1.
Blood Only Shines in the Moment

“My knife barely needs to make contact. Flesh giving way with the lightest touch. Blood dripping, streaking the white porcelain leading to a pool of black grease. I drink it up! The bitter aftertaste startles at first then excites me! Like used motor oil marking my arrival home after a long journey away. Simply to die for. Now onto the milkshake—”

Chef Rosemund Montagne hit STOP on the tape recorder letting only the littlest puff of relief slip from lips unpursing a tight expression. 

The veins on his tree-trunk forearms, weeding through rose tattoos like vines, went slack then vanished. He laid seized property back onto the tablecloth with a delicateness men quick to anger only mustered after embarrassment. “Excuse me my ill manners, Mademoiselle,” Rosemund apologized, wiping his hands of the faux pas on the lady’s behalf. “Whispers by lone guests over top of their lunches naturally draws my suspicion.”

“Don’t receive too many compliments on your Black Pudding Lamprey, I take it?” Mademoiselle teased. She rested one cotton-gloved hand across her right cheek, content to play with the remainder of her food.

“Critics, animal-rights activists… They’ve disguised themselves as innocent tourists in the past to assail me and this restaurant with their slander.”

“Mercy me,” Mademoiselle gasped, “I must’ve left my fake rubber nose in my other purse.” She quickly grew bored stabbing at her plate of flayed eel outlined in vegetable chunks with a fork. She nonchalantly reached over the ceramic crime scene platter in front of her to place the confiscated tape recorder back into her purse—next to the lipstick, designer shades, and Astra A-100 pistol. “Why the cloak-and-dagger? You only serve walk-ins. Goosey Gander’s painted on the window going ‘honk honk for delicious food’…”  

The question was rhetorical. Mademoiselle had done her research:

Rosemund’s maiden restaurant bore the name The Waterfowl. A true, bonafide brasserie (aka real fancy joint). Enter Ernst Gill, the Kingmaker. “The faux-brutalist architecture is suffocating rather than inviting. I find myself already buried under the rubble of the owner’s incompetence. Bring the first dish…” 12 courses served at the whim of a picky-eater: sturgeon caviar on blinis, a truffle-infused mushroom mousse, gazpacho, beet and goat cheese salad, escargot, seared scallops with butter sauce, roast duck with orange sauce, lemon sorbet, rack of lamb with rosemary, aged brie, chocolate soufflé, and a salted petit four… capped with a complimentary bottle of Mourvèdre. One dissatisfied bite and sip taken out of each. 

This Grand Opening was nevertheless framed in Rosemund’s mind as a masterpiece-in-red. The red table wine glurp-glurping out of a bottle cocked full-tilt down that pencil-necked Ernst Gill’s sputtering throat. The whites of bugged eyes Pollock’d red with ruptured blood vessels looking wild and helpless at Rosemund’s free hand squeezing harder. And what Rosemund did with the emptied bottle in the other…

“If it bleeds, it leads,” the newspapers love to say. Rosemund bled Ernst Gill plenty. 

A reader-starved page 18 food column in The Free Press offering feckless barbs and little else suddenly ballooned into an award-winning, front page, double-spread exposé: “RUNNING AFOUL OF THE FOUL OWNER OF THE WATERFOWL”. This pun-and-preposition-flogging hack could have simply titled it “Fowl Play” and been done. But Ernst Gill was never simply done with anything. After the hospital stay and wheelchair purchase covered by his insurance, The Free Press fast-tracked Ernst Gill to Editor-in-Chief within months. Ernst Gill used that editorial pen and position to pop any ambition Rosemund could conjure larger than a soap bubble. Spilled ink staining Rosemund’s past, present, and future black. Merely ducking jail time by the grace of his benefactors in The Commission, Rosemund was exiled to this tacky strip mall restaurant goose stepping to the tune of a squawking store manager and a cartoon mascot.

Rosemund simply offered Mademoiselle this cryptic passing thought regarding the incident: “I don’t pander to witless effetes who fawn over beautiful results but never anything resembling the guts given in their creation.”

A snorted laugh stifled by cotton gloves escaped Mademoiselle’s lips in a charming and refined “O-hohoho” titter. Rosemund waited patiently. Second blush with a tomato complexion signaling irritation. His anger-tic was to fiddle with the most prominent knife handle sticking out of his apron. “I didn’t intend to wound you, my little cabbage,” Mademoiselle managed with only a tinge of condescension, “Your answer was so… serious, is all. It caught me off guard. I didn’t think artistes were so firm in their convictions, anymore.”

