Structo issue 13

Zoological Catalogue

by Nat Newman She’s restless. Feathers rustle. Restless.

Another day cooped up inside. Nothing done and nothing doing.

‘Fuck it!’ – and she’s in her room tossing clothes out of her wardrobe onto the bed.

A pair of low-slung pinstripe pants and a collared polyester paisley shirt.

Why not be outrageous? A blue wig and some heels and she’s out the door.

At the end of the street she makes a left. Start down the east end and see where you end up at 4 a.m. That’s the old route, what they always used to do.

‘Let’s do it!’ – and she’s heading east. Alone, looking crazy, feeling crazy, with a knife in her purse.

‘Are you packing?’ he used to ask her, back in the old days, before they’d go out. And if she wasn’t he’d give her one of his own knives. But she’s always packing now. Right now, she’s packing, and if you could see her walking down the street – I don’t know, maybe you can – if you could see her walking you might even say that she’s strutting.

There’s a lousy nightclub in the east end. A good place to start. Cheap drinks, loud music, lots of sweaty bodies. Lousy with pop kids popping pills. Lousy with bartender chicks with low cut tops and abnormally large breasts. Something in the air, down there, in the east end; all of these beautiful people in beautiful clothes, with perfect faces and bones so sharp you think maybe you could get sliced if you rubbed too close. Just lousy with them. She liked that word. Lousy.

‘Lousy!’ – and the bouncer stares at her but lets her go by. ‘Lousy,’ and she’s walking down the stairs into the crush. Music makes their hearts pump and their glands pulse. Sweat pools in puddles and makes the walls slimy.

She slides between lubricated dancers, feels her shirt dampen with other people’s sweat. She closes her eyes and feels her way through the heat for somewhere cooler. The beats beat her brain. I’m in bed with everyone, she thinks. The bodies writhe and she is in a pit of snakes. But they have no teeth, these snakes; they’re worms. She is a worm, too. Blind in the dirt she wraps herself around other worms. The worms are squirming together and it’s warm and dirty and dark and she has eyes in neither end of her body, and both ends are her head. The head on the oor is having 