Old Nichol Street Rookery, named after the devil himself, scoffed its way between High Street and Spitalfeilds. The old Victorian slum was patched like a quilt, stitched together by the neoteric architecture. Loose threads were nothing more than dilapidated ruins, threatening to unravel tedious work. Youthful apartments stood across from aged gents, whose teeth and bones were rotten solid. Only one commercial venue stood, whose sole purpose was to entertain. But this place was perpetually empty, for its retched past clung to it like Indian food to an apartment. The only inhabitants emerged to sniff the moon.

A knock crippled the dead of night. Its beaten rapport was absorbed into the wooden entry, alerting the shadows of a customer. The door croaked wide, they were open for business. In walked a man of large proportions who hid under an ink charged frock and a cockney accent. He slipped some bills onto the counter and chose a door. The night was just commencing.

The knob turned and revealed a broken girl. Her fragile limbs scattered across the bed like broken glass, frigid and transparent. Her cropped hair was whisked to the side, framing her jaw in the most appeasing way. Her milky irises swam around her aqueous as if it were the sea itself. Her chest moved up and down deeply, trying to extract every air molecule out of the world. She was exactly what he desired.

Tonight was the best night for doing, for there were no stars, no moon. The darkness would cover everything up. It would erase them like ghosts. This was their séance. He waltzed to her, savoring the quite before the storm. His fingers grasped her lace-covered hips and tore them off, like the dress on a flimsy paper doll.

He went to work, trying to get under her skin to pry her open, getting into the hot red heat of her. He was exploring a part of her no one else had ever dared to touch. He was ablaze, paying no attention to the jostling corpse under him. His lust surmounted to a barbaric cry, which matched her resigned groans. He was done.

She was left pressed into the chaise like an insect into amber, whole but dead. Semen blotted the covers like a mulberry tree that stains the palms of children who crush its berries. Red and raw, her wounds were displayed on her sleeves where her heart should have been. Before abandoning the room, he turned, giving her one last thing. A look that said, “you already bleed every month anyway; more blood will change nothing.”

The night bled through and the exhausted theatre across the street watched the ongoing pain. Reality was its movie.