Honestly, I've been begging my mindset to return. Six months of a new job and 55-hour weeks have been my focus and I'm still all out. But I need to turn on inspiration, just to get the ball rolling. After a little re-reading I post the following from page 28 of A Hunger.
CHAPTER 7 (1,638 words)
Through the exterior door I banged a right and saw the batwing saloon doors and only darkness beyond. A dozen strings of dull colored beads hung, still as death, from floor to ceiling. I paused. My mind raced, trying to find a movie that I identified with beads but I came up short.
I touched the right bat wing and pushed through the beads. The scent of sandalwood almost knocked me over and I saw the burner to my right, propped on a chest-high shelf just inside the beads.
Beyond the incense, if my nose managed to get beyond the incense, I was presented with a short hallway. The corridor was maybe fifteen feet long and bathed in soft yellow light emanating from a tiny wooden lamp sitting atop a knee-high wooden stool. At the lamp, the hall dog-legged to the left and I stepped up into Ms. Twilight’s abode proper.
The one step up brought me off solid flooring and onto a series of pillows which seemed to be mostly flat and purple in color. Each was the same, the pattern tiny white asterisks probably meant as stars, and together they traced a path to a low rectangular table. More soft light to either side of the table was accentuated by a UV light. The ultra-violet shone on my clothes as a neon purple glow, rather than light, and the dust on my shirt and khaki shorts stood out bright white.
The word radioactive came to mind as I knelt before the table. Where’s the sake tea?
“Ms. Twilight bids you welcome.” The female voice was high and sexy and not at all what I’d expected. Ms. Twilight of the third person sat forward from a reclined position.
The UV light messed with my judgment of colors and details but I thought she had long blond hair pulled back in a flowing pony tail. She was both cute and young, from what I could tell – no more than 30 years old. Then again, she was playing the lighting well in this, Ms. Twilight’s lair, and the shadows could be concealing that worth concealing. Her clothing was very I Dream of Jeannie – the silk negligee top with open arms and low cut – and naturally, my eyes took in her cleavage.
Make a note here. Women don’t need perfect round breasts or large breasts to pull off stunning cleavage. And don’t let WonderBra ads fool you either; they’re just accessories. A woman who works on the arrangement and plays with what she has can make it work. I digress, yes, but the larger meandering point was just to say that great cleavage doesn’t mean a great rack and vice versa. I apologize.
Anyway, Ms. Twilight gestured toward a triangular plastic sign propped on the far side of the table. It stated her flat fee of $15. I wanted to ask if things would finish up with a lap dance. Instead, I produced three crumpled fives and handed them over.
“Ms. Twilight thanks you in advance.” She grimaced at the state of the bills, but accepted them just the same. The money disappeared beneath the table.
I glanced around the room as my former Abe Lincolns rustled a bit in Ms. Twilight’s skirt. The walls were completely obscured by draped rugs. One depicted what seemed to be an ancient cave painting of a deer and a hunter. Another was a simple floral pattern. A third was dominated by an Indian chakra wheel.
An easel stood in one corner propping up a bulging three-ring binder. Was it a spell book?
“Ms. Twilight is also an accomplished tattoo artist.”
“Of course,” I agreed. If I had a car, I would have asked if I could also get my oil changed.
What the hell was I doing in here? I’d seen Bianca – spoken with her, even. It wasn’t Avery or her ghost. Getting in Ms. Twilight’s line had served its purpose and Bianca had disappeared from my radar immediately thereafter, with help from a sausage. Why hadn’t I high-tailed it right then and there? Shit!
“What can Ms. Twilight do for you this evening?”
I should have found the third-person thing annoying. But her voice, or should I say Ms. Twilight’s voice, was so smooth. Enticing. Fortunate, then, that I encounter her in the safety of all these cushions and soft light, where the most oppressing aspect of her presence was the sandalwood scent. I pictured her in a bikini, seated on a high crag of rocks at an unforgiving shoreline. She’d be singing siren-like to oncoming row boats, prodding fishermen and soldier types to their watery doom.
“You read palms?”
Ms. Twilight smiled. “The most intimate of tasks Ms. Twilight offers. Fewer and fewer of my patrons ask for the sight that comes from human touch.”
