Jude opens her hand to the panic of mad horses in her chest. The washcloth is marked with a bloody knot of red. The shape of a gouged eye. She sits naked on the edge of a clawfoot bathtub trying to regulate her breathing. She pushes from her head the irrelevant notion that her blood on a white washcloth is the single source of primary color in a strange bathroom yawning black and white around her. The only window is a black square painted over and nailed shut. She stares at the locked door across from her and counts to ten and when the panic is gone she takes stock of her situation.
She is seventeen and it’s a school night.
Her left arm is so bruised it looks like it belongs to someone else. The bruise runs so deep she is sure she can smell it, as if the blood pooling in there has gone bad. Her legs are cold to the touch. Her thighs flash and shiver with goose bumps and when she pulls her hands from her knees they leave marks slow to fade.
She wonders if it’s true that fingerprints may be dusted from human skin and makes a mental note to look that up.
Jude locked herself in this bathroom exactly two minutes thirty-seven seconds ago, not counting a few too rapid heartbeats. By her estimation she can safely remain another three minutes more. Any longer and he might get suspicious and come to the door with soft purring not quite veiled menacing voice to say alright, love?
She can’t bear that. She won’t.
She will exit this bathroom without prompting. Already it has taken her twenty-five seconds to pee and thirty-nine seconds to run water over the washcloth and bathe herself as instructed. Barely a minute but too slow and it sickens her to realize she has now been staring at the knot of blood for another minute trying to organize her thoughts into a linear progression that makes sense. She has a sudden overwhelming sense that if there were a proper window in this little boxed room she’d be scrambling with torn fingers for the roof regardless of the screaming black vertigo in her stomach that tells her she is tucked away in a corner apartment on the nineteenth floor of some downtown tower with no balcony and windows sealed shut and a sleepy doorman out front, where no one might ever think to look for her.
Nonsense.
Jude hears her father’s voice and nearly glances over her shoulder.
Silly girl. I’m not here. I’m in your head.
I know dad.
Remember the animal urges.
Jude growls. I know dad. I fucking know.
Her father often told her how some predators were comfortable only on familiar ground, never straying far from home. These were not the most skilled hunters but they were unpredictable and dangerous because they hunted on impulse. Others followed prey from one waterhole to the next. But the smartest hunters roamed far from home, where the rabbits would not recognize them. Her father always laughed, telling that joke. And he’s right. It’s far more likely she is still somewhere in the Castro where she had been pretending to shop earlier in the day. Because the man who waits for her on the other side of the bathroom door is the lazy impulse predator who hunts near to home. And it doesn’t matter. She has to first get outside, then worry about where she is.
The bathtub is long and wide as a coffin. Jude fights off the childish urge to crawl into the tub and shut her eyes and convince herself that if she can’t see him, he will not see her. Her memory splinters briefly, such that she sees the landscape inside her head in the thousand and one reflections of a shattered mirror in the sun and she has no idea how to sort the images, the sprawl of information. The first shall be last she mutters and briefly feels comforted to seize on something familiar, though she can’t remember if that line comes from the book of Matthew or Mark, or precisely what it means.
Another mental note.
The sisters would not be proud if they saw her now. Jude is in her senior year at Sacred Heart, a private Catholic school for girls so ancient the halls smelled of raw earth and, according to her father, boasts tuition fees that may only be described as obscene. Jude once calculated that taking into account her spotty attendance record and history of expulsions, her education to this point had rinsed her father to the tune of a thousand dollars per day. Jude is forever restless, bored to the edge of psychosis by the curriculum and she has a tendency to get into fights. Two years ago, in a dispute over a borrowed jacket, she hit a Brazilian girl named Noel harder than she intended, damaging the girl’s larynx. Only the fact Noel threw the first punch spared her father an expensive legal headache. To be safe Jude taught herself to be invisible ever after. She learned to move through crowds of people without a ripple. To be a ghost. She wishes now that a thousand people had noticed her today but they hadn’t. Because she was a phantom. She was a shadow, her hand slipping in and out of their pockets.
