For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror.
—Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies
December 16, 1932
The sun was as hot as the Fourth of July, though it was almost Christmas. I ran a finger over the note in my pocket: I like what you wrote about that creep who killed the kids. Show up at the jail on Thursday. You’ll be on the visitor list.
Inside my car was hot leather and stubbed-out Chesterfields. Sweat dripped onto the photo. I swiped it with my handkerchief. Look at that moony hair, those baby doe eyes. Beside her, the mother had the same lunar hair, but her eyes were dark as a locked closet. The mother was hacked to pieces along with Tom Ash—the new talkie Valentino—in the desert past Palm Springs. With the suicides, tent cities, and one-dollar apples, this double murder offered some grim entertainment.
Horrific Double Murder! Butchered Movie Star! Rumored Satanic Rituals, Including, Hopefully, Naked Girls!
Then Doe Eyes goes and ruins it. Sashays into Central Division. “I did it,” she says. Chopped up mom and movie star like liver no onions. She pleads nolo contendere to premeditated homicide, waives a trial, requests the death penalty, and gets it. Now, denied a circus, the disappointed have only her execution next week up at San Quinten to look forward to.
I headed east toward Lincoln Heights, my hands clammy. Why the hell was I so nervous? I glanced down at the photo. Look at those eyes. Guileless as a lamb. Were lambs guileless or just witless? Stop it, I told myself. Wait till you see her up close. No nice lighting in jail. Up close, those moony eyes would be sickos like Northcott’s before they dropped him—black planets, dead stars.
Headline: Angel Face With Killer Eyes. Not poetry, but the general public isn’t much for subtlety. Doe Eyes claimed to be psychic, her mother supposedly a reincarnated goddess. Of course, this is the promised land of loons. Mom and Pop from Idaho happily forking over the lettuce to some charlatan claiming he can raise Mamie from the grave. That Mamie was a blonde cocker spaniel is beside the point. But this mother-daughter act wasn’t after dupes from the potato state. They were after glitter and shine—the kind that glows on celluloid.
Chaplin and his wife supposedly were members of their cult at that desert ranch. Bill Powell and Mabel Normand attended orgies? Whispers no one would verify. But threats couldn’t shut up the rumors. What’s the real story? Why’d she do it?
Doe Eyes turned down every paper. Yet here I was. A nobody from a nothing rag with the biggest exclusive in years. Luck, some would say. But I don’t believe in luck, much else for that matter. My article covering the Wineville execution at San Quentin sold her. That it took an axe murderer to recognize my work—no need to dwell.
Traffic thinned after crossing the 7th Street bridge, but I was already late. I pushed the pedal down on Hollywood Boulevard, festooned overhead with fake snowflakes waiting to light up the night. Meanwhile, the back of my shirt was sopping wet—California Christmas.
I stuck my head out the window to catch the breeze, and my hat took off. My best hat. My only hat. A man wore a hat. Even when robbing a bank, a man wore a hat. But I couldn’t risk turning around. I was already running late for this interview of a lifetim,e and time was something neither of us could spare.
***
The Lincoln Heights jail is brand new, a concrete squint-eyed monster. Whoever designed it didn’t like people. I wipe the sweat off my forehead and fan my jacket to try to dry out before climbing the stairs.
Inside, it’s so dark I wonder if this dreary twilight is meant to depress any hope of escape. A uniformed guard signals to approach the sergeant’s desk behind metal mesh. My shoes echo on the naked floor.
“Can I help you?” asks the sergeant, clearly uninterested in anything of the sort.
“Pete Sailor. Valley Daily.” I flash my press card. “Got an appointment to interview a prisoner.”
The cop barely glances at the card I’d worked so hard to get so I could flash it in faces like his.
“I’ll check the log. Wait over there,” indicating a bench as welcoming as he is.
A fan whirs, blowing hot air everywhere except where I’m sitting. I stare at the clock on the wall, the only decoration. I was given an hour, and I’ve lost twenty minutes already. In the distance, a cell door bangs, the air fills with the acrid smell of ammonia. A woman listlessly shoves a mop back and forth.
“Mr. Sailor?”
I look up. A prison matron stands before me with a star-shaped badge atop a mighty shelf of bosom. “Follow me,” she commands.
Her sensible shoes are silent while mine ring out like a hoofer on Broadway. I trail behind down a linoleum-floored corridor with walls painted a painful green.
