Fabric.

It should feel good, but it doesn't. The night air is crisp and sharp, like the air in a refrigerator, but not cold. It's good, old-fashioned Autumn weather, and it should feel good. The night air is riddled and bedazzled with stars and pollution, like some kids got together with one of those bead machines and just went at with the sky. It's dark too, and you can see the faint, peek-a-boo linings of big black clouds, heavy with built-up rain on the horizon. The dark blue of the sky is rainbowed across the skyline; faint pink on the edge, and deep ocean blue on the rise. It really is beautiful, but it's not what anybodies looking at. No body in this city ever looks at the sky anymore, and if they do, it is never to appreciate. It should be beautful, but now it isn't.
Could it be like that old rhetorical question, perhaps? If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it still make a sound? That's our city. If something is breathtakingly beautiful, or even breathtakingly ugly and no one notices, is it still so? Logic should prove that, shouldn't it?
It should, but it doesn't.
You could take a stroll through this blind-eye city and very well miss the very bowels of hell. It's not hard to spot, but unless your looking for it, the brain won't register it. The devil's workshop is snuggled down between two hulky buildings that stand like fat, moneybag gaurds over the city's latest sin. The pink fluerescent sign, blinking and out of date, isn't something that shouts 'welcome to hell', but it's only a decoy; it is only a trap. The sign says 'The Hangar Bar'.
Step inside and prepare to take cover.
You could step inside and cover your head, but nothing would fly at it, nothing would grab your ankle and drag you off to be dehumanized; no, that is not the case. The Hangar's real filth lies deeper, since you can tell that the actual interior is really not that frightening. In the very back of the bar is a stage, and upon that stage is where people become monsters in thier own flesh.
The living, breathing, dancing dead.
This stage is for the go-go boys of the bar. This is where pretty, buff boys shake thier feathers and spill money from thier non-existant underwear. Below it is where grown men are reduced to sniveling, wolfish feinds that push those pretty boys on and on with thier steady cash flow. This stage is where my brother spends his life.
My brother is a go-go boy in a gay bar, and that isn't hard to admit. I have come to terms, and I can handle it. I have to, becuase I'm a waitress in this gothic castle. I serve the wolves thier appetizers and liquer, when what they really want, what I can't give them, is the sheep on that stage. Sorry boys, you won't get my flesh and blood if I can help it.
I would say I'm my brother's keeper, but that would be a lie. He is my protector, my hero, and my best friend. I love my brother, and I will always protect him, but he will always be the more valiant knight.
The pretty little boys that work here wear masks onstage. Mere waitresses and other staff aren't required, but the dancers are. It gives those beasts downstage a little mystery, a good problem that they never have to solve. It's a good system, but it doesn't make it better.
It should, but it doesn't.
My brother and I, we leave at different times. I leave earlier, and I blow him a kiss as he's spinning his little web around the stage. I can just glance at the back and know exactly which one is him; he's the beautiful little boy that's not so little, with his chocolate-tousled hair and amethyst-feathered mask I always know. I can see his eyes through the mask, even from the other side of the room, and they're so vibrantly hazel that I think of kaleidescopes and carousels. I blow him the kiss and he returns the favor. The animals in the lot howl and whine and they think it's them that the kiss was meant for. This makes me oddly revolted.
It shouldn't, but it does.
Outside hits me like a train. It is so hot, so wildly suffocating and smoldering inside that i'm breathless with the cleanliness of the night air. I fill my lungs with polluted, smoggy, better air and feel like i'm sort-of alive for just a few seconds.
I do, but I shouldn't.
It's nearly three hours until Jude finally makes it back home. He's right on time though, becuase this is normal. I always know when he comes in, becuase I can't fall asleep unless I know he's here, safe and warm and caccooned into our little apartment, not suffocated and swamped and buried-alive somewhere between the cash flow and the city morgue. I hear him jump into the shower, but it's a goo lullabye, a soothing fall of rain on faux-porcelain and it lulls me to sleep. I got to sleep still worried, and just like clockwork, I do every night.
I shouldn't, but I do.