The number of calls grew and grew and offers for dinners and questions about how-are-you became something of a routine for her to ignore early in the morning. Family was easy to shake off for her. Especially when life was going...well? Even with a stiff neck from car sleeping, life was going more than well. So good in fact, that Kat thought something of herself for once. After all, she'd done her job with the task. Her editor was happy with Kat's high click-rate social media posts aand added to the feeling she had in her gut: she deserved to sleep on a bed and live like a human being. And it was over the next few days where she had finally found the gumption to drive house to house on a wild hunt for a new place to live. And it was on the third day, with the second to last house on her list, where she had finally found something of interest. A couple who lived in South Central Havenbrook¹suburbia, who had opened the door to her with two smiles on their faces. One known as Cindy Star and the other known as Cosmic Jane according to the online ad, both of which smelled of reefer and practically fumed scented lines from their bodies up to the ceiling. She swore she could see the air around them fluctuate.

And Cosmic Jane (the taller of the two) told her, “Your shirt looks gnarly. Did you thrift that?”

And Kat said, “No, my grand mother bought it for me at five o’ mart²,”

That was when both of them smiled to each other and then back at Kat who stood at the door, her car parked in the shade of a quiet cul-de-sac on a day too hot for anyone to be enjoying the midday oppressive sun. Underneath the wind chimes, the sweat evaporated from the back of her neck. Kat and the two looked at each other, the pot heads stepped aside for her to enter. She did so, inspecting the living room from within.

“So, you’d like to rent the room,” Star said. “It’ll be six hundred a month and we hope you don’t mind animals, we’ve got too many,”

“I don’t mind animals, no,”

“Good, the last one did,”

“Is that why she left?”

“No, she left when she tried to steal some product,”

“Product?” Kat asked.

“You know, product,” Jane turned to the kitchen sink and the chemistry lab on the island across. A top the cutting board a scale with bags of what looked like grass from the distance. Below on the floor, dehydrators and their almost-pine scent of spread out marijuana on trays. An intense set up yet something in the air made a calm wash over Kat before she shook her head and realized what type of house this truly was. But it was five hundred. So she entertained them a bit more. The mid-century open floor now covered head to toe with plastic and linoleum around the furniture, around the stability poles even on the pictures on the walls. Upper body gloved suits like hazmat suits rested on coat hangers near the garage where an even deeper scent emanated, coming for her in the dark of the garage like a basement monster. Kat coughed. She plugged her nostrils with the back of her hand.

They walked through the house and down the hall past the room with snakes and spiders and little rodents all on stacked terrariums.

“Jane like to collect,” Star said.

They smiled at each other. Kat nodded. They went down the hall.

“The legalization was really good for us,” Jane said. “Kind of opened the doors for what we were always supposed to be, you know? Like the karma gods finally had it for us. An answer, you know?”

“I know a little bit about that, yeah,”

“Do you believe in karma?” Star asked. “Uh, uh, what’s your name again?”

“Kat,”

“Lovely name, you have a purple wave length, you know that?”

“What’s that mean?”

“Are you a therapist?”

“No,”

“Maybe a scientist?”

“No, I’m a journalist,” She felt a little phony saying it.

“Ohhhh,” They both nodded at each other.

“What’s that oh mean? What’s a purple wavelength?”

“You’re inquisitive, half red and half blue. A little violent red and a little empathetic blue. Naturally, curious,”

“I guess? I don’t think emotions are colors,” she said.

“No, not emotions, wavelength,”

The walk down the hall felt long. They stopped at the door.

“Anyway, this is your room if you’d want it,” Cindy said.

“Five hundred a month,” Jane coughed.

She opened the room. It was empty, nothing but blue pool water waves reflections undulating on the white backwalls of the room from the pool behind the glass sliding doors. The patio opened up with ease. And connect to it, a small bathroom. The two girls smiled at her and Kat to them and something about the silence that surrounded them and the warmth of the daylight upon the white pavement lining the pool and lounge space made her decision for her.

