From: giovanne@ccrs.emr.ca (Mme. de la Declasse)
Subject: Bikersluts, Chapter 1
Organization: Ugly Twisted Nastiness
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 1993 20:18:15 GMT


Curved Love


It was the pewter-grey eyes which stopped her first, like cold
rocks on a slate, flashing from the wet darkness of the porte
cochere. Then it was the body. Lithe and animal, unkempt and
wrapped in rags which looked to her like the large burlap potato
sacks that they used to cover the stable floor.

Then with the body in frame, in an instant through the window, the
cold rocks became polished stones visible under the surface of a
quickly flowing stream. During that momentary vision which
represented to her such desperate and unconditional immediacy, she
begged her father to stop and the car rolled to a gentle standstill
on the shoulder of the road.

The memory was vivid. It was 1968, the year the student riots
swayed over France, the year before de Gaulle finally resigned, the
year of her 12th birthday and puberty. And now, more than twenty
years later she was looking over the banks of the Seine from the
balcony of her Paris apartment remembering that unlikely night
which had carved an unbreakable friendship from its rank air.

Shivering and soaked, Denise's eyes darted through the interior of
the car with the intensity of the deranged. Examining, sucking in
details, reconfirming, glancing again. Back and forth in erratic
fever, like balls bouncing between walls down an endless corridor.
Her hair, long and dark, clung to her face and disappeared under
the burlap bags. And her teeth, brilliantly formed alabaster
squares, flashed occasionally between drawn back lips set into a
thin face whose pallor mirrored the cold and the hunger, the wet
nights alone and the life of a girl in the streets of Paris, 1968.

Denise was fourteen when she moved in and it had taken her two
decades to wear off just the first layer of grim reality that two
years on the street had heaped upon her. Like her eyes, flecked now
with green, the paranoia, the mistrust, the inclination to draw
into herself and the deadly vulnerability punctuated her mind with
an unstable combination of pillars to support its twisted
immensity. She had grown up beautiful. Tall and slender, her hair
contrasted harshly with the paleness of her skin for an effect
which suggested excitement somehow, and a thinly detectable aura of
tamelessness, secrecy and unfortunately, dementia.

Monique had survived her youth without bearing the teeth-marks of
uncertainty that had bitten into Denise. She retreated from the
balcony now, and turned herself on her toes in front of the cheval
glass which decorated her bedroom along with the dark velvet
tapestries hanging from the walls, the small escritoires which
stood in every corner and the large four-poster bed that climbed
all the way to the ceiling in gnarled oak.
She had grown even more beautiful than Denise, and without the
bitter past to taint her vision or her dreams. She had looked out
onto a world beyond the demesne that had surrounded the mansion of
her youth with the eyes of a child, wide with expectation. As an
inevitable result, her innocence and innate disbelief of the innate
cruelty outside ran her like a river into pain. Ran her like
fingers over the curves of a body into love and ran her like a
train into a daughter.

-- 
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Brought to you by the Shepherds of Grace and Danger, Ottawa, Canada.

           "We will breach no sheep before their time."