All rights reserved to their original owners.

Updated: 3/4/18

To catch a cat you must first go where the cats go. Or, you can cheat that system. Instead of going where the cats go, you go to where the mice go, and catch the cat on the hunt.

My arm, side, and back are bandaged to the point of being mummified, and they crinkle slightly as I walk through the endless maze of hard shell carriers at the marina. Gotham city port is a U-shaped inlet that juts into the city, bleeding off into various streams and rivers that go inland towards the north of the city and beyond. Separated by a vacant swamp that has formed from one of those rivers is Bludhaven, only accessible by the cast iron bridge that connects Gotham to its sister city. Giant barges and cargo ships move in and out daily, loading and reloading towering metal boxes from each barge that are sorted onto trucks, which take the merchandise towards whatever destination lies before it.

Last time I visited, the deep black waters were full of trash and waste. Chains and hemp rope fell about the place as autumn leaves fall upon the ground, scattered, housing rats and stray dogs that skid across the concrete surface covered in mold and barnacles. There's no wood, nothing like those pretty pictures of bays and docks on calendar fronts, but sloshing, discolored water against stained pavement. (John said 'if there is a hell, this would be it' and I watched the city over the rising manmade fog and wondered 'if this is hell, then where is heaven?')

It is in this twisted labyrinth where most transactions take place. Since the Bat moved into the city communication between sellers, buyers, and their bosses have become difficult and sporadic. Batman was everywhere in the same way the Holy Trinity were, and being within the city limits came to the point where walking down the road and standing gives you a one way ticket to jail. (That was when Batman was new and he cracked down on petty crimes, before there were men in clown suits and freaks with riddles. That was when he actually helped the city. When he focused on those besides the select few insane.) And so the smart bosses, under the guidance of Black Mask in the early, uncertain days of his drug control, directed all their business to take place in the ever changing, bleak puzzle of the port. It is here that most of the attention has rested for the last few years, with relative safety for both buyers and sellers.

(In reality, this maze is so vast that getting to the end would be impossible and knowing every corner would be improbable-that is why this place is safe. Whoever controls it, controls the world. Luckily, John has no interest in the world.)

I lean back against the wet metal. The humidity has settled like a mist and made everything soggy under my touch, a burning that settles in my eyes from the chemicals that are unleashed under the barges and cargo ships. (Some people think that those ships were the start of the environmental issues that Gotham has, but really, if people never came to Gotham, this would still all be swamp land.) My bandages are sticking to my skin in patches, creating a rash under the moles on my arms. There has been very little to see since dawn.

It's been a long day.

Searching for the Red Hood is like searching for a needle in a haystack. Gotham is a huge city, with activity ranging from petty crime to murder to public indecency, which leaves very little room for any one death to be out of the ordinary. The police don't seem think the Red Hood is premeditative. Victims of opportunity, Taffy called them. But that isn't good enough for me-not on the back end of Vet's death, when I feel like I know so much about him. How else would Red Hood know that these people, in these specific locations, were going to be selling? It would be exhausting for him to be roaming the city hoping for an opportunity, and some of the murders happened back to back. It was possible that he could have been following them for quite some time, but that would be a stretch-no one has come forward as an eye witness, so no one has given testimony of him following his victims.

So the Red Hood knew who his victims were, and where they would be. And he planned it. But how?

I haven't found the answer. And I've been looking for hours. For hours I've been scoping out the perfect spots where transactions are likely to take place, in dark corners or spaces between boxes, and even if I have come across some drug deals going on, I've seen no sign of the Red Hood. It's taken a lot of strength out of me just to lean against the iron surface of a sweating box, trying to regain my breath as the pain form the scabs pulse, slightly agitated with the heat.

To my right, two men are speaking. Their tone isn't hostile or nervous, but conversational, and it echoes down the long corridor formed between stacks of boxes. I've tuned it out; I focus on trying to fix the wrappings around my hand, where the scabs have opened and are bleeding through to stain the white.