She will regret being invisible if she wakes up in the boot of an unmarked car tomorrow. Jude lives with her parents in Pacific Heights, seventeen blocks from school. And though she leaves the house promptly at seven each morning, she so rarely arrives at school it’s possible no one would notice if she disappeared for a week. She still wears the uniform most days, because it helps her mother not get agitated. When her mother becomes agitated she tends to go overboard with her medication, a generous cocktail of amphetamines benzos and painkillers that throw her into episodes of such extreme paranoia she once nailed shut the door to her bedroom and burrowed into her closet with a hammer and small axe trying to dig a tunnel to a neighboring room that existed only in her head.
Jude wears the uniform because it soothes her mother. The sight of Jude in the familiar gives her mother the temporary illusion that the inside of her head is in order. And because Jude’s mother is a near bottomless source of guilt for her, she wears the uniform.
She reckons she’d wear it anyway, because it’s endlessly useful. By the time she entered middle school she discovered that if she moved her hips just so and let the tiny blue and black skirt flutter at her thighs, men and boys in her orbit became hushed and compliant. If she crossed her legs and sneezed the man nearest her trembled and handed her a tissue. When she crouched on the sidewalk to dig through her purse with her knees pressed together and hair blowing in her mouth and her butt just touching the heels of her black mary janes, even the stoned hustlers and street artists stopped to ask if she was lost. If she twisted her white shirttails into a bow that exposed an inch of bare belly a college boy would buy her a coffee. And when she tugged her socks up over her knees, cab drivers offered her cigarettes and took her wherever she wanted to go.
Jude would give anything to be in the back of a yellow cab right now. She would ask the driver to take her to the one place that felt like church to her. The ruined baths just up the hill from Ocean Beach. She would close her eyes as they sailed through the Sunset and she’d thank the god she didn’t recognize that she wasn’t on her feet. Because she is sore. Every muscle aches to the bone and she is raw inside. The soft pink hidden flesh of what her mother perversely refers to as her special prize feels like it has been flayed with a shard of glass. Again she looks at the washcloth, the smear of red against white.
This is not menstrual blood.
Jude has the altered internal clock of a long distance runner and rarely suffers a regular period. She runs up to seventy miles a week through the rain and mist in the Presidio. She trains with weights and knives and works out every other day with a krav maga master class. This regimen plus the birth control pills and the amphetamines she skims from her mother’s nest have for the most part disappeared her cycle.
This is the blood of trauma in her hand and now it strikes her that she will never forgive herself if she leaves even a drop of it behind.
Jude pushes herself up from the edge of the tub and crosses still dazed half wobbling to the sink where she cranks on the hot water. She rinses the cloth with liquid soap and scrubs it with her fingernails until the water runs clear, and not once does she so much as glance at herself in the mirror. Not because she dislikes her body.
The opposite, rather. Jude is perfectly happy with the body the big machine dropped her into at birth. Her body is like a knife.
Most of the girls her age, the ones she bothers to talk to, suffer rather brutal body image issues and eating disorders that haunt and consume them. Jude never knows what to say to these girls, though she tries to feel what they feel as it might be a useful emotion or psychosis to add to the toolbox. Her own body is the product of regimented physical conditioning and the genetic gift of a Thai Croat mother and black Irish Jewish father speckled with Japanese blood. Her body is long and lean with fine yellow skin and small breasts with large brown nipples that paralyze men and boys without fail. Her stomach is flat and rock hard but never quite the washboard she covets. Thousands of pushups and pullups and thousands more have brought shadowy definition to her arms and shoulders. And though she considers her ass to be on the smallish side it is tight and curved and fits perfectly in the palm of her father’s hand, or so it did when she was six and shaped like a wisp of smoke and he was still unafraid to touch and pet and wrestle with her.
Jude’s father never touches her inappropriately. Never stares at her blossoming body. But he terrorizes her often. When she was five and not yet a confident swimmer her father tossed her into the swimming pool and stood watching from the pool’s edge as she panicked and thrashed and finally went under. Her father allowed her to drown then revived her. He brought her back and left her with two cracked ribs and Jude was never sure if his purpose was to teach her not to fear death or to remind her that he had the power of life over her. The power of death, the shadow.
