Белый заяц (Belyy zayats)

Feed Your Head

Back into the safehouse and it’s burnt. 

Fuck. 

Tossed while she was making a nut at GIRL’S NIGHT in the desert. One night dropping a load at a party, and she drives back to this. Door battered off hinges and filled with holes with black tendril underwater worms waving up at her from them. So high, she looks down and her tattoos are undulating, peonies on her arms waving at her in a psychedelic breeze. Blink. Still there. The smell of dried blood and char turns floral in her nose. That copper smell that should overwhelm her, burnt hair, all of it smells wildflower field from the doorway.

What the fuck happened to you? Rumiko asks a corpse on a couch. Flies already all over, their buzz sings EDM static and they leave light show tracers around the room.

I was gone, for a day! She screams. 

Shut the fuck up dad! She screams.

Colors melt into dead bodies, burn marks and bullet holes leak neon, vision starts to do the pinwheel thing. Checks her pulse, 140. Sweating to death just out of the cold rain. Rumiko is entirely too high for this.

Rumiko grabs the go bag from the secret spot she keeps it hidden in a high vent. The place was ran in on hard. Slips on shell casings. All that’s gone is money, but the work is still there. She grabs the black jars and stuffs them into another bag. Gift for the police. Let them know it’s a drug crime. Huge LSD bust. Millions of dollars. 

Frantic, hallucinating, she grabs the powder packs too. Takes the family heirloom. She doesn’t notice the scrawled undulating black graffiti scrawled and vibrating against the bright tropical printed wallpaper over the couch in the main room. She’s still smelling sweet wildflowers, vanilla, orange blossoms, fresh pussy.

The graffiti she misses reads “THE RED QUEEN RULES HERE”

She bolts from the safehouse. Written above the front doorframe, behind her as she runs for the stairs, Hiragana graffiti reads “Matayoshi Gumi.”

One place to go, she knows one place to go. One place to go. Repeating it over and over in her head. Trying to make sure that she’s headed the right direction. The raindrops on the window are oilslick rainbows. Lights shine, flicker, change colors.

Breathing exercises. That always helps. Yeah, that always helps. Fuck never eat a half sheet and then drive back from the desert. Heart pumping the Junglist DnB she’s blasting her 4-7-8 in, hold, out repeat barely lowers her blood pressure,

Doesn’t touch her heartbeat.

The Nine Story Hotel. You can always hide out at the Nine Story Hotel. She has no idea who told her. No idea where the thought came from. Right here and now it might just be floating on the universal subnet. It may just be the place she needs to be.

She ditches the car ten blocks away from the hotel and walks in the rain. Dressed for a party and soaked, she’s a sponge waiting to be wrung out over a bucket. Iridescent pearled Lapis Lazuli liquid would seep from every pore. Breath, control. Breathe, control.

 Once out of the car she starts to regain composure, fragmentary, not of the visuals, but of her pulse, her spiraling thoughts. I wanna be high all the time. 

The hotel has a strange sign that vibrates with every breath, pulses and breathes, the only thing she can make out is the number 9. Right place, wrong time.

What time is it? I’m late for a date, important one. She knocks the doors open and the bright lights of the main walk to the lobby are solar flares. Stumbling, almost falls over some round couch. Trips up some stairs to a wooden archipelago and collapses against it. Thin man tall as a single bamboo stalk behind glass and bars says “you’re looking for a room,” but she’s already opened up  her pockets, unzipped her fanny pack, pulling out wads of money, piles of it, putting it on the counter in front of the window. The grain of the polished wood is snakes slithering and paint whirling in water.

The door in the window slams open and the man, tall and thin, tone changes from go the fuck away, “you’re looking for a room then?” Too polite, too welcoming, too much invitation, this is bad. “Well,” he’s already brushing wads of her money across to his side of the bars and window.

This is not how you get a hotel room. You’re still more frantic than you thought. She reaches across and starts to pull back all the money he hasn’t taken yet. Fuck. Money pulled back and down the bra, the front of her pants, the pockets of her coat, up the sleeves, down between her ass cheeks. Fuck. Realize those are tears that are making a threat at the eyes about all of this.