I'm so tired. There is a –tap- against the metal.

I ignore it, trying to focus on getting the gauze to go where I want it to on my arm. –tap- -tap- -tap- the sound keeps going until it becomes constant, like a peg leg walking above me across the iron. I glance up, slightly, towards the misty sky-nothing but rain is falling, nowhere for the sound to come from.

-Tap- -tap- -crunch- -tap-

The hair on the back of my neck suddenly stands up. My whole body becomes stiff and unresponsive even as I tell myself to move. Only the street kid within me can force myself to look up straight, right at the gun-

-it's not pointed at me. It's pointed towards my right, where the two men stand in a heated conversation, unknowing of anything strange happenings in the darkness of the alley across from them. Breath creases the crest of my head. My breath has stopped; I no longer believe I am breathing. (I don't think, I don't breath. Everything in me has come to a halting stop.)

I can almost feel the rotation of my neck bones in their cartilage as I look at him. There is no light coming from the black slits of his eye holes, and I can hear his breath, smell the thin veneer of leather, and I imagine that looking at him this close up is quite like what a rose looks like to something very small-a fly, or a blade of grass, confronted with eye popping, deep, stunning red. And like a rose, it is beautiful and deadly and used for a purpose that doesn't always suit it. (There is nothing more dangerous than love.)

His hand ventures up towards where his lips must be, and one finger gracefully cocks up to cover them, shushing me silently. I cannot tell in the shadows if he is looking at me or at the two men who are the current target for his shooting practice.

I take in a breath, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in-

"-What is he that builds stronger than either the mason, the shipwright, or the carpenter?"

His voice is distorted up close, but I can clearly make out the male touch, not scratchy like a smoker, but strong and clear as though he has spent his life singing. But I still don't…I don't know. I feel lost. Lost in this endless sea of metal boxes. Lost in this endless sea of violence. And all I can say to myself is, oh God, oh God, oh God…

"Well?" he moves his head closer to me and I try not to flinch, but my muscles are to unfamiliar with being so close to another person and they jerk-and I -whack- my head against the metal box, sending colors invading my vision. (Colors, colors, everywhere, but life here is so bleak that the only real color besides blacks and greys I see is red. The red of his helmet. The red of my name.)

"What's your answer?"

I shake my head.

There is a moment's pause.

-bang!-

The gun explodes, and my whole world is tossed, thrown, the back of my head suddenly -slams- into the box- and I don't know if I even make a noise. The sound of the gun lifts high into the foggy skyline, with the wet sound as a man screeches and falls to the ground, splattering rose colored blood all over the cement. I can hear feet against the pavement, someone falling back against the metal, running, yelling, crows unhinged from their spots and flung upwards towards the sky-

(The gun is still positioned in front of my face. It hasn't even moved. I swear it didn't even jerk backwards as it sends a bullet straight into another man's skull. Does it feel the strain of taking a life? Does the smooth surface see the reflection of terror in its victim's eyes? Or does it feed off its master's whim? Does it feel joy when another person bleeds?)

"Another ran off," the red helmet man says. "That makes two this week."

(He found me once and he found me again. I wonder if he recognizes me. Will he turn his gun to me next? Will John and the other come looking for me if I don't come home? Will they find my body? Will they know me, when my face is crushed?)

Shivers run down my spine. The man pushes off the metal box he is leaning against and the gun leaves my line of sight. I risk a glance towards him. He towers over me, in the way of a man whose used to being tall. His mask stares in the general direction of where the other man ran off, but I don't want to look at the death of another man. I fear it will be a second death within myself.

(Selfish, selfish, selfish…)

The man moves forward. My legs wouldn't even haul me up straight, my eyes have a hard time following his movements. I cannot even gain control of my body.. I already feel pain in my arms. I already feel pain inside my chest. I think about the wild look inside the eyes of the man at the bombing. Perhaps being stuck in a dream and being high are very similar occurrences-and at this moment, I feel like I'm both.