Jude decided it was all of the above and became wary of him. But aside from offering advice with math and soccer, her father left her alone until she was eleven, when he drove her up the coast and made her hike through the woods in the dark until they reached the beach. He armed her with a knife and compass and left her there, telling her she had one hour to find her way back to the highway. He promised that if it took her longer than an hour, the car would not be there.
Jude believed him.
Not long after her twelfth birthday he began teaching her to be a pickpocket.
He allowed her to practice on him for exactly one day in the relatively intimate space of his closet at home before taking her for a ride on BART during the afternoon commute to try the real thing. He selected easy targets for her to start, then ever more challenging ones. The worst of these had been a burly sweating man in a rumpled suit and tie with needle bright eyes who would not stand still but kept scratching at his arms and swiveling his head left and right. Jude had failed to come away with even a pack of cigarettes but neither had she been caught with her hand in the sweaty man’s pocket. Her father smiled and said nothing when she returned to her place by his side, and she understood later the man had been a junkie day trader of some kind, chemically altered and overly paranoid and therefore not a suitable mark. The lesson of the day had been to choose your prey with care.
Her father had never once touched her anywhere he ought not to. But when she was thirteen Jude had been fascinated to discover how the sudden proximity of her body made him uncomfortable. She first assumed this had to do with her resemblance to her mother and the natural spin of echoes and nostalgia and involuntary physical response.
Then she read Nabokov and she understood.
Ever since she watches herself through her father’s eyes. Jude looks at her her body through his eyes and through the eyes of the men who work for him, through the eyes of men on the street and men she has yet to meet. At night in her room at home she stares at herself for hours, studying her body for its strengths and weaknesses to see precisely what these men see. To better grasp the rush of blood the lust they suffer when confronted with her flesh, so that she might use their suffering for her own purposes. Jude kneels on the floor before the floor length mirror to apply her makeup and to meditate and breathe and to escape her mind’s eye. To conjure the secret most violent thoughts of these men, staring at herself until she goes dizzy until her image wavers and she feels she might fall into the mirror and drown.
But this isn’t the mirror in her bedroom where she is safe to sink and spin dizzy below the surface. Jude cannot afford to allow this image of herself naked and bruised in a strange bathroom to make her feel small or vulnerable because when her four minutes expire she is going to kill the man in the next room, and she must not feel small. Jude must kill the man not because he so ravaged her with his hands and mouth and vile sex toys that she bled. Not because he abruptly shoved her from the bed and told her in a soft cold voice that her pussy stank and to go wash herself. She needs to kill him because he is not finished with her.
Hazy and drugged she had seen the trophies coming through the door. The pink mp3 sony walkman on the mantle, the rollerblades in the corner. The red cowboy boots on an end table, the baseball glove in a box, the tiny black Emily the strange T-shirt nailed to a wall. And there was a faint smell maggots and rotten meat in his kitchen.
Time is slipping from her. Jude calculates that one minute thirty remain before he knocks at the door. The washcloth is white again. Jude turns away from the sink and gathers the remains of her clothes. The blue and black skirt barely larger than a handkerchief. The thin white tank top. She had not worn a bra today. Jude is a small B cup at best and rarely wore anything but a snug sports bra that felt like a ballistic vest but it was sunny today and her small breasts were useful when hunting. It was a decision she made breezily in the rosy light of her room roughly thirteen hours ago, half a day that now felt like a lifetime stuck in amber. And while she remembers being satisfied this by how snug the cotton tank fit her, pleased by the slight but just there impression of her nipples, she is not so thrilled about it now. And as she pulls the top over her head she can smell the man’s skin. Jude has no gag reflex but it annoys her nonetheless. Never mind. She promises herself she will burn these clothes in her father’s ceramic fireplace next to the swimming pool. She will smoke one of her father’s cigars and drink some of his best champagne and have a midnight swim to bleach the man’s smell from her skin. But there’s work to be done between now and the and she shrugs the smell away from her mind and concentrates on the task of fastening her skirt at her hips.
