Charming. Prince Charming.

How does one call for a hero? What is the heroic equivalent of an employment agency in the current world?

Testy pondered the question. In the days of kings and quests, one presumed the ruler of the moment just put the word out, and heroes flocked to serve him, lined up in front of his throne. But what was one to do, when one was a piebald, roly-poly drag queen?

“Bet he’d turn up if it were Rachel freezing her ass off up here,” Testy grumbled.

“Que?” the waitress asked as she slopped more coffee-flavored swill in Testy’s cup.

“Never mind. But I bet he’d show up if it was you tied to the railroad tracks and screaming for help. Or even just lost in the wilderness.”

The waitress smiled in confusion and waited.

Testy waved her away. “No, no, I’m not going to order anything else. Thanks, doll. Don’t mind me, I’m just a crazy old leftover.”

Another smile, and a burst of Spanish as the girl walked away.

“Gracias and da nada, doll,” the drag queen sighed. “Now, if I could just get Rachel threatened by an evil mastermind, I bet we’d have our hero here in no time. Wonder what Donald and Rudy are doing?” Although, come to think of it, there were plenty of dire threats around Manhattan that didn’t even require the services of a megalomaniac. Maybe, once her nubile sidekick got home from the West Coast, all Testy would have to do was abandon her in any unfamiliar neighborhood, and she’d be hero-fodder in an instant.

“Or…” Testy drawled, staring into her coffee. Her showgirl sidekick was at that moment in the air somewhere mid-flight. She was zinging, winging between SFO and JFK, having spent the last week getting warm and visiting her parents out West in Sacramento. She'd complained so hard and long about the cold in New York that Testy had practically shoved her onto the gangway in the first week of December.

Now, she was coming back East, apparently fortified with enough sunlight and orange juice to survive the New Year. Or so worn out enough by her mother's comments about missing husbands and unforeseen grandchildren that even Manhattan in the slush of winter would seem like a respite.

She landed tonight, sometime late. Testy pondered. Rachel was a little long in the tooth for the classic damsel in distress, Testy thought to herself. But that had never mattered too much in Las Vegas.

She checked her watch and tried to remember exactly what time Rachel's flight was due to land.

NEXT POST: WHAT THE SEER SEES (Friday 1/1)

A Dark and Stormy Vegas Night

It was a dark and stormy night, both of which were unheard of in Las Vegas.

“Where is she?” Zem demanded, staring out the floor to ceiling windows of the Zeus suite at the Olympus. They hung thirty floors over the Strip and commanded views in both directions. Through the raindrops, sheeting like a private fountain down the glass, red and white lights from cars streamed by, and neon glowed in all directions.

“I don’t know,” Magnolia told him. “I’ve had people out looking.” She shrugged. “She’s a goddess, for god’s sake. She’s supernatural. I’m sure she’s got a million places she can hide that we can’t see. Maybe she went back home, to Greece.”

“Greece isn’t her home,” Zem snapped. “She never belonged there. Find her.”

His high priestess stood three paces back from him and placed her fists on her hips. “How should I do that? Why don’t you go looking? You’d have much better odds than I do. She’s a goddess, Zem. She’s one of your kind.”

“She’s no part of me,” he growled, and he turned and glared. There was lightning in his eyes, this time. Magnolia held herself still, refusing to step back, but it took an effort. Those black eyes, lit from within, were, perhaps, the single scariest thing she’d ever faced. Even her mother could have learned something from that look.

“I’m out of options,” she said, spreading her hands. When cornered by Zem, she’d learned to hit him with practicalities, with nuts and bolts of a human sort. He had no answer to them.

“I need a hero,” he grumbled.

“Ha!” Magnolia hooted. “Agreed. Know any?”

Zem muttered to himself, turning back to the window. “There must be someone, even in this place...”

“What?”

“Never mind,” he snarled. “Go back to your organizing. I’ll do something.”

“Good,” Magnolia said, and dusted thoughts of Venus lightly from her hands. “I don’t know why you’re worried, anyway. It’s not as if–”

“Why should I worry?” he demanded.

That time, she did step back. And then, when he turned back to the windows, she melted away, back to where her three top aides, with clipboards and anxious expressions in place, waited.

Magnolia wasn’t accustomed to melting. But she knew when an exit was called for. She glanced back, over her shoulder, and then stepped busily up to the aides.

“Let’s go downstairs, all right?” she suggested. They followed her gratefully, three ugly ducklings with no hope of swanhood, trailing after their spectacular mother.

Zem stared at the passing cars. “There must be some fool in town who thinks he’s brave,” he muttered.

