Story and Enhancements by Craig

Preamble:

This is a story about a young woman from another world. She finds herself trapped among us, gifted and cursed with exceptional abilities.

This story occurs following her accidental murder of her human stepfather.

It is dedicated to the less than perfect who strive to be more than they are.

Part One: "Greta"

        With the certainty of someone whose home has been broken into Shakespeare knew something wasn't right. He surveyed the alley cautiously looking for abnormalities. Indeed he had come to think of it as his home but years on the street had taught him never to allow that feeling to dull his wariness.  Regular people were safe in their "homes" street people were any thing but.        

"Tyler?" he ventured cautiously,  "Sheena?"        

There was no sign of either of the runaways who had become part of his street "family."        Just as well, he thought sardonically to himself, they've been through enough.  There was no sound, no movement, no obvious danger, but something definitely wasn't right.  The alley looked the same as usually did, squalid, to be sure, but sheltered and relatively accommodating all things considered.        

It was the smell that tipped him off. Punching through the omnipresent musty salt-sea stench he was now barely aware of, was a different odor...the copper smell of rust.  Corrosion was situation normal in Venice Beach. The salt in the mist ate away at everything: bricks, stucco and especially metal. Shakespeare had noted wryly to himself  more than once that  the area's physical state of decay was in a race with its moral slide to see which could tear the place down faster.  Scanning the alley again, this time for things rather than people, the hunched little black man  finally spotted the source of his unease. Someone had moved the dumpster.        

Flakes of rust had been knocked off and lay on the ground around the base of the one-ton metal box. Hence the smell...but this deduction brought him no peace... who would move a dumpster that hadn't been used in five years? What's more how had it been moved? The alley was far too narrow for the huge disposal trucks the city used and what was more, there was no sign anything else in the alley had been touched, as it surely must be if someone had brought a forklift in here.        

A veteran of LA's streets for six years, Shakespeare had survived on his smarts, his nerve and his senses....the very things which had let him down when the stress of the commodities market  proved to be too much for him. An eminently civilized man with three university degrees, how ironic the 'survive or die' environment of the Venice streets suited him better than the kill or be killed world of the steel and glass towers that loomed on the horizon. Then he looked but didn't see, listened but didn't hear. Now he knew his eyes, ears and nose not only would not lie to him, they were the keys to his survival.        

His ears were picking up the sound of suffering, a sound he knew oh so well.  It was a soft, high pitched whine, punctured at irregular intervals by heart racking sobs. "Keening" he thought to himself. "Nobody uses that word anymore, but that's what I'm listening to. Someone is keening." He was halfway to the dumpster before it occurred to him that while he'd heard the soft wailing, he hadn't heard anyone breathing.        

His instincts told him before he peered around the corner of the dumpster that he would find a young girl. This was nothing new in LA. The city fed the nation's fantasies while chewing up dreams and dreamers foolish enough to believe it held what they sought. Shakespeare was familiar with the process that sent  deluded young women spiraling down the LA food chain from potential actress, to potential plaything to potential overdose to potential corpse. He expected to find a candidate for the latter; that was, after all his world. Last reality stop before the infinite freeway to oblivion.        

There was something odd about this one. Crouched in the corner of the alley, at the very back of the alcove framed by the building and the dumpster huddled a young woman in her later teens, Shakespeare guessed. Incongruities immediately began to register. She had the stench, filth and matted hair of a street kid.  Partially wrapped up in a rancid old blanket, he could see she was wearing what appeared to have once been a white party dress, ripped, soiled and apparently charred. This was no surprise. She'd probably ended up in one of the city's many "escort services"  and either could not stand herself any longer or had dissatisfied a customer or her "manager" to the point she'd been beaten and then ran away.  Like many before her she was drawn to the ocean, by it's primal promise of rebirth or perhaps release.        

Again Shakespeare noted the irony. This narrow strip of sand was a dotted dividing line between eternal life, emphasized these days by the spawning grunion, and the inevitable entropy of the small fry who migrated to LA from across the continent. The  fish came to fuck, the kids came to get fucked, he noted.  Here in Venice, they often died in sight of each other, each oblivious of the other.        

Shakespeare was not given to jumping to conclusions however. He noted several puzzling things about  this young woman. The state of her clothing suggested she had been on the streets for some time, a couple of weeks at least. There seemed, however to be no signs of physical deterioration. The arm and leg he could see both looked bronzed and strong, not, thin and pale. This was a tall, solid young woman. She must have really pissed someone off no end to be down here. More than likely, he reflected, somebody would be looking for her.        

"Excuse me. Miss?"  he said in his incongruously deep voice. No reaction.

