Free Fist of the Spider Woman by Amber Dawn

them. Just yuppie squares. Comatose, clean professionals. Squash-playing, slacks-wearing, martini-drinking Lesbian Zombies. Half dead, desperate for a rush, and they don’t even know it.
    My feet ache. The line moves at a pretty good clip so I decide it’s all right to have a seat on the stoop, just hunker down and stretch out. When I was real young I used to think I could bounce in and out of Nice Lesbian Bars, city to city, find womanly understanding, Lady Love, shelter. One stop shopping. Mama. Took me a while to stop looking for it, hoping. I wonder at that strange phenomenon all across North America: universally bad music, overpriced drinks, mean women, and hostile security. Top four reasons why I take my trade to the Nice Lesbian Bars and my party to the dirty, run-down punk bars. Sick truth is, they sense the sham. Forensic evidence of my rage, my violent scorn for every last one of them piles up unstoppable, and it draws the whiny victims forward, moths to the flame.
    Someone has to fall for it. Someone always does. Someone just has to want me.
    I see one giving me the eye. She’s about 5'7", late twenties, trendy blonde-streaked hair, bone-crunchingly thin with a long nose and a small off-centre mouth. She’s wearing some straight pleather clubwear, cream-coloured jacket, low-slung pants, heeled sandals. She tucks her car keys in her purse, laughs nervously with her ugly friends, and looks over her shoulder at me.
    I give her the spine-tingling, lonely stare-down. Hold her attention for a long minute, then look away. Disdain.
    I got a nose for the masochistic type. The rich masochistic type. Perfect for hustlers like me. They usually got a scattered look about them. The kind of woman that only fucks when she’s loaded and has secret obsessions even her friends don’t know about. An emotional junkie. Loves chaos and conflict ’cause it screws up the chronic order and control she exerts on all material objects in her path. She’ll do anything to feed her infinite insecurity, her deeply seated psychic wounds. Daddy . The less available you are, the more she’ll want you. Especially a no-good, mercenary predator like myself.
    When I look back, Blondie’s gaping like a trout. All hands dying on deck. I give her a meaningful stare, the shrugging smile.
    Her part of the line moves forward. They’re the next to be let in.
    She says to her friends, “I forgot something in the car. I’ll meet you inside, promise.” She bites her lip, fumbles with the keys again and walks this way, peering through her bangs at me. Her friends gesture, make drunken noises, but they turn to go in.
    When the door swings open, loud dance music pumps out onto the street all around us. Quasimodo, the braless wonder, looks at me and shakes her head.
    Blondie drags her left shoe across the sidewalk a little bit with each step. I hate that. She slows as she nears me, eyes trained on the ground, perfectly unsure. Perfect. I will her to look up when she’s closing in and she does. Bingo. My best sad face, my very best down-trodden, hard-on-my–luck expression, complete with slight pouting of the lower lip. Eyes clear, with a slight glimmer of hope.
    Needless to say it works like lube in a tight hole. She says, “Hi,” and mentions the imaginary thing she forgot in the car. I offer to walk her, “beautiful lady alone in the night,” and so on. I light a cigarette, give it to her. She pretends to smoke it. I ask about the city we’re in, first time passing through, leaving tomorrow, and my only friend has stood me up. Left me stranded.
    This causes her concern. “Where will you sleep?”
    â€œOh, maybe a park or something. Know any good ones?” I say casually, and flatter her into thinking she might be street savvy enough to know what makes a place good to sleep in or not. Her pulse thrums in her tiny neck. I want to snap it. Her skin is pale, dry. She’s