Distorture - Excerpt

Knives For A Narcoleptic-

He'd love to stay for the view but break-time is over. It's later than Schwinn, a precocious degenerate on NA training wheels, wants to hang without working on his four track. Output is key, Schwinn keeps telling Ratboy and Ditch. All day, Rat sidesteps talk of music and the future, changing the subject to The Ritual: Germans tied to trees in the Tenderloin District, strippers gone wet-eyed during the sacrament of blood-book printing. Singers whose stomachs quake under criss-crossed dripping red arcs, modifying the cutter's strokes with shrieks. By the time Schwinn remembers the real subject, Rat is half-way down the street on some cryptic errand-metal case in hand an leaning against the wind like a broom-riding herald.

At he merest mention of The Ritual, Schwinn stares into space. Spent little girls have appealed to him since the age of six. Which is not surprising, since Schwinn's just turned seventeen.

Rat walks over to the entrance of a tenement, looks inside, squints and nods. Must know someone in there, Schwinn figures.