“This way,” says the matron without turning.
There is only this way, I think. This way and the other way that leads to out. Out of this building, which I’m beginning to think is a very good way indeed. I pass a photograph of Herbert Hoover. He peers out with eyes reminding me of a nervous possum. Will they hang Roosevelt next to him after the inauguration, or just chuck old Hoover in the trash?
At the end of the corridor is a gated steel door, which the matron unlocks. I follow. It clangs behind us, locking automatically. Only other time I heard that sound was at San Quentin before they hanged Northcott. Say a prayer for me, he’d whined. I looked away when they dropped him.
The air is close here, ripe with perspiration, anxiety. Women crowd the cells we pass.
“Hey, Mister, you a lawyer? I need a lawyer.”
“Come here, honey, lemme tell you what—“
“Don’t pay attention, only encourages them,” says the matron, marching ahead.
“Where you going, handsome?”
“Give up, you old whore, he ain’t interested in spoiled meat.”
“Oh god, please help me.”
The voice—like a cracking heart. I pause. The woman’s face is blotched from crying.
“Please, sir, please! I’ve got a baby, for the love of God, help me, my baby.”
“Well, you shouldn’t have tried to drown it,” says the matron. “Quiet, ladies.” She nods to a guard who opens a barred double gate.
“This is all quite new,” she says with what I gather is pride. “We have two cells for solitary, but they’re occupied right now so we keep her down here. It was set up for violent mental cases until they’re picked up by County.”
Another steel gate bangs shut behind us. The sound vibrates inside my head until I realize that everything has gone silent. I’m standing in a large underground space with one cell. There’s room for five or six more, but for some reason, they stopped at one.
“Our private room,” says the matron, “for special guests.”
In a far corner is a chair and a small table with a lamp and a pile of magazines. The lamp’s halo only accentuates the surrounding shadows. The floor is concrete, the uncirculated air is swollen and thick. No natural light. Not a single window. How can anyone stand it shut up like this? How can you even breathe?
“I’ll be over there.” Matron points to the chair. “You only have half an hour now.”
I’m looking at the woman sitting on the bunk inside the cell.
“You’re late, so only half an hour. Hand.”
I hold mine out, thinking she wants to check I’m not palming a toothpick-sized crowbar.
“Hand,” Matron repeats.
The woman on the other side of the bars says, “Lose your hat?”
Instinctively, I reach up and try to smash my exploded curls. Her name—Hallelujah Hand.
“Nice hair, lotsa woman would kill for that.”
Was that a joke? She isn’t smiling. Behind her in the cell, a small enamel sink and a steel toilet. She’s so small sitting on the bunk bolted to the wall with leather restraints at the four corners. Surely they don’t use them on her, a wisp of a thing. Then I remember the matron said the cell was intended for crazies. Except she’s sane. The head doctor certified it.
She comes toward me. We’re inches apart, separated by the bars.
“Red hair,” she says.
Her own hair is as pale as moonlight. Her face doesn’t move, as if her features are painted on porcelain. Her eyes hold me without seeming to blink. She must have blinked, of course, I just haven’t seen her do it. She has eyebrows. Strange thing to notice, but women pluck them out and draw them back on these days, so I notice. She is beautiful. Is she beautiful? Perhaps I’m finding her beautiful in a city full of peroxided blonds with no eyebrows. Sweat trickles beneath my shirt; it’s suffocating in here. I run my hand through my jumped-up hair.
“Lost my hat. How are you, Miss Hand?”
She lets out a dry chuckle, but her eyes don’t change.
I’m an idiot. She’s locked in a cage, about to hang at San Quentin two days before Christmas.
“I meant are they treating you okay?” There! She blinked.
“I’m an axe murderer—that’s what they call me, though I didn’t use an axe—so what do you think? Got a cigarette?”
I pull out my pack and shake one loose, offer it through the bars. God, she’s so small, how could she have—
“Light?”
She leans toward me, cigarette between her lips. The sharp scent of lye hits me. Must be the cheap soap, but underneath I smell something else—wood fern forest form and dissolve in my mind. I strike the match. It goes out.
Again.
“Third time’s a charm.”
This match takes, and the paper begins to curl. Up clos,e I see glints of yellow in the irises of her eyes. “Scared?” she asks.
I smile, but it feels lopsided. “No.”
