Trying to Return
So, there has been a lot going on in my life this summer. You have no idea how happy I am that it is turning to autumn here in Seattle. Because of all of the drama and scrambling to catch up on nearly everything, I stopped writing. Just stopped. Chapter four was the last chapter I wrote, and that was in, like, July (I actually had to go back to my Twitter feed to figure this out, because it has been such a long, dramatic summer I honestly forgot). It's not even finished, chapter four. It's just sitting there all open-ended. I actually wrote the words "more words" on the last page where I intended for the next scene to take place. That was the last thing I wrote.
But, now, my life is free and easy and I miss writing. I had to put school off for another quater and, while i am hell-bent these days on becoming a doctor, I have the time on my hands to at least look at what I've written so far in book two.
So, that's what I am doing this afternoon. And, in an effort to motivate myself as well as titilate my readers, I am going to share a little of what I have. I think I have already posted this, so if you've read it, I'm sorry. Unfortunately, I am not prepared to share anything else. Not because it is still rough, but because I want it to be a surprise. :)
So, here it is, the first scene of The Skeleton Girls:
Sometimes I still dream about sirens.The echo of them—bouncing against houses, reverberating off of sidewalks and asphalt streets—a melody on repeat. The corresponding colors, the memory of them dancing, penetrating the black city sky, play like a series of disjointed home movies on the insides of my eyelids, haunting my sleep with the weight of melancholic nostalgia. I usually wake with a cool sweat dappling my forehead, names of lost friends on my lips, the vision of blood spatter dancing in my head. But, not tonight. Tonight there will be little sleep. And the sound of sirens will be reality, police and emergency vehicles rushing to another scene of another crime in this city. The blood spatter that will stain the streets will be fresh and fragrant, the body it came from still very much warm. This city is full of homicide—gunshot wounds and ruthless beatings, initiations and executions. And I am deployed into the fray to point out how these killings happen, whether the cops should add another name in red to the long list of names filling their murder room murder boards. I am a medico-legal investigator—a woman charged with the responsibility of the dead. I’ve abandoned the world of the living and spend my days studying liver, rigor, bloating, and blood. I observe their bodies, assist in their autopsies, and inform their families of their passing. Often, I have to track down who they were. Often, there isn’t a straight answer to that question. In this city, this bloodied city, I am the conduit between the living and the dead. I wonder sometimes if my view of this city from my position in the morgue has tainted my opinion of this place. It’s new to me, still, though I’ve been here more than two years. In many ways, it remains unfamiliar—uncomfortable and unfitted to my personality. I keep waiting for it to grow on me and, as much as I like the snow, the city hangs around me daunting and heavy. Death comes every night, haunts every neighborhood, stalking with his scythe, his hood pulled tight against the cold. Tonight is no different. It’s past midnight in Chicago and the war is on.