NEXT POST: HOLDING OUT FOR A HERO (Monday 12/28)

Here Be Monsters (maybe)

In the far Northern reaches of Manhattan, up where the streets are numbered well into the two-hundreds; where the island narrows around Broadway till there is no land and only the street remains, one tiny thread crossing the Broadway Bridge from which hangs the whole bulbous Christmas ornament of the island; up where blocky post-war apartment buildings brood; and just where the subway bursts from its banishment below ground to sail like a galleon in victory over to the Bronx, there stands an Arch.

It might be a miniature Arc de Triomphe if the residents of way Upper Manhattan had ever been Francophiles. It might be a gateway from some grand palace outside Moscow, moved to New York by a robber baron rich in Vodka. It might be a power relay station or an auxiliary outpost for subway machinery built by a crazed designer addicted to neo-classicism when the city had some spare money to throw away.

Who knew what it really was, or had been? It was one of those odd, old pieces of forgotten architecture New York is full of, crowding up against the newer, more efficient structures, and as eager to be remembered and fawned over as an opera diva past her prime.

What the Arch on Upper Broadway became, though, was more definite. In the last half of the Twentieth Century it variously served as: a landmark; a sometime billboard; a pedestal for a city garden more hopeful than burgeoning; an extra storage area for three businesses built in front of it, and, once, long before Rachel knew her or took her first step onto any stage, it was Testy Lesbiana’s home.

Testy had moved in on a whim, both hers and the owners. The Arch then formed the back two rooms of an auto body shop where she came looking for a used motorcycle. The owner, Lenny, turned out to need a bookkeeper, and they struck a deal. Testy kept the shops books clean and well-trained, and he built her a Harley-Davidson out of the bits and pieces that passed through his hands. The cot was an added extra, and every few days he would lumber back to it in the Arch’s left leg and drop a carburetor or a gas tank or a pedal, grunt, and leave again. Testy would open one eye, stare at the newest puzzle piece in all its grimy glory, and go back to sleep, unless the sun was high enough to fight its way in through the exhaust fumes and wave to her.

The whole process took over a year, and Testy used her hours and hours of free time, every day, to roam the city and haunt the streets. She learned New York, and she uncovered mysteries there.

New York had no recognizable, assertive identity as cities like London and Paris did, she thought. It had no intrinsic spirit like New Orleans. It was a mishmash, not really a melting pot, but more of a human junk drawer. And proud of itself for that. For someone like Testy Lesbiana, who thought consistency was not just the hobgoblin of little minds but the downfall of whole civilizations—Rome, she claimed, really fell from boredom, because what was left to do there?—New York was endlessly entertaining. The city was a candy store, and she was a sticky-fingered six year old.

She spent her days collecting oddities for her own mental menagerie. She met strangers, and then she met even stranger-ers. She sought out whatever was odd or outstanding in the city, whether living and breathing or stone and mortar. Or sometimes both.

The Arch was her starting point. It was only the first example, the first hint of another, hidden city below the veneer. Someone dreamed and schemed to build this, she thought one day as she glanced up from her books. This was someone’s great ambition. She stared out the door and up at a bit of the overdone dome, with all its bas-relief and crumbling plaster floridness. Someone had envisioned this baroque bit of concrete, and then either their abilities faltered and this was as far as their dream got, or else she hadn’t yet stumbled on its other outgrowths.

She decided to go out looking. If the Arch were here, hulking in the middle of Broadway, hunkered with no explanations in the middle of Washington Heights, then there must more fabulous and romantic leftovers lurking just underneath common perception. She put down her pencil and went out to look. And she was right, and they were everywhere.

She found herself, in short order, unearthing a Manhattan made up of another mishmash altogether. It was, to some extent, the metaphorical Manhattan everybody imagined, the real source of the city’s fame. But it was much more subtle, much stranger, and much more filled with weirdness than the legends had let on.

This Manhattan was made up of lost, forgotten dreams from generations disappeared. It had a different skyline than the island’s well-known bed-of-nails profile. It had a different sky. It was peopled by characters barely real, and sometimes blatantly fictitious. They walked among the normal hustle-bustle without ever being noticed, because that was what the physical Manhattan prided itself on.

And Testy got to know it, and its denizens, because she looked for them, and was willing to accept them on their own terms. And she’d been known to frequent some barely-believable wonderlands before, truth be told. She had a well-stamped passport from all sorts of alternative realms and kingdoms.

And now, as the days were getting longer and the sky had long since given up any hope of blue, settling for a steely gray even at noon, Testy walked both sets of streets again, and scanned the buildings, and noted the changes.