Her eyes aren’t gray. Blue?
“The weapon you used. A Khopesh. An ancient Egyptian sword?”
“Get away from the bars,” says the matron.
I take a step back.
“I mean her.”
Hallelujah rolls her eyes and takes a step backward. “Khopesh. Used by the Pharaoh’s guards.”
She turns her back and walks to the bunk. I mean, sort of drifts. I can only describe it as sort of a languid stroll, as if walking along a seashore on an island where her eyes match the sea, instead of across concrete to a bunk with leather straps. For a moment, I see those small wrists, those fragile ankles, buckled into those straps. I shake the picture from my head, but it lingers like a dirty mist.
She sits, tilts her head to the ceiling, exhales a perfect smoke ring. “Pelo rojo.”
We both watch the smoke ring expand above her head.
“Did you know in Mexico red hair is a mark of the devil?”
“You spent time in Mexico?”
“Never been. Well? You just going to stand there and gawk?”
I pull out my notebook. Behind me, Matron clears her throat. This collar is strangling me. “Let’s start with where you grew up.”
“You already know, the whole world does.”
“I’d like your own words.”
“I didn’t see you at the sentencing hearing.”
“My mother was ill.” I turn a page of my notebook, pretend to notate something.
“Your mother’s dead.”
Is she trying to play psychic? I tap my notebook with my pen. Look at the blank white page. “Can you tell me—”
“I see her bent over in pain.”
“You spent your childhood in St. Louis?”
“Oh, the pain. Horrible. In her stomach. No. Wait.” She makes a weird humming sound. Stops. Looks at me. “She’d been complaining, doctor said it was just the change of life. But it was cancer, wasn’t it? Eating her from inside.”
I feel like I’ve been gut-punched. For a second, I’m in the room with my mother, shrunk to shadow, smelling the sweet rot in her bedroom. How the hell could she know?
“So what’s your angle, Peter Sailor?”
The question catapults me back to the windowless room. She’s staring with those eyes. “My angle?”
“What are you doing here?”
“You invited me.”
Her skin looks poreless, smooth as metal. There was something the coroner’s assistant told me unreleased to the public—Tom Ash had been sexually mutilated.
Cut off his fucking dick.
A nasty taste floods my mouth. “I’m here to get your story.”
“You want my story?”
“That’s why I’m here.”
“Is it?” She flicks an ash to the floor.
I get it. I’m just an amusement, a game, but I’m not playing. “Miss Hand, may I remind you we have very little time?”
“Your fault. You were late. Oh.” Holds up a stop sign hand. “You meant not much time before they stretch my neck.”
I feel my mouth hanging open. I snap it closed. “How old were you when you moved with your mother to California?”
“I was twelve when we moved to Los Angeles. Speaking of age, I was expecting someone older. How long you been a reporter?”
“Long enough. This is your last chance to tell your story, so what do you say?”
She stands and stretches, arms raised, one reaching toward the low ceiling, then the other. Her shift lifts, revealing knees and a flash of thigh. Like a dainty cat. With teeth to rip a head off, I remind myself. She blows another perfect smoke ring.
“You were born in Kansas City, Missouri, correct?”
“I don’t remember being born. I simply arrived. Where were you born, Mr. Sailor?”
“Your father, Calvin Hand, was a porter for the Kansas City Southern Railway? And your mother, Olena Hand, had a hat shop. Your father died, I understand, when you were young. That must have been difficult. You have a brother, too. Were you a close family?”
“You don’t much look like a reporter, Mr. Sailor.”
“We don’t all look like what we are, Miss Hand.”
“Touché, Mr. Sailor.”
The sound of metal scraping concrete sounds behind me. The matron has scooted the folding chair closer to the dim glow of the lamp.
“If you’ve changed your mind—” I let the words hang as I close the notebook.
“What if I have? What would you do?”
“I’d be very disappointed, but if—” My heart pounds. I feel dizzy, what if she does end this interview? I’ll never have a chance like this again.
She plops onto the bunk, letting out a loud sigh. “Call it a millinery shop in your story. Men wear hats, milliners create art. Mother was an excellent milliner.”
I allow myself to breathe. “Milliner,” making certain she sees me write it down.
“Can’t have been a reporter for long, you’re what? Twenty-four?”
