Everyone Knows How Ugly You Are

By PW Cooper

A story of fame/decadence/power/fear/beauty/glory/horror/ugliness/hate/abuse/despair/forever

• Language: English
• Publisher: PW Cooper
• Release date: May 27, 2018

PW Cooper

PW has been writing for almost 10 years. Graduated from the Ithaca College Creative Writing program in 2010, with honors.

Book preview

Everyone Knows How Ugly You Are

pw cooper

Copyright 2018 - pw cooper

All rights reserved.

The First Age

The dying day is blood smeared across the horizon, writhing red through the gloaming. Trees clutch their gnarled black hands skyward from seats of green stone and naked root. Concrete fades to earth. A long night is falling, even now as you race towards it and into it.

Are we lost?

We're not lost.

You're sure?

Sure I'm sure.

This just doesn't feel right.

It is. For Christ's sake, Kate, it's fine. Okay?

If you're sure.

He has one hand on the wheel. She sees him by the luminous dashboard, sleeves rolled back and clock-light jaundice on his pale face. A pack of cigarettes in the shirt pocket, curling dark hair low over his eyes. His smell is soft and clean and unnatural. He has the map in his head, he says, and he knows where they are. They have neither of them ever been so far from the city.

She turns the radio dial to break the silence. Static and haze, a swirl from deep deep in the mountains and wild lake-land. Emergency broadcasts and ranger's channels flicker and are gone, ghosts in the air as if of another time. She feels they could be going back, stumbling blind into the past and lost to all who knew them. This wilder world, this terrain of supernatural history. Out of the mist a vision of time before man: no glass no steel no electric in the air. Only a low fire against the chill and darkness.

We're way out there, aren't we?

Yeah.

She's so alone. So far from everything.

People like her can't hide. Eventually everyone finds you.

He lights a cigarette in the dark. The flicker of the lighter, the flare, the slow glow burn. He smiles at her. Puts his hand on her knee, other hand clutching the wheel, knuckles white.

You ready?

She nods.

You nervous?

No. She is laughing.

Good.

His hand moves up her leg. His skin feels hot on hers. He feels her, following the curve of the body. There the lacy garter, the nylon cord, the plastic buckle, the silk band. And his fingers follow.

She shivers. Don't, Mark. Focus on the road.

Yeah. Sure.

His hand is moving up her thigh, touching her there.

Her legs squeeze together. Then a shake of the head, a laugh. She pushes him away, her voice for a moment low. Don't. The road. She points ahead.

Right.

He leans back, smiling and blowing smoke out the crack of the window. Very satisfied with himself, knows he gets her worked up. She thinks it's cute, but it's annoying too. He thinks he can do anything, thinks he owns her. Sometimes she thinks so too.

They are riding into darkness.

* * *

They park amid a fleet of automobiles unattended and silent, glossy in the wild. He shuts off the engine and they are plunged into the great silence of the woodland.

Guess we're the last to arrive.

Hope we haven't missed anything.

We've got the whole weekend. There's plenty of time.

There's never enough time.

He shrugs on his jacket and puts his glasses in the pocket.

She can see the light of the house, a faint gleam through thick of the midnight forest. This is fire, something alive among savage trees. She feels entranced, summoned, and begins down the narrow and scarcely-trod path. Beyond the light she can see the glitter of the lake in moonlight, its expanse turned to shards of crystal. He follows, branches clinging at his coat as though to hold him back, woody fingers tangling in four-figure knit.

Goddamn, it's a real jungle.

It's spooky.

Anything could be out here. We'd never know it.

Not until it was too late.

They come through the brush into an immaculately tended clearing. Rust red gravel gardens in wide rock spirals, blooms like petals of stone. Granite steps down to the building on the shore. High brick walls crawling with ivy and wide windows that peer into rooms of indistinct splendor and shadowy figures. The closer they get the bigger it seems, looming and vast, a malignant growth in the wild as if erupted here from deep within the earth. From the connected boathouse there is a lone jetty extruded like a tongue to the water. The front door is the gloss black color of beetle shells, and stands ajar.

He grins and offers his arm. Shall we? Sardonic, a half-mocking. She smiles and rolls her eyes as she takes his hand.

In this way, as always, they descend.

