SNUFF (h.s.)

Chapter 02

Nora

There is no other God for humans but Death. Under her tread someone could sense death lurking, under her feet it growls. She shivers no more, her fingers don't tremble, her eyes don't flutter nevermore. She was a wanderer; in the night she strolls around the dark streets which only shine when the city lights shed their glow upon them – they shine like a bullet when it crashes the forehead and wedges between the eyes.

The streets were vast; long and forked tongues and she walks, she had crossed them all; every alley, every dead end, every dirty lane in Roseville. She was always on the sidewalks and she couldn't tell how fast she grew up, she didn't even manage to feel sad about it. 

She would grab roaches or stubs wherever she could find them on the road and she tried to smoke something out of them – sometimes cigarettes aren't bitter. Yet most of the times someone had stepped on them and they tasted bitterly, she could taste the footsteps, the soles, the fleeting pace. Whatever. She didn't mind.

Nora was living in a dead's dream, she was wandering around the silent streets and her fierce gaze called the wolves in the midnight hour. She could easily get a nosebleed and she'd wish that it was from fun and games but she was no child anymore. Sergio wasn't blessed with patience. When she fucked for money her face was numb when they didn't look at her and her voice was weak.

But when she fucked for the camera.. oh, Nora was shining like a shooting star then! Her throat could fit all the Chicago dicks. Nora rode every poor soul for the camera. But this was just a fool's truth. Nora was just a girl – a crazy girl – she couldn't console every weak fella and Sergio had said to her that she was a heartless bitch but she never felt her heart cold.

Everyone put their hands on her. They rubbed, they squeezed, they pinched, they caressed, they hit, they scratched, they scraped her and every time she smiled showing her shining teeth. She fucked for the glowing glass on the lens and it was more brilliant than any diamond.

Sergio broke one of her front teeth once and it was a good one so he fixed it for her. She didn't hold it against him. She never held anything against him. He liked smashing jaws. He had his reasons. Now, she has a fake one which seems to be harder than the others. Whenever she licks it, she imagines that she had traded her own with a tiger's or a snake's.

If she tried to bite anyone who blew in the motel rooms – when the camera didn't look at her straight in the eye – she might kill them in an instant or transform them into vicious beasts. This is what she imagined since their expressions were fucking pathetic – they were miserable, sluggish, predictable; always the same stupid and world-weary smacker groaning and growling like a fucking mutt.

Those men were ugly; their skin was gungy and greasy full of curves with deep wrinkles like scars, buried eyes and bristles all over. Faces of workers, fathers, uncles and husbands, brothers and lovers; everyone was there for her and she welcomed them with a wide open and greedy mouth. She was ravenous. Well, she didn't have many choices and the underworld was full of fat and delicious rats.

That's what she was; a raging coyote. There was a time when her body was too thin that her collarbone looked like two parched branches. Her skin sparkled at night, it was lustrous and clean until dawn when it dries and abrades, she touches it and it fades away like dust wandering in between the waves of the wind.

She was beautiful because the city lights shone on her. The blue and red signs flash along with the green and orange letters beside the purple and yellow boards with the smiling faces. The asphalt glows as if it is a giant wave while she wanders on the spume. Her eyes were bigger and rounder, men saw something rotating on her irises and it aroused them.