(Something within myself says 'you came hunting for this.' I ignore that voice.)

The red helmet man kicks the body. I can't pull my eyes away. Blood blooms on the cement.

"What are you doing?" Forcing out those words is harder than it should be. More painful than it could be. What, did I eat sand and become incapable of speaking? John has left a scar on my life and nothing can be more terrifying than him, or his intentions. Then why am I so afraid of him? Why does he shock me when he so callously kicks the body of a dead man?

"Do you want to know the answer to my riddle?"

"I…" Is he going to kill me if I don't know it? What if I do? What's going to happen? "I don't remember the.."

He snorts, dragging his foot through the dirt to kick some up into the blood, which clots as though still within the dead mans body, "What is he that builds stronger than either the mason, the shipwright, or the carpenter?"

"I…"

"It doesn't matter either way," he says, and for a moment I think about John and his riddles, because I solve riddles every day, little ones with no meaning but riddles all the same. They are how John tests me. How he gets his point across. But is this really the same thing? "You're a pretty smart kid, I thought you would know it."

The dead mans glass eyes stare at me from below. My body shakes. The Red Hood rifles through the dead mans pockets until he pulls from them a small packet of muted white powder.

(I'm not afraid…I'm not afraid…I'm not afraid…)

"Should have known better," The Red Hood tells me.

"I don't understand," I tell him, "I don't know the answer to your riddle!"

My honesty isn't appreciated. I mean, what was I supposed to tell him? My mind is somewhere else entirely, on the police issue gun (How did he get it?), on the blood dripping down his fingers, on the man from whom the blood blooms. And like a shadow growing from the dark, the murderer in questions stands gracefully, looking directly at me, his gun still positioned at his hip. He's more terrifying than the first time I saw him.

He says nothing more to me. He just turns and starts off in the separate direction, his gun still nonchalantly cocked towards the metal boxes, as if he can sense the presence of another target happening through metallic properties. And I swear to God, he starts humming some tune that I have heard somewhere, maybe in the dark of the night when I lay alone in bed afraid.

"Wait," I wet my lips, try again, "Wait! What's the answer?"

He shrugs his shoulders, "To hell if I know. I don't get Shakespeare."

What?

"Catch," he tosses the packet at me, the small, heavy baggie of powder that he pulled from the pocket of the man he killed. I nearly drop it, having it settle between my fingers like sand in an hourglass, but as it leaks onto the ground at my feet I get the strong, heavy scent of venom on my system, "You're looking for this, right?"

(Venom, venom, venom, it echoes. One of the few drugs that will kill you in two hits if used in a span of a few hours. Venom, more powerful than meth, more potent than weed. The only drug even dealers are afraid of. Venom, and the only person I know of that sells venom is Galante.)

The pieces slowly fall into place as I hear multiple gunshots go off in the distant, -Bang- -Bang- -Bang- -Bang-, and then the added addition of sirens, far away as distant stars. If I stay I risk getting caught for murder, or if anything, possession. And that means publicity for John. A publicity that isn't wanted.

As I turn to go, the blood beneath the man's skull pools around my feet, soaking into my tennis shoes, and I find myself risking a glance towards him, where I meet eyes with the hollow brown ones that lay stunned on the ground. The perfect bullet hole leaks still, right in the center of his forehead, blooming on the cement. A perfect, beautiful rose.

Ricky has a daughter. He doesn't even remember what she looks like, or how old she is, but he knows he has a daughter, and he has had one since he was a teenager. But he's older now. And he feels old. He isn't really twenty-seven, and he isn't really living, so that means he can't get any older. But he does. And as he gets older, she does too. He thinks about that a lot lately, now that he does what he does.

Her mother named her Rose. She also didn't give her Ricky's last name, but at the time, Ricky thought that was fair. For God's sake, he was there for the baby making part, but other than that, not too much. He didn't want a kid. Hell, he was just a kid.