“Come on, bub,” she breathed as she went. “Come out, come out, wherever the hell you are. What are you waiting for? You should be here by now. Rachel's gonna give up and go home if we don't hurry.”

NEXT POST: A FORTUNE TELLER'S NIGHTMARE (Friday 12/25 — yes, on Xmas)

A Fall From Grace (Sort Of)

Sphinx lay in the moonlight and contemplated the infinite.

The infinite was not particularly easy to see, from his vantage point. There was a major intersection, a hotel tower, and an airport in the way, not to mention a new, enormous billboard of Venus in full Extravaganza! regalia looking down at him from one side. But he contemplated, anyway, and felt he did an acceptable job most nights. A good enough job to please his own relatively undemanding deity, at least.

And speaking of deities, he’d seen remarkably little of Venus, lately. At least, he’d seen little of Venus in the flesh. The painted version, several stories high and beaming at visitors as they approached from miles away to the South, was more than he needed as a reminder.

There was a time, he thought, when he would have welcomed this solitude. He would have rejoiced, quietly, and celebrated in his meditations. He would have declared himself deity-free, like a house recently swept clean of termites. And he would have thanked the Goddess, sailing over him nightly. He would have prayed, and praised, and offered up a hymn.

But now, he had to admit, he felt mightily out of touch.

He was a little sad, tonight, and more than a little itchy to learn what was going on in town. He listened to the conversations of the tourists and the valet parkers, but they just kept saying the same things. Sphinx was bored with their old gossip.

There was a time, he thought, when he’d known everything.

“Sphinx!”

If Sphinx had had ears, they would have pricked up. A wail, a cry looped through the night, a mixed, braided sound of anguish and of anger, a twine of emotions, a strong rope busily tying itself into a hangman’s noose. It approached.

“Sphinx!”

A shriek, a roar. Not a release. A sound full of rage. It sucked up anger and hurled it out again. The wave of it flattened Sphinx’s marsh grass and warped the glass walls on his ersatz pyramid.

“Sphinx!” Venus had arrived. “Do you know what’s he’s done?!” she screamed.

She was suddenly in front of Sphinx, her glorious hair flying all around her head, her peekaboo robes whipping this way and that. She was attended by a private whirlwind. She was the very picture, Sphinx thought, of a pissed-off goddess. The statue settled down to take in the show.

And no, of course Sphinx didn’t know what “he” had done. He wasn’t even certain who “he” was — probably Zem, but who knew? He cleared his concrete throat with caution. He’d have to finesse Venus for information.

“No,” he offered, “What has he done?”

“He shouldn’t even be here! I told him to go– this is my home, this is my city. And I told him. I demanded it! But he wouldn’t go, and now... He’s hateful, he’s horrible–”

Must still be Zem, Sphinx reasoned.

There was a brief pause while Venus digested her own words. Then the moment passed, and she licked her lips. She tossed her hair. Sphinx reflected that, if she hadn’t been hiding herself from the passersby, those two gestures by themselves could have caused a twelve-car pile-up on the Strip behind her.

He was a little surprised to see that Venus was hiding herself. Usually, when she was this worked up, she forgot. Or else, she just liked being the center of attention so much that she deliberately chose to show off her tantrums. Many times, she had stood out on the Strip and faced Sphinx and yelled at him until a mob of pedestrians had stopped and stared and the cars slowed down so that their drivers could hang out their windows drooling at the gorgeous, insane creature on the sidewalk. Maybe now she was finding her new Extravaganza! stardom taxing. Maybe she just wanted a break from her fans. But the fact that she was being circumspect made Sphinx take the ranting much more seriously. Whatever was going on, Sphinx reckoned, Venus thought it mattered.

“He’s taking over the whole town,” she spat out. Sphinx blinked. Not really, of course, but he did the thing he habitually did to indicate to Venus that he took that information in and was duly shocked. In effect, he blinked.

“He’s enslaved everybody. He’s got them all coming and going for him. The magician’s union worships him now.” Venus, Sphinx knew, had always been a favorite with Vegas’ magicians. They all longed to saw her in half. “I can’t stand it. I can’t stand it!” Venus screamed, shrill and piercing. Every individual, blond-to-perfection hair on her head stood out separately for a split second, and even the tourists who couldn’t see her looked up at the sound. They felt its passing, a metal-ripping, live-flesh-tearing screeching in the aether as if Mother Nature were ripping her fingernails across the midnight-black chalkboard of the whole desert sky.

