The day of the trial began as an itch.  Cassandra lay at the edge of the futon.  All awry.  The itch traveled up the back of her thigh and dug into the small of her back.  The teal wall pressed cold against her left shoulder and around her waist blue sheets twisted tight and pulled up between her legs.
    This was the day she had been waiting for.
    The skin of her hand worried her.  Its deep hue was more purple in the predawn light than natural brown.  The lines along her palm were white.  Chapped.
    This was the day she had worked for.  The day when everything would be set right.
She pushed herself onto an elbow.  The long muscles in her back gasped, sending currents of pain through her and down her arms.  The sanctuary she had built the night before with warm red Bordeaux, thick and thoughtful trance music, luxuriant, oily sex, Patrice surrounding her with loops of flesh and whispers and orange, wiry hair, crystallized and fragmented and fell from her.  Her cough was dry.  Dusty.
    "Patrice?"
    She was alone.  Next to her lay the comforter.  Like a blue body shoved to the side.  An awkward light reached pale from the bay windows and fumbled with the corners of her eyes irritating her vision.  Around her drifted pieces of last night.  Spilled wine.  Corals of wax.  Stale cigarette smoke.  The timid hum of a book shelf stereo.  Sweat stains and the effluence of sex rose from the futon, slipped into her nostrils, and snagged the base of her skull.  A dull and tepid ache.  Like the memory of her brother.
    Sweet, quiet Timothy.  A thin, somber teen-ager.  Cold beneath a granite cross at the edge of the Lakewood Cemetery.  The grave buried beneath fresh snow.
    She was tickling him.  He had come up behind her and worked his bony fingers under her arms.  She collapsed on top of him and returned his tickles vigorously.
    She was holding him.  The wound on his forehead no longer bled and he slept.  As the bus rocked through the night taking them farther and farther from the horror behind them, Cassandra felt a strange and surprising calm.  She had not expected their escape to be as easy as it had been.  As easy as stepping onto a bus bound for Minneapolis.
    She was laughing at the cartoon he had drawn of her.  A warrior priestess with breasts the size of coffee jugs.  She laughed at the corset of gold plates, the sheepskin boots, the emerald baubles that hung from her wrists and ankles.  She laughed at the idea of being a warrior priestess.  Timothy laughed with her but his eyes turned sideways so she taped the cartoon to the cash register at Café Cass and this pleased him.
    With dry, purple fingers she dropped these memories into a place small and deep inside herself.
    "Patrice!  Where are you?"
    A line of yellow light fell across the futon.  Water splashed into the bathroom sink.  Her legs still bound by sheets, Cassandra drew herself across the wall and edged the door aside with an outstretched hand.  Patrice stood in front of the shell-shaped sink.  A washcloth pressed to her face.
    "Are you okay?"
    Patrice glanced at her through the round, frameless mirror.  Her green eyes were tight with frustration.  Her voice nasal, annoyed.
    "It's only a nosebleed, Cass."
    "Nosebleed?"
    "I think it's done.  Go back to sleep.  God, I hate these things.  Left over drama from a coked-up youth.  I'll be fine.  I'll join you soon.  Sleep."
    Patrice nudged the door shut with a hooked foot.
    Cassandra turned herself free of the bed's sheath and limped to the large, paneled window.  This was the day of the verdict.  She could feel it.  It was as true for her as the cold air that fell in from a gap in the window and ran down her shins, pooling at her feet, nipping at her toes with sharp, icy teeth.  It was going to be a verdict of guilty.  It could only be a verdict of guilty.  Guilty as charged.  Guilty of murder.
    "I hope you freeze to death," she said and she took the pain that pulsed in her back and placed it in a small, bony box.  She wrapped the box in skin and gave it to the man who took her brother.
    "From me to you," she said and smiled.
    A flutter of darkness caught her attention and there on the window ledge perched a large bird with beady, yellow eyes.
    "What are you doing here?" she asked.
    "You invited me, remember?"
    For a moment, Cassandra believed the bird had spoken to her.  Then arms circled her and Patrice snuggled up against her neck.
    "Come away from the window," Patrice said.  "It's…Jesus!  Where'd that come from?  Hell?"
    "Asgaard."
    "Right.  Come to bed, Cass.  It's cold."
    Instead, they stood there and stared at the bird that stared at them.

