming from her cunt an identical sister to the star upon which we are united. I close my eyes. As I do I am positioned such in my genuflection as that my arms rest on her thighs, allowing my fingers to caress her back, while my chest dangles over the candle's flame just inches below. A spotlight of pain opens across the skin.
I take it.
I let it help me focus.
I focus on the image of her secret and moist star. Within its center I form a symbol. A single wish made of a single word collapsed into a single letter in my head.
When my hostesses thighs clamp around me I can feel her body begin trembling as feathers begin falling around me. My lashes to her pleasure come quicker, jaw aches, candle burns, fingers slip into a damp shudder, and I taste...
... lost in the woods afternoon, March after the rain everything frost and mud with the scent of life burning ready through it all. A shadow watched me, a stranger, I was only fifteen then, too old to be scared, too young to know better. It lurked around the trees around me along the trail, it hovered behind the bushes while I searched for some sign that I had been this way before. Finding none, I found the shadow was closer now. It paused and I felt my heart racing as it does now between my hostess's thigh. Found myself with what were then a damn near every waking moment erection. Knowing my shadow could see it as well I whipped it out and began jerking off slowly as it hovered there silent.
When I came my seed hit steaming a muddied footprint and from a jolt of the spine an insane peel of laughter roared out of me into the woods. When it passed, I quickly realized my shadow was gone. Intuitively I followed the rest of those footsteps accompanying the one I inadvertently masturbated into and soon found myself back on the right track. I come across a large skeletal tree, there's something carved into the bark at eye level, a symbol of sort, a single letter made of a single word , made of a single wish...
... and the death stalking us around the room jumps inside my hostess's body through me. She gives an electric chair dance, squeezes tight the Lydia the Mute and muffles an orgasmic roar with a bite into the swan's immaculate white throat. It takes a few tries of but her teeth manage to chew through feather, skin and muscle. Blood sprays across her face, trickles off the chin, down the breasts, and splatter across my freshly shaven head.
My Hostess drops Lydia to the floor, in her death throes the swan runs around the circle three times spraying blood everywhere before collapsing lifeless next to me. A last tremble of an outstretched wing knocks over the candle. The last light doused, my hostess pries me free from slackened legs and rises me into her kiss.
She stumbles out of the chair as I come out of the crouch, we do a stagger dance before we collapse with me landing with my back against the swan. Her hand finds my zipper, my heat unsheathed and mounted.
When I'm able to form thoughts again I'm back on the 21 back to King Station. The last route of the night. I'm the only one on the bus. The driver was the same one from the trip up. She just looked at me standing there with a white Mute Swan feather dangling out of my zipper. Good thing I went all black or I'd have to explain the blood stains to her. As it is though she didn't say a word and neither did I. I paid my fare and made my way to the back of the bus to stare out the window.
"Jack, I'm sorry but I think I got the better deal here." My hostess speaks from beneath the dwindling flotsam of recent memory. I'm on my way out of her place - the attic, the basement, the shed, you pick - and she's wiping with the palm of her hand a drop of blood I missed when I washed up.
"I wouldn't say that." I smile coyly, a disheveled man-child with Chucks untied and clothes hastily slapped on.
"We needed, you needed a Trumpeter Jack... you wanted to summon a goddess visions to give you something to write about, to blog, joke or roar about. But for that you needed a Trumpeter. A Mute..., well a Mute will summon the same Goddess but those visions she'll bless you with come with a price and that price is silence."
"A little on the nose, don't you think?" I tell her still endorphin high and despite the overalls sans wife-beater can still see her naked.
She laughs, politely in that way you do in compensation of finding nothing funny in what was meant to do only that.
"So what'd you get?" I ask, knowing the answer and just stalling for company.
"A friend on the inside." Her eyes light up for a moment with an ancient and alien insanity before narrowing back into the present with a furrowing of the brow. "Some company I can call upon for those hard times to come. Good luck with your mute visions, Jack. Next time you come by follow the instructions."
She closes the door and I stand there nodding at the door until I'm back nodding at my own reflection in bus window. We're a block from my station. Next stop and it's the start of the rest of the trip. I lean on the window. I breathe heavily on the glass. In the film of condensation I draw a single wish, a single word collapsed into a single letter... close my eyes, think of a secret star moist with seven points and then erase the letter that is a word that is a wish.
This last detail of the invocation finished, I rise, get off the bus, enter the station and race for an incoming eastbound on the tracks above. In my wake, the single feather of Lydia the Mute flies off my zipper. Behind me it floats in the empty station, fluttering in descent between the turnstile gates and landing gently from its final flight.
