Smoking Rosemary ♚
{` On every surface have I already sat,  like tired dust have I fallen asleep on mirrors and window-panes:  everything taken from me, nothing given.
                          I become thin—I am almost equal to a shadow. }
W ithin this cavernous night, she should be deeply tousled in the bed sheets of a fivestar hotel room, naked, soaked and fatigued; but placated with the relief of a satisfactory completion and release. The body of a man responsible for the murder of the Jopok’s first lieutenant should be dismembered beside her; veiled, and bundled up in an unescapable, secure sheath of shame, blankets and pillowcase. In celebration for a job well done she’d pilfer one of his flavored cigarettes from the nightstand table and chew on the dented filter with the sliver of her bloodied teeth.
Many of the men back at headquarters would tattoo themselves or collect personal trinkets from each efficacious stunt pulled. Marquis snipped long, flowing locks of his victim’s hair and kept them in a safe at home. JaeGun would take jewelry- with the exception of engagement rings –and give them to his wife as anniversary gifts. Even the Big Boss would accept nothing less than the head of his victims fixed on a plaque of commemoration, docile expression fossilised, and befittingly conserved. An infamous rumour from his favorite whore detailed that he had precisely thirty-two in a furtive partition of his home.
But Bom was different; this much they could articulate from the moment she first sauntered through the door. She didn't accumulate or aspire to compare trophies and other disturbing galleries like the others had ardently done, but she acquiescently shared war stories and battle scars when their tradition of morbid story time was rousing the tranquillity of what should have been a quiet evening. One night after one too many beers, she revealed that once a gig was complete, the dried blood on her hands and the blistering of a bellicose smoulder in her lungs from a stolen cigarette, courtesy of the victim, was worth more than any lock of hair, ruby necklace, or severed head.
Bom blinked down to her pale hands when her phone blinked with a notification of a successfully sent text message. They were spotless, brittle, pale, but a little yellow under the lights of a restaurant’s awning saturating her in its lavish rays. If tonight went as unplanned as planned, they would not be an altered variable.
