The Knife Sharpener (42)

42.

Lucia sat in her Honda Jazz and flicked through the recent photos on her phone.

            From her vantage point on Smith St, she had managed to get a few good pictures of the wind jackals attacking the motoboys. Action shots of the beasts in stooped run. Charging and clamouring. Slashing and ramming. Faces of the motoboys unanimously in shock under various helmets. Falling over their scooters and motorbikes as they tried to flee.

            One she particularly liked. A close zoom. A little pixilated. But charmingly. It was all movement and blur either side of her subjects. Beasts caught in grapples. Falling. Running. Contorted. The suggestion of pained howls and electricity sparkling against the void. And in its centre: a perfectly modelled still frame. The imminence of violence. Frozen in time and locked into her digital library.

Lucia applied a black and white filter. A little light contrast to deepen the dark and make the light almost impenetrably bright. A motoboy backing up towards the window of the café, hands up in defence. The wind jackal cornering him already in flight. Whipped claws extended. Amplified chest up. Just the corner of the face in the image. Mouth in screaming rictus, filled with glowing light.

            The result all but certain. But, also, not. The suspense of the next, absent frame. Did the window burst? Did the motoboy trip into the small stool behind his knees? How hard did the wind jackal hit?

A thousand mysteries if you spent enough time with it. Classically posed. Man, versus beast. Chaos of the hospitality class. Just another night. At the end of the day, how safe is a helmet?

            Lucia tilted her head and considered the photo. In all her own artistic missions, she had never quite captured this moment. Always the after effects. They lacked the volatile velocity of this. The sense of it being locked into a kind of static present. Its blurred imperfections casting doubt on technique but seeming to embody the tale. The tense cessation of dynamism, viciousness, and terror at their peak. The million microseconds that immediately predate and hold an instant’s bloodshed from its inevitability. Form is never more than an extension of content. Lucia was finally starting to understand what that meant.

She was usually so self-exacting. Made sure her KillingTime pictures had their own narratives. A broad ideological commitment to the idea that violence can be eloquent, revealing, unveiling. The desecrated remains a comment on existence, time, society, culture. The sly comment a perfect execution of literary irony. Look at her digital literacies. Her ability to contort them to glibly dismiss the bullet in the middle of a forehead. Her canvasses contained multitudes. It was why she shied away from documenting murder for murder’s own sake. She hated the Modernist position. Art had to mean something. To her or her audience.

            Especially, online. It needed to be more than a pretty picture. An inspirational quote. An appeal for love. It had to say something about her. There was no other point to the Medias. The endorphin hit of her audience was nice. But what she wanted was to portray a life she felt deeply in her very being, which didn’t quite line up with her lived reality. A life that could be validated by her legions. Brought dragging to the surface.

            This photo, though, was tricky. An unexpected conflict with her worldview that art is a deliberate considered exercise. This was an accident of timing. Lucia had done nothing to set it up according to her standards of lighting, posture, position, and morals. She might infer meaning and story from the launching wind jackal and the cowering motoboy. But it was pure interpretation. There was no deliberation. It existed because she had decided to take a few snaps. For her own enjoyment later. Maybe for her Story – although she was wary of oversharing and alerting the motoboys to her behaviour. It was art’s for art’s sake.

            Yet, there was real story in the photo. A story she had set up with her Bluetooth speakers and now told in her study of camera phone’s contents. A story with an air of mystery and impossibility.

Heard the one about the wind jackals, the motoboys, and the café?

How very Melbourne.

            She wasn’t sure if she’d share it. The black and white almost made it pretentious. Existentialist. Noir-European.

Her whole left side ached. Shoulder, hips, and breast. Scraps and bruises. A loose tooth. One of the wind jackals had collected with her firmly when that scoundrel, Chance, had alerted them to her presence. Drove right into her body, slamming her into Smith St. She could almost see the shards of crystal and broken glass on the street. Stomped syringes. Piss stains.

Stunned, but not incapacitated, Lucia managed to pull her pistol in close and release a series of shots to the stomach of the creature before it could start to shred her body with its claws. It slumped and she slipped out from under it, already shooting at the next wind jackal bearing down on her. Precise, measured shots, from a single knee, blowing out the circuit board brains of two. Then out of ammunition.

She had pulled herself up and reeled down the street. Heard the swift clunking steps behind her. Then the van sliding by, seeming for a moment to veer in her direction. Then away again. Curious about the evasion – a mistake she filed away – but also desperate to lose the wind jackals chasing her, Lucia turned sharply into an alley next to the abandoned pub from where she had originally watched the action.

The sudden change in direction caused the ill-proportioned animals to slip in their haste. She reached the end of the alley, vaulted over wooden fence, and circled straight back into the pub from a delivery entrance. A splintering bang sounded out from the alley as the wind jackals ran through the useless impediment to their charge. Then a few static soaked grunts and long bending squeal. Lucia waited in the shadows of the bar and reloaded her gun.

Another droned howl.

She heard them stumble away. Bumping and jostling the side of the building.

From the empty balcony where she had observed the chaos and taken the photo which both obsessed her and caused so much consternation, Lucia watched the wind jackals head back north. They left the strewn and ragged bodies of the motoboys spread out the front of the cafe. Disinterested now whatever rage and confusion had brought them here had dissipated in their orgy of screaming. In the absence of anything else to slaughter.

Her Jazz had been where she left it. She drove it away from Collingwood aimlessly. Pondered her next move. Pulled into a carpark in the city and now waited.

She drifted through more photos. They would have dumped the van by now. That would be the smart move. Much harder to track. Still, up close, the girl had been familiar. The jaw line, maybe.

Slid through notifications from KillingTime: inquiries about her hunt. Fans hungry for more.

She relented and posted the black and white image of the wind jackal and the motoboy. No comment. Let it speak for itself. A few hashtags: #art #laststand #stillhunting

As for the motoboys and Mr Pistol – well, let them give her an excuse to hunt the man down. Pose him and strip him and leave the remains of his empire to his horde of hungry boys.

A comment rang through almost instantly from ChaunceysChance98: good eye, trade ya?

She puzzled over this.

Then Jumjuphries wrote: OMG! WOW! Take my photo!??

Datenitenanal wrote: down? dm me hot stuff. we can make art alllll night

They continued to filter in. Buffed her up. Made it all feel a little better. Not a complete waste of time. They always got her. Held her identity close. Even when she went abstract, poseur like this.

A text message came in. It was from her current employer.

Hello, LuciasLuvs. Please call at convenience. I have someone who may be able to help you.

Lucia dwelled. Usually she didn’t work in pairs. It always ended ugly. Disputes about shares of spoils ended when she had to put them down. Greedy blighters. But, but, but, she was at a lose for the moment. Where would they have gone? Maybe her employer could provide an answer without her even having to ask. Tell her who the chick was, too. A target with a name always had a better story, she thought. All kinds of meanings in a name.

Lucia dialled the number. Grinned a little and prepped her girlie voice. There was dried gritty blood on her teeth and wind jackal cords knotted in her hair.