I-I-XI

I need to get a life. Doesn’t matter whose. I’ve had heroin in my blood, cocaine in my sinuses, and a Greek gymnast in the back of an armored personnel carrier – but for the ultimate pick-me-up, you can’t beat soul power.

There’s a door behind the racks at the back of Rosa’s office. I’ve never gone through it, never even been tempted. Rosa’s business interests extend far deeper than prophecy and the garment trade, and I know enough to know that I don’t want to know just how deep. Rosa, after squinting at me for a few moments with those slitty cat-eyes of hers, bounds off the desk and slinks into that other room. She returns a few seconds later with a plastic baggie in her mouth.

I take the baggie from her. My hands feel numb; I give up on the twist-tie and just tear the plastic. I shake a single shiny dime into my palm. I squeeze.

Yesyesyesfuckittyyes!

A good butcher can sell every part of a pig but the squeal. Rosa’s better than any butcher. Departing souls tend to leave a bit of themselves behind, and she has perfected a process for skimming off the residue from the bodies she buys. Judging by that tiny taste, I’d say she’s got about three percent of a human life stashed inside my pretty new dime. Just the thing for a fellow who may, if things don’t go perfectly hotsy-totsy tonight, find himself needing all the life he can get.

“Ta, Rosa old girl.” I scruff the back of her head. She mrawrs and heads for the exit – politeness and old friendships are one thing, but I wouldn’t want a doomed chap loitering in my parlor either. I grab my suit and follow her up the stairs. I slam the trap door behind me. “Suppose I’d best be going, what? Oh, but I must take old Tom there with me. I’m only renting him, don’t you know.”

Rosa waggles her tail in the air, gathers herself, and leaps up onto the altar. From there she springs to the shapely shoulder of the body she was wearing when she answered the door. Instantly the dark-eyed girl’s corpse, which had been standing quietly with a blank look on its face, is once more alive and luscious. The empty eyes become the eyes that ten generations of fearful villagers sewed closed before giving ten successive martyr’s pyres to Santa Rosa de Izquierda, patroness of the Wicked Truth. I shiver.

The cat, suddenly un-possessed, loses its footing and tumbles towards the tile. It rights itself in time, lands on all fours, and sets to licking itself. Cool little bastard, it wants me to believe that dying in a dusty street and being resurrected in a candlelit temple are about what it expected from a Tuesday. I stoop and gather it up under my arm.

“I’ll owe you for the Old Black,” I tell Rosa. “Put it on my tab, what?” We both know that she may not have to wait long to collect - in the event of my death, she gets whatever’s left of my body afterwards. I’ve got a tattoo that says so. Treat me right, you may get to see it.

Rosa nods and escorts me to the door. She plucks a night rose, red as a whore’s kiss, from one of the sticky black vines that coat the inside of her home. She hangs it on my undershirt by the thorns. “Come back in one piece, my little Spex,” she says. “And don’t develop any new bad habits, si? Junkies are so uninteresting.”

“I promise,” I say. She’s worried about me getting strung out on the life she slipped me. She’s right to be concerned; once your body decides that it’s used to being 100.5% alive, every waking moment that you spend at baseline normal stretches into a weak-tea eternity that makes you wish you could be bothered to kill yourself. Once, and only once, I allowed myself to get hooked. My buzz ran out just as I was about to knock on her door to beg another hit; she found me looking up at the sky, trying to work up the energy to open my mouth so that if it rained I might manage to drown. “Cross my heart. Hope not to die.”

I have some fond recollections of staring up at Rosa's ceiling, but my brush with life-addiction is not one of them. There’s only one way to kick that nasty little habit: cold turkey. I remember lying on her altar, jumper-cabled to some vagrant she'd hastily procured, as she pulled the dagger from my chest.

I pat my pocket, where I fancy I can feel the dime throbbing against my leg. “Cheeri-o, then.”