She lies down on the bed, propped on one elbow, back to me. The ugly shift drapes over her hip, legs curl beneath her. I remember a picture of a painting in a book, a woman propped on an elbow like that. Some sort of seraglio scene, velvet, satin. The woman looked right at you over her shoulder in that picture. She was naked, that woman, softly fleshed. Hallelujah looks at me over her shoulder just the same.
“That nose. You were a fighter? How come you stopped?”
“Words don’t hurt as bad.”
“That’s not true, is it?”
I shrug. “Listen…”
The electric light above her cell buzzes like an angry bee, flickering. Did I imagine it, or for a second did it all go dark? It’s so hot I feel I’m melting. You’d think being underground would be cooler.
“Twenty-five?”
“Six.”
She nods. “Yeah, well, it’s not the years, it’s the experience.” She uncurls like a lazy serpent, sits at the end of the bed facing me. “Bet you thought you won the Kentucky Derby when I wrote you.”
“It was,” my tongue sticks, “an honor to get your note.”
Her eyes melt for just a second before an Arctic wind kicks back in. “Sure. What a story! They all want to read about it, right? Bloodsuckers.” She smiles. “But who could blame them? I would too. You wrote the piece about that pervert, the Wineville murderer. That was good writing. That’s why I chose you. You saw it. The faces, like Romans at the coliseum. What’s the attraction? You think it’s because it isn’t happening to them? Maybe there’s something deep down, dark, and bloody in humans that makes them glory in seeing suffering because it isn’t their own. Ever have the feeling that maybe the reason people like watching someone else’s pain is because it cancels out their own? Maybe they think somebody else dying keeps them living a little longer. Ever think about that?”
“Not really,” I lie.
“You wrote a good piece. Almost taste the bloodlust.”
I don’t hide my surprise. “But didn’t you waive your right to trial and request the death penalty?”
She raises an eyebrow. “I was talking about the spectacle.”
The matron titters. I glance over my shoulder. She has her nose in Photoplay.
“Mother made beautiful hats. She had customers even in New York City.”
“Did your mother have an interest in the occult in Kansas City?”
“Would you mix Jesus with the word occult?”
“I don’t understand.“
“Raising the dead, Mr. Sailor. Resurrection.”
“Black magic was mentioned.”
“Are there colors of magic?”
“Belief in dark forces,” I continue, “spells, curses….” She stares as if I’m a deranged five-year-old. “Et cetera,” I mumble.
She stands and lifts her palms toward the ceiling. “‘And all wept, and bewailed her: but he said, Weep not; she is not dead, but sleepeth. And they laughed him to scorn, knowing that she was dead. And he put them all out, and took her by the hand, and called, saying, Maid, arise. And her spirit came again, and she arose straightway.'”
She drops her hands. “Luke, 8:52. Resurrection in the Bible isn’t occult. Look at your face. I take it you aren’t religious.”
“I believe what I see.”
She shakes her head. “Prove it, they say. And then you do, and they say it’s a trick. Remember that, Mr. Sailor.”
“Will do, Miss Hand. Meanwhile, I can’t find any record of your mother prior to her marriage to your father in Kansas City. Where was she born?”
“Don’t know and don’t know how old she was, though my bet is close to ancient. But come on, Mr. Sailor, that’s a woman’s prerogative, right? She was a Leo, though, I’m certain. That jaw. Stubborn. Taurus.” She cocks her head. “No. You’re a Pisces.”
I flap the corner of my jacket, not a breath of air. “Can we—”
“When’s your birthday?”
“Miss Hand.”
“Tell me you were not born in the last week of February.”
I sigh, “February twenty-seventh.”
“Knew it! A seeker.” She slaps her knee and walks a brief lap around the cell as she says, “I thought to myself when I read your piece, that one’s drawn to the mystery.”
“Looks like you got me. So I’m a—?”
“Pisces. The Fish.”
“Fish. Great. I look at my notes. “Now. Your cult. The Divine Order of Mother of Angels.”
“Sensitive. Emotional. Yet highly spiritual.”
“Angels?”
“For every demon there is an opposing angel.”
Get in, we’re heading to Crazy Town. I scribble angels demons devil Satanic?
“Black mass sort of thing?”
“You’d love that, wouldn’t you? I’d like to point out, Mr. Sailor, Pisces often behave rashly. You’ll want to remember that. And please don’t refer to the Order as a cult. Sounds negative.”