“And now he’s after me! He sent that woman, his harpy, his first servant here to tell me. He’s given her immortality, I could see it right away. He sent her to talk to me in my dressing room with Honoré, and she stood there and told me...” Words seemed to fail her. The blond hair flowed of its own accord around her face and out, away again. Her eyes snapped and she bared her teeth and curled her lip. “They expect me to serve him! Take a place in his temple at my hotel. My hotel in my city. Serve him! Do as he bids! Be priestess in his accursed penis-temple there that he’s forcing the hotel to build. He’s mocking me and defiling me and he’s taking my home!”

And there it was, Sphinx concluded. Las Vegas had offered a haven to Venus, a home and sanctuary when the whole rest of the world had outgrown bubbly blondes and eschewed living dolls. Now Zem had arrived without warning, and appropriated the city. Venus had no choices but fight or flight– but Venus hadn’t fought in centuries, and she had nowhere left to run.

Zem has her trapped, the monolith concluded.

The goddess trudged through the mini-swamp to climb up to Sphinx’s paws and slump there, miserable. The angry wind fell away. She leaned over to one side against a concrete toe and hid her face.

The blond cloud drifted down around her like concealing mist shrouding an injured kitten. The kitten was whimpering, sniffing its injuries, licking its wounds. The blond mist made sure it had the privacy it needed.

Sphinx couldn’t really do much in the way of comfort, but he imagined nudging Venus with his paw, to let her know that he was there, and offer some small indication of support. Meanwhile, he thought over what Venus had said.

“Surely the whole city can’t just be rolling over and giving up without any fight at all,” he murmured to himself. “What can he want with it, anyway?”

Venus shifted against him but didn’t speak, so Sphinx assumed she hadn’t heard.

NEXT POST: MEANWHILE, BACK IN NEW YORK... (Monday 12/21)

The Goddess In Training

Magnolia sat at home and thought about this Venus.

She was beautiful, that much was undeniable.

Of course she was beautiful. She was the fucking goddess of love, Magnolia chided silently. Beauty was her stock-in-trade. Beauty looked to her for help when it was having a bad hair day.

Hard to compete with that, Magnolia thought. She pursed her newly plump and now permanently red lips lusciously.

Not that Zem seemed to care for Venus, personally. And the love goddess certainly nurtured no warm, fuzzy feelings for her former master on Olympus. Judging by her reactions tonight, she considered him a major source of unhappiness, the thorn in her lovely, perfect side.

Would that be useful? Or was it another problem? Magnolia considered the thing from all angles, or as many angles as she could think of, and wondered where her best course of action lay.

She’d sat, had Venus, silent and stony-faced, while Magnolia described the Temple of Impotence in all its sleazy single entendre glory. Magnolia had deliberately gotten more flowery as she’d talked, trying to get a reaction from the blonde goddess. But nothing had moved her, nothing had elicited so much as a raised eyebrow, until Magnolia pulled out the sketches.

Then, all hell broke loose. Venus had raged, she’d screamed, she’d torn the pages out of Magnolia’s fingers and ripped them to shreds. She’d ranted and raved and stormed and banged. And then she’d left.

It wasn’t as impressive as Zem’s anger. No lightning bolts, no transformations. Magnolia had watched after her, not realizing at first that the scene was finished. Honoré had watched, too, incensed in her own way at the Temple designs, but mostly just staring open-mouthed at her star.

A full minute after Venus’ exit, Honoré had suddenly realized that her wonder girl might be gone, really gone, and ran out, screaming at stage hands and dancers to find her, find her before they had to cancel the whole show.

Magnolia had sat and surveyed Venus’ dressing room. She fingered all the goddess’ brand-new costumes. The hotel had spared no expense, she noted. The beads were real crystal, and the fabrics were divine– a turn of phrase that made Magnolia smile as she thought it, running a jeweled cape through her fingers. She imagined wearing it, the luxury of feeling it swirl around her as she spun and strode across the huge stage.

Venus didn’t know how good she had it.

Then Magnolia left, too. The backstage of Extravaganza! was in uproar. There was no sign of Venus, no hint of where she’d gone. There was also no chance whatsoever of any of the hundred other Extrav! girls, who wandered the halls aimlessly, filling in for her. The very idea of an understudy to the Love Goddess was laughable.

Magnolia walked out frowning, thinking dark thoughts. Her own position in this pantheon was new and precarious enough without ancient goddesses, she considered. Would there have to be a Battle of the Blondes in the near future? In that case, she would have to study up, to find out what made this one tick, and how to beat her. Or, maybe, how to manipulate her.

Magnolia did not intend to let has-been deities interfere with her position. Or her prospects. If Mount Olympus was going to be reborn in Vegas, well, she intended it to have a new addition, a certain former human, former male, beauty of the modern world.