"I  mean you no harm. Is there anything I can do to help?"        

This question was greeted with a snort of contempt. Well, he thought to himself, there's a brain in there and it's working at least enough to get sarcastic. 

"I don't mean to be forward," he continued in his formal way, "it's just that you seem to have taken up residence right next to my home, and in a way that makes us neighbours. I'm just trying to be neighbourly  and see if there's anything I can do to assist your move into our little community here."         

Shakespeare shuffled slowly towards the young girl, his hands held wide and open in a gesture of reassurance. The huddled figure seemed to take no notice at all of his approach other than to pull the blanket  more securely around herself.  He spoke in low  reassuring tones. The last thing he wanted to do is spook her. Runaways who ran away from Venice were usually never seen alive again.  He noted, now that the dumpster had been moved, what a perfect spot to hide this was: sheltered and invisible from the street. This girl was lucky indeed to have happened upon it so soon after its strange relocation. If she was aware of her good fortune, she gave no outward sign of it. Indeed the only movement  she exhibited was racking sobs, which seemed to cause almost spasm-like contractions to her entire body.        

It was during one of these Shakespeare thought he saw a flash of extremely muscular arm, just for a moment, but immediately dismissed the notion. Not enough food, not enough sleep will do that to you, even when you're used to it. Ever so slowly he edged up to the huddled figure, all the while speaking in a low, almost sing-song voice. It was not his way to interfere with the lives of others, but he was, he liked to think, a decent human being. While she might be part of the driftwood of society, she had washed up on his  beachhead and if she was hurt or on something he would do what he could to prevent further harm or death.        

"Here," Shakespeare said as he laid a gentle hand on a surprisingly hard shoulder, "let me have a look at you."

A muffled voice, with a plaintive tone mumbled something indecipherable into the blanket.        

"Sorry, I didn't quite catch that," he said in a tone he knew was comforting as well as disarming.        

She raised her head and Shakespeare was stunned at the face peering up at him through filthy, matted hair. Even covered with  muck and the grime, this was without question the single most beautiful face he had ever seen in his life.  Eyes, not sunken and wan but brilliant and luminous. Eyes beyond time, beyond sense, beyond reason.        

"Please," she said in soft, almost rasping voice.        

He was dumbfounded, stricken with compassion and passion at the same time. Transfixed by her beauty and by the desperation of her simple plea.        

And while Shakespeare would never understand why he began quoting John Donne to this lost angel, somehow she did.

Rather than the quizzical or contemptuous look he was expecting she looked back into his eyes with sudden focus and understanding. She raised her right hand and caressed his bristled cheek. Softly he covered her hand with his left and gently took her wrist in his right. He was amazed at the hardness and obvious power in her forearm. Amazed by the silken softness of her touch, by the depth of pain, empathy and understanding in those crystal blue eyes. Amazed that she seemed to be in an intense fight for control of herself, the tension a physical presence in the alley with them...more real than their shadows.        

"...so to intergraft our hands..." and as he said the line she held up her right hand , fingers slightly spread, an action he mirrored with his left.        

He noted with some surprise that her hands were exactly the same size as his. Their fingers and palms a perfect fit.        

An understanding had passed between them...and this time when she made the request they both knew he would honour it.        

"Please, for everyone's sake, keep people away from me...I want to be alone...I have to be alone."        

Any possibility he would be able to talk her out of her self-imposed exile evaporated the moment he looked back into those eyes.

        "Do you have a name?" he asked.

        "No. Not anymore...I destroyed my name, and my past," she replied cryptically.

        "I should call you Helen, after Helen of Troy...but because you want to be alone I will call you Greta, after Greta Garbo."

When this was met with a puzzled frown, he explained: "She was a great beauty who sought only to find peace from the world, that was her famous line 'I vant to be alone'."

        She nodded, understanding. "That will do," she said and buried her head back in the blanket.  Shakespeare felt like he'd just been told his audience with the queen was over.

        He shuffled back to the opening to the alley where he slumped against the wall, guarding the passage.  His eyes drifted from the setting sun across the alley to the side of the dumpster mere inches from his feet. Beyond the tip of his left toe the base of the dumpster had been deformed. As he leaned forward he thought the metal looked for all the world as if it had been crushed. Just on a whim he grabbed the deformed section with his right hand. There were four finger shaped dents on the underside and the groove he have thought was a stress fracture was now, he realized the same size and shape as his thumb.  The dent was in the shape of a human hand....a hand exactly the same size as his.

        As he looked down into the gathering darkness of the passage 'Greta' began to sob. Shakespeare glanced at  the dent in the dumpster again and decided to respect her wishes and leave her alone.

Part 2