Short For Gertrude

Chapter 1: A few minutes to midnight

It was a few minutes to midnight, and the woman with black eyes was opening an old wound. Her name was Tru, short for Gertrude, and even though she looked young and limber, her bad knee made a clacking sound with every second or third step she took. It sounded like someone snapping their fingers, and it was always too loud...

She walked close to the buildings on one side of the road, just out of range from the cones of light cast by the street lamps. She kept her eyes to herself, and she guessed at that hour there were fewer than half a dozen people in sight of her at any point. A car drove past her on the other side of the road and she managed to kill her urge to see if the driver looked at her. She had been down this road many times before, and she found her destination with her eyes half open as an extra precaution.

The man who hired her wanted to meet in a building slated for demolition, and Tru made her way there early for two reasons. The first was because she did not trust the man who wanted her help and she had to make sure it was not a trap. The second was because she hated the man who wanted her help, and she wanted to give him a good scare if she could. She had green glass contact lenses hiding her black eyes, ivory fake teeth slyly hiding her pointed ones, and added black nail polish when her nails grew that color anyway. Her strikingly pale flesh never tanned so she wore a green evening skirt that covered her legs and a black armcoat to do the same with her arms. Her raven hair sometimes moved on its own so she had it done up in braids and hit most of it beneath her favorite tan hat. Her entire outfit looked beaten up, and it was because she never bothered buying new clothes. All her money went elsewhere. Elsewhere to do good even though it came from somewhere foul.

The rotting building had all the different kinds of windows. There were boarded up windows, windows that looked like spider webs, stained windows that could have had grime, mold, or blood on them but in the dark it just looked like dirt. The bricks were not bright anymore, and the facade had enough cracks running up and down the building's body that any part could give out if the foundation shook at all. Part of the top floor looked like it collapsed on itself already, and there was a thick layer of red brick dust on the ground combined with chunks of plus and mortar and a few wide piles of broken glass that looked like puddles. Tru looked up and down the building a few times, wracking her memory for what it was used for but failed to remember. Through the broken windows she saw the first floor was stripped of furniture and completely empty. The sign out front had been ripped out from the front wall and replaced with a smaller sign that read "Slated for Demolition - Structure Unsafe." She waited a few minutes for the street to clear. That did not take long and she let out a breath of relief. She looked at the sign and smileda tired smile. There was a time when she would have gone into an unstable building without a second thought if it there was work to be done, but those days were long gone.

Tru crossed the road and sat down in the shadow of a stoop, resting her back against the foundation of the building across from the condemned one. The feeling of being off her feet was blissful. Midnight came and went, and she waited. A few more people passed her by but none looked in her direction. The moon was absent that night and fewer people still walked down the street at all. She did not doubt that if anyone looked at her at just the right moment she would scare them half to death, but it was the time of night everyone walked down the street with their eyes half open. And the rough appearance of her clothes made her look like a homeless woman. Tru had spent a few years of her life homeless. Even if someone did see her, the only thing normal people looked away from more quickly than a homeless woman was a homeless girl.

By one in the morning the street was dead quiet. More quiet than it really should have been, Tru imagined. No more cars passed through and no more footsteps coming or going. There was a trail of ants that was going around Tru's outstretched legs. Somehow bugs always knew not to come near her. Crickets and locusts stopped chirping wherever she went if she did not move along right away. That night a few cochroaches crawled out of the building she sat against. She did not bother looking at them, but she knew that sometimes when did get close to her, they stopped dead in their tracks, paused in a way that bugs rarely did, and retreated swiftly from where they had crawled out from. Tru watched the line of ants go around her legs and crawl up the stoop to her left, not getting close but not shying away either. Tru never liked bugs, but she appreciated the ones that never ran from her. Part of her wished she could ask them what they knew about her that she didn't. She rolled her head onto one shoulder and wondered how ironic it was that out of all the strange things she could do, talking to bugs was not one of them.