I can’t help staring at this tiny woman about to be hanged by the neck until dead. I unglue my mouth. “My apologies. The Order. How does someone become a member?”
“What do you know about Freemasons?”
The Rotary Club, the square and compass of the Masonic Lodge, was on the sign welcoming travelers to the small town I grew up in. “Masons? Secret handshakes. Mumbo jumbo.”
“What kind of mumbo jumbo?”
“I get it. It’s secret. Members only. But of course I’m going to ask you about these things. Clear up wild speculations.”
She leans toward me, the shift slips a bit, revealing a glimpse of shoulder. “Well, let’s see. New moon? Definitely need a blood sacrifice. Virgins in Tinseltown are as rare as hen’s teeth, so we use a goat. I drink the blood out of a human skull followed by moonlit dancing—all wild tossing hair and naked female flesh.”
Hallelujah drops the cigarette on the floor, slowly grinds it into the concrete. She leans back on the bunk on her elbows with a little smirk.
“I’m not looking for sensationalism.”
“Liar.”
Who the hell does she think she is? As if I’m not the one who can walk out any time I want. As if she’s not a crazy murderer.
“Our work takes us outside the realm of everyday consciousness.”
“And what exactly is out there?”
“The eternal, the true reality.”
I pat the back of my neck with his handkerchief. “And how do you do that? Séances?”
“I have contacted the dead, Mr. Sailor, and the dead have likewise gotten in touch with me. But that’s not what I was talking about. I was talking about the steps one takes to get in touch with other forces. There are those who would conjure more than the dead.”
Now we’re getting somewhere, scribbling conjure.“Like a magician?”
Hallelujah laughs, the sound unexpectedly harsh. “No sawing girls in half, no top hat bunnies. This is much older magic and a lot more dangerous. What you call these forces—angels, demons—are only words for the unutterable. It’s humans that give them names. But they are far older. Sometimes they leak into our spaces. Sometimes people go to great lengths to bring them here.”
“Maybe not blood out of skulls, but still, rituals, correct? To get them here, to get what you want?”
Suddenly, here she is at the bars. How did I not see her move? Sweat drips from my forehead, the light buzzes. It’s so hot, I must have blanked out for a second. Her eyes aren’t blue, they’re green.
“Rituals keep the mind on track. Rosary beads, mystics creating mandalas of sand. What about you? Would you perform a ritual for something you wanted? Conjure it? What do you want?”
I want to shout this story goddamnit, but she’s waiting. I pretend to think then, snap my fingers, “A hat. Mine blew off on the way.”
She stares. “A hat.”
Those weird eyes. A strange, toneless humming commences.
“Your mother, what was her role in the Order?” The humming stops.
“She held the door open for those who wished to enter. Next question.”
I flip a page. When I look up, she’s smiling. I mean, her lips are curved, but her eyes don’t match. Why isn’t she sweating? She looks cool as ice box lemonade. “Your brother, Arthur. He was a stuntman until an accident. Fell off a horse?”
“The director wanted realism. He didn’t tell Artie he was getting on a wild horse. I told him not to take that job. The cards said it would end badly. Artie should have sued, but he signed their papers. Now he’s crippled and poor.”
She turns away. I’ve hit a nerve. “Were you close?”
“When we were younger.”
“Why’s that?”
“We grew apart.”
“So he wasn’t a member?”
“He went his own way.”
“What about Tom Ash?”
Her face impossible to read. “Tommy was a believer in the great work.”
“What’s the great work?”
She sighs. “Finding the way, the path.”
“Where’s it lead?”
“Outside ourselves. To become awake to our true natures. That has always been the path.”
I can’t write this gobbledygook. I scan my notes. “Allaway. How’s he connected?”
Her very real eyebrows form a frown. Another nerve. Cyril Allaway made a lot of stinkers, but for some reason, the studio keeps letting him make them. His name was on the deed for a mansion in the hills above Hollywood. “Was Allaway on this path?”
Hallelujah has pulled a thread from the hem of her smock and is weaving it between her fingers. “Miss Hand? Allaway transferred the deed to that house to your mother. You lived there, you and your mother.”
“Wasn’t illegal.”
I nod. “But he was involved, I’d say, more than just spiritually. With your mother?”
“Not like that.”
“In what way then?”
“I told Mother not to trust him. I was right. He took a different path.”