Rosemund finished his thought letting no further emotion paint his cold, level tone. Peach hue slowly returned to his cheeks, “By what right does a man think his life’s work can be to condemn another with a thoughtless word? These… stud-eunuchs, these… clever-buffoons, all these pen-devils. Oh, I could amuse myself with word games, too, but arguments are won with action. Persuasion dies on pallid lips and tortured tongues.”

“You really must’ve beat the brakes off the guy, huh?” Mademoiselle intuited.

“Proudly,” Rosemund responded.

A shared smile. Both thinking about the other: Target confirmed.

“If I may be bold, Mademoiselle…”

“By all means, Chef.”

“What brings a lady-of-taste such as yourself into a modest bistro such as this?” 

“I’m waiting on an old…friend.” Mademoiselle’s hesitation rippled through the other restaurant patrons as stilted stillness and awkward silence only broken by black servers flitting from table to table. The word “friend” hanging in the air like a joke made in poor taste. Or blasphemy spoken on holy ground. 

Slavish to Time as his profession required, eyes always darting between wall clock and kitchen without intent, Rosemund ought to have noticed the red second hand leap from 6 to 39 without hitting a single mark in between. 33 seconds gone in a flash. He’d been Enthralled. Along with every other fair-skinned person in this dining area. Serving as the unwitting lenses through which Mademoiselle’s pursuer glimpsed her:

A spotted dark horse.
Grazing, surrounded by a pool of shallow water.
A snow white arrow balanced by blue
Nightingale feathers whistling through the air piercing
Between her shoulder blades. The wound bleeding—carnation petals. 

Not a voice, more the feeling of a children’s lullaby:  

HERE/IS/MY/HORSE/SHE/IS/BROWN/
WITH/WHITE/SPOTS/SHE/GALLOPS/
FREE/IN/SPITE/OF/ME/BUT/ONCE/I/
GRAB/HER/BY/THE/REINS/I’LL/HAVE/
HER/HEAD/ON/STRAIGHT/AGAIN

When Rosemund’s senses were returned to his mind, they zoomed in on the dark-skinned woman seated before him. A citrus spritz of a fragrance he mistook for L’air Du Temps misted the air around her supple neck. A cascading waterfall of dark curly locks poured out the bottom of her floppy sun hat only parting to reveal pearly whites and a crimson-coated smile that began on Sunday and ended on Saturday: “Back from commercial break, Chef Montagne?”

Shame did not emerge from the drooling openness of his appetites which Rosemund wore like badges on his sleeves. Or even out of this uncharacteristic absent-mindedness. He stood flustered wondering how, just a few moments ago, he could ever have seen mud in eyes that now reflected an ocean’s blue. Rubbing the salt-and-paprika in his beard with a slight cock of his head, as if being fed a line through an earpiece, Rosemund asks, “Have you ever considered modeling?”

“Oh? Is that what I was doing behind that blank expression of yours just now? Modeling?” Mademoiselle clicked her tongue expressing triplicate disapproval. 

“You were…” Rosemund trailed off, hungover from the vision he’d experienced.

“Dressed, I’m sure,” Mademoiselle continued, “As tastefully as one of your geese.”

Rosemund could only pivot away from the strange moment with humor, “Don’t be ridiculous: I’d never dress one of these geese in a sour cherry spread.”

Mutual smile one and a half. Smirk still lighting half her face, Mademoiselle suggested, “How about I take your picture instead?” Before Rosemund could shield his face from the flash, Mademoiselle was pulling the photograph from the instant camera’s lip and wiggling it in the air until Rosemund’s objection to the act manifested in a still image. 

Rosemund shrugged and let it go. “Keep it. The organization I cater for has been searching in vain for a bright new smile to plaster over their various wares and services. Consider what I’ve asked you.”

Curiosity sated enough not to pick at the bones of this conversation further, Rosemund quickly barreled through the cramped dining area and disappeared through double doors back into his kitchen. Stale sweat ran cold from hot tempers wafted into the dining room briefly interrupting the chemical perfumes which kept the old wood decor, old tourists, and old food politely considered “Aged”.

