Skinner's room

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Halloween, she finds her way up into some old hotel above Geary Tenderloin’s cannibal fringe down one side the gray shells of big stores off the other. Pressing her cheek to cold glass to spy the bridge’s nearest tower — Skinner’s room is there — all lit tonight with torches and carnival bulbs.

Too far away but still it reassures her, in here with these foreigners who’ve done too much of something and one them’s making noises in the bathroom — when someone touches her, cold tinger on bare skin above the waist-band of her jeans sliding it in under her sweater and the hem of Skinner’s jacket, not the touch that makes her jump so much as the abrupt awareness of how hot she is, a greenhouse sweat, zipped up behind the unbreathing horsehide of the ancient jacket, it seams and elbows sueded pale with wear, a jungle of hardware as she swings around — D-rings, zip-pulls, five-pointed stars — her thumbs tip against the hole in the knife’s blade, opening it, locked, ready. The blades’s no longer than her little finger, shaped something like the head of a bird, its eye the hole that gives the thumb purchase. Blade and handle are brushed stainless, like the heavy clip, with its three precise machine screws, that secures it firmly to boottop, belt or wristband. Edge of serrated razor.

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