Penny Dreadful

Born in Mississippi in 1966. Old Southern family. Lived in Montreal and Italy as a child. Spent high school years in Memphis, Tennessee. Attended college in New Orleans, Louisiana (Tulane). Dropped out. Finished B.A. at Memphis State. Received MFA 1995 from Jack Kerouac School at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. California since 1996, Bay Area, L.A., now Santa Barbara. Worked as homeless counselor, taxi driver, bartender, video store geek, college professor (Evergreen State, Olympia, Washington), screenwriter, and journalist. Short stories published in numerous places, notably
Nerve
and
Bomb
. Married, one child by previous marriage. One brother. Parents still living in North Carolina.

To play the Game of Tongues, you must first understand the caste system. Phineas Poe, antihero of
Kiss Me, Judas
, returns to Denver to find reality rewritten and the laws of reason fractured. When Poe is enlisted by his old ally, Detective Moon, to find a missing cop named Jimmy Sky, he is drawn into the Game of Tongues, a violent fantasy game played out by disaffected college drones, hacker kids, and Goth refugees in underground punk clubs, on rooftops, and in sewers. Everyone he meets has multiple personalities, and before long Poe begins to lose track of his own identity. If he can hang on to his sanity long enough to find Jimmy Sky, he might just beat the game.

for Elias

-Why was the host (victim predestined) sad?
-He wished that a tale of a deed should be told of a deed not by him should by him not be told.

-Ulysses
, James Joyce

Goo:

The Trembler was young and fair, with red hair and stupid blue eyes and the pale furry limbs of a spider monkey. And shameless. The girl had no shame. She clung to Chrome as if grafted to his hip. Goo rolled her eyes and followed them down a road white with mist. Chrome was her boyfriend, technically. She liked to sleep with him. But she rarely hunted with him. It wasn’t her bag. Goo was not a Mariner, and she didn’t share his bottomless black hunger for tongue. Nor did she like to watch him go down on others, which Chrome very well knew.

They had found the Trembler under the 17th Street Bridge, crouched near a sewer opening. Alone and mute. She had obviously become separated from her little tribe, her pocket of the game. And when Chrome and Goo had come upon her she had pathetically tried to tremble them, which only made Goo more tired and grumpy.

Chrome, though. He had been unpleasantly cheerful all evening and apparently found the Trembler amusing so he had scooped her up like an injured sparrow. He had muttered something to Goo about having a delicious threesome, a sickening idea. Goo wished he would just take the girl’s tongue quickly and cleanly and deposit her in an abandoned car, or behind a trash barrel.

But she could see that he was in no mood for the efficient kill.

The Trembler could be no more than sixteen, thought Goo. She was a newborn, barely an apprentice. Fashionably unclean, barbaric. The girl was dressed as some sort of prehistoric cave dweller, wearing a babydoll dress of raw suede and no shoes. Her legs were unshaven and she smelled.

Goo spat in disgust. She was an Exquisitor and was therefore expected to be a bit more elegant. She wore brown leather trousers, clean. She wore polished black motorcycle boots and a vest of fine silver chain mail. And Chrome, being a hunter, wore only black. Black jeans tirelessly reconstructed with black tape and rubber patches. Boots that laced up to the knee and a black T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. His head was shaved to black stubble.

Goo watched him drag the unprotesting Trembler along by the elbow, his fingers no doubt raising bruises in her flesh and from a distance he looked just like a boy who had found a lost kitten and was taking it back to his tree house to feed it milk and tuna or possibly cut off its feet and now Goo quickened her step and came up alongside him.

I’m going home, she said.

Nonsense.

I am, she said. I’m gone.

Chrome stopped, flicked his wrist and the Trembler stood upright, quivering.

Have you ever seen such a waif? he said. La jeune fille, exquis.

Yes, said Goo. The girl is exquisite. But I’m bored. I’m hungry and I’m tired and I’m going home.

The girl stared at them, unblinking. She was a wetbrain, thought Goo. She was a ninety-eight-pound victim of the Pale. Chrome growled, impatient.

Come, he said. There’s a market ahead. I will buy you a loaf of bread.

They turned down the next street and Goo flinched at the web of bright lights. She didn’t like the bright. It reminded her of day. But Chrome did not even look to see if she was following. He merely flowed down the sidewalk, as if he were made of water. The Trembler trailed behind, a balloon on a string, forgotten.

It was near dawn.

Maybe four or five in the morning. Traces of yellow and pink in the sky, like fine hairs. Which made it Thursday. There was a twenty-four-hour Safeway up ahead and Goo sighed. She could get a bite to eat and perhaps distract Chrome from the Trembler. Not that she was sorry for the girl, not in the least. Goo wasn’t interested in the girl’s fate, near or far. She was tired and she simply didn’t want to watch Chrome eat a stranger’s tongue.

Through hissing doors into terrible white light. Goo squinted, covered her face.

Chrome grinned, mocking. Le soleil cruel.