Most of her things were in the room within an hour. And after a long day of compiling notes (who’s insane enough to work on a weekend, uh-oh), Kat sat with legs crossed in her messy still-half-empty room. Not that there weren’t things in there, but that those things hadn’t made it any more habitable and they’d all been bundled into mountains to the side. She wiggled her butt against the hardwood into a more comfortable position. She typed and her eyes drifted. This was all extra credit, something to throw in the meeting next time. Tag lines came to her like the crawl of credits in a film. Large words slowly rising to the top; yellow in her head, “A decade in death, the Mason” ran freely up her imagination. Another suggestion for a headline, “The Concrete Killer is Coming for Us,” and she started writing a fake-article, hoping to make it a real article. The notes of Janine Flores’ dessicated body on little scraps of paper. Who she was, who she knew and it’s about the history, not the man, it’s about the cops that are yet to catch him and the crime still waiting to happen. It’s about a young woman murdered for nothing but the way she looked and dressed and who she was. You can always sell a crime. That isn’t hard, I’m sure you see it every day in your life when you turn on the news. Someone stabbed in the subway, the rape in the alley, the politico pedophile outed. Every time, every where. But what you don’t see is the legacy of violence. Her body was there for ten. Ten long years - and we can sell that, we’re uniquely able to sell that.

She fell asleep with her fingers on the keyboard of her little laptop and was late to work. But when she arrived she immediately went to the writers room hoping anyone was in there. There were people alright.

“So we pitch the girl. And we pitch that this isn’t a one off. We pitch the Cement Killer for what he is, what the police have been burying. He statue-fies his targets and renders them into icons. No one leaves a one off calling card, and if we don’t figure out how or why or when, then he’ll keep doing it. The people should be reminded, murder leaves peoples memory banks like anything else. Tragic news always does. But this guy? We’ll leave them with something they can’t forget. This isn’t just a murder. It’s a statement, it’s like per formative art for this guy,”

She was breathless in front of the crowd. She turned her head and her hair went slick in one movement over her shoulder and to her back. She looked about the gawking crowd, little heads in their small Eanes chairs facing her with their noses turned upwards. They didn’t know what they were looking at and looked about each other to affirm some kind of agreed emotion amongst themselves. They began to nod their heads. There weren’t many writers here, this early at nine in the morning and they were all the older people, the men balding and the women with lines across their foreheads. They nodded more. Finally one leaned back and turned his blank expression into a not-smug-yet-still-smug smile. His chair spine was taken to its limit, he faced the ceiling at his incline.

Leslie was stood and against the wall in the back.

“I like it.” She said.

“Oh it’s wonderful. A whole odyssey of murder. I mean, real tragic stuff…”

“Tragic but so, like, encompassing of Americana. Right? A narcissist killer who statuefies people. Makes men into monoliths, crazy.”

“Oh, and look at poor girl. Mexican, young, pretty. Pale for a Latina, right guys?”

“They’ll love to hate him. Artist killer can’t let go of his subjects, turns them into statues.”

“What do you think he does with them, Kat? Kat?”

Kat stared. They’d all run off and she was expected to follow. But Kat was new and lame with her experience and slow of gait to follow their ideas. All of it so new - the meetings, the pitch, the public presentation. She had forgotten all of it in college, having believed it would never come up in real life, believing everyone who told her “You learn nothing at school,” for so long. As it turned out, you use a lot of it. It’s just that most people are too stupid to realize it. Too arrogant that they believe they somewhat intuit these skills; the public presentation, the information regurgitation, the babifying of knowledge into little morsels to consume like a feeder momma bird.

Kat stared and the more she did the more deer-like she became. She walked back, felt trapped behind the wall. Looked about herself, faces going back to her.

“Kat? Anything else on this guy?

“Besides his name and modus operandi?” She shook her head.

Kat scratched her chin ad scraped everything in the back of her mind of what she thought this guy was and what this man would do.

“I don’t think he’ll be caught any time soon,” She said. “I don’t think the police know much of anything except that people will die, even if they don’t admit it,”

“Police negligence,” One of them said. “That’s good. Add that to the tweets,”

They talked. They became animated with their hands amongst each other.

She found a seat some ways away from her and then she rolled away from the tables and away from people. She leaned back. Her eyes facing nowhere in particular. This room is where it happens. One day I’ll be a permanent here. She thought the thought And it didn’t make her feel the least bit happy about anything.

This is what my life is about, right?