The snow is iced over, thick and crunchy, the gathered piles on the sidewalks black with soot. My boots are knee-high and protect my feet from the chill, but it seeps in everywhere else. Between the threads in my scarf, under the hem of my coat, scratching at my jean-wrapped legs, begging to come in. I trudge off the sidewalk and into the foot-deep accumulation on a scrappy city yard. The body is another young black man. Bullets riddle his lanky physique, his blood leaking quickly through fresh wounds, melting the snow below and pooling at our feet. He is a rare one, to be pronounced dead on the scene like this. Usually a drive-by doesn’t do enough damage to merit this kind of instantaneous damage. Usually—the boys and girls, the men in hooded sweaters, the young mothers with young children—usually there is a slow progression, a reverberation that ripples through the neighborhood, because bullet wounds are stray and random and almost always miss their first or second or third mark. Victims are taken to the ER still breathing. Gang shootings, for me, usually culminate in hospital trauma rooms and chilled, over-full morgues. But tonight I get to witness the devastation in situ.I huddle down a little into my coat, pulling my shoulders in and involuntarily shivering. I can handle cold, I tell myself. It gets cold in Seattle. I can handle wet and cold and cloudy. But, fuck, this is cold. I can almost feel the flesh of my lips turning blue. Snippets of conversation, of the cops updating me on the situation, barely break the frost building on my skin.“Pretty straightforward—dealer hanging by the porch waiting for buyer, gets gunned down by rival gang.”“It’s too fuckin’ cold for this shit.”“Ain’t never too cold for killing, Joe.”“Isn’t that the truth?” I sigh, looking first to Detective Miguel Rodriguez and then to Sergeant Joseph Sawyer. “So, what do you want to do?” the sergeant asks me as he raises the collar of his coat and sniffs a red, stuffy nose.“Well, time of death isn’t really going to be an issue. He’s practically still warm,” I mutter, though I haven’t even pulled my hand from my pocket to touch him. “Oh yeah,” says Miguel, “we were on the scene pretty much as the smoke was settling.”“I’ll get the guys to take him to the morgue. If you need something from him, wallet or I.D., go ahead.” I nod toward the body. They can’t touch him until I clear them. The moment the words leave my lips, Miguel is bending over and giving the young man a shove to his side so he might frisk the body for anything of interest or importance. I step back and let the cops handle this part, though it is part of my job and something I should be doing. But, I’m tired, and freezing, and there is a willing cop before me ready and waiting to take the helm. Miguel is able to shove hard enough to flop the fresh body onto his stomach, revealing the blood soaked snow that lie beneath.“Wait!” I stop Miguel from further inspection. Pulling a set of purple nitrile gloves from my pocket, I step closer to the dead man. There is a little hole in the blood-soaked, ice-packed snow carpeting the lawn. “It wasn’t a drive-by,” I say thoughtfully, bending over and palpating the small puncture. My fingers begin to burn instantly, the thin gloves offering no barrier from the cold. A little way in, maybe the length of my pinky, I graze something hard and jagged. With a scooping motion, I pull the bullet from the hole and hold it up to Miguel and the sergeant. “Someone was standing over him?” Miguel asks, scouring the scene for evidence of another body.“I’m guessing one set of these foot tracks belongs to your killer,” I offer as I drop the bullet into a plastic bag the sergeant proffers. “Shit, man,” Miguel says quietly.“I don’t think it changes much, except maybe the guy knew our man. Came to buy a hit, pulled one instead. That makes everyone’s job a little easier, at least.” I shrug.“You got a good eye, kid,” the sergeant says with a smile. The collar of his coat droops again onto his shoulders.As I begin to answer, my phone buzzes in my pocket, the vibrations causing an ache in my cold hands. Shit. “Carlyle,” I answer, a little surly, as I lift the device to my ear.“Hey, sorry Carly, but I got another one for you,” the voice of my boss, the MLI coordinator and right-hand man to the county medical examiner, crackles over the line.“Where’s Andy?” I ask, truly annoyed. In a city this size, we should have more than one investigator on call, but budget cuts and hiring freezes plague the public offices of Chicago.“He’s got family stuff. And, before you asked, I tried Marlow, too. It’s not her night, she didn’t answer.”The three MLIs in my precinct and I am the only one available for a midnight murder. Although, it could simply be a peaceful death, natural causes in the warmth of their bed. But, I doubt it. It is too early in the morning for people to wake to find loved ones cold in bed. And, sometimes, I just know.“Text me the address,” I say shortly and hang up. He’s my boss and I should probably be more respectful, but I don’t have the patience for pleasantries. If there are consequences for my attitude, I will deal with them in the morning.Later in the morning, I mean, since it’s already past midnight.“I gotta go, guys,” I tell the cops standing over this dead body.“Another one, eh?” Joe asks, readjusting his lapels and raising the collar of his coat around his neck again.“Yeah. It’s almost surprising. The boys’ll take him to the morgue, I’ll probably see you guys there in the—in a few hours.” I turn and trudge away, their sympathetic goodbyes calling after me and hanging heavy on my shoulders.
