"Can I get a smoke?" She called up to them. They tossed her the quarter of a cigarette and she puffed at it with her elastic, toothless lips and horked up a gob of dark phlegm. She had sores about the mouth, and her tongue was covered with a thick white thrush. She smoked some more and coughed and coughed. "Caught the pox," she said, thumping lightly at her chest, "just getting over it." She squinted into the setting sun. "Bad pox. Down in Anchor. Damn nuisance Red Devils burnt the place up. Saw them in Candlestick. They fly their brooms openly over the city. Makes it bad for us all. Better when the burghers are complacent." The cigarette had burned down to its roach and she pinched it in her yellow, grotty claws and whiffed at it from a distance. "They're bringing the whole thing down. With the cities being lost to terrors of witches the roads are full of bandits, the forests full of cannibals. They're giving the game away." "They live in the dreams, too," she said, pointing a fingernail filled thick with black at her forehead. "They enter my dreams at night. Searching for something." Warm droplets landed on her from above and she looked up and saw two hairy pussies pissing down at her. "Pissing on me?" She backed up hastily, tripping over herself, "you pissing on me, you little shits?" Heathcliff and Mistrial turned back and looked down at her with wide cat eyes. "Piss on an old woman?" She coughed and surveyed her wet, stinking cloak. Another cigarette landed in the dirt at her feet. A fresh one. She shakily reached down for it. Picked it up. Sniffed it. Raised it up to them in gratitude. "Thank you, girls," she said, and kissed it, sipped some of their piss from her wrinkly old hands in gratitude. "Thank you!" Angels, she thought to herself. Absolute angels. "Don't go eating any more children, Seka!" They called after her. She turned back, and her eyes were occluded forms, white with cateracts, set dead on them. "Then don't give me any," she said, and her voice was low and grave. Then she laughed like a chainsaw and teetered off vigorously, but nowhere fast, into the forests. That night they told their Sekasperience to Kate and Kate, seated at the head of the table in the kitchen, told them one day that the world went through phases, and, with the reconaissance of the Red Devils, now was a dark time. That one day she herself might not be recognizable to them, but would take on an evil form and live among the shadows just as she had taken on a beautiful form now and lived with them in the light. A mostly good form, she corrected, after they eyed her dubiously. Mostly good, anyhow. Some time after, Endor was popping a squat in the upstairs bathroom, caught between urgently needing to go but producing nothing because of some toxic microdosing Victory and Valorie had talked her into taking, and the drugs they preferred had an effective dose narrowly similar to its toxic dosage so this sensation was probably just some organ inflamed by toxins pressing on her bladder, but, anyhow, she was looking out the window at the lovely patterns of nausea warping her field of vision when she saw a dark figure in the trees with inhuman, hollow eyes. She waved timidly to the apparition, uncertain if were real or hallucinated, but feeling it were due some decorum either way. The crimson woman receded into the dark layers of vines and branch and holly and Endor slotted shut the irregular old window which stuck on its painted edges at intervals on the way down. She perched back up on the toilet with her feet up on the seat and squatted there praying and straining and put the encounter with the creep in the tree branches out of mind.
