Bone Pattern

Walking into the Dark - The Journal of Calix Bishop

Just barely beat the storm walking home tonight.  I walked beneath lightning and made it inside just before scattered raindrops turned into a downpour.  Batteries don't last long out of the shallows, so I didn't have my mp3 player while I did it, either.  Sunset is coming earlier now, and this summer is drawing to a close.  At last.  Summers never seem entirely real to me.

    

But I've skipped ahead.  I call myself Calix.  I live in Denver, sort of.  My apartment is in the shallows of Denver.  The part of the world in which things are simple and the past is being wiped away by fiberglass storefronts added to the top.  But I work in the deep world.  I am a business woman.  I buy and sell things.  Hard to get things.  Magic and curses, sometimes.  Sometimes just stories.  I thought I ought to keep a blog about the things I see.

    

Back to today.  I made it home before the rain really hit, which was a relief.  I'd been visiting Ellis Nyx.  She lives a little deeper than me, in a basement apartment near Cheesman.  Did you know that Cheesman park used to be Prospect Hill cemetery?  Ellis's apartment is close enough to it that the earth she lives in used to be sacred ground.  They left a lot of bodies when they moved the cemetery, and she lives in that miasma.  Sometimes I wonder if she was still in the shallows when she found this apartment, and if living in among the graves dragged her out into the deep like a riptide, or if she looked for an apartment like this specifically.  

    

The truth is, I'm a little jealous of her apartment, even if it's just a little studio with concrete walls.  Ellis says she doesn't need much.  She acid stained the walls to a glossy rust color and keeps candles burning most of the time.  All she has is a futon on the floor, lurking behind two patched armchairs.  Her desk takes up most of the far wall.  Some strange elaborately carved slab of wood, balanced on two sawhorses.  The rest of the room is filled with books.  Papers pinned to the wall.  She writes on a typewriter.  No TV.  No computer.  Even I have a computer.

    

Ellis herself seems to live on tea.  She has ragged brown hair that I think she cuts herself.  It rises into a poof around her head.  Her eyes are dark and strangely deep set.  When I first met her, she seemed half dead to me, in her graveridden apartment.  I had not come so far out then.  

  

 Anyway, we were chatting about how her writing is going.  I buy stories from her sometimes to publish.  E-books mostly, and I have to transcribe her work into the computer.  The typewriter rollers were empty though.  The room was colder than usual.  It occurs to me as I am writing this it has been a couple of months since she has sold me anything. 

    

Today, her eyes kept going to the wall behind me.  I've been around long enough to know not to look.  She gets like this sometimes.  Maybe when I go back she will have something for me.

    

"There's new graffiti coming up," she told me just before I left.  "I found some scrawled on the concrete of an underpass last night.  Uncanny stuff.  Deep stuff.  It's not by someone I know."

    

After that, I wanted to stay and press her.  She knows more people than I do.  I have never heard of this graffiti. Not in Denver But I could hear thunder even in the basement, and I didn't want to be caught.  Ellis acted like I ought to know what she was talking about already.  At least I got her to tell me which underpass it was.  It's out toward Commerce City, near Riverside.

    

Maybe tomorrow, I will visit the weaver and see if she can sell me anything.  I can check out the graffiti on the way.

    

Sort of a boring introduction, I see.  This is what I do, though.  I try to trace rumors.  Find people who will give me deep-touched things.  Or sell them to me.  And maybe the graffiti tip will be worth a photograph to sell in the store.  If not, the weaver is always worth a story.