A diaphony of sound spills from the house. Voices, loud and jovial and ragged, all concession to the world here abandoned. Faint music, something classical, she cannot recall the composer but feels as though it is one which she'd ought to know. Water licks at the age-stained dock and trees rustle their leafy skirts without, while within soft cries and faint moans whisper in the air. The chink of glass on glass, the slap of footfalls on hardwood, the creak of the door as they pull it open and are thrust into the light.

He goes inside, and she follows. For a moment she resists, iris constricted lips parted, knowing not what holds her back. Of course she goes; the tide is crawling and she cannot but be borne upon it.

Flesh and gold. Blood and money. To the chattering of voices.

It's Mark and Kate! They're here!

Well, look at this... the young starlets finally make an appearance.

Now the party can really begin.

An overwhelming array of faces greet them, dozens of voices calling out to them. And yet the crowd seems almost to melt away, it fades until there is only one person left standing in the center of the room. This is the mistress of the house, and they have eyes only for her as she turns to them with the ghost of a slow sad smile crossing her lips. Her dark nails clack against the banister, her garment is a whisper of black silk. There are lines on her face deep as the cracks of a city sidewalk and her eyes are as empty as glossy puddles in the road. She holds out her hand to them, regal and rictus. Kate kisses it; the skin against her lips is soft and without warmth.

You're here.

Welcome children.

On the balcony above a man in leather crawls, welted thighs and stiletto marks along the spine. Below a woman with milky skin and languid eyes and hair the color of wheat in sunshine, she smokes an ivory pipe on the settee while another basks between her thighs. A man, naked with a hanging belly and hairy as a bear is eating soft cheese and turning the heavy rings on his fingers. A lash a sigh a laugh a moan and the gurgle of running water.

She withdraws, and beckons them after.

Dear Kate... and my dear Mark. Come in, come in. Be comfortable. You had no trouble finding us?

Mark is nodding, he removes his jacket and looks for a hook. A young man appears to take it, his expression impassive as he bows and removes himself.

Darling Joel. I would be lost without him. Her voice is distant and clouded, as though she were already gone. She turns and laughs, but it is a laugh as weary as her smile.

I'm Sophia, she says, but of course they already knew that. They had recognized her at once.

Everyone in the world knew Sophia.

A History of Love

The immigrant girl sits in the waiting room. Her eyes trace the grains of the wood-paneled walls. They seem false; everything in this city is fake but these seem especially so. This could be a movie set, something one could reach out and push aside. All the world on wheels ready to be deconstructed at a moment's notice, at the command barked through a megaphone.

Six other girls wait. They will not look at each other. They seem each of them in a universe of their own, no sound or light or shared breath.

This is a room with two doors. The first, drab and slate gray as a tombstone, leads back outside into the cold. To hunger and chill, cockroaches in the mattress and rats in the walls. One by one the girls are sent back through it. One by one returned to anonymous misery. And the other door, polished oak, varnished and gleaming hardwood with a handle of brass like gold. What waits behind this door is opportunity. A life beyond all of this. One by one, to each girl in turn, it is denied.

And now it is her turn. The secretary calls her. Harsh angular woman behind half-moon glasses, gray-shot hair pulled back and high. Her every look a curt dismissal and a judgment.

You can go in then, the secretary says, and the immigrant girl nods – almost a bow – as she steps through the door.

They're waiting inside, beneath the great clock counting down, behind a desk like the prow of a monstrous ship. Three men, corpulent and breathing smoke, laughing as they swish amber liquid in crystal glass. They look at her, chuckle, brushing ash from their mustaches. Their suits are elegant and painstakingly tailored; they're wrapped in linen and silk like sausages, red faces full and squeezed out. They watch her approach, watch her stand there in the center of the room with her hands folded. Their laughter does not stop. It seems to the immigrant girl that they are laughing at the young woman who came before her, the one who just left the office dabbing tears from her eyes.

The immigrant girl stands perfectly still, head down, hands folded. She does not touch, she does not act, she only waits.

The man behind the desk waves at the two sitting beside the smoke-stained window glass and the laughter dies away. The man turns to the immigrant girl and sizes her up, his deep-set eyes twinkling. He brushes his graying mustache with his thumb. His smile is like that of a hunting animal,