oneI thought I saw a purple cloud above the body on the floor. I did not for one moment think that it was a departing soul or spirit; there was some malevolent intelligence in the way it quickly withdrew out the crack between the jamb and the broken door. I did not have time to think about that though. The girl standing over the body answered the question I had asked.“Some people don’t know and they don’t talk about it ‘cuz they don’t know.” She raised her cigarette to her lips but didn’t inhale. “And then, you got people who know and they don’t talk about it ‘cuz they smart. And you got people who know and they don’t talk about it ‘cuz they weren’t smart, and they dead.” The girl had women’s breast, true, but her silky red dress hung off adolescent shoulders. She couldn’t have been more than fifteen, sixteen. Still, she glanced at the dead body behind her with the detached coolness of a coroner’s body bag stuffer who was just weeks away from collecting a pension. “And all you gots to know about this…” She raised a thread-narrowed eyebrow over her ancient eyes and sucked in about three inches of her long menthol cigarette. Her eyes never left my face until she lowered the burning tube of tobacco. Yeah, her eyes tried to convince me, I’m that bad, and that tough, I’m the shit, but when she looked away from me a tremble, something like fear, shook her lower jaw as she released smoke. “All you got to know about it is I’m smart enough not to talk about what I know.”She shrugged and pushed lightly against my extended arm.I listened to her heels clicking on the tiles behind me and then to the little protesting squeal of the outside door’s broken pneumatic arm. A little street music came with the chill of the night air that weighed down the smell of cigarette, blood, and released bowels. The door closed with hesitant, jerking clicks .It took me a minute to realize a couple of things. One, that I could drop the arm I had raised to stop her from leaving when I had asked what happened here. And two, she had left me alone in the tiled foyer of my apartment building with a body. A dead body.“Well, Lisa,” I said more to myself than the dead body. “What you gonna do?”There was no denying that it was a dead body. A man, by his dress. Possibly balding, middle aged. He may have been going to fat. Or, he could have been impossibly tall. At that moment he was an accordion fold of flesh slumped in the corner by the glass front door against a tall divider that split a small seating area away from the rest of the foyer. He did not seem to have any bones left in his body. No whole bones anyway; I think I saw the red splintery end of one poking out of a hole in his suit jacket. He looked like a large hand had smashed him down in preparation for his new job as Jack in a jack-in-the-box. A surprisingly small stream of blood worked slowly to fill the grout lines in the tile. It flowed sluggishly toward me. Definitely a dead body, I thought. I wondered where all his insides had gone. The blood, bright against the black and white tiles, turned with the valleys between the tiles and crept closer to me.I kept one eye in its general direction while I fumbled at my side for the pocket I knew I had there and the cell phone I hoped I’d shoved into it when a scream had pulled me away from my police drama and to the foyer.It had been stupid to step outside my door. I lived in a marginal neighborhood of San Noe, that little coastal city of bridges north of Los Angeles and south of San Francisco. Almost exactly between the two, and without a really usable port, it got overlooked for years. The Spanish explorers had been excited by what appeared to be a promising bay, but had been so disappointed by the shallow draw and rocky shores that they hadn’t even named it after a real saint (some historical documents suggest Noe had been the galleon’s cook’s cat). They had turned their attention north to the more promising and protected bay of San Francisco, or south to the wider beaches of Los Angeles. Anyone interested in making money still turned their attention away. Those that were drawn to the mild eastern ocean feel--rocky, windswept, unpredictable--stayed and built a university, encouraged growers to cultivate grape vines in the surrounding valleys, and made the little city pretty with bridges to attract tourist. Too many bridges, we all thought, wondering if the plan had been to make it a Venice. Compared to the metropolis to our south and the true city to the north, San Noe was only marginally a city with its two hundred thousand people. Its marginal neighborhood, West San Noe, was not diverse enough, or impacted enough, or disadvantaged enough to be called a slum, but it was the closest thing to inner-city/ urban that San Noe had to offer. Here were the college dropouts, the drug dealers, the concentrations of minorities, the forgotten elderly, the immigrants, the teenage hookers, and a few middle class dreamers who wandered in with the hopes of gentrifying the community.Gentrification had probably been my landlord’s plan when he had taken over the rundown building his family had owned for years. Though the neighborhood could be