There are kids everywhere who aren't really kids. Kids like Tommy, who got in with the wrong people. Tommy couldn't have been older than seventeen, which didn't really make him young but also didn't make him old. He was a kid to Ricky. And a good kid. Now Ricky sees him, is wearing him, coated in blood that will take months of washing and therapy to remove. He can see him when he closes his eyes or when they are open, and even when he is focusing on something else. Tommy is with Ricky now.

Ricky wonders if he will ever go away.

"Damn it! Damn it all! Damn you, damn him, damn, damn damn…!"

Ricky wonders sometimes if Black Mask has a daughter, and if he does, if she is proud to say that she is his child. Ricky would like to think that Rose would be proud to be his daughter, if he was around. He would like to think that her mother didn't ruin his image in her mind like a lot of angry girls do when they get pregnant with someone else's kid. Ricky wants to imagine that Rose thinks he's a guardian angel that could never show himself. But he wasn't stupid.

"What the fuck!?" Black Mask spun around at his desk, his fists slamming against the leather layer, long and spidery fingernails digging into the surface and leaving rough, jagged looking scars. His snarl was fierce and ugly, altered by the color of his skin, the red veins popping form his eyes, cheeks marked with flaring angry ripples. "Who the fuck is this guy? Who, damn him! Damn this Red Hood! How many of my fucking men is he going to kill?"

Ricky keeps his mouth shut. He isn't stupid.

"Sir," the secretary walks into the room, her high heels clicking on the marble office floor, "you have been warned multiple times about your rising blood pressure."

"Fuck my blood pressure!" Black Mask takes his phone and tosses it with all his might towards the beautiful woman, but the wires catch and the thing back lashes against the desk and smashes to pieces. No one even flinches. "I want to know what this guy is getting at that he takes down fucking seventeen of my dealers! Who the fuck does that?!"

"Galante did that sir," the secretary responds calmly.

"Galante? Fuck Galante! I could crush that little spider right under my shoe. And I thought I fucking was already, I thought you idiots had a fucking hold on this!"

"We did, sir," the secretary says, tiredly. "But Batman got in the way, remember? During the riot?"

"Fuck!" The computer screen goes flying, and once again, was connected to wires and jerked back almost flying into Black Mask's face. This made him even angrier. Pacing behind his desk, Black Mask throws a vase at the opposite wall and slams a fist into the glass window, "Why the fuck do I have the most incompetent people working under me? Who the fuck are you anyway? Get back to what I pay you to do!"

The secretary turns on a heel and leaves, telling Black Mask briskly, "I am doing my job, sir. Fifty percent of that is listening to you rant."

Another piece of technology goes flying across the room. Ricky thought the secretary had it easy. She wasn't in throwing range, and kept very careful distance from it.

"Tell me what else you saw," Black Mask demands from Ricky, his jaw grinding together so loud that even he can hear it from halfway across the room, "Tell me the details."

Ricky has repeated his story so many times he feels he could never forget it. Plastered there in his mind is the information that his boss has slowly been trying to extract as one would slowly understand the detail of each and every solidary snowflake, and he was sick of it. Didn't Black Mask see that he was covered in Tommy's blood? Couldn't he afford him mercy enough to go and change? "I told you everything…"

"There has to be something," Black Mask says, "Some little detail that can give us some insight into who this guy is."

Ricky felt sometimes that Black Mask saw him as not a person but a thing. He wonders often if that is why he treats his possessions the same as his people. When one day he is angry with Ricky, will he then toss him about the room, hoping he breaks? Will he buy him with his offers and then throw him away when that broken day comes? But Ricky can't afford to think like that. He likes to think that his allies are solid.

