jack_babalon | Lady Ulysses

"'Writer's Block'?" scoffed Lady Ulysses with a sad shake of the head, "Pfff... I wish!"

Of course she didn't have Muses but rather Sirens, hermaphroditic as angels with voices that hit the ear the way blow hits the nose. They beckoned to her from treacherous shores, from the night heights of Midtown suites to the long drop down in Alley City squat houses. Their song was charged with an art so powerful, so unrelentingly true and beautiful, as to shatter any thoughts that dared stand sentry between melody and the listener. Identity dissolved in their music, memory's candle extinguished under the roll of their echo... until finally only the body remained - consumed with an unyielding desire to become one with their song no matter how hostile the waters that may separate the two.

Ship wracked she had herself bound to the mast of her resolve.

But unlike her progenitor, that mendacious adventurer whose name she bore so proudly, was by wit and by trick able to slip free from her self-imposed captivity. Her friends, who had long deafened themselves to the Siren's song by stuffing their ears with wadded cash or earphone plugs that piped in bad habit thoughts, tried to wrestle her down to the deck for her own good. Not a one of them went without being immediately rewarded with a bruised eye, shin or groin. So it was with a muttered curse that she sucked back into a deep breath, a knife sheathed between clenched teeth that she Tarzan dove off the port bow into waves that crashed as serpents against her body.

For a moment you could track her flight but then just as a quick she was plucked, swallowed entirely from view by the raging tempest that carried the song.

The ship continued to drift away. The current furiously battering its retreat as the crew vanished for safety down below. Not one of them caught the speck that appeared against the churn of tide, as brief and bright as a single star heralding the coming dusk.

Lady Ulysses burst to the surface and tore through the defiant tide under the will of her momentum. When she reached the craggy shore, she climbed the cliffs with bloodied fingers and then, when she staggered to the flats of those cliffs with bleeding feet, she began to systematically hunt down each and every Siren she could find. Bedding them ruthlessly and tearing the song out of their throats to devour raw when she was done with them.

Needless to say her 'process' had left her with many an interesting scar that she wore with the intuitive regality of a queen bedecked in royal jewelry.

Her latest conquest had been a tittering popinjay whose blood she wore as a discreet perfume (smell of carnivals and firework gunpowder). The song though had burnt her mouth which she hid under a heavy layer of red lipstick.

The scent lingered in the diner, overpowered the smoke of meat and grease. It intoxicated the senses whole. The wait staff dotted on her and made me for invisible. The cooks made excuses to clamber out for a smoke, never taking their eyes of her the whole time. Eventually I had become vaguely aware that I was now trying to seduce her. She smiled politely at my involuntary advances, didn't retreat the boot mine brushed slow against or remove the cool hand I clumsily smothered with a trembling one.

Instead she reminded me, kindly... but not too kindly, that the last time was indeed the last time and that, as they say, was that. I removed my hand from hers and stroked affectionately the set of jagged bite marks orbiting the bob of my Adam's Apple. Months have passed since and their mark has refused to heal.

A permanent memento then to a glorious drunken night; one spent buried alive under the world in an alcohol cocoon, where I carved with flame my poetry deep within the hollow of her absence while she lapped the words from the wound in my throat.

I've never sang the same since.

"You'll figure something out, Jack" she says reassuringly while I pretend not to notice that she's stealing my last cigarette from my pack, "You always do."

With that she stands up, drops two crumbled twenties across a ketchup stained plate (peeled fresh from a wallet she lifted during a quick trip to the Woman's Room) and leans across the table to deliver a Siren stained kiss against my cheek.

The lipstick imprint sizzles against the stubble and in its sting I am briefly relieved of the ache of her impending goodbye. She waves politely at the cooing wait staff and with a click of her heels that resound as if an army of daggers were marching behind her she exits the diner and leaves me to write these clumsy lines across a coffee ringed napkin.