But that was in the future. Meanwhile, she could report to Zem that his minimal competition in town wasn’t offering much of a threat today. From Venus’ grand exit, the erstwhile mayor imagined it would be a long time before she so much as showed her face again, let alone mounted any real resistence to her one-time Ruler.

And by that time, Zem would be securely installed and in charge, Magnolia concluded, and she, herself, might have climbed a few steps higher on the god-ladder. She ran her long fingernails through her hair, tossed it, and walked out amid the raging chaos of a goddess-less Extravaganza!

NEXT POST: FALL FROM THE TOPLESS OLYMPUS (Friday 12/18)

Prelude to a Battle of the Blondes

Magnolia closed the door behind her as Honoré sat down at her desk. Gina had been kicked out.
“Mother.”

“Don’t call me that.”

Magnolia sighed. “Miss Honoré, then,” she said, exaggerating.

“That’ll do, Magnolia.”

“Can we just see this girl?”

Honoré looked up, and her face glowed. Magnolia studied her expression. If any of Extravaganza!’s dancers from the past thirty years had seen that smile, they would have been shocked. Miss Honoré, smiling and soft and looking happy?! Magnolia was only slightly less startled.

“What has she done to you?” she asked.

“What? Nothing.” All the accustomed hardness was back. Honoré sat back, reaching for her cigarettes and lighter. The lighter was a heavy-duty Zippo, and Honoré demonstrated the muscles it had developed in her forearm as she flicked its lever. “Sit down. Let’s go over what you’re going to ask her.”

Magnolia pulled out Gina’s desk chair and made herself at home, settling slowly and giving her mother ample time to notice her new figure. She’d lost ten pounds in the last week alone. All the curves she’d ever dreamed of having were in evidence.

There was no word from the other desk. Magnolia crossed her newly-perfect legs and watched her mother’s smoke curl around her face. “I’m not going to ask her anything. I’m going to tell her what’s going to happen. This hotel has plans for your girl, Venus.”

Honoré took a deep drag. All the tendrils of smoke around her seemed to suck in the air in unison. Magnolia felt the atmosphere getting stiff. “Maybe she won’t do it,” Miss Honoré suggested.

Magnolia shrugged. “Then she won’t work in Vegas. This is a city-wide initiative, Mother, not some whim from a minor executive.”

“I told you not to call me that. What if someone heard?”

“We’re in a closed office. And your cast knows much better than to listen at your door.”

Honoré smiled ever-so-slightly, thinking, perhaps, of the French girl she’d had deported for doing precisely that in the days when she’d been having an at-work affair with one of the stage managers.

“Even so,” she warned.

Magnolia sighed. Honoré watched her through slitted eyes. Her offspring had rarely behaved as she’d expected, ever since she’d shown up at Extrav!’s original auditions and blown away the competition. She’d been the best thing onstage till Venus arrived, but when they’d sat down on that first day to deal with the contracts, Magnolia had handed hers back with a smile that made even Miss Honoré quail, just a bit. Magnolia had said, “Thank you mother. Europe was wonderful. It changed my life. As you can see.” Honoré had looked her up and down without a word, inspecting the work she’d had done, and nodded. And thus was their new, improved relationship begun.

Honoré found Magnolia more interesting than she had Frank. She tacked one of Magnolia’s campaign posters up backstage each time she ran for mayor. But Magnolia had another thing coming if she thought she could waltz in here and dictate what Venus did on stage or even– Honoré could barely form the thought, let alone speak the words– take her away. Now, Honoré sucked on her cigarette– the smoke poured through what was left of her lungs like a derelict rattling through a tumbledown house– and looked at her child whom she’d never wanted. “What’s going on, exactly?” she demanded.

“Big things,” Magnolia smiled. “Vegas is going through a metamorphosis.”

Honoré snorted. “Another one? Since the corporations took over, it’s one change after another. Every year there’s something new. It’s endless.”

“This will be really new. And it’ll stick,” Magnolia said.

“We’ll see. What’s up with Venus?”

Magnolia’s smile quirked higher and she tilted her head to look at her mother. “You seem very taken with her, Honoré,” she said. “I’ve never seen you care so much about one of your girls.”

“She’s the whole show these days,” Honoré answered gruffly. She coughed, then sucked in the last breath of the cigarette, suffocating it. She flicked the butt into the huge, granite ashtray that took up a square foot of her desk. It landed on a three-inch pyramid of burn-outs. “You haven’t seen her, have you? You don’t care about anything else when you see her. All the other kids– they might as well go home. They might as well not show up in the first place. Maybe we’ll cut all of them next contract. Who needs ‘em? Venus is the show.”

“Interesting,” Magnolia said. “She may not be the show for much longer.”

