Ariel Gore - Santa Fe Noir

Bella felt a weight on her thigh. She glanced down. The prized samurai sword, suddenly so much larger than inside its demure glass case on the wall, leaned up against her leg. It was surrounded by a halo of red light. Something in her stomach started to rise, and the rising moved up into her armpits and up her arms until they started to move with the rising. Bella watched her arms float up, and the outline of the sword in its soft veil of red appeared inside her hands. Suddenly the dark red lines all over her arms turned into a blinding white, like electricity, as if thunder and not blood was shooting through her.

The blade came down fast and made a wet sucking sound as it passed through the man’s neck. At once, the top of the massage table came loose and was now hanging by a piece of yellow foam and green pleather, and there was a soft thump as Chris’s head fell on the floor and rolled toward the stool. Thick blood pumped out of the decapitated head on the floor and the body on the table. Bella found large portions of her body slick and warm with it. Something broke inside, some root of her, and a warm flush began to spread and move up until she couldn’t stop it and it was now in her throat and she had to open her mouth to make space for it all. “NO!”

She collapsed onto the floor and put her hands into all the blood puddled there. It was warm and thick. It felt good. She moved her hands around like she was a baby playing in rain for the first time; like she was four and trying to find matching images in a deck of cards; like she was fourteen at railroad tracks in New Hampshire, bleeding from the front and from behind. She was smelling all that new blood from her own body, metal smells mixed in with dank shit smells. Dirt and mud and dead semen.

And then everything was quiet and she felt a movement in her chest. It wasn’t pounding in her ears, or grinding in her mouth and skull. It was soft, steady. A heartbeat, quiet and good.

Things were already vanishing by the time she opened her eyes. Particles of red were turning clear. Outlines of the puddles and foam table and sword were all disappearing; objects were returning back to where they had been. Within moments, the grain inside the wood floor came into clear view again; the stickiness and warmth of the blood evaporated and Bella could see her skin once again. There were details there, tiny details like brown freckles and moles all along her arms that she had never noticed before.

When she got up, there was nothing to clean. No blood or guts or even a man’s headless body. Instead, there was just a clean white sheet and the towel and face cradle, exactly where they should be. The table was ready for a new body. She climbed onto it and spread her arms and legs out. Even the stinging in her temple was gone.

The moonlight streamed through the windows. She let it soak into every part of her until she felt something inside beginning to fill. Her entire body started to swell as her heartbeat grew strong and her long, deep breaths moved clean air through her throat and chest.

So much beauty, so much light.

Casa Solana

I’m going on thirty-six hours at the blackjack table counting cards and watching my chips pile up when Russell, the night manager, tells me I got a call.

“Tina, it’s your sister,” he says, and I shrug him off because I already told him I’m not to be disturbed. Throws off my rhythm, and I lose track of what I’m doing.

“Tell her I’m not here,” I bark over my shoulder.

But of course I’m on the phone with my sister after my next hand because she tells Russell she’ll just keep calling and doesn’t mind tying up the phone lines. It’s a small casino, and my sister knows me too well.

“Aunt Mimi died,” my sister says without so much as a hello.

I don’t even pause. “Why are you calling me here to tell me that?” I hiss into the phone.

People have called me cruel but I think they just don’t understand me. Those people are fully irritating. It’s been fifteen years since I’ve seen my Aunt Mimi. Fifteen years since the summer I spent at her hippie, armpit-smelling house in Santa Fe “drying out and finding my mystery again.” Bunch of hippie bullshit, really, that involved doing yoga with her students daily (skinny white women, mostly, with veiny arms who twittered to each other about balancing their constitutions) and eating plants. But I was seventeen then, and I’d crumpled the family station wagon around a light pole when I was on a bender. Internment at Aunt Mimi’s seemed preferable to the other choice my parents offered: rehab.

Little did I know...

“I told you, I’m in Los Angeles all week,” my sister snaps. “Go check on Mom. See how she’s holding up, for fuck’s sake. She’s been trying to contact you too, and frankly, you’re just lucky I didn’t tell her where you are.” She pauses, then goes for the jugular: “Katrina.” My sister knows how much I hate my full name, so our conversation is over. I slam down the phone.

I’m outside next, squinting at the skyline, all neon and amber glow against the clouds. I pull a cigarette from my purse. Try to feel something for my Aunt Mimi, but fail. She meant well, but there’s literally nothing about her that evokes anything like grief in me. I try, honest I do, as I smoke my cigarette to the filter and flick it toward a puddle a few feet away. The orange tracer lingers in the night; I turn, go back inside, and lose all my money.

A month later, I get a card in the mail and nearly drop it when I see who it’s from. Aunt Mimi’s full name, Mildred Grant , and her Santa Fe address are etched across the upper left corner in her unmistakable script. The envelope is postmarked three days earlier, as though Aunt Mimi’s ghost is trying to catch up on things left undone.

I mean, probably someone found it and popped it in the mail, right? I rip it open.

Dearest Katrina , it begins, if you’re reading this, I’m dead.

In her handwriting, reminiscent of my mother’s family cookbook, Aunt Mimi tells me from beyond the grave that she enjoyed having me live with her, despite everything, and was proud of how I tried to redeem myself in the end. I bristle at the mention of redemption. I always just knew how to play the game, ’cause that’s how you get what you want in the end, you know? Redemption is all sorts of brainwashy, so fuck that.

The note continues with an apology for labeling me a failure, something she barked at me when I didn’t pass a drug test in the second month of my internment at her house. Up to that point I’d earned freedom by degrees, over some very painful weeks of yoga and vegetarianism, and when I met Tic on the plaza one night, while I was lurking around Häagen-Dazs scoping the party scene, I was smitten immediately. He was a beautiful human being. He parted his hair on one side, and dyed the tips blue, plus he was taller than me, which was no small feat given that I’m six three. He wore black rubber bracelets stacked up one arm and all I could imagine was that he’d give me a bracelet or two after kissing me. And then he’d kiss me again for good measure. He also had the best weed, so there was that.

Anyway, in the card, Aunt Mimi writes that she wants to make it up to me for calling me a failure. She finishes her missive with a hope that her death will help me “sort out my karma,” and says that her lawyer will be in touch soon.

I can’t help speculating that maybe she was a millionaire and made plans to leave me her fortune. It makes sense, after all. My mom kept me updated on Aunt Mimi’s life after the summer I spent in Santa Fe, as though I cared. Apparently, Aunt Mimi’s business in natural healing books and paraphernalia was thriving, so she traveled around a lot.