Tomorrow someone may find it and through its magick another story will begin.
No cops, which was good.
No bus either, which was bad.
It all came down to which one would come rolling up on me first.
Life runs on Wrath of Khan Time where - "The minutes seem like hours."
I get fifteen of those minutes past when the 21 was supposed to arrive before it comes rumbling down the avenue, slows down out of an already slow crawl and pulls up in front of me with a shudder. The doors hiss and after a delayed moment swings open.
I get no more than one foot onboard when the driver looks over at me, gets rattled out of the job somnambulism with bulged eye horror and outrage.
"Sir, I can't let you on here with that thing." She all but shrieks at me
"Why?" I ask as the adult Mute Swan wrapped up in my leather jacket struggles to break free from my grip. It's pressed to my chest with a one armed hug and its beady black eyes swing around on a long white neck question-mark curved. It looks at the bus driver and hollers out with this noise resembling a kazoo with laryngitis.
"You're not allowed to bring a wild animal on the bus." She says and points to the abandoned factory behind me. "Now, sir... please... if you don't mind..."
"It's not a wild animal." I interrupt stepping completely into the bus with a polite but defiant smile. "It's an emotional support animal and one instrumental in helping me overcome a strain of pharmaceutical resistant depression that would otherwise leave me bedridden."
"What?" The driver says staring incredulously at the swan who is giving her what on a human face would be called 'the Stink Eye'.
"She's like a seeing-eye dog for people with psychological problems." I explain with a long sigh. "Only she's a swan."
"What?" The driver repeats staring at the beast waddled up in my jacket craning its neck so that its banana yellow beak is just inches from a nose-chomp of her nose.
"Her name's 'Lydia'." I offer widening my smile.
"Shit!" Yells a little old lady sitting at the back of the bus between two young men with prison tattoos inked along bulged muscles. "Just let that man on with his damn bird already. You might got nowhere to be but in a bus tonight, but some of us want to get home, get drunk and get laid."
The two young men flanking her do a double-take while the rest of us - myself, the driver and Lydia included - look on with slack jawed awe. But before the little old lady can protest again, the driver shoots me a real 'go fuck yourself' of a look. "Well, get on if you're getting on then."
I tap my MARTA card. It beeps and a fare is deducted. I take my seat as the bus fires back up. Lydia squirms in my jacket and I coo a - "Hush, girl. It's okay. It's okay. We're almost there."
***
"I distinctly recall telling you to bring a Trumpeter." She says standing with folded arms in front of the door while icily ignoring Lydia's struggles for freedom. "We, by which I mean you, will need one if you want to get the bastards attention."
"As often is the case with Fate, a Mute will serve herald to our efforts. " I answer, dripping wet from the rain having finally delivered on its two day past due promise to pour - which it did the moment I stepped off the bus.
She looks at me unimpressed, "Ever the poet."
I shrug with a goofy wannabe lover-boy grin. "Come on... a swan by any other name and all'a that good shit, right?"
"Ever the poet." She repeats with a roll of her eyes and steps aside giving a mock courtesy by ways as an invitation to come on in.
Her place is a different place every time I have visited. Sometimes it's an attic rented out from a house, sometimes it's a little shack in a backyard, sometimes it's a studio basement, sometimes it's in the heart of gentrified Terminus, sometimes it's in those parts of the city still designated - "NO GO" - after dark.
Thank Eris she's never changed her number over the many years we've known each other.
She leads me to a spacious bedroom that as always looks as if it had just been ransacked by burglars during a localized indoor tornado. She tells me to take a seat on an unmade bed with splayed open books and magazines mixed along the twisted sheets. The walls are covered with artwork and framed photographs - a few of them her own. Along the floors stacked into crooked towers are piles of books of every subject and size- again, a few of them her own. A single desk sits in the corner, cluttered with candles and a laptop with a cracked screen under the room's lone window.
She begins rummaging along the floor frantically, scooping up discarded clothes by the armful that she tosses into a closet overflowing with dirty laundry.
"Where did you get it?" She asks without looking at me plucking panties and t-shirts off what I am starting to realize are hardwood floors.
"What...you mean the swan?"
She stops, mid-crouch and looks over at me with blank unimpressed eyes.
"I got her... well, at least I think it's a her... but uh, yeah, I got her from one of those new townhomes they got popping up everywhere. It had a pond in the backyard along with a playground and a patio for grilling. No one was around and I didn't see any cameras, so I think the coast is clear."