"I mean, he had a red mask, a gun, standing in the alley," Ricky didn't remember anything he hasn't already said. It was dark, there was a lot of fog, and the barges had been loud. Even hearing each other was difficult for Ricky and Tommy to do. But there was the murmur of conversation, and the eyes of another person. "There was another person with him…"

"Another person?" Black Mask threw his hands against the desk and leans forward, examining Ricky through impossibly wide eyes. And Ricky remembered, beyond the point of remembering, when he had heard the crystalline little voice, the smoky second undertone…

When Ricky had first seen the girl, as always, he thought about his own daughter and tried to find his own features in hers. But it was foggy and dark, and he had done this so many times that the novelty runs out after a while. So he decided to ignore her and focus on Tommy, focus on the job, focus on anything beyond what he was capable of understanding, "Yeah, there was a kid. A girl, maybe thirteen or so. I don't know. Skinny, long hair, white…"

Black Mask, for the first time all night, sits back and is silent. Ricky couldn't even begin to understand what goes on beyond his charred skin. He knows that Black Mask is more devious than he lets on to be, more powerful than people treat him, and he has more respect from his people than even Ricky can understand. Because Ricky is not a respected man. Sometimes he wishes he was. For his daughter. But only the positive have wishes anymore.

"If Red Hood is working with a partner then we might just get our golden opportunity to take him down. Whatever he has, a kid, a fuck buddy, a sidekick for God's sake, we can exploit her. Then she can lead us right to Red Hood and all that venom he's been collecting." It was a thoughtful few statements that Black Mask says. Even his hushed voice sounds loud, loud like everything else about the Black Mask, even his reputation.

His reputation is a nasty one, after all.

"If I send you to someone who can make an outline of this girls face, will you be able to remember her?" Ricky could only nod. "Good. Good, this is good. Maybe this was worth something after all. Good. Listen, I want you to find her. I want you to bring her here. I want to look in her eyes as I kill this bastard. It's good business, after all."

Ricky is not a leader. He is also not a follower. He is a flouter who looked at life as one would look through a soiled rag, half formed shadows moving as if they were all illusions. He likes to fancy sometimes that he doesn't really live at all, but instead shifts along the edges of life like a piece of lost driftwood torn from the edge of a mighty ship, left limp in the waters just before the bubbling white of the shore. He likes to take his time making his decisions, he likes to taste anything before he really bites it, and that makes him unsuited for this life.

Ricky is also not stupid. He must work to be alive because being alive cost money. Jobs create followers more often than they create leaders, and that is where Ricky finds himself, he has found himself washed onshore from the murky depths that held him before and like everything else, the dose of reality is hard for him to take. So many years of drugs and liquor has left him a liver down and a daughter lost, and now he finds himself gripping his freedoms in slippery, ocean slick hands. He looks down and what he thought was ocean water is actually blood of the kid who he had done business with in a world where kids are older than they should be and adults younger than is necessary, where men in red masks run around spilling bloody tears on the sidewalk and crime can only be fought when people dress up to the point of ridiculousness and give themselves a different name to try and pretend they do good work.

Ricky doesn't know who really does good work, but he knows that somewhere in the time when he was flouting out on that ocean, he had lost something of himself that will never be retrieved. And still he dives in and frantically splashes around trying to find it while trying not to drown. But there's little else he can do, so far deep into the shit he cast himself into. And there's no one to blame but himself. No one to blame but his own stupidity, and his own damp rag outlook on life.

Ricky takes jobs because he has to. And because Black Mask has a murderous look as he turns around towards his window.

And somewhere out in this city, a Rose blooms into adulthood, and he is not there to see it.

There is a door in Gotham that is rarely opened, it's knob like a flame, deflecting anyone who dares to touch its unpolished surface. This is not the door to Narnia, or the Hobbit Hole, or any small reminder of friendliness that comes in the old, classic books that lines the sides of bookstore shelves in the evening times when the doors are flown open for ten cent sales. This door smells of the dumpster ten feet down the alley, crusted with dirt and oil, smelling of the thyme that burns behind. Herbs and memories and murmurs that are barely heard through the thick metal.

I sit under the concrete and metal stairs, at the doors base, trying to calm my shaking, trying to quell my beating heart. I think that at any moment danger will crawl down the alley towards me, slithering like a snake, and when I least expect it sink its teeth down into my flesh and dive into my bloodstream, killing me with its poison.