Jude wishes bitterly she were wearing her shoes. She is more vulnerable when barefoot, which she reckons qualifies as irony. She hazily remembers kicking off her shoes upon entering the apartment because she was aware that men liked her best when she appeared small. A vaguely defined business associate of her father’s had once seized her and lifted her up without warning in the kitchen when she was thirteen, his hands gripping her firmly and touching more of her tiny budding breasts than she liked, and he remarked after that it was like holding a doll.
His face had flushed slightly as he released her.
She remembers she left her damp socks on the radiator by the window and by that point she had been truly dizzy, the room warped and turned sideways, the building tipping on an axis that wasn’t there. Jude remembers the man had removed her underwear without her help and without asking if she minded, after she sat down or rather collapsed in a leather armchair. He had pulled the pale pink boy shorts over her thighs and down with care, not ripping them as she expected but handling them as if they were a captured butterfly he was reluctant to crush.
Jude feels it inaccurate to call that moment a memory because she watches it happen now from a faraway overhead camera angle, as if she had briefly vacated her body and climbed to higher safer ground. She has no idea what he did with her shorts after that. He may have stuffed them into his pocket for luck or calmly eaten them.
Jude had seen but not touched her white oxford button up shirt on her way to the bathroom. She imagines it must still be there crushed at the base of a wall like rejected flowers, splashed with blood and one sleeve torn from the body. Unless the man has added it to his trophies. Never mind. She will collect it after she is done with him and burn it with the rest.
The blood puzzles her because she still doesn’t remember spilling it.
Now she glimpses another wide angle bird’s eye shot of herself on top of him, rising and falling in slow motion and underwater light and remotely aware that he was inside her and she saw that her nose was bleeding not because he hit her but because some critical piece of wiring had come untethered in her head. Jude shoots a brief glance at the mirror to scowl at herself. She does not care for the image of herself riding the man but she’s aware she had taken the top for reasons of her own. Jude had reasoned through the haze that if the man were going to be inside her he would not fuck her.
She would fuck him.
The dissociative neural pathways and foreign splintered memories that came with it were the result of an unknown drug in a cup of hot chocolate, one she had lifted to her own lips. And she had been aware the drink was roofied, she had seen the man produce a small plastic envelope and dump pale powder crystals into the cup. These broken memories and troubling out of body images of herself were never intended for her because the hot chocolate had not been hers. She had taken the cup in place of another and she had heard her father’s voice telling her not to be afraid as she drank.
Jude had spent the day hunting while pretending to window shop in the Castro. The easiest pockets to pick were those belonging to tourists and by far the easiest of these were the gay men in their fifties who came to San Francisco on vacation from Atlanta or Denver or anywhere that same sex culture was kept hidden from view. These men were be soft and unaware with pink faces and eyes milky behind rose lenses. They were either very thin or shaped like pears and wore khakis or jeans that were too tight with new sneakers, and their T-shirts were always tucked in. They traveled in couples, one of them carrying a city guide, the other an umbrella. They actually wore those velcro travel wallets around their necks. They might as well dangle a sign from their exposed throats saying oh yes please rob me. They walked around the Castro with eyes so wide they might have been exploring the far side of the moon and they were such soft targets that Jude made a game of it, trailing a mark for an extra block after she hit them to ghost past and slip their wallet or sunglasses back into their khaki pockets.
It had been raining today but warm and the streets smelled of urine. And even though animal and human prey alike tend to huddle together and become more wary of others in adverse weather, and their pockets that much harder to reach, Jude had become bored of her shadow practice and resolved to work the Financial District the next day, where the men deserved to have their pockets emptied and where it was infinitely more difficult for her to be a shadow, especially wearing the uniform.
Jude had first seen the man as she entered a coffeehouse called Last Drop, a long narrow place with a sunny plastic art deco meets the Jetsons feel, with Japanese nudes on the walls and funky details like barber’s chairs. The man was in a booth with two white girls. Jude scanned them as she crossed the room. The man had blonde hair that just fell in his eyes. Long nose and a crescent scar on one cheek, narrow red mouth. He was thin and looked British, but that might have been a false echo of his clothes, a mint green teddy boy suit and boots with pointed toes.
His hands flashed silver as he made a point and Jude saw he wore rings on both thumbs. He sat in the corner with his back to the wall. He kept his hands and mouth at a safe distance as if he posed no threat, then lunged forward as he said something that made the girls laugh and Jude saw his thin lips pull back for a heartbeat to show his teeth sharp and white as he palmed and disappeared the plastic envelope and flicked the crystals into the blonde girl’s coffee cup while she laughed and wiped tears from her eyes.
The girls were blind mice. They didn’t notice anything.
Jude marked them in the space of one breath as nineteen or twenty. They were second year students at the art institute or New College. The sort of girls who lived in a flat with three housemates in the Haight. They came to California after boarding school in Connecticut, where they had gone into the city on weekends and listened to Velvet Underground and the Cure in their rooms. They had likely done their share of ecstasy and ketamine and experimented with being bisexual, but both were clearly straight. The one with the tainted cup was pale and blonde with fragile cheekbones and black eyeshadow. Sylvia Plath gone heroin chic. The other one was sort of rich girl punk with a pierced nose and shocked blue hair and they were both perfect targets for the man in the mint green suit because they thought of themselves as streetwise but were not. They were rabbits in a dark wood, and one or both of them would be hanging upside down with her skin removed before morning.
Animal urges, Jude thought. She would be the thrush.
Jude made her decision without much deliberation. She had made the error of hunting the hunter on impulse because while the man offended her deeply and fascinated her just a tiny bit, the notion of sparing either of these girls a blood soaked washcloth had been but an afterthought. Jude had made the choice because she was bored. She despised a bully on sight and she stood a better chance against him than they did it would please her to remove him from the board.
And because she thought it would be interesting, .
She went to the bar and ordered a cappuccino, walking with the shadow of a limp. The man wouldn’t bite if she was too obvious. It was just a sore ankle, not even wrapped. She twisted it playing soccer. She fell off her skateboard. She paid for her drink and dropped a dollar in the tip jar for luck, watching the girls’ table out of the corner of her eye to be sure Sylvia didn’t yet drink from her tainted cup. Jude hummed, waiting for her own drink. When it arrived, she turned and limped across the café, eyes skating left and right as if looking for just the right table. She held the cup to her face and blew on it with her lips curved into a bow, circling close to the table. Her one fear was that he had already made his choice and would not want to deviate.
But she could push him.
Jude stopped a dozen feet from their table and winced. She crouched on one knee, her cup balanced precariously, and while she examined the sore ankle her skirt slipped up her thigh just enough to flash the pink boy shorts. Two heartbeats and the man called her over to the table and insisted she join them.
The college girls regarded her warily for a beat, then the one with blue hair shrugged and slid over, and Jude sat down among them. She looked across the table at Sylvia and gave her a shy nervous nod hello, as if she were unused to being with such worldly higher animals, then turned her attention to the man. Jude looked first into the crosshairs of his eyes, and she had to admit the man had something, a sort of hypnotic pull. His eyes were a shattering blue, the ghost of a smile in the crow’s feet on either side, and now she saw his left eye was graced with a splash of brown and he was staring at her without blinking, staring into her as if he could stop her breathing. Jude realized what he was doing, and she made a note of it. He was staring at her as if he loved her, as if he had lost her in the wilderness of a past life and only just found her again, and she imagined he had left a few bodies behind him in shreds with that look. She blushed and smiled and scorched Sylvia with a telepathic smoke signal saying that if she ever laid eyes on her again, her soul would no longer belong to her, but to Jude.
Because she had made the man deviate.
Jude took two sips from her cup then placed it on the table next to Sylvia’s cup so the two drinks sat side by side like twins. Then it was a simple matter of redirecting the girl’s attention with a trivia question about Elvis Costello, one that had no answer, then reaching for Sylvia’s cup and drinking from it, and making sure the man noticed.
And now she stands in his bathroom seven hours later, exhausted and marking time by counting her heartbeats and wondering what she might use as a weapon while blood trickles down her thighs. Jude is bleeding still. Maybe it is her period. Her cycle is altered and irregular and almost nonexistent, but it does come around eventually. She finds herself hoping bleakly the blood is menstrual after all. The other choice being the man had ruptured something inside her and she is hemorrhaging.
Jude reckons she has sixty seconds to act. Less than a minute before he taps on the door and purrs in that high nasal voice are you okay love. Even in her head filtered by her own voice it’s unbearable. Nothing under the sink. Nothing in the narrow closet but a few ratty towels and spare toilet paper. The medicine cabinet contains only the most essential toiletries. Mouthwash and hair gel, blue toothbrush in a cup, sliver of soap. Jude reaches for the mouthwash, rinses her mouth and spits.
She looks left and right, listening to the metronome of her heart. This building was constructed in the 1920’s, prior to the innovation of plastic. The towel racks are slim pieces of iron bolted to the wall. She gives one a tug and imagines she could pry it loose without tools if she were locked in here all night. The cover of the toilet tank is an option, but would be neither silent nor graceful, and she needs to surprise him. Jude turns back to the bathtub, her thoughts circling the concept of surprise.
She no longer knows where the man is. He might still be lounging among the soiled sheets feeling pleased with himself. He might be anywhere in the dark flat and if he is in the hall or the kitchen upon the moment she exits the bathroom, the advantage will briefly belong to him. Jude will call his name. She will summon him into her space when she’s ready. Now her eyes settle on a small round button set into the wall above the bathtub and Jude is glad for the days before plastic because that button can only be the end of a clothesline, one that she prays is not rotten. She climbs into the tub and plucks the button from the wall. The blood surges in her for the clothesline is a sturdy nylon cord five feet long, just under the length of her wingspan.
Jude pulls the line until she reaches its end. Takes a breath and gathers herself, then yanks the line from the wall in a single violent twisting motion that burns both hands and showers her with a brief cloud of plaster and dust. Jude breathes and listens. The man may have heard that button pop from the wall. She needs to be faster than him, she needs to act at the speed of thought. The speed of animal urges. Jude prays for her thoughts to fly, to race ahead of her body. She prays for her mind to let go of her body. She will need to draw his eye when she calls him to the bathroom and without agonizing over it she changes her mind about leaving her blood behind for now. She will wipe it down after she finishes with him.
Jude presses one hand to her bloody thigh, then slaps the wall.
Now her handprint is the source of primary color in the room and as she steps from the tub she hears not her father’s voice in her head but her own, making a list of everything in the apartment she knows or suspects she might have touched, everything that my need to be scrubbed for prints and hairs and DNA. Jude glances down and sees that she has already twisted the cord around one fist, now the other. She coils the two ends round and round between her jagged fists until she has a suitable garrote.
Jude unlocks the door. She opens it with great care, as if she were peeling back the sky and expected a fury of angels to flood through the narrowest crack of sunlight. She calls the man by his name. The last time she will say it aloud. His name dies with him. She calls for help and steps aside. Jude waits calm and cool not breathing. She wait for the man to come into her shadow where she will disappear him from the sun.
end.
*deception of the thrush originally appeared in the anthology San Francisco Noir, from Akashic Books.
it has evolved since then as the first chapter of the Jude Evers origin story.
in the coming months excerpts of the graphic novel version of Thrush will appear here on the velvet stack, plus new chapters tracking Jude from the moment she disposes of the serial killer’s body and vanishes from San Francisco, following her time on the road as she skates through the criminal underground as bodyguard, fixer, contract killer and freelance razor girl, her military exploits, assorted run-ins with Interpol, scotland yard, and mossad then tracing the unlikely string of actions that bring her to the Hotel Peacock in Denver, where she meets an unlucky disgraced ex-cop named Phineas Poe and relieves him of his kidney.
if you’d like to follow Jude on her travels and collect a signed first edition of the graphic novel already in the works by the artist known in the cloud as @666slaughterhouse, please consider becoming a paid subscriber or founding member of the velvet stack.