I was a little surprised by this business trend. What with Ms. Twilight’s silky voice and, well, I already said my piece on her chest.
She leaned closer, her breasts now resting on the table and I offered up my right arm. I placed my elbow on the table, arm-wrestling style, and she grasped my wrist. With strength I wasn’t ready for, Ms. Twilight twisted hard, wrenching my thumb to her left and bringing my palm up. My elbow jabbed my ribs and I winced. What a tough guy I am.
Fortune-telling, tarot, palms, tattoos, maritime mischief and Greco-Roman wristlocks. Ms. Twilight was proving to be a series of consecutive surprises.
“Life-line, love-line and accumulation of wealth and power line, right?” Sometimes my wit fails me, I’ll admit, but I was struggling with being manhandled the moment before.
Ms. Twilight’s mouth evened out at my poke at her profession, which she surely took quite serious. “Much can be gleaned from one’s palm. None of it, however, comes from the fold-lines of your hand.” Her tone was harder. The seduction was over. I was in the spider’s web and now she was going to explain every aspect of the surgical procedure to her helpless patient.
Ms. Twilight observed my palm, my whole hand. She turned it over a few times, studying something closely. Eyes narrowed, she said, “The art of reading palms is sometimes referred to as Chiromancy and draws its Hindu and Romani roots some five thousand years ago.”
“Romani?” I said, fearful she may break my wrist for being ignorant.
“Gypsies,” she said evenly, never looking away from her thorough inspection of my hand.
“In Ancient Greece, each area of the hand and fingers were associated with a god or goddess. Elsewhere, these same areas were given associations with the signs of the Zodiac. The overall shape of the hand is, in some methods, interpreted and determined to be one of the four basic geological elements – Earth, Air, Water or Fire.
“And I don’t have to tell you what skeptics say about palm reading.”
“No.” I gave a weak chuckle, trying to seem informed. Yes, I can laugh at your industry jokes.
She paused to give me a blank, yet clearly disappointed, look.
“I don’t deal with any of this. I read palms simply as a vehicle, or a medium.” She finished her inspection and straightened up, pushing my hand to the surface of the table, palm up.
“Electric currents in the human body, obviously most important in the brain and heart, are also concentrated in the hands. Hands, the objects of a majority of voluntary directions from the brain, are therefore hotbeds for the type of concentration that gives one such as Ms. Twilight her sight. It doesn’t hurt, either, that the hands are filled with some of the most sensitive nerve endings and heavily used during sexual encounters, reciprocating pleasure back to the brain. Consider next time you get your paw on your girlfriend’s tit.”
This last froze me. It was no more than a coincidental statement and one she’d probably send to a thousand other horny little morons and dirty middle-aged yuppies. Nonetheless, if the caress of her soft fingers on my palm was making me hard or putting me to sleep (or both), I was paying strict attention after that. I straightened my back and cleared my throat, trying to indicate to Ms. Twilight a more professional approach.
“Now,” she said, “to business.” Her eyes widened and her smile returned. Was there a hint of hunger in it? “I’ll ask that you hold as still as you can. Also, unless I ask you a question, please don’t speak until I release your hand.” I wondered if she’d slipped into the first-person by accident, or if business meant it was time to raise the curtain and shed the schtick.
Ms. Twilight’s left hand held mine a little tighter and the play the fingers of her right hand made over my palm slowed. She pressed them to my skin harder with the slower motion, as if trying to sponge up some of that electricity she’d mentioned before. I thought of Mr. Spock and Vulcan mind melds.
She closed her eyes and tilted her head down a bit, her nose six inches from her own hands and the dance her fingers performed. Her breathing slowed and grew louder.
The sexual quality of her breathing and the concentration on her face, not to mention the slow, steady caress of her fingers was wildly arousing. That scared me, too. I tried to drive the feeling away. I tried to think of Avery, maybe of the fear I’d felt earlier; whatever it took to not seem like a pervert. I fidgeted my waist and legs, trying to adjust my shorts which were a bit tighter than a moment before.
That proved to be a wrong move – both the fidgeting and the focus on Avery.Simultaneously, Ms. Twilight opened her eyes, shooting me a glare, and whispered, “Fear.”