I long to go inside. But the door is locked.

It's not the first time that I have been denied access into the house. When John is particularly angry or in a strange sort of mood, he will allow no one to come in until the mood has passed. And a few times no one bothers to let me in, if there is a meeting or a transaction going on behind its solid walls. For hours at a time I have rested in the shade offered by the staircase above, listening to the harsh laughter of the homeless men who gather lost around the burning barrel.

(I went to church once with LaDasha. When she was young and still living in her home town, there was a little steeple church on the embankment before the ocean, and when the tide hit the steeple would be shifted an inch closer to the sea. It was there that she said her family went to the Sunday afternoon services and sat among the hundreds of people who converged there. When she woke me up early on a Sunday, shuffling me into my best and pressing her mounding breasts into an actual bra and a modest dress, John watched from over his morning paper. 'You really believe this shit?' she responded, 'we have ta believe in someting.' And when I sat in the back row of a gothic, cinderblock building, praying to a God I never meet, my eyes fell on LaDasha as she cried over the children's bible, the picture of the burning bush. 'Everyting ends,' she tells me, 'everyting must come to an end.' We never go back to church. LaDasha never spoke about her home again.)

The door opens, screaming on its hinges. Taffy leans against the opening, her hands shoved deep into her pockets, looking intently at the brick building across the alley way. She says to me, "John's not happy. Avoid him."

"I have to tell him something," I tell her as I stand, whipping the moisture that has accumulated on my palms off onto my shirt. It has to be near two in the morning, a dark morning marked with fog.

"Tell me instead," she says, "I'll tell him."

I don't know what all I can tell her without her messing up what I wanted to say when relaying the message back to John. I'm not sure if I really want to tell her. If I tell her that I think Red Hood is killing Galante agents, would she really tell John? (When did I start doubting my family as I do? Is trust not something that normal families have?)

"Never mind," I tell her, "I guess it's not that important."

Remy forces her way out of the house, her hands spread wide up towards the sky, "Ah, an ode to sunlight! Where for art though, gentle beast?" her fingers are like plant leaves searching for sunlight, starving for the nutrients that they cannot get from the smog and smoke. Remy has always been like this. She was once an aspiring poet, but in the end, the streets call louder than the white hat moments in shady bars, reading words that will never be recognized. Now she spends her time drawing on her own skin in nonpermanent paints, forever changing tattoos. "A slippery bastard, isn't he?"

"Who?"

"The sun," Remy answers. "Apollo riding his chariot through the clouds-"

"-shut up," John says, coming from the doorway and into the night. His face looks up, extending himself into the night so that for a moment it seems he is not with us at all. (Perhaps he never was) "Where is Nate?"

"She comin'" LaDasha says. She is zipping up her jacket as she comes out of the door, bringing the smell of thyme and lavender with her. She throws a bag over her shoulder and repositions her breasts under her jacket so they bulge out before her.

"We don't have time to wait for her," John says, to the sky. His voice is pure as if he never spoke against Remy's gods, against LaDasha's Jesus, against Taffy's elated sense of self. But there is a hidden intent there; we all know that such a voice is false. "Red, we wouldn't be back for a few hours. More, probably. Don't expect us. And here-"

He digs for a moment through his bag (I want to know what secrets lay behind, but as it is, I'm afraid to know. I've become aware of a lot of things that I am afraid of in recent days, hours, minutes, seconds. To many to count.) And from that bag he pulls a glinting metal weapon, a Banner .34, a small issued handgun made only in the Gotham area that fetches a small price on the black markets. He tosses it, glinting with some unknown light that is not seen through the clouds, and it lands heavy and cold in my arms. (Cradled like a baby. It's an infant in my arms. Such a heavy burden, children and guns. They both take lives, give lives, bring happiness and bring sorrow. And at the end of the day, childhood, like lives, must come to an end.)

"If anyone comes by, I want you to use that. Anyone. Even the fucking president."