Honoré had been reaching for her pack and her Zippo. She refused to pause at Magnolia’s words. “Don’t try that, Magnolia,” she said. “This girl is Extravaganza! You don’t want to pull her out and destroy this show and get all the bad publicity from that. Besides what I can–” She looked at her daughter, slowed the act of lighting her cigarette to a crawl, went through the motions without blinking. Magnolia looked back. …what I can tell about you hung in the air between them. Honoré didn’t speak the words.

They each had a threat to hold over the other. Magnolia didn’t understand the power of hers– why should Honoré still care who knew about her single indiscretion, or whomever it had been with?– but that would never stop her from wielding it. For her own part, the secret of Frank O’Connor getting out seemed a lot less cataclysmic since her trip to the top of the Spire. Eternal youth and beauty were wonderful cures for all kinds of anxiety. Magnolia preened a bit, and reached back to fluff her hair. It had been getting gradually blonder, all on its own, for the past week, and had grown till it brushed artfully against her shoulders.

“It’s not in my hands,” she said. “I’m just the messenger. Now let’s go see Venus and I’ll tell you both what’s up for her future.” She stood, and waited while Honoré, cigarette smoldering and Zippo clenched in bony fingers, left her chair and led the way out of the room.

NEXT POST: THE GODDESS IN TRAINING (Monday 12/14)

The Goddess Is In

“Have you heard from your friend yet?” Rachel asked Testy.

“No. I’ll let you know when I do.”

They were sitting in Belle’s living room. The Rockette herself had gone to bed, but she was still with them in spirit, in the form of an even dozen cats. Rachel petted Partly Cloudy, while Testy communed with On Location and Lauer between attaching rhinestones to a deep blue dress that could have doubled as a refrigerator cozy.

“Will you?” Rachel asked nervously.

“Yes, honey. I will. Don’t worry. Haven’t you been having fun?”

“Yes,” Rachel admitted. “But now it’s getting colder.”

A moment went by. Some cats purred.

“He’ll come,” Testy reassured her. “Soon.”

“He’d better,” the ex-showgirl grumbled.

Meanwhile, back in Vegas, a completely different sort of scene was playing out.

Miss Honoré knocked on Venus' dressing room door. “Venus, dear,” she said as she entered. And then she paused, because Venus was standing almost nude before her, waiting in her tiny g-string for her dresser to put on her costume.

The first sight of Venus was always breathtaking.

“Lovely,” Honoré breathed, barely audibly. Then: “Venus,” she started again, “I wonder, could you get dressed quickly so we’ll have some time before the show?”

Venus looked more or less in her direction and made a half-shrug. The gesture and her expression seemed to say that she had only the vaguest notion any show was going on, and that she wasn’t entirely sure who Honoré was. She certainly had no idea, that look said, about the time. Time was beneath her.

“It’s nothing, really,” Honoré continued as Venus stepped into her fishnets and let the dresser roll them up. “The hotel has a new project they’d like to involve you in. There’s someone coming in who wants to meet you and explain it. So I’ll bring her by in a little bit, and we’ll find out together what she wants, all right?”

Venus made a movement with her head that Honoré took for a nod. She licked her dry lips and looked down at the clipboard she carried while the dresser hooked Venus’ fishnets to her g-string. “Good then. I’ll come back in fifteen minutes and we’ll talk. Now, for the show. There are ten boys tonight, John’s still out sick, I sent him home, so Terrence and Boyd will lift you in the Finale.” Her dancers were, for the first time in history, fighting to work, whether they were ill or injured or at death’s door. The chance to rub shoulders with the Most Beautiful Girl In the World was worth it. But Honoré had no intention of letting any unhealthy germs free in the theater. She couldn’t imagine Venus with a cold, but she was taking no chances. The cast had to pass muster. They had to prove their fitness to back up the Star each night. And she’d been sending them home regularly, a slump-shouldered, dejected stream trickling from her office, through the corridors, to the stage door. They knew not to dillydally or try to stick around for glimpses of Venus. If Honoré caught them at that, when she’d dismissed them already, their lives, not to mention their contracts, might well be forfeit. “… and you’ll be escorted by four singers in Big Bows, not six,” she finished. “Nothing else should change, I don’t think…” she made check marks on the paper, “unless someone else gets a cough, and then all bets are off.” She looked up and smiled, but Venus had turned back to the mirror, where she traced the line of her right breast with her left index finger. “Good then,” Honoré croaked, her throat achingly dry all of a sudden. “I’ll be back.”

As she walked back out to the corridor she checked again for passersby, and seeing gratefully that there weren’t any, she leaned against the wall and breathed heavily until her heartbeat steadied.