questionable, my building was not. It was a good building, a well-kept seven story apartment house. There were three large and spacious apartments on each floor, except for the top where the owner had the whole floor. Having the owner living there was one of the reasons why it was a well-kept building. Another reason was that the occupants were carefully, but not obtrusively, screened; we still had our share of weird, noisy, or just plain spooky characters but we all felt that living in the Banks Building was a privilege so no one complained overmuch or got in the business of others. And that was why we happened to tolerate a broken door because none of us were very vocal about complaining simply because it was a good building in a marginal neighborhood, with good residents and a conscientious owner/landlord who valued his privacy.But lately the working girls had begun to value the goodness of the building, too. It was quiet in the foyer for long, predictable periods of time. There was a neat little sheltered sitting area just on the left of the foyer--separate but not secluded away from the rest of the room. If you were there having a quiet conversation with a neighbor, or talking with someone you didn’t want to invite up to your apartment, you could do it there without feeling like you would be intruded upon. People who were just passing through to leave the building, or going to the laundry room, or getting their mail, or using the elevators wouldn’t notice you sitting there. So, it was only logical that someone could transact three or five minutes of business without being disturbed there, too. Although the door to the outside was never locked--didn’t even have a lock--just the fact that it was broken and noisy seemed to be like putting a welcome sign there for some reason.Hunger Bradley had brought a discarded condom to my attention only the week before. A tall beige man of indeterminate heritage, Hunger--who claimed that was the name his mother gave him--was the resident in 4B. I think he’s a photographer, but I only think that because he always had an expensive camera near him. We had been standing at the mail wall when he had said, “At least they practice safe sex, “ with a shake of his long, narrow head.I had paused in the sorting of my mail to ponder what I wanted to do with that statement. Hunger and I, after some confusing encounters, had decided we weren’t each other’s type long ago. I didn’t know if he had perhaps forgotten that decision and, if I had to remind him, how was I going to do that, so I had paused, holding my mail.He had read my confusion and laughed his deep, full-chested laugh. “Just look,” he said with a follow-me toss of his head that I did follow to the edge of the sitting area. There was a rather high divider around it. The divider was topped by live mother-in-law tongues; healthy, green, blade shaped plants. Hunter parted those with his camera hand so I could see.A slimy looking blue condom was curled on the floor near the Oriental rug that separated the two sofas. I felt my face wrinkle with disgust, for who could ever say a used condom was pleasant to look at. “Who would do that?”Hunger had smiled smugly. He had called me an unswayable ice-cold bitch once. He had said it with stunned admiration, true, but he had said it. Now he was pleased that he had been able to rattle me. He holds most of his conversations with his head and he tossed it toward the street casually. “One of our industrious neighbors, I’m sure. Caught sight of a bobbing head the other night. Slurp, slurp, you know.” He rhythmically pushed his cheek out with his tongue. His eyes took on an even deeper wicked glint than usual, but it faded quickly when he didn’t get the reaction he expected. He shrugged. “Only can hope they charged a little extra for the luxury of the surroundings compared to the bank doorway.” He had walked away laughing that deep laugh that should not belong to such a slim, ferret-like guy.In the week after our encounter, I had taken more notice of activity in the foyer. Since I lived in 1B, just down a hallway from the entrance, I was in a position to hear most of what went on if I cared to. I hadn’t cared to before. I was used to living among people and their considerate--and inconsiderate--sounds, smells, and displays. In the quiet of my own ground floor apartment, with the luxury of a small courtyard garden at the back of the building, I could ignore most of what people did in the front of the building when my door was closed. I could go to the library, do my job, come home and not have to interact with anyone. At least I could ignore what others did before my ears were opened by Hunger and that blue condom. Suddenly I could hear giggles in the night, groans, and the harsh treatment of furniture not built for repeated bouncing. I heard the occasional angry demand, the wheezy plea of a man for release, or the gasp when a woman’s hair was pulled. The scream I heard that Wednesday night was too much. It hadn’t been a loud scream of fear really. More a startled angry scream that said, ‘Somebody come see about me,’ more than ‘Stay away! There’s danger here!’ And fool that I was, I had come to see if my mere presence could stop what had caused the scream.As I stood with my finger about to press the 9 on my cell phone, I remembered suddenly that I had thought it was a woman’s scream.The dead body was definitely that of a man. I glanced at it to be sure. The stream of blood hadn’t advanced much. I was certain that it had been his scream I had heard. A scream like a little girl, it had been a scream of shock. It had literally been smashed short. He hadn’t had time to scream from pain.And there was no purple cloud, Lisa, I told myself. You imagined that. Let it go. When the police come don’t you dare go talking about any damn purple cloud. Because if you start thinking about a purple cloud you have to think about the rest of it, so don’t think about a purple cloud.Which had the effect of the purple cow you are not suppose to think about but cannot not see once you start.The cloud itself had not bothered me as much as my first thought did. I had stepped out of my apartment as a perfectly normal human woman. I ran down the long hallway to the foyer as an average thirty-one year old, single, black, librarian; just Lisa Anderson who had wanted only television and a quart of Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia before going to bed on a Wednesday night. Seconds later, standing with a young street worker over a dead body, I was something different. In between the running and the standing there had been that moment. In it I was aware of that cloud of light drawing up from the body to the top of the tall glass entry door. Purple, but purple as it is becoming purple, like red and blue swirled so quickly in it that my eyes could only see the blending of them. I had seen the cloud bellowing out into the night through a small gap at the top of the door and I had not questioned the cloud. I had questioned my sanity. I’m going crazy, I had thought, That’s what killed. But I only thought I was going crazy because that’s what I imagined I was suppose to think at that moment. Some where in my mind was the certainty that the purple cloud was very real. I even accepted it did not belong to a familiar category of real when I thought, That’s not human. And my mind followed that with an even more bizarre observation, And I must not be human to know that. How very interesting. That was my first glimmer of approaching change. But I did not focus on it. I did not bring that back of my head thought anywhere near the front of my head where I would have to spend time with them. Later, Lisa, I told myself, later we’ll think about that. Right now there is the young girl and the dead body.The girl was gone but the body was still here at my feet.I turned away pressing the 1 as I considered my certainty that the little girl with the big breast had not been the one to scream. I had been sitting in my living room when I heard the scream. I was only steps away from my front door and had paused only to shove my phone in my pocket. If there was no purple cloud, how, I asked myself, could anyone--how could anything have done that to a body without making a sound? And, since I could see the entrance when I opened my door, how could that thing that wasn’t a purple cloud have gotten away without being seen? It was a long hallway that I’d run down, but I could see the entrance door all the way down that corridor. How had something left? The elevators? They hadn’t been moving. I would have heard them. Was it still here? I glanced at the door that lead to the laundry room and to the other that opened to the stairwell. I would have seen anything using either of the doors. Could it have leaped over the divider and be lying there on one of the sofas? I shook my head thinking that the dividers were too high to hurdle. Stupid, Lisa, you know what did this. But if you want to forget all about the cloud thing, if you insist on not believing your own eyes, look at what it did to the body. If something else did that, how do you know it couldn’t leap a five foot divider? I took a very tentative step to the divider thinking I would peep over and see if anything was there. But I reasoned the plants would have been disturbed. The long almost succulent leaves of the mother in law tongues were still and just as straight as always. I decided the best thing to do was the good citizen thing to do. My phone’s screen had gone dark. I pressed clear to turn the light back on and 1 again.The entry door squealed loudly and I heard, “Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh, Oh, Oooh!”I faced Margaret Kraemer-Levy. A prune-like and prudish blue haired neighbor, she was standing with her back pressed against the mail boxes. A gloved hand was over her wrinkled mouth. She was staring at the body when her eyes weren’t flicking to what I held in my hand. She finally seemed to recognize me and dropped her hand from her mouth. “Oh, my God, Lisa, what happened here?”I pushed the 1 for the last time and with my best Hunger-like head toss said, “Murder, I guess.”The rest can be downloaded for free at www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/curiosity/7257500
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