LaDasha runs her finger up my sooty cheek, but she doesn't look at me. The gesture isn't cold, but it's absent. I wonder if any of them were ever with me at all. I wonder when we started getting people at our door who deserve death.

"See ya, kid," Taffy says, waving slightly over her shoulder as they make their way down towards the street, not visible in the thick fog. The heavy mist lies over my world, and I feel it tighten around me, as if I'm being stared at from every possible angle.

I retreat into the door, and cradle the gun to my chest.

(To trust those that you love, or to have no other option, are two different things. I force myself to make them merge. Some sights are too beautiful for words. Some thoughts are too dangerous to be spoken.)

There is a heavy mist that has settled over her world.

Sometimes, she muses that it has always been there. In the boundaries of her sanity there is the mist, and she likes to reach out beyond that boundary towards whatever thick substance lays beyond, take it into her hands, and rejoice that something other than normality exists in this universe. But then, that is all relative to the mind, and this mist is relative to the body. It's a physical substance that has seeped in through the thick cinderblock.

Through the crack in the wall she can see down into the footholds of Arkham. Here in her prison, everything is physical but the people who are sentenced here. They all are workings of the mind. Delusions, she likes to think. They don't really exist. Only she exists, and the walls, and the bed sheets, and the bars, and the cracks that give her glimpses into other realities. That's why she believes everyone else a lie. Why shouldn't they be figments of her own imagination? The doctors tell her that she's crazy. She can admit it to herself. So how does the insane, who know their insane, work out the fake from the facts?

How she longs to be young again! How she longs to be in that place she was before the itchy illusions of joker men haunted her dreams. How she longs to have some weed in her fingers, inhaled into her blood stream, to calm her out of this mess. She's sure she could take on the world with a bit of weed with her. Why, she was on top of the world. She was an heiress! She was a star! But mom and dad stopped coming to see her, stopped sending letters, bailed the city, tried to make up for her crimes. But her crimes were a falsehood! She never killed that baby. She never even had a baby. She is sure of it, she knows, because she was there.

But still, in the back of her mind there are a few thoughts she tries not to think.

In the back of her mind there is a girl. A beautiful girl, with her mouth the color of roses and her eyes a bright, stunning hazel. A perfect, perfect girl. Her girl. The girl she used to have before she was sentenced here, but she still remembers what it was like when she worked here with the insane. She still remembers the smell of her beloveds shampoo, the thick pearls of laughter when she does something he knows she loves…

What a shame. What a shame, is her life.

She was an heiress. She had anyone she ever wanted. Why would she want him? Why would she want someone who's insane, whose not as intelligent as she is, whose a murderer? She has strict opinions on murderers. She still remembers them, the sharp, animalistic pity that overtook her when she saw him for the first time. She still remembers the joy in his body when he carried their newborn around their bedroom when they had her home, singing, 'rock'a'bye baby, on the tree top, wherever the wind, the cradle will drop. When the cradle drops the baby will die, and death will come over, like batting an eye.'

But she has convinced herself that she never had a daughter, she believes the child is really a younger version of herself that she thought into being, because, as the doctors say, she is insane. Being insane means she can make anything happen. Being insane means that she could kill the reincarnation of herself. It all makes sense. It all makes sense…

She lies in her cell day and night thinking, watching down into the cracks where the pale man paces. He comes and goes like the north wind, the pale man. He moves in and out of the small room down under the insane asylum, like a predator, a fish, graceful and deadly in his movements. And now he stands with his hands laid on the table before him. His teeth are bared, sharpened like pikes.

"You asked me here?"

Another man comes into view. A tall, broad Africa American, his nose crooked from an unhealed break, his eyebrows mismatched as if one is permanently drawn. He's not attractive, but he has something about him that she cannot place, he commands the space around him like one would command a loyal army. The air around him bends to his will, and follows his commands.

"Johnny," the pale man sings, "I'm glad you could make it, man. Thought you would never get here."

"I had some minor…setbacks." Johnny says.