“Usually we take payment upon checkout but since it is so late and we have so few rooms available, I will be kind enough to take payment up.” The man’s grin under his thin mustache slits her throat. “Front.”

He slides a key to her, “I will need the key back of course when you check out, and you must make an appearance in person to check out or else. Wait, my little thing, can you find the room? It will be on the south wing,” he speaks slow, he points. “Up the stairs” He points up with one long boned finger “and right after there is a hall, you will find the elevator. Can you do that?” 

This man is a sobering experience.

“Valentine is the elevator operator, and I promise he will see you to the sixth floor.” He’s not mentioned the room number yet. “Can you read numbers? This key, don’t worry, is to room 650, you see?”

His smile, her cut throat, she feels the blood dripping from it. Looks down and she’s covered in blood down her tits and soaking into her pants. “Now off you go.”

The track clicks over in her head. The music she always hears. And clarity descends. On her back she has a full tattoo of a snake being eaten by seven red eyed rabbits with sharp teeth. Matayoshi Rumiko has a fervent want for the man behind the glass to be dead. Both of their demeanors change. He turns puzzled, and she turns to ice. Saucer eyed, pupils so dilated that all they can see is clarity, and says the first clear thought that god puts in her mouth.

650 is the California police code for threat. Flat affect, pillar still, and glaring. She grabs the key and turns to walk for the south stairs, having to remember which way he pointed. 

Out of his sight she still stumbles up stairs. Put on that voice. What does god tell her, what comes out of her mouth?

Time is thin here, she shouts back at the man. A dry reed she prays to crush, walking through dry late summer grass in the drought.

Stumbles and bounces against the wall to the elevator. A statue with silk wrapped eyes stands outside the blinding shining doors that will take her to the. Fuck what room? Sixth floor, fuck what room. “Room 650, Miss,” the statue is a man is blind is talking to her and knows what room  she’s staying in. A minor deity, he lets her into the box, the blinding pulsing lights, the scratches in the walls, the stains she sees fading in and out.

How did you know my room?

“While you may see that I cannot, I did hear your interaction with our lovely Mr. Pinch at the front desk.” he says and taps a black umbrella that he’s using as a cane or a prop but it’s impossible to tell on the floor of the elevator. Two sharp raps, and then he hits a button that says 6, 8, B, or G. “I assure you, you’ll make it to your room fine, it’s late. The dragons have all either taken to sleep, left, or retired to their rooms for the evening.” he says. Dragons? “I’m fond of metaphor.” Gravity pulls her down as the elevator ascends. And your name is Valentine? He nods, “or so many would tell you, but for brevity, yes, Valentine is my name.” You’re short for a God, Rumiko says and he just chuckles. “I don’t know if I would go so far as to say that.” I am M- she stutters on the name Matayoshi Rumiko. Valentine’s face is contorting from the drugs, not in any way that reads as threatening, but still, his silk eye wrap melts down to cover his whole face.

You can call me Shina though… But, I am the White Rabbit. She leans against the back of the elevator and hugs herself tight as she breaths steady, in 4, hold 7, out 8.

“Well White Rabbit, we have reached your floor,” and as soon as he finishes saying floor, the elevator dings. “I do hope to see you again under more coherent circumstances. Your room will be on the right side of the hallway, halfway down. I believe 650 is a double queen, but I do forget sometimes. For that, Pinch must have robbed you…” He lets the theory of his self effacing pun hang in the air. 

I want to kill Pinch.

“That’s quite alright Miss Shina, most people do.”

The room has two queen beds, just like Valentine said. She walks into the shower in the bathroom and strips naked. On the way out of the bathroom the peonies and chrysanthemums tattooed up and down her arms are still waving. A three quarter turn and the rabbits are chewing on the snake.

Unpacks the work into the fridge, hugs her backpack, and The White Rabbit curls in a fetal ball on top of the covers of the far bed, closing her eyes to pinwheels of color and light, memories replaying as vibrant as sunlight after rain, and the prayers for sleep that go unanswered.

The room is meat locker frigid, but running hot and with a pulse that’s only slowed to 123 by a feel, Rumiko sweats the entire night and next two days away sleeping and waking but just barely to keep her body alive, as the acid wears off.