The Hurricane Caged Inside of Her

The Hurricane Caged Inside of Her by Erik Hofstatter

Book excerpt

Unblinking stars chaperoned me to the dockyard where I drank with old ships. The world was more bearable at midnight. No soul-eaters masquerading as people. Dark horse raced to my hands. A cheap title printed across a flask once given to me by a writer I never met. I disliked his book, but his generosity tasted good on my lips. When ghost faces of abandoned loves scream at your heart—a stranger’s benevolence can keep you alive for a little longer. The whiskey sang to a tired audience built from my veins. I listened.

“Are you lost?”

“And now I’m found.”

We sat on a bench commemorating someone who no longer mattered. I looked at her face. Moonlight suited her. It erased sins of wild youth. She moved closer. I smelled like poverty. Unwashed hair and unwashed soul. Wars were lost inside my eyes.

“What’s your name?” she said.

“Tristan Grieves.”

“I’m Liene.”

Her ear was small and naked. In the other she wore an earring—a dangling feather. I knew Liene was the kind of woman other women desperately tried to imitate, but how could you dress in someone else’s charisma? She had a style that spoke without an eccentric accent. A footprint that provoked curiosity in men like me.

“You soak in strange hours, Liene.”

“Whilst you just soak in alcohol.”

“I’d rather soak in you.”

She moved even closer. Her eyelashes were strong and thick, like little whips.

“You want to taste me?”

Whiskey devils blurred my vision. I thought about gullible lovers, climbing those words all the way up to her clever lips. Then how they fell and died when she spat them out.

“Maybe under a different moon, darling.”

Her laugh belonged to a lying child, but she stayed close to me. Cold fingers slept in my lap. I was a fool for white poison, two decades younger.

“So what brought you here tonight?” Liene said.

“I like drinking with wooden bodies. You?”

Mischief travelled in her eyes, gaining speed as she unsealed a little plastic bag.

“I bury my problems under a naughty avalanche. You want some?”

She read no in my face, but held her gaze anyway. There was something behind those eyes—a dirty innocence etched on hypnotic, pale blue amulets. I watched her nose hoover borrowed happiness. Swans painted black by the night watched her, too.

“We wear the same heart bruises, you know.”

I heard a ball of accent, hopping on that word roulette. Her tongue had a passport to many places.

“Tell me about your origin.” I said.

Liene slouched, the weight of my question seemed too heavy for her. I waited. Above our heads, cloud bullies mocked us in their own way.

“I’m an English soul, stranded in a Czech body.”

Even her phrasing brand walked tall on the language catwalk. I rode on her pheromone thunder—feeling electric. I drank more whiskey and thought about her eyes.

“What are you thinking about?”

“I’m thinking about your eyes.”

“Are you drowning?”

“In big blue ice cubes, yeah. I want to meet them at the bottom of a whiskey glass.”

I sold shares in grim insights and she still paid in smiles. I watched her mouth—a cocaine white theatre of teeth.

“I read somewhere that Hell is the eyes of a lost lover.”

“Is that why your nose orbits planet coke? You lost someone?”

“No, Tristan. I was his Hell.”

Her revelation nudged me off the bench. I lived on a past diet of hellish women. I gambled with fate and its petty love torments. I lost tears and hair and quarter of my weight to them.

“Where are you going?”

“Emigrating to quieter benches.”

Drunk feet and sober instinct carried me away from that crazy bullet. I walked in hungry puddles and still felt like they were richer than me.

“Wait.”

I was arrested by the cry of need. Something in her voice had the power to command—to destroy. She moved with feline confidence, her hips narrating trouble.

“What do you want from me, Liene?”

“The tiniest vial of your help.”

A vagabond fox trespassed on her shadow. For one night they shared colours, maybe even lies.

“Help with what?”

Those vixen eyes, spinning my every thought. I smelled her faux fur coat scented with opium and porn star dreams. She wished to be fucked, wearing nothing but that coat.

“You think I like to be dressed in sweat of strangers?”

“It’s cold and I like to keep my throat warm with a whiskey scarf.”

The flask was dry, so I drank her old words. The tiniest vial of your help. Typing on red enigma—I felt tired, helpless in my own skull-sized hell.

“Come to my place. If you lend me your ears, I’ll pay you in booze.”

“Where do you live?” I said.

“I live in-between hearts.”

“Sorry?”

“You know, somewhere on that fracture line when a heart is about to break.”

She was higher than a suicide bridge, but the mud on her soul had my handprint in it. Moth soldiers partied hard under street lights and I wanted to eat their spirit. Liene finger-stabbed my shoulder.

“Oi. Daddy Moth. Your fire is here.”

My heart. A survivor of third degree burns, even when days still smelled like fire-daughters. I touched my chest and imagined a human pump—charred and ugly, slaving in a hospice for dying organs.

“Wrong night for a heart attack, man.”

“Hope you brought croc tears.” I said, waiting for a reaction that never arrived. The weather turned and God spat in our faces.

“Where’s your den again?”

“On the other side of Luton Arches. Walk with me?”

Three words, hundred interpretations—all ballads for undefeated sinners. I weighed my temptation and lost to the hurricane caged inside of her.

“Course. I got nothing to lose and nothing to drink.”

“That logic is packing flavour.” Liene said, holding my hand. It was tattooed with scars and rain.

***

We stood in someone else’s misfortune. A shelter for the homeless. Her eyes alone were a soundtrack to this funeral of egos. Identities trashed in unclean bodies on concrete beds. Living on knees in a world that nullified them. I wondered if impetuous decisions would total me a zero too someday.

“It’ll start raining soup in a minute.” I said.

Liene crushed half a cig under her heel. An old street lord picked it up as we walked away. I watched smoke eat the grief from his face in a city the colour of gargoyles.

“Why do you linger among undesirables?”

“Why do you?” she countered.

“I’m one of them.”

She told me the stairs were once caressed by fire and Russian feet. A redhead hooker guarded locks to her flat. There was something animalistic carved into her aura.