She isn't very good at focusing, but now she cannot look away. Never has her own delusions been this vivid and detailed, never has she been able to correctly employ speaking people where the noise sounds as though it travels through the very crack. She feels distinctly proud of herself in a sick, morbid kind of way. It's satisfying.

"…a coworker of mine named Nate was discovered dead on the way here," Johnny was saying, "A bullet to her forehead. You got any idea who would put a bullet through her forehead, Shark?"

"Not at all, man, not at all," Shark says, his pale skin glistening with sweat. It's so hot in here, she thinks, too hot for a delusion. "Though I gotta say I've been having my own problems down in here."

"No kidding? Thought this was a paradise."

"Normally," Shark says, "But as you know, the guards are making life pathetic to live. Dealing from my seat in Arkham is beginning to get difficult, and then all the fucking sudden, you throw in all this random influx of venom in the market being sold by God-knows-who, and then that fucker-what's his name- Galante, coming in this mix acting all touch, ruining my own trade. It's difficult you see."

"What, have none of your guys gotten picked off by the Red Hood?"

"None, if you don't count my spies. Even they're dropping off like flies. But I bet I know who killed your girl, Johnny. I bet it was Galante."

She doesn't know who Galante is, or who any of these people are really. But she is suddenly interested in the conversation in the same way children are interested in toys. She wants to know what they're talking about more than she would like a bit of weed.

"Galante?" Johnny leans up against the metal table that Shark is leaning against. His ugly face is turned towards the wall, as if contemplating something. "You know, I've been hearing a lot lately about this guy. I've got a man on the inside, Carlos Rinavra, real close to the guy now, says he's been getting braver and braver. I got another informer that's dead set on believing that Galante is the reason for all the access venom, thinks he's selling it."

"I don't give a shit whose selling it," Shark says, "venom isn't my trade. Acid is. And this kid just doesn't seem to get that you mess with a man's money you mess with the man. Now, I even set off a God damned bomb, right in the middle of the city, and the fucker didn't even get my warning. It felt-" he makes a motion right over his skull like a slice, "right over his head."

"That bomb at the retail store was you?"

Shark says, "I thought I could give him a warning not to mess with my trade. But instead he doesn't get the joke. Means I'm going to have to take drastic measures."

Johnny doesn't answer.

Shark laughs, bitter and deep. She doesn't like listening to the sound-all of her favorite laughs are high pitched and keening, "Don't look at me like that, man. I know you don't just deal drugs. Hell, you wouldn't be this fucking powerful if you just dealed drugs. I know you're big on the arms dealings. I know you have guns and shit to spare."

"What of it?" Johnny asks.

"What of it is that I want a piece of that action. We have a little mutual relationship. I want a piece of your arms deals, half off what you ask street wise. And in return, I up your drug game, and we both get what we want. Galante dies. Things go back to the way they were. Consider it a partnership. Consider it an agreement of friendship. This is business, after all."

She cannot focus on the conversation anymore; her mind is pulled three different directions. She focuses instead on the illusion of a little girl, skin pale, hair dark, her little fingers wrapped around a doll. She imagines the girl skipping around the room, reaching back for her, trying to take her along for the ride. But she doesn't want to go with the little girl. The little girl has been dead for a long time. The little girl is no longer in her life. That is how she wants it to stay, and that is how it will stay forever. She made sure of that a long time ago.

She is plagued by thoughts about the exchange between the fictional Johnny and Shark all day long, and all the next day, and all the next, until she believes that they will consume her in their domineering presence. She wants to know why they all seem so important, she wants to know why it is important that she is here.

Until the fourth day, when she skips her pills-hiding them within her sleeve and under the arch of her foot. And in the slowly clearing haze, she reaches for all the thoughts that had been denied her, all her goals and dreams and her daughter whom was killed-and behind the image of her daughter, another image, a wide, maddened smile, one she hadn't seen in-

Her breath hitches. Her back arches. She reaches for him. And the words melt from her mouth like a promise.

"Puddin'"