Aickman's Heirs by Simon Strantzas

Author:Simon Strantzas [Strantzas, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Tags: Fiction, Horror, strange, weird fiction, simon strantzas, aickmanesque, robert aickman
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Underground Economy

John Langan

That’s not what I want to talk about. If you’re interested in hearing about the day to day of a stripper, there are plenty of books you can read. Some of them are pretty good. Or you could watch Showgirls. No, it’s not accurate, but it’s the kind of movie most of the girls I danced with would have made about themselves. So there’s that.

It’s a person—Nicole AuCoeur, the girl who told me I should try out at the Cusp, they were hiring and I could make some serious cash. I want to talk about her, about this thing that happened to her.

We weren’t friends. We’d been in a couple of classes together at SUNY Huguenot. Both of us wanted to be writers. Nikki said she was going to be a travel writer. I was planning on writing screenplays. We took the same fiction-writing workshops, and were in the same peer-critique group. I read two or three of her stories. They were pretty good. The teacher was into fantasy, The Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, so Nikki turned in that kind of story. She was that type of student. Figure out what the professor likes and play to it.

I didn’t know she was working at The Cusp. She was always late for class, and she always showed up stoned. She drenched herself in some kind of ginger-citrus perfume, to hide the smell, but it clung to her hair. She had long, brown hair that she wore in long bangs, like drapes. If anything, I thought she was some kind of dealer. I remember this one time, in the middle of class, she opened her purse and started to root through it—I mean, frantically, taking stuff out of it and piling it on her desk. The professor asked her if everything was okay. She said, “No, I can’t find my stash.” The guy didn’t know how to respond to that. The rest of us tittered.

Anyway. I ran into her the summer after that class. I was sitting in Dunkin Donuts, making lunch out of a small coffee and a Boston cream donut. Nikki sat down across from me. I hadn’t realized she was still in town. I assumed she’d gone home for the summer. She said she’d stayed in Huguenot to work. I asked her what she was doing. She said dancing at The Cusp.

I blushed. Everyone knew about the club. It was on 299, on the way into town, a flat-roofed cinderblock building. We used to call it The Cusp juice bar, because they couldn’t serve alcohol there, on account of the girls dancing fully nude. I hadn’t known anyone who worked there—well, not that I was aware of—but I knew people who’d known people. Although what I’d heard from them had concerned the professors who were regulars at the place. There was a story about this one old guy who’d paid for a girl to come to his place and pee on him, so I guess I had an idea of the place as one step up from a brothel.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.