The pole dancer looked over the burning city in triumph. She cared not that her skin was dyed blue from the cold wind howling across the top of the tower block, nor that her forearms were streaked with blood from her split palms. Her enemies were burning and that was all that mattered.
Besides, the devil himself was coming to collect her soul shortly – what point would there be to start whining about a little chill now?
For the sheer hell of it, she climbed back on her pole and sun round once more, thankful that she’d invested in a rotating one rather than settling for static. Some of the other girls at the club might consider it cheating but she loved the speed she could accomplish easily on a rotating one, it made her feel like she could spin fast enough to throw the spirits that haunted her from her mind.
She laughed again to feel her hair whipping against her face, if she went fast enough she could blur out the arcane symbols written in blood below. Her blood.
Down below in the city, the flames roared.
-----
She and her elder brother had arrived here several years ago, fleeing something she did not understand. Her only knowledge of it her brothers urgency in the middle of the night, begging her to come with him, fleeing their parent’s house. His obvious terror.
She had loved her brother more than anyone back then. She surprised herself with how long that love had lasted.
Even now, she had no truth, no certain why he had left home, nor why he had taken her with him. Although now, after these years spent with him, she could hazard a guess.
It wasn’t long before her brother got himself into all kinds of trouble. Money trouble, drug trouble, women trouble. They had arrived here with little money, knowing no one, with scant resources to be able to protect themselves from the consequences of her brother’s actions.
It wasn’t long before she knew it was up to her to keep them safe, to provide for them. She had always been on the acrobatics team at school – pole dancing was simply another form of that she told herself. To her surprise, she actually enjoyed it – not the men leering at her but she found out that once she was on stage with the music pounding through her bones the rest of the world seemed to drain away, leaving nothing behind but her body and the music.
Her skills became so good she was recruited by one of the top clubs, and actually seemed to be able to keep one step ahead of the debt collectors her brother seemed to accrue like used condoms.
But, like all things so precariously balanced, you cannot hold such poise forever.
Her brother angered one mobster too many. She came home one day to find pieces of him scattered around the kitchen floor. She had slipped on his spilled and discarded guts, right into the arms of the awaiting debt collectors.
They had taken her to their boss, who calmly informed her that her brother’s debt now passed to her. Her brother’s blood drying and sticking to her skin through her socks, they had not given her time to change or out on shoes, she explained that she already was paying off his debt and that, given her current rate of pay, it should be cleared in a