Disclaimer: Only the plot is mine.
It was terribly cold and nearly dark on the last evening of the old year, and the snow was falling fast. In the bitter cold and encroaching gloom, the wind whipped through the clothing of any poor souls stranded outside, to freeze them in their very tracks.
Columbia clicks the remote once.
"Fuck the Weather Channel," she says to herself. "Goddamn depressing, that's what I say."
The American Bandstand guy has replaced the images of the storm on her forty-eight-inch screen. Dick somebody, right? What the fuck is he laughing about?
Safe and warm tonight inside her office on the thirty-fifth floor, Columbia draws her bare feet up beneath her in the large leather chair behind her executive-sizedd desk. Both pairs of her shoes are ruined or gone. A young man lifted her not-yet-out-of-the-bag Reeboks on the subway. He'd been part of a gang of performance artists, who'd laughed as they'd danced off with her running shoes, saying they could use them as cradles for the twin births in their nativity program. She had to wear the fucking Gucci's to the office-ruined those suckers in the slush, damn it. And she'd had to carry those goddamn sample cases the whole way, as though she were no more than a cmmon salesperson. She shudders and draws her feet further up beneath herself. Leave it to the Chinese Army to want to do business on New Year's fucking Eve. Well, she wasn't going to lose this account-no way. Sheffield and Buck had bids in, but her own company's blades were going to be the official knives of the Chinese Red Army, and it didn't matter to her whether she had to miss New Year's Eve to cinch the deal.
But the phone does not ring.
The fax machine is silent.
Damn it!
Click. The large-screen television in Columbia's office offers up the evening's news: family shots, parties.
Click. Couples going out for dinner and drinks. Fuck'em all.
Click. A diamond is forever.
Click. The television winks out.
She glares balefully at the phone. General Ping is over an hour late. Bastard better call-she isn't about to go through this day without closing this deal. If she doesn't sell this lot of blades, the CEO is going to hang her ass out to dry. She snortsd once. That asshole is most certainly at the company party right now, smiling that ice cold smile of his, the one he'd taught her when she'd joined the company, the smile she scares herself with in the mirror nowadays. She's vice-president in charge of overseas marketing, and she can play hardball with the toughest of guys. But tonight is going to make or break all of that.
She shudders involuntarily and hugs herself- a gesture she hasn't done in years. Her fingers trace the toned muscles of her forearms. No sign of the scars anymore-Doc did a good job. Ha! She'd paid him enough!
Click. More parties, more people laughing, dancing, singing, laughing, kissing...laughing.
Click. Silence.
Columbia doesn't dare leave the office without this deal. Her eyes drift to the sample cases, and before she can stop herself, she opens each one. Revealing row upon row of gleaming, razor-sharp cold-forged steel blades.
One more glance at her arms, scar-free now for...what was it? Four years, ever since she joined the company. Four years since she'd become as hard as she had, as cold as any of the assholes working here. No...colder. Four long years since she'd made herself bleed. Four long years since Frankenfurter was dead. She looks longingly down at the blades.
"Yeah...yeah...what the fuck," she says softly to herself. It'll take the edge of waiting for General Whatsis-Ping to call. She barks a short luagh.
"Or put the edge on," she whispers.
Slowly she draws a long, curved blade from the sample case-she cannot stop the small animal cry that escapes her lips. Holding the blade between the thumb and forefinger of her left hand, she lightly scrapes it across the fine down on the back of her forearm. Oh, yes: as sharp as she might hope. Hell, she used to do this with Frankie's razor blades!
She takes a deep breath and, eager and sure, cuts the warrior mark into her upper right arm.
Ohhhhh, yes.
The warmth of the pain spreads swiftly through the rest of her body.
Yes, yes, yes. It really is a wonderful cut: blood dancing out behind the blade and trickling down her bicep. But more truly wonderous, it now seems to Columbia that she is kneeling beside a small burning brazier with polished brass feet and intricate brass ornamentation. She can see the irons heating up to white hot. With a small whimper, she lifts her thighs to present herself for the brand when, lo! The blood from her mark stops flowing, the brazier and irons vanish, and she has only the red stained blade pressed between her fingers to remind her of this vision.
Breathing heavily, she shakes her head. Omigod, she thinks, I can't go back into that space. No no no-I've got to much going for myself in this job, can't give it up for that. Yet, even as she thinks no, she takes a second blade from the case and slashes more deeply across the mark on her arm. She cries out in joy and pain, the blood pours willingly down her arm. And where one or two drops fly from her blade onto the wall, it becomes as transparent as a veil, and she can see into the room beyond: a dungeon! Beneath bright lights, a young slave lies on a table, eyes closed, a ceremonial dagger piercing the upper thigh.
Who's that laughing with such pure delight? The creature on the table? Or herself?
What is still more wonderful, the slave jumps down from the table, and hobbles across the floor, knife in thigh and all, right up to her. But the bleeding in her arm ceases, and once again she is left alone in her darkened office.
"Gotta stop this shit," she says aloud, but she's already grabbed the third blade and, crooning softly to herself, she cuts a deep circle into the top of the vertical slash on her arm. Blood seeps from her wounds, suffusing her with a warmth she hasn't felt in years. A moan escapes her lips as she lifts her eyes to the next vision: herself, pierced with hundreds and hundreds of needles, each sparkling and dancing in the light of the now blazing brazier. Taller and taller she grows, this pierced apparition, till the needles themselves seem like stars in the sky.
Stars indeed. The bleeding has stopped, and she's looking out through the office window into the New Year's Eve night. A star falls, leaving behind it a bright streak of fire. "Someone is dying," she thinks to herself, for the woman who first collared her, the only person who had ever loved her, and who was now dead, had told her that when a star falls, a soul was leaving the physical plane.
She drags a fourth blade through her arm. Blinking, dizzy, she lifts her head to see...Frankie, her first owner, the man who'd put a collar around her neck and said "Mine."
"Sir," she calls out to this vision, her voice hoarse with tears uncried for four long years, "Please take me with you. I know you'll disappear when my arm stops bleeding. You'll vanish, like the branding irons, the slave with knife in thigh, and the girl who was pierced by the night sky itself."
Columbia quickly takes blade after blade from the case, and cuts here and there, everywhere all over her body, for she wishes so deeply to keep her lover with her. Her blood flows with a heat that is more intense than the summer sun itself, and her lover, who has never appeared so large or so beautiful, takes the still bleeding one into his arms, and makes a final cut: deep across her throat.
"You knew I always wanted to do that, didn't you love?"
She can no longer speak to answer, only shake with ecstasy. And they both fly upwards in brightness and joy far above the earth, where there is neither coldness of heart nor hunger of soul, for they are together and they are in love.
In the dawn of the morning, there lies the young woman, with pale cheeks and smiling mouth, curled up in her over-large leather chair; she bled to death on the last evening of the year; and the New Year's sun had risen and shines down through the window upon a slashed a bloodless corpse. The woman still sits, in the stiffness of death, holding the blades in her hand, many of which are still stained with her blood.
"It's because the China deal fell through," said some, "She couldn't take the pressure," said others. And in the very highest offices, they agreed, "It's a man's job after all." No one ever imagined what beautiful things she'd seen, nor into what glory she had entered with her lover, on New Year's day.