Lydia gives a kazoo wheeze of a honk.
"Uh-huh." She says and tosses the last bit of clothes towards the avalanche splattered closet.
"I call her Lydia." I smile puppy eyed and give my leather bundled Mute a big old hug.
"Of course you do." She says and shakes her head studying the clearing on which she stands, she spots a stray high-heeled boot that she kicks under the bed.
Look at her. Dirty bare feet and a white wife-beater under some denim overalls. She's aged well over the years, not by her reckoning of course but we are always our own worst judge, or at least anyone worth knowing seems to be. The weight she's gained looks good on her, probably gives that right-hook I remember so well some real momentum. Only the dark bags under the eyes give hint to those sleepless nights of bad habits conquered yet still occasionally indulged. There are a few wrinkles to the wisp of a perpetual half-smile curled with unspoken wisdom. She wears her hair short now, dyed bangs from beneath which her cinder stare watches the world around her with detached amusement.
She rifles through the pockets of paint-splattered and curry-stained overalls before retrieving a stub of white chalk tucked behind her ear.
In that patch of freshly cleared hardwood floor before the bed upon which I sit, my hostess draws a wide circle in one motion involving a slow, crouched pivot. She then draws a second circle within the first just inches shy of the original's circumference. Inside the space between the two circles she begins scrawling angelic sigils and infernal runes appropriate to the cardinal direction they have been designated dominion over. In the middle she draws a seven pointed star. I don't say a word, neither does Lydia, we both know, even if only intuitively the silence that her actions demand.
Without looking at me, at us counting Lydia the Mute, she steps to the desk, grabs a candle off the desk along with the battered office chair tucked under it. She rolls it directly over the seven pointed star and with lighter fished from pocket lights up the candle before setting down between the wheeled legs of the chair.
My hostess then shuts the door, closes the blinds on the lone window, kills the lights and stepping back into the circle to face me, begins stripping out of her overalls. The lone flame of the candle gives off enough light to separate her silhouette from the rooms darkness. Shadowed arms unhook one button, then another and her overalls drop to a puddle at her feet. She gives them a kick and they land in my arms and over Lydia's face.
Next she tugs herself free of the wife-beater, curves of belly and breasts accented by the faint orange glow flickering beneath. She gives the wife-beater a toss that lands in a veil over my head. When I pull it free from my I find my hostess seated, facing me on the chair in the circle, shadowed thighs spread open and yearning arms beckoning me forward.
Breath caught in the throat, chest tightens as a sour need churns in the gut, nerves electrified - my balls tingle as someone or something steps over their grave. The next move is clear. I rise from the bed, from the masks of choice and under the angel of my will's wings approach with a single step before collapsing to a single knee before her throne.
She leans forward and the silhouette recedes under the faint candle glow to reveal her gray eyes shining with bemused pity with a smile you give to a funeral anecdote. She leans closer and I can begin to feel my heart race as I swallow back the panicked breath lodged in throat. Her lips hover a treasonous whisper's distance from my own, I close my eyes and find it is not enough to blind me to her face. Her face as when we first met. 1990-Never, us after after-party hook-up casualties staggering into the realms of bedroom improv magick. We astral cosplayed rebel gods and trickster goddesses, LOA limboed deep within broken into cars, before finding ourselves arguing dead philosophies and nascent ideas in the Waffle House dawn.
Sometimes she would like the way I would rant to the windows or mutter misquoted Rilke to the morning and reward me by leaning over quickly emptied plates to lay a kiss on me. Those were some of the best damn kisses, this ex-squid and struggling poet had ever tasted.
I open my lips here in the now ready to meet her own again and in return she only takes from my arms a trembling Lydia the Mute before receding back into silhouette.
Knowing what must be done, I open my eyes.
The white mute struggles in the black shadows of my hostess, the candle flickers and reach out before me. Hands find the straps of her panties. I slide down them her legs to the ankles, to small steps of her feet nowhere allows me to slip them free and I toss them over the shoulder.
Somewhere around us in the room death smiles invisible and Lydia gives a scream as white fingers flutter helpless against her silhouette which is when I dive into my hostess's lap. My frustrated kiss finally finds home on a different pair lips. Gentle licks, a blind little girl tasting ice-cream for the first time, curious at first and then slowly building into rapturous hunger. The hair around her sex shaved, in its place a series of seven tattooed triangles forming from her cunt an identical sister to the star upon which we are united. I close my eyes. As I do I am positioned such in my genuflection as that my arms rest on her thighs, allowing my fingers to caress her back, while my chest dangles over the candle's flame just inches below. A spotlight of pain opens across the skin.