That girl would be the death of her.

If she were lucky, she thought.

NEXT POST: A PROLOGUE TO THE BATTLE OF THE BLONDES (Friday 12/11)

Magnolia Blossoms

Magnolia Posey Connor, nee Frank Hubert O’Connor, stood in her bedroom, naked, and looked at herself in the wall of mirrors that faced her bed.

The room was sumptuous. The house was a work of art. It had been built as just another tract MacMansion, but a showboy friend of Magnolia's from the old days had done it up, decorated and painted until it was unrecognizable. The mayor's house was almost as famous as she was.

"We're both works of art," she joked privately, and let people assume she was referring to her political career.

Sometimes, late at night when she couldn’t sleep, Magnolia walked through her whole house and imagined giving Honoré a tour. She saw her mother admiring the expensive decor, the few carefully chosen pieces of classic sculpture in which Magnolia had been convinced to invest, the one or two good paintings and baubles she’d had placed here and there to impress those who knew good things.

Honoré had never, quite, been invited. But Magnolia still hoped that she’d come, knock on the door some afternoon with a much-belated housewarming gift of teas and jams, or a spray of flowers. Magnolia knew, in her more realistic moments, that what her mother would bring, if she ever did, in fact, turn up at the front door, would be a haze of nicotine and a pointed disapproval of all she saw, but fantasy is a great comfort to the needy, and Magnolia Posey Connor, nee Frank Hubert O’Connor, considered herself unquestionably needy when it came to mothers.

"If Honore could see me now," she murmured. She stood nude in her bedroom in front of a whole wall of mirrors and admired herself. The goods were looking good, at this moment. Better and better since her negotiation with Zem. She turned right and left, inspecting his work. He had certainly reinvigorated what she saw before her.

Immortality was good, Magnolia thought, but eternal youth was good right now.

Her ass had lifted. That was the latest. Last week, her thighs had tightened and toned, and her neck and chin had gotten firmer, and then this morning, when she’d caught a look at herself in the gold-tinged mirror that covered one wall of her bathroom, she realized, her ass was higher.

Magnolia’s ass, in her heyday, had been one of her star features. Her tits had always been on the small side. Nice, pert, and well-shaped, but small. She’d considered, more than once over the years when she was dancing, having them enhanced surgically. They weren’t original equipment anyway, she reasoned, but just two among the many results of the hormones she took daily. Why shouldn’t she upgrade, spend a few bucks and get herself a more impressive pair? But she’d hesitated, realizing that plastic surgery was forever and she might not always want to be a D cup. She’d been prescient, because although boob jobs were common in Vegas—plastic surgery of all kinds was common, with more doctors per capita than anywhere else in the world except for Century City and Buenas Aires—she doubted whether even the voters in this permissive city would have seen past them to elect her. Or whether the Old Boys at City Hall would have been able to look her in the eye if they had.

But her butt… well, it had been her best attribute, when she had spun around a pole at Frankie Gallagher’s After Dark All Star Gentlemen’s World.

“I do good work,” Zem said.

“You do,” she agreed, straightening slowly and refusing to startle. He’d started simply appearing in her presence more and more. Now that she was a fellow immortal, he'd dropped all pretense of appearing normally human. “I could make a million bucks back in the strip clubs, if this plan of yours fails.”

“If my plan were to fail, you’d be in no shape to make a dollar,” he said.

“Good thing it can’t fail, then,” she said. “It can’t, can it?”

He snorted. He hadn’t moved since he’d appeared. It unnerved Magnolia sometimes, how still he could stand. As if, as a god, he were so alien to humanness that even the most deeply assumed habits of shifting weight, drumming fingers, blinking, swallowing, were unnecessary and distasteful. He was becoming more godlike, if that were the test, almost every day.

“This is not a two-bit heist, Magnolia. You’re not living out some Sixties caper movie. Remember who I am.”

“I never forget that,” she assured him. She threw a silk robe on and walked up to look at him. Magnolia was a tall woman, not surprising for either a transsexual or a former showgirl, and Zem stood only four or five inches taller. But he towered, he loomed, and sometimes even as she looked at him, standing preternaturally still like now, she wondered that his head didn’t crush a hole in her ceiling. “You are a god. Will you ever tell me what you’ve been up to, all these centuries?”

He snorted again, crushing the stillness. “Are you planning on writing a tell-all?” he asked. She thought—hoped—he was teasing.

“You never know,” she cocked a grin up at him. “It could be good for marketing. In a year or so, when the world is hungry for details of you.”

“Oh yes, the tabloid version,” he nodded wisely, then shook his head. “The world doesn’t need to re-learn its own history through my eyes. The people can imagine whatever they like between Olympus and Vegas.”

