Pulp 006

Bonnie of the blue eyes, standing at the end of her world overlooking ours; a girl who carries around in her pocket a life without scars, crime, hunger or pain.  I stand beside her, close enough for the ocean to smell not of wretched sewage but of the clear waters I swam as a boy. Bonnie is a special chest in a Grandmother’s attic, unlocked and full of all treasures and happy photographs. Bonnie’s eyes see magic things and when she’s around, that magic comes out. Always welcomed into house and home, always given a special seat at the bar for the drink will be crisp and the food that more tasty. Bonnie, ah. What turned you away from this world? What pain was so strong that it spurred you from us and into a world where you are never weighted down by sorrow? And if ever that answer revealed, will this world disappear, no more than a bubble or a drop of dew in the sun?

“Yours is a face that brings the lame to dance,” I say. “And now I see it sullen and your hands full of flowers.”

She looks at me. The smile is there but it’s struggling. How I came privy to know her to be bound to this duty is a story for another day. But she is a Maiden who must cast her flowers out to sea when the last call is made and the only taxi in service is that one black cab driven by good Ol’ Sam. Death, sweet charity. Death has come and here stands Bonnie, hands full of white blossoms kissed at the tips with a star of red.

She turns and tends to her duties, he end of that bargain made. I ask her who the flowers are for.
“Michael Tanner.”
“Mikey?” The name’s a crashing thunderbolt to the mind and I see that old coot Mikey slapping his knee with face blushed by beer and bawdy joke. “Mikey Tanner? Mikey Tanner's dead?”

She doesn’t nod. She watches the slow parade progress out towards the cut-off of the point, to waters full of dragons and angels alike.

“He will be, Waylon. But not for a long, long while.” She hooks her gaze onto me. “He’s in trouble, Waylon.”

“What do you mean?”

In her outstretched palm, she presents me a flower. “Find where these grow, and you’ll find him.”