A Naked City

The night began when the glass broke against the wall beside my head. I watched the light fade out of the window, heard the birds go quiet with the rise of the evening breeze, heard the room go dead and heard the soft drip-drip-drip of booze on the carpet. I didn't say a word, didn't have to, just walked out the door. My city is a bustle by day and a slag heap by night; when the moon comes out so do the drifters, the faces lit by the angry red tips of the cigarettes, the stalking coyotes that skulk back from the headlights but are unafraid of the dark. The moon stripped people down to cheekbones and collarbones and ribs and ankles and knuckles and sinew, shaving off the tenderness of day, and I pulled my jacket tight across my chest to keep myself from looking so desolate. The car keys in my pocket were cannonballs, noisy and hampering, and I handed them to the man with the vape pen in exchange for his pocketknife. I sat down and sawed through the high heels I'd worn to impress God knows whom, left the black spikes glittering on the pavement and kept walking. The rest of the shoes I handed over to the rats in the alley for safekeeping. Three women sitting in the intersection of two scrappy fences offered me a smoke; I kissed the joint until I had no lipstick left, then smoked it to a stub and offered up my checkbook for them to roll another. There was a long expanse of empty street ahead; I left my clothes in the street and approached the wall with a bare blade, naked and exposed to the world in that abrasive light, and I chiseled my initials into the fence like an epitaph. The moon hardened my translucent skin like clay, and I pressed my forehead into the wood so hard that the letters left imprints in my forehead. I listened to the night city say, over and over, you are no longer made of glass.