I take it.
I let it help me focus.
I focus on the image of her secret and moist star. Within its center I form a symbol. A single wish made of a single word collapsed into a single letter in my head.
When my hostesses thighs clamp around me I can feel her body begin trembling as feathers begin falling around me. My lashes to her pleasure come quicker, jaw aches, candle burns, fingers slip into a damp shudder, and I taste...
... lost in the woods afternoon, March after the rain everything frost and mud with the scent of life burning ready through it all. A shadow watched me, a stranger, I was only fifteen then, too old to be scared, too young to know better. It lurked around the trees around me along the trail, it hovered behind the bushes while I searched for some sign that I had been this way before. Finding none, I found the shadow was closer now. It paused and I felt my heart racing as it does now between my hostess's thigh. Found myself with what were then a damn near every waking moment erection. Knowing my shadow could see it as well I whipped it out and began jerking off slowly as it hovered there silent.
When I came my seed hit steaming a muddied footprint and from a jolt of the spine an insane peel of laughter roared out of me into the woods. When it passed, I quickly realized my shadow was gone. Intuitively I followed the rest of those footsteps accompanying the one I inadvertently masturbated into and soon found myself back on the right track. I come across a large skeletal tree, there's something carved into the bark at eye level, a symbol of sort, a single letter made of a single word , made of a single wish...
... and the death stalking us around the room jumps inside my hostess's body through me. She gives an electric chair dance, squeezes tight the Lydia the Mute and muffles an orgasmic roar with a bite into the swan's immaculate white throat. It takes a few tries of but her teeth manage to chew through feather, skin and muscle. Blood sprays across her face, trickles off the chin, down the breasts, and splatter across my freshly shaven head.
My Hostess drops Lydia to the floor, in her death throes the swan runs around the circle three times spraying blood everywhere before collapsing lifeless next to me. A last tremble of an outstretched wing knocks over the candle. The last light doused, my hostess pries me free from slackened legs and rises me into her kiss.
She stumbles out of the chair as I come out of the crouch, we do a stagger dance before we collapse with me landing with my back against the swan. Her hand finds my zipper, my heat unsheathed and mounted.
When I'm able to form thoughts again I'm back on the 21 back to King Station. The last route of the night. I'm the only one on the bus. The driver was the same one from the trip up. She just looked at me standing there with a white Mute Swan feather dangling out of my zipper. Good thing I went all black or I'd have to explain the blood stains to her. As it is though she didn't say a word and neither did I. I paid my fare and made my way to the back of the bus to stare out the window.
"Jack, I'm sorry but I think I got the better deal here." My hostess speaks from beneath the dwindling flotsam of recent memory. I'm on my way out of her place - the attic, the basement, the shed, you pick - and she's wiping with the palm of her hand a drop of blood I missed when I washed up.
"I wouldn't say that." I smile coyly, a disheveled man-child with Chucks untied and clothes hastily slapped on.
"We needed, you needed a Trumpeter Jack... you wanted to summon a goddess visions to give you something to write about, to blog, joke or roar about. But for that you needed a Trumpeter. A Mute..., well a Mute will summon the same Goddess but those visions she'll bless you with come with a price and that price is silence."
"A little on the nose, don't you think?" I tell her still endorphin high and despite the overalls sans wife-beater can still see her naked.
She laughs, politely in that way you do in compensation of finding nothing funny in what was meant to do only that.
"So what'd you get?" I ask, knowing the answer and just stalling for company.
"A friend on the inside." Her eyes light up for a moment with an ancient and alien insanity before narrowing back into the present with a furrowing of the brow. "Some company I can call upon for those hard times to come. Good luck with your mute visions, Jack. Next time you come by follow the instructions."
She closes the door and I stand there nodding at the door until I'm back nodding at my own reflection in bus window. We're a block from my station. Next stop and it's the start of the rest of the trip. I lean on the window. I breathe heavily on the glass. In the film of condensation I draw a single wish, a single word collapsed into a single letter... close my eyes, think of a secret star moist with seven points and then erase the letter that is a word that is a wish.
This last detail of the invocation finished, I rise, get off the bus, enter the station and race for an incoming eastbound on the tracks above. In my wake, the single feather of Lydia the Mute flies off my zipper. Behind me it floats in the empty station, fluttering in descent between the turnstile gates and landing gently from its final flight.
Tomorrow someone may find it and through its magick another story will begin.