“What do you mean?”
She shrugs, “He was with Crowley in Italy doing their work, then fell in with the O.T.O. people here.” She looks like she just ate something sour.
“You don’t like this Crowley character?”
“Never met him.”
“What’s OTO?”
“Ordo Templi Orientis.”
Hallelujah is now using the thread to clean between her teeth. “Golden Dawn and Crowley’s Thelema.” She pulls the thread out of her mouth and runs her tongue over her teeth, smiles broadly without moving the rest of her face. The effect is somewhat unnerving, like the smile of a diabolical doll.
“Allaway became involved with this other bunch. Did that upset you?”
She looks at me with disdain. “Why should I care? And by the way, Crowley’s Thelema, even the sex magic? Too tame for Cyril. Said he’d raised a demon called Adywandus who’d taught him new methods and wanted to incorporate them with ours. I told Mother to throw him out.”
“May I ask what those methods you’re talking about were?”
“No.”
“Because it’s secret. Got it.” I scribble, Alloway Golden Dawn Crowley OTO. “How was Tom Ash involved? Was there something between Ash and your mother?”
Hallelujah shakes her head. “Aren’t you supposed to be a reporter? Doesn’t that mean you’re supposed to report the facts?”
“I can’t get the facts unless I know what they are. So you’re saying Ash wasn’t your mother’s lover.”
“Adoration is the highest form of love.”
“Or yours?”
“We were just friends.”
“What about Allaway? He must have really adored your mother. Not only the house, he also bought her that ranch out in the desert.”
“Who says?”
“Public records.”
She shakes her head. “I didn’t know he put it in Mother’s name.”
“That’s where your temple is located, isn’t that right? Windy Valley Ranch. Records say there’s a mine on the property.”
She sighs. “Dig for gold, but not something much greater. That mine played out years ago. The only gold is inside—why most alchemy fails. I see you don’t follow. Okay. The ranch sits on ley lines exhibiting remarkable energy. Allaway must have put it in Mother’s name, thinking it somehow gave him power.”
“That’s why you killed them? Your mother? Ash? A power struggle?”
She glares. “I made a mistake about you.”
“Please. Miss Hand, come on. You’ve confessed to a double homicide, one of the victims was your own mother. You’re sentenced to hang on the twenty-third. You invited me to write your side of the story. That’s all I’m trying to do.”
“Maybe there was more.”
“More? More than what?”
Those look like real tears. Again, I’m struck by how small she is. How could she have had the strength to hack up two grown people with an old sword? She drops her head. Her pale hair looks soft as a baby chick.
“I’m sorry. I have to ask these questions; you must know that.”
“Have you ever looked at the early morning sky and seen the full moon hanging there and thought how odd that it should be there in the light of day? Doesn’t it belong to the night?”
She speaks so softly that I have to lean toward the bars.
“The moon is up there in daylight, you see its roundness, its reality, and it hits you that there’s a dead world always hanging there above your head. Suddenly, nothing seems real, everything becomes abruptly impossible, shockingly inexplicable.”
For a moment, the earth under my shoes wobbles, and I’m oddly so terrified that the sweat on my back grows cold. She continues as the light buzzes, or is that my head?
“There are things you don’t understand, don’t make sense,” says Hallelujah, eyes locked to mine. “Oh, but you back away from this kind of thinking. The moon is just the moon. Up there, like always.”
“Time’s up.”
Matron is behind me, fanning herself with a magazine.
“Miss Hand, I’m following up on what’s previously written. Now I want your side.”
Hallelujah lies on the bunk, head toward the wall. Only the rise of breasts and the rubber soles of her jail issued shoes are visible.
“Tomorrow?”
“Follow me,” commands Matron.
Trying to bury the panic, “Miss Hand, I’ll tell the story you want to tell.”
Hallelujah lies still as statuary on a sarcophagus.
Matron unlocks the heavy gate.
Hallelujah’s voice floats. “Don’t be late, not even a minute.”
Matron gives a shove.
Steel clangs, reverberates. I trail Matron past the gauntlet of women.
***
On Franklin Avenue, something blows across the hood of my car into a crimson bougainvillea. Odd enough to pull over, get out. It’s a hat caught now in the flowery vine. It flutters like a big brown moth. I pluck it free, survey the oddly familiar sweat stains in its interior. I put it on, ignoring how perfect it fits.
