The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [1]
Shelter
The front door cracks, and a sliver of Javier appears behind it, bed-headed, unshaven, in a sleeveless undershirt and a pair of rumpled wool slacks.
Venusians
Ursula wends her way down a steep and curving section of Lansdale Street, staggering a little in the heels that she likes to imagine make her height seem...
Scars
I’m So SCHIZO!” is the title of a photo essay in the fragrant new issue of Mademoiselle. The spastic, jaunty letters of the capitalized word stagger across a two-page spread...
Chat
The revelers at Camille Stypnick’s upslope, split-level townhouse have come to celebrate the launch of Betancourt Rum and its concomitant ad campaign...
Mornings
The shades are drawn, and the computer screen bathes Chas’s bleary eyes and papery skin in its pallid light. His head rests heavily in the seat of his hand...
Conspiracy
The tips of Ursula’s fingers and toes charge with static electricity as she walks through the Plexiglas-lined cavern entrance to the South Slope Mall, the way a cockroach...
Order
The savage girl always used to be doing things, making things, but now she’s doing less and less. For the last few days her only activity has been chopping the wooden slats...
Jellybeans
The theme is apocalypse fashion today on the Ricki Lake Show, and the prostitutes saunter onto the set in catsuits accessorized with thigh-high thermal stealth boots....
Fishy
James T. Couch leans back in his chair, his pale, naked arms folded over the white towel tied snugly around his rib cage. The two eyes tattooed on his nipples stare wide and crazed at Ursula...
Business
Chas stands facing her in a white bathrobe, his neck and face red, heavy bags under his eyes, his wet gray hair combed back.
Ice
In the cab Ursula and James T. Couch sit very still, staring straight ahead. Slowly Couch turns his head to face her. She glances over and finds his face plasmatic with teeth.
Praying
Javier sleeps surrounded by machines, ventilating his lungs, drip-feeding his veins, stimulating his brain stem with gentle sound waves...
Remembering
Policemen move the outer barricade, and the squad car taking Ursula to the scene inches through but doesn’t make it much farther.
Gift
“I saw a woman flirting with a bearded academic on the subway,” Chas says, his voice made even drier and more acerbic through the phone connection.
Cyborgs
Interface
Ursula closes the station door behind her and crosses the small clearing, settling her pack on her shoulder. The rain forest greets her with its thick, sweet aroma...
Afterword: “Virtualism”
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Smirkers
Stitching
The savage girl kneels on the paving stones of Banister Park, stitching together strips of brown and gray pelt with elliptical motions of her bare arm.
The sleeves and sides of her olive-drab T-shirt are cut out, exposing her flanks and opposed semicircles of sunburned back, like the cauterized stumps of wings. A true redskin, more so than any Indian ever was, her skin more red than brown. It must have been pale once. And her Mohican is whitish blond, her eyes blue or possibly green.
Her pants are from some defunct Eastern European army, laden with pockets, cut off at the knees. Her shins are wrapped in bands of pelt, a short brown fur. Her feet are shod in moccasins.
There is a metal barb about the size of a crochet needle stuck through her earlobe, and a length of slender chain hangs from her scalp, affixed in four places to isolated lockets of hair.
Each time the girl bends forward to make a stitch, her tattered shirt drapes and reveals her breasts, full and pendulous, whereas the rest of her is lean and unyielding. Down the bench, the man with the greased hair and mustache and forty-ounce beer, and his friend, the man with the Afro and mustache and forty-ounce beer, watch the ebb and flow of her flesh with sleepy smiles, lulled by the