“What are you looking at?” she asked. He'd been gazing over her shoulder into the mirror.

“You’re looking more like Venus as your body tones,” he answered. He stepped away from her. “I’m going,” he said.

“Wait—was there something you wanted?” she asked. Why had he shown up tonight, anyway?

He looked down at her and smiled. “No,” he told her. “Nothing. I thought I’d join you, as you were enjoying yourself so much.” His cheeks creased as he smiled at her, but his eyes were still calculating.

There was something else he’d done, although Magnolia hadn’t asked for it. She glanced back at herself in the mirror, now, and something that was almost a shiver ran down her spine and through her. Zem had made her beautiful, immortal… and female, through and through and in her every cell and hormone.

She’d been a woman, pragmatically, for more than half her life, now. She’d gotten the surgery when she was barely an adult, in Sweden, where America’s Puritan ideas had never taken hold and gender was understood as just one more medical condition. And then she’d spent a couple years in what she’d thought of as “training” around Europe. She’d crowded her way into every cattle call in Paris, and eventually worked all the top Paris nightclubs: Lido de Paris, the Moulin Rouge, even the tired old Folies Bergere for a few months. She’d learned how to walk, how to do her makeup, how to get noticed and take control in the ways women could, that men knew nothing of. She’d always sensed that real power required a pair of breasts, a working cunt. The Swedes had given her the equipment. Paris had taught her how to wield it. When she arrived back in Vegas, she’d become untouchable, unquestionably the most womanly of any woman ever seen.

But her body, like those of all transsexuals, had never forgotten its history. Magnolia had a very discreet doctor, who’d faithfully taken care of her needs and supplied the hormones she required for many years, mostly because she had photographic evidence of what he did with young boys when his wife was out of town. Her body had never betrayed her, as some of her gender-reassigned sisters’ had; it had never reacted badly to the pills, never developed untoward symptoms as she aged and her physiology adjusted.

But then Zem had granted her petition for ageless beauty, and as a bonus he’d thrown in the Holy Grail of all transsexuals, genetic femininity. She hadn’t realized the change till she’d gotten slightly sick and gone for a checkup. Her doctor had done tests and told her, looking confused, to try going off the pills. Magnolia had been terrified, imagining black stubble sprouting on her jaw, her warm, honeyed voice dropping an octave, and her breasts exiting stage right and left in a flash.

None of that happened. She grew more feminine. Her skin actually improved. Her laugh took on a lilt she’d never heard before. Her breasts grew perkier as youth took hold. She threw the pills down the drain and asked Zem, knowing from his grin before he spoke what he had done.

“I just gave you what you really wanted,” he’d said.

“Thank you,” she’d answered, even though the change alarmed her. She wondered what was going on beneath her skin. She lay awake at night, sometimes, feeling as though tiny aliens had invaded her body and were rebuilding it, ripping things out and creating other structures while she kept walking through her days, trying to adjust on the fly.

What has he done to me, she wondered.

“You’re welcome,” Zem said again, now, in her bedroom. She looked up at him still watching her, reading the course of her thoughts but showing none of her uncertainty at their import.

Of course he’s not uncertain, she remonstrated herself. He’s never questioned anything he’s done in his whole millennia-long existence!

“That’s right, my dear,” he told her, reading those thoughts, too. “Certainty is the gift of the gods, you know. It’s what sets us higher than mere mortals.” His cheeks creased as he smiled deeper, and his cheekbones rose and his eyes crinkled, and Magnolia thought Jesus, he can almost out-do Santa Claus when he gets going– the world’s going to fall right into his hand!

“Yes,” he told her. “That’s exactly what they’re going to do. They always do.”

There was the slight sucking noise that happened when he went. The air around where he’d been standing rushed in, and the sudden vacuum was filled. Magnolia fancied she heard chuckling from the empty space, but there was no telling if it came from Zem’s mouth, or just the air itself, amused at her.

The air itself seemed to have eyes, these days, to be watching her, just as Fletch and all his cronies had watched her on the runway. At any moment, she thought, some invisible admirer might slip a bill down her lace, thong panties. That would amuse Zem, wouldn’t it?

There might have been more chuckling. Maybe Zem had heard her thought again. She shivered, wondering if she might find cash beneath her robe when she slipped it off.

She didn’t want to look. She pulled the belt tighter around her newly trim waist and knotted it.

The air around her held too many eyes. Zem’s two were far too many. He, by himself, she thought, was more than enough audience for any woman.

NEXT POST: AN AUDIENCE WITH THE DIVINE (Monday 12/7)