Judy was a villain who came from the coast, spilling sand and eating empires as she traveled on a truly enormous, crawling old spider that she had saddled like a horse. She kept her hair fashioned in the style of moguls and matadors, swept up and away like white doves under northeastern winds, prepared for the worst at any possible second. She held herself aloft but concerned, like an emptyhanded philanthropist, a selfish Florence Nightingale, who spoke of Roman noblemen like old friends long buried instead of the unconfirmed legends they really were.
She wore a broach of amber and silkstring filament which held a tiny fly forever trapped inside, buzzing and groping, pushing and flying--its entire world consisted of a decorative bubble pinned to Judy's chest from which there was no escape.
Framing her left ankle was a bright blue scar, a "souvenir of the war" she called it. There had not been a war in 150 years and there would not be another in either of our lifetimes.
In the saddlebags of that enourmous old dragging spider were picture postcards of painters and tiny oriental statues of elegant orphans that she had collected along her way, each one fashioned from the remains of someone she meant to keep tightly in her pocket, someone she was determined to never let go of, much like the fly buzzing in its pretty little coffin. They were not mementos, they were totems, small monuments to a life once lived free and now experienced only under the strictest control, and they grinned with an ugly defeat. She kept whips and candlewax, tattoos and horse-maps from every place she had been and every place she meant one day to be. The poor spider--which she had named Ivan the Terrible (after "the only man who could ever possess me, a shame he should pass 425 years too early")--could barely hold up as she weighed it down with the plans and delights, damages and games of an entire evening's wicked life. Ivan's back bent in a low arch, a reverse camel, and his henpecked old belly dragged comically against the seashell sand of the coastal shores they were fleeing.
But still he trugged on, carrying poor, tiny Judy as she fled from crimescene to crimescene, from witness to victim, breaking beauty and burying sentimental hearts, spilling sand and eating empires all the while. She never slowed down, she never looked for a home.
Judy was a villain who came from the coast and planned to never return.
 |