    There was grit in his coffee and congealed cream.  He was cold.  A tall, well-dressed man, he wore an olive-green Structure shirt and smooth, ash-gray slacks.  He looked good.  He thought so himself.  He smoked surreptitiously.  There was nowhere to sit in Café Cass so he stood by the bar and watched the crowd turn around him.  His back hurt, a dull ache lodged at the base of his spine, but he was happy.  He was free.  The unease he suffered, suffered for months, peaked this afternoon when he stood in front of a grand jury.  His left eyebrow twitched, spasmed, and then it all crystallized and fragmented and fell from him when a balding woman in teal read his acquital to the judge.  Timothy was once again cold beneath a granite cross at the edge of the Lakewood Cemetery.  His vengeful ghost banished by court order.
    Around Alick, the café bustled.  Like an old diesel engine.  Like a noisy shuffling of half-heard jokes and nervous, steep laughter.  White plates, hot and glowing with steam, smelling of soap and disinfectant, cackled against each other as a boy in long, brown dreads pulled them from an industrial dishwasher and dropped them onto the wooden bar.  Bodies dandied from table to table, friend to friend, flirting with themselves and with sarcasm.  The hunger in the room was palatable.  Like spicy hands weaving through the smoke-dense air.  Like a many-armed dance in search of … anything.
It was the hunger in Timothy that attracted him to the boy.
    He was watching Timothy from across the café.  A boy full of arms, nursing a cup of coffee.  His shoulders hunched forward and curved his teenage body inward.  With his head tilted down, he glanced up and caught Alick in the chest with a glance: No one loves in this world.
    He was filming Timothy and tickling the embarrassment he saw on the boy's face with verbal jabs and pointed insults.  Alick had not expected how easy it was to make the film.   He simply gathered a few of the boys together with a wide supply of liqueur and then sat back with his camera and let the fellowship slip into sexual taunting.  Timothy was soon undone and glazed with sex.
    He was holding Timothy as the boy died.  A convulsion took the kid and a pink tongue jutted from between his thin lips, the tip curling upward.  A suicide's dose of heroin.
    Alick slipped these memories with his long, cold fingers into a safe and private place inside himself.  He stepped out onto the stoop of the café and pulled his gloves over his hands.  They were not nearly warm enough.  It was absurdly cold outside.  Like a razor Popsicle.  But he liked the way the dry leather squeaked.  Like whispers in the dark.
    A stone hit him on the shoulder and he spun around with fear on his tongue.  No one was behind him.  Another stone hit him and looking up he saw a bird perched on the café's awning.  It ruffled its feathers and scolded him.  A silly bird with no sense to fly south.
    He was thinking.  Scattered thoughts.  Batman the Dark Knight -- an India ink membrane -- jagged like teeth -- lurking above it all then sliding silent and smooth into it all and kicking some badass ass.  He was thinking of the Sandman -- a gaunt cartoon with cavernous eyes discussing promises, boons, and death with the head of his son.  He thought of heroin and opened his eyes.
Timothy stood alone in the middle of a long, residential road.  A flat valley in a lumpy, snowy landscape.  A dead river bed passing silent houses and tall, eloquent elms.  A hush as nervous as needles.  A shadow of heavy snow like the brush stroke of white oil rose from the ground and circled Timothy.  Flakes dusted his dark skin, the tight curls of his hair, the narrow length of his nose, rendering him an ashen smudge.  Thumbrubbed.  He wore a black-n-tattered T-shirt.  Across the front Iggy Pop growled in bright, terse, muscular colors.  He did not know whose shirt this was nor did he know where he was or how he got there or where his suit was, the one Cassandra gave him, the one he was buried in.
    In the distance, the color red suggested itself.  A color that grew more firm, more vibrant, more necessary as it came upon Timothy with confident speed.  A red Corvette humming to itself and whistling to the road, the silent houses, the tall, eloquent elms.  Timothy knew he should move aside, avoid the traffic, save himself, but the instinct for survival was no longer in him.  He was no longer alive and he stood in the middle of the road and waited.
    The driver noticed the shifting darkness in front of him and kicked the brake.  The car turned into a skid and sideswiped Timothy, throwing him across the street, over the snow bank, and onto the sidewalk.
