Neon City
She slips through the rain-soaked city in fits and starts; a second spent in the open air of a green square bordered by white townhouses, the next a single footfall in the back alley between a corner shop and a boarded-up nightclub, where only the rats are there to bear witness to her fleeting presence. She walks through the underpasses, along the vibrating rails of the high line with its constant thrum. A brief moment finds her balanced atop a glowing shop sign.
No part of the city sees her for more than a second. She is there and then not. She moves so fast that the city cannot hope to keep up and ties itself in knots trying to catch the flicker of her soul on one of its neon streets.
At the bus stop, an old man swears he waits alone as the last single-decker of the night rolls around the corner. Then he hears a soft, feminine sigh from the girl perched on the bar-like seat beside him. Before he even turns his head, she is gone again. So are a handful of his memories. He rubs his tired eyes and clutches his coat tighter.
At the stage door of the rundown theatre a dozen streets away, an understudy grinds a dead cigarette into the concrete with the sole of her stiletto and imagines it to be the fingers of the female lead who never seems to fall ill. The hairs on the back of her neck lift. She looks up sharply. The shadow of a girl, but not the girl herself, flits over the entrance to the alley. The understudy steps back into the refuge of the theatre and pulls the door closed. There she remains until the show is over and the cast find her on their way out, still gripping the door handle having forgotten how to let go.
In the park that hugs the river, late enough that the lamps are lit but not so late that they have dimmed again, a lone runner loops the winding path under the lime trees. They have seen him pass beneath their boughs countless times, and in all those solitary runs he has not once shared the park with another soul. It is his time, his moment to himself after his long days in a cramped and stuffy office. Yet, through the quiet of the night and the rhythmic but faint thumping of the music in his ears, he hears the unmistakable sound of another runner’s footfalls. He turns his head to see who is invading his private time. The footsteps stop. The path behind him is a barren strip of black tarmac cutting across the grass. He removes his earphones and continues his run in silence, not realising that he has forgotten how to stop.
His memories barely touch her gnawing hunger.
Around her, the city is a haze of neon lights that shimmer and blur in the downpour. The rain is her ally - it hides her tracks, muffles her passing, so that anyone following would spend their entire lives without so much as a glimpse of their prey. The average bounty hunter would be lost in her web of false trails and overlapping paths.
Tonight, though, someone with greater skill than average is on her tail, and that makes her wary. He dogs her every step. It is with surety that she knows he is dedicated to the hunt, and so she remains always on the move. It is her nature, but usually she is the chooser of her path; she is not accustomed to moving forward in an attempt to flee. She can almost feel his breath on the back of her neck.
It is pure chance that she is aware of him following at all. She had felt the moment he crossed paths with the old man at the bus stop - through rheumy eyes that were not her own she had seen the dark shape at the back of the bus and the out-of-place top-hat pulled low over his brow. He knew she could see him too, and from that moment on she swore she would not stop moving until she had sufficiently befuddled the trail.
With every soul she passes, she adds further confusion to her past, adds noise to the otherwise quiet line of her thoughts as she hops across the boroughs of the city. She brushes up against passers-by, barely noticeable to theses late-night wanderers, and from each she takes a pocketful of their thoughts to sustain her. She leaves her mark upon their minds in exchange. Some she lets continue on their oblivious ways, others she directs to walk another route - one that will once again confuse her pursuer. She feeds little and often. She doubles back, takes long, circuitous routes that cross old footprints over and over.
The unfamiliar taste of fear creeps into her throat. All she knows is that if he catches up, she is dead, and her little game will be at an end.