Mademoiselle sucked on the straw like a candy cane, nursing her bushwacker into an emptied glass of wet powder while admiring all the cream-colored faces surrounding her. Allowing room and liquor to fill her with their welcome warmth, any chilliness wisely attributed to the ice cream housing the rum. Nearby conversations showered her with overcast “black” “black” “black” obviously complimenting the rich blackness of her hair. The nearness of the tables, and her position smack dab in their center, meant she felt like the guest-of-honor at every single one. A woman could only blush so many times, demure and coquettishly mute, in response to such shameless admiration. The attention, scored by the most beautiful violin-playing, took her back 

———

Madam Jean’s dance collective proved overly-focused on contemporary trends much to Mademoiselle’s distaste. Therefore, Mademoiselle took it upon herself to become their specialist in ballet.
Pirouette.
Kick.
Naturally, the other dancers envy her grace and poise.
Men covet it. From the time she’s an adolescent, men recognize how such a talent barely bud begs for their immediate and intimate cultivation.
Pirouette.
Kick.
Sniffing after their concrete rose ready to be
plucked from obscurity.
This one a photographer.
That one wants her to star in movies!
“Okay. Just one drink. To stave off the jitters.”
Pirouette.
Kick.
He promises they’ll make “sweet music” together even though the commercial
landscape at the time only seems to reward crude and unsavory acts.
Pawing her way into the “mercury Coop Devil”, Mademoiselle wonders
where the record producer could possibly hide a studio inside his 1 bedroom apartment.
Pirouette.
Kick.
Mr. Record Producer slams on the gas, swerving in reverse, until the back door is shorn clean off by the car parked behind his.
Pirouette.
Security drags her out from the passenger seat of his Coupe DeVille. The stage demands
her at once. The show must go on.
Kick.
A hopeless, hapless dancer with wide-set eyes
and a head like a hammer
lunges for Mademoiselle in the dressing room, claws forward, hoping to pry
Mademoiselle’s eyes apart to match her own.
Pirouette.
Kick.
Praying aloud:
“Lord, let me nail this bitch!”
Divine intervention took place a decade and some change prior
when God decided to make Mademoiselle Mademoiselle
and the other girl the other girl. Mademoiselle’s retort is plain and simple:
Pirouette.
Kick.
“Aw, Baby! Stop spinning like a damn record and let me see something! Bad enough this joint’s lit like a wet cigar!”
Pirouette.
Kick.
Dance harder. Never slow down. Quit.
Pirouette.
Kick.
Mirror and blood-stained carpet are added to Mademoiselle’s monthly expenses. Debt
is crushing her. She’ll never get away clean.
Mademoiselle must run.
Pirouette.
Kick.
Faster than cowardice. But how can she when she’s shrouded herself
in armor? Body numb. Mind blank. Onlookers mistake the awkward clang of artifice
for her heartbeat.
Pirouette.
Kick.
Blood only shines in the moment.
Leave it to academics
to poke
rust and figure out it’s red.
Pirouette.
Stumble.
Keep heart bare.
No matter the risk.
Pirouette.
Take a bow.

Mademoiselle stops. The world keeps on spinning. No one cares. Legs jelly from dizziness and exhaustion wobble and spill off the stage. The African Man whose eyes squint from the dark-too-bright looks down on the ballerina in this music box shattered at his feet. Gnashing his teeth on the bone of an oxtail. From the plate on his lap hemorrhaging the juice of collard greens he garnished it with.

“Stand tall, kipusa.” He says smearing grease and saliva on thick lips with his tongue, “It gets easier.”

“Huh?” Mademoiselle whimpers disoriented.

“The world revolving around you.”

———

A waiter, shifting in his white coat as uncomfortably as Houdini escaping a straitjacket, clears his throat interrupting Mademoiselle stewing over her ex. A meringue pie, Rosemund’s business card, and the bill are left behind:
“Compliments of Le Chef.”

Had she not been seated perfectly parallel behind a gentleman (whose tall and prominent forehead suggested an intellectual or even a Duke’s pedigree) and the corner reserved for performers behind him, Mademoiselle’s “Bravo! Chapeau!” wouldn’t have fallen on deaf ears nor her bonnet doffed in reverence on blind eyes as the virtuoso violinist made their swift exit.

She checked the clock on the wall. Francois ought to be arriving soon. The good thing about being chased was setting the pace for the chaser. Where you were is where they’d be. Trailing behind. She’d left Francois in a taxi cab by hopping through the back window onto a taxi-bike weaving through the parked cars. Glancing past Goosey Gander on the window, she spotted a baby blue hatchback with a cracked passenger side window drive by that’d been 14 cars ahead of Francois meaning the jam had let up.

Mademoiselle took down Rosemund’s information then wrote in pretty cursive on the back of the business card; taking a couple bites before sticking it into the pie’s cream.

Rosemund: When we next meet,
Maybe we’ll share more than a treat
~Mademoiselle xoxo