    Timothy lay where he fell and waited.  He thought of the Maxx -- a purple monologue with gargantuan feet.  Sidewalk chalk and long, warm evenings outside Café Cass.  Iced coffee.  Mosquitoes.  He thought of his sister and a small thing broke inside of him and he knew.  He knew where he was.  He knew how he got there and where his suit was, the one Cassandra gave him, the one he was buried in.  He waited for the Corvette door to open and it did.  A chime cried.  He waited for each of the driver's careful, balanced steps.  The driver was muttering to himself.
    "Oh God … Oh God … Oh God."
    When Timothy felt the driver search for his pulse, nervous fingers fumbling for his jugular, a frightened caress, Timothy opened his eyes.  A familiar face loomed over him.  A face vertical with panic and skeletonized by fear.  Timothy placed a hand along Alick's jaw.
    "Hello," he said.
    Timothy was running.  He wanted to shout and he did.  Alick echoed and this pleased Timothy.  The snow lifted from the ground they passed and followed them, embracing them in a world of gray ground and spinning oblivion.
    Timothy was thinking.  When is love ever a mistake?
    He ran with jolting strides.  The bones in his chest snagged against each other with audible clicks.
    Alick ran ahead of him, the man's own steps a mess of ankles, knees, and swinging arms.  He glanced behind himself and saw Iggy Pop and the hunger in Timothy's eyes and lost the rhythm of his gait, falling hard on his left shoulder.  The ground underneath popped, a strange thick noise that radiated outward like wings unfolding.  Long white cracks angled from where he lay.  A geometry across a black-green slate of ice.
    Timothy placed his right foot on Alick's heaving chest and thought of the Spawn.  An organic red reach and tight chains.  Blistering green eyes and a clown on his back.
    "I can't move," Alick said and Timothy stuck out his tongue.  A long, triangular, gray muscle.  The tip curled upward.  He raised his arms and pushed down with his foot.  Smooth and hard, the two of them fell into it all.  Into the black, muddy water of the lake below.
    The party went on around her without her in a living room of burnt orange.  A web of yellow lamps turned along the ceiling like Aztec suns.  A dozen Munch Scream dolls floated about, each three feet tall and filled with helium.  Natalie Merchant sang from four speakers to a crowd of woman who sang along at the top of their lungs or laughed at intimate anecdotes.
    Cassandra sat alone on the velvet, red couch and toyed with the ice in her whiskey.  A dozen jurists sat with her and rubbed her arm gently.  We find the defendant not guilty.  The boy was troubled.  They rubbed her left shoulder.  Self-destructive.  Unstable.  They rubbed her neck.  A drug user.
    And what did they know?  Where were they when Timothy came to her bedside in the middle of the night?  A nine-year old with one eye swollen shut and blood on his pooh bear pajamas.  Bright red, damp patches.
    "Timothy?… What? … What happened?"  She asked even though she knew.  It had happened to her.
    "I'm sorry," he said and without further ado she took the boy and the money hidden in her room and fled on a Greyhound bus from Lakeville, from the fear and from the pain, to a new life in Minneapolis.  A new hope.  Her brother in her arms.  The movement of the bus rocking the boy to sleep.
    "It's okay, sugar."  Cassandra heard the voice coming from next to her on the velvet couch or was it only in her head or did it come from the Munch doll that floated off to her right, spinning slowly to the left.  She couldn't tell.
    "What?"
    "I've taken care of everything."  Timothy's voice sounded far away and soft against her neck.  "He won't hurt you ever again.  It's okay, sugar.  You don't need to be scared anymore."
Something small burst inside of her.  A membrane.  Jagged like teeth.  The convulsions that took her, rocked her, were long, gut wrenching, and silent.
    It's okay, sugar, she whispered to the ten-year-old in her arms.  She pressed a cotton cloth to the wound that seeped above his left eye.  A ring had split the skin.  I've taken care of everything.  He won't hurt you ever again.
    Patrice ran to her from the kitchen and led her, carried her, away from the stunned party and into the hostess's bedroom.  She held Cassandra as everything imploded and the grief and the guilt found its voice Oh God and fell from her.
    A moonless night surrounded the bus.  All that existed for her was the weight of her brother curled up on her lap and the yellow dash that asserted itself in the headlights then slipped away.
It's okay, sugar, she said to her brother.  You don't need to be scared anymore.