“Goddamn it, Chicago,” I mutter to myself as I slide into the driver’s seat of the county OCME vehicle I use when I am on the clock. I turn over the engine and blast the heat, scowling down at my phone for the address of the next departed soul.
But, now, my life is free and easy and I miss writing. I had to put school off for another quater and, while i am hell-bent these days on becoming a doctor, I have the time on my hands to at least look at what I've written so far in book two.
So, that's what I am doing this afternoon. And, in an effort to motivate myself as well as titilate my readers, I am going to share a little of what I have. I think I have already posted this, so if you've read it, I'm sorry. Unfortunately, I am not prepared to share anything else. Not because it is still rough, but because I want it to be a surprise. :)
So, here it is, the first scene of The Skeleton Girls:
Sometimes I still dream about sirens.The echo of them—bouncing against houses, reverberating off of sidewalks and asphalt streets—a melody on repeat. The corresponding colors, the memory of them dancing, penetrating the black city sky, play like a series of disjointed home movies on the insides of my eyelids, haunting my sleep with the weight of melancholic nostalgia. I usually wake with a cool sweat dappling my forehead, names of lost friends on my lips, the vision of blood spatter dancing in my head. But, not tonight. Tonight there will be little sleep. And the sound of sirens will be reality, police and emergency vehicles rushing to another scene of another crime in this city. The blood spatter that will stain the streets will be fresh and fragrant, the body it came from still very much warm. This city is full of homicide—gunshot wounds and ruthless beatings, initiations and executions. And I am deployed into the fray to point out how these killings happen, whether the cops should add another name in red to the long list of names filling their murder room murder boards. I am a medico-legal investigator—a woman charged with the responsibility of the dead. I’ve abandoned the world of the living and spend my days studying liver, rigor, bloating, and blood. I observe their bodies, assist in their autopsies, and inform their families of their passing. Often, I have to track down who they were. Often, there isn’t a straight answer to that question. In this city, this bloodied city, I am the conduit between the living and the dead. I wonder sometimes if my view of this city from my position in the morgue has tainted my opinion of this place. It’s new to me, still, though I’ve been here more than two years. In many ways, it remains unfamiliar—uncomfortable and unfitted to my personality. I keep waiting for it to grow on me and, as much as I like the snow, the city hangs around me daunting and heavy. Death comes every night, haunts every neighborhood, stalking with his scythe, his hood pulled tight against the cold. Tonight is no different. It’s past midnight in Chicago and the war is on.
The snow is iced over, thick and crunchy, the gathered piles on the sidewalks black with soot. My boots are knee-high and protect my feet from the chill, but it seeps in everywhere else. Between the threads in my scarf, under the hem of my coat, scratching at my jean-wrapped legs, begging to come in. I trudge off the sidewalk and into the foot-deep accumulation on a scrappy city yard. The body is another young black man. Bullets riddle his lanky physique, his blood leaking quickly through fresh wounds, melting the snow below and pooling at our feet. He is a rare one, to be pronounced dead on the scene like this. Usually a drive-by doesn’t do enough damage to merit this kind of instantaneous damage. Usually—the boys and girls, the men in hooded sweaters, the young mothers with young children—usually there is a slow progression, a reverberation that ripples through the neighborhood, because bullet wounds are stray and random and almost always miss their first or second or third mark. Victims are taken to the ER still breathing. Gang shootings, for me, usually culminate in hospital trauma rooms and chilled, over-full morgues. But tonight I get to witness the devastation in situ.I huddle down a little into my coat, pulling my shoulders in and involuntarily shivering. I can handle cold, I tell myself. It gets cold in Seattle. I can handle wet and cold and cloudy. But, fuck, this is cold. I can almost feel the flesh of my lips turning blue. Snippets of conversation, of the cops updating me on the situation, barely break the frost building on my skin.