Birthright

Maddy was drunk. So very drunk. She tottered on a pair of ill-advised heels and stared at a yellow concrete wall. It was the side of an E-Z-mart, three blocks off the main drag in Las Vegas where the neighborhood started to get shifty. She had a bottle of booze in a brown paper bag, super classy, and a hot dog with extra relish. She was already dreading throwing it up later.

A few yards away, a bum huddled on the curb next to a phone booth. Maddy lifted her hooch in a respectful salute. “Exes, man,” she said. The bum lifted his drink in solidarity.

Five minutes with Gus had really fucked with her head and put her in full scale rebellion. Be a good girl, Maddy. Play nice. Join up with Team White. Well, what had Team White ever done for her? And since when was he on it?!

She wiped her nose and decided this spot was as good as any. Under her arm pit, Maddy held a can of spray paint. She shook it and a ball rattled in the canister. The paint went on too heavy and wet, but it wasn’t important to be anal-retentive. With three slow lines and a circular dot, the outline of a door was obvious. Maddy dropped the partial can.

“Let’s see… who shall we invite over for drinks?” She whirled on the bum, whose name was actually Sal, and gave him a bright (slightly crazed) smile. “No ideas? Hm? Well… This is Vegas. We’ll let the chips fall where they may.”

With pinched fingers, Maddy retrieved the key and its chain from her neckline. Then she closed her eyes and thought of…

Nothing. The Void. Which was no void at all, because it was full of entities, doorways, chaos. Then, before her brain could pull a Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man Maneuver, she pressed the key to the makeshift door knob. There was a click. A slow creak of hinges. An unusually charged breeze on her face, an otherworldly breeze that smelled faintly of mothballs and ozone.

And that is how Maddy left the wall, with a wide opening into Nowhere, and no clue what waited on the opposite side. She turned in the direction of home. "Later,” she told Sal around a mouthful of hot dog.

Yeah. Let the chips fall where they may.

It was the holidays, which naturally meant that money was tight. Even though she had no family in the city, Madeleine Ricks had a handful of friends she considered as good as blood and they would get decent Christmas gifts if she had to wear holes in her bargain basement tap shoes.

Over the decades, Maddy had picked up a few talents that could be milked for extra cash. She could slaughter in a karaoke contest, she could pantomime crawling into invisible boxes, and she could tap dance. What she hadn’t learned by legitimate means, she made up for in waggling fingers and wind milling arms. It was her experience that if you faked talent like a champ, people either didn’t notice you were full of shit or were too impressed by your gumption to care. So she struck out for a busy corner next to a bank and danced to a dubbed cassette recording of Billy Joel’s 1977 album The Stranger. As ‘Only the Good Die Young’ swung into the third chorus, a scuzzy looking guy lurched past and stuffed a colorful item in with her cash.

Maddy stopped dancing and watched him disappear into the crowd. With suspicious eyes, she unscrewed the cap on her re-purposed mayonnaise jar and inspected its contents to discover eight dollar bills, five quarters, a poker chip, a Hershey’s kiss foil, and an empty condom wrapper. She sighed.

“It’s like I always say. Tis the motherfucking season,” she mumbled. She plucked it out with two fingers and dropped it on the sidewalk.

Thump, thump, thump... th-thump-th-thump…th-th-th-cli-cli-cli-bop-thump…

The drummer’s fists banged on a shittily constructed bedroom door, which blocked sound about as well as a hastily tacked up sheet. Madeleine had heard things through that door, terrible things, most of them having to do with the shared bathroom a few feet away. Mikey had one hell of a case of irritable bowel syndrome. With an impatient grunt, she stuck a finger in her book to save the page and rounded on the noise. “What!?”

‘I’m going to Vons. You want anything?’

The brunette rolled her eyes. “No. Wait, yeah. Bleach. A big-ass tarp. And some duct tape.”

‘Haha, you freaking psycho. You planning on killing somebody?’

“Yes.” Maddy’s voice was pointed, an aural knife cutting through the air.

‘Leaving.’ Mikey pulled on a flannel shirt and walked the narrow hallway to the door. He slammed it and trotted down the steps. Their apartment was on the second floor of a mixed purpose building. Underneath them was a bakery, and sometimes the whole joint reeked of yeast. There were worse things.

Once she was certain her roommate was gone, Maddy opened the book again and skimmed the contents of the page. “Where was I? Bzz-bzz-bzz… bunch of fucking Latin. At least I think that’s Latin.” She turned the page and eyed an engraving of an archway set in ancient ruins. Her thumb traced the thick paper on which it had been printed. “Here we go.”

She lowered her eyes and imagined the place and time. Night. A sky full of dying stars. Green grass underfoot. A chorus of bugs. When she lifted them again, a door had appeared in the wall before her. The keeper of keys slipped a long chain from her shirt and unlocked it. The door creaked on its hinges and, in a strange inversion of physics, darkness flooded her room.

“Oh, crap! Sorry about that! Occupado. Got it.”

At twenty-four years old, Madeleine Ricks was trapped in the body of a fifteen year old. Or so it appeared to the rest of the world. At 5’5”, she was of average height, but thin as a rail with limited curvature. The results were infuriating. Carded for alcohol, carded for smokes, and the latest insult, carded for Gore Fest at the Huntridge Theater. Only this time, she had stuffed cash in the pocket of her overalls and left her ID card at home.

The employee – who had barely scratched eighteen himself – suggested she bring her mother to sign a release form.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me!” she screeched. She slapped her palms on the plexi-glass that separated the ticket salesman from the throng of fans splattered in fake blood outside. Making a scene wouldn’t get her anywhere. On a cognitive level, Maddy understood it. But she had a hell of a temper. She grabbed the paper and rolled it up lengthwise. “Do me a favor, okay? Heh… you take this release form and you gently guide it up your pimple-covered ass!”

She left the window and paced in front of the building, chewing a hangnail.

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