“Pretty straightforward—dealer hanging by the porch waiting for buyer, gets gunned down by rival gang.”“It’s too fuckin’ cold for this shit.”“Ain’t never too cold for killing, Joe.”“Isn’t that the truth?” I sigh, looking first to Detective Miguel Rodriguez and then to Sergeant Joseph Sawyer. “So, what do you want to do?” the sergeant asks me as he raises the collar of his coat and sniffs a red, stuffy nose.“Well, time of death isn’t really going to be an issue. He’s practically still warm,” I mutter, though I haven’t even pulled my hand from my pocket to touch him. “Oh yeah,” says Miguel, “we were on the scene pretty much as the smoke was settling.”“I’ll get the guys to take him to the morgue. If you need something from him, wallet or I.D., go ahead.” I nod toward the body. They can’t touch him until I clear them. The moment the words leave my lips, Miguel is bending over and giving the young man a shove to his side so he might frisk the body for anything of interest or importance. I step back and let the cops handle this part, though it is part of my job and something I should be doing. But, I’m tired, and freezing, and there is a willing cop before me ready and waiting to take the helm. Miguel is able to shove hard enough to flop the fresh body onto his stomach, revealing the blood soaked snow that lie beneath.“Wait!” I stop Miguel from further inspection. Pulling a set of purple nitrile gloves from my pocket, I step closer to the dead man. There is a little hole in the blood-soaked, ice-packed snow carpeting the lawn. “It wasn’t a drive-by,” I say thoughtfully, bending over and palpating the small puncture. My fingers begin to burn instantly, the thin gloves offering no barrier from the cold. A little way in, maybe the length of my pinky, I graze something hard and jagged. With a scooping motion, I pull the bullet from the hole and hold it up to Miguel and the sergeant. “Someone was standing over him?” Miguel asks, scouring the scene for evidence of another body.“I’m guessing one set of these foot tracks belongs to your killer,” I offer as I drop the bullet into a plastic bag the sergeant proffers. “Shit, man,” Miguel says quietly.“I don’t think it changes much, except maybe the guy knew our man. Came to buy a hit, pulled one instead. That makes everyone’s job a little easier, at least.” I shrug.“You got a good eye, kid,” the sergeant says with a smile. The collar of his coat droops again onto his shoulders.As I begin to answer, my phone buzzes in my pocket, the vibrations causing an ache in my cold hands. Shit. “Carlyle,” I answer, a little surly, as I lift the device to my ear.“Hey, sorry Carly, but I got another one for you,” the voice of my boss, the MLI coordinator and right-hand man to the county medical examiner, crackles over the line.“Where’s Andy?” I ask, truly annoyed. In a city this size, we should have more than one investigator on call, but budget cuts and hiring freezes plague the public offices of Chicago.“He’s got family stuff. And, before you asked, I tried Marlow, too. It’s not her night, she didn’t answer.”The three MLIs in my precinct and I am the only one available for a midnight murder. Although, it could simply be a peaceful death, natural causes in the warmth of their bed. But, I doubt it. It is too early in the morning for people to wake to find loved ones cold in bed. And, sometimes, I just know.“Text me the address,” I say shortly and hang up. He’s my boss and I should probably be more respectful, but I don’t have the patience for pleasantries. If there are consequences for my attitude, I will deal with them in the morning.Later in the morning, I mean, since it’s already past midnight.“I gotta go, guys,” I tell the cops standing over this dead body.“Another one, eh?” Joe asks, readjusting his lapels and raising the collar of his coat around his neck again.“Yeah. It’s almost surprising. The boys’ll take him to the morgue, I’ll probably see you guys there in the—in a few hours.” I turn and trudge away, their sympathetic goodbyes calling after me and hanging heavy on my shoulders.
“Goddamn it, Chicago,” I mutter to myself as I slide into the driver’s seat of the county OCME vehicle I use when I am on the clock. I turn over the engine and blast the heat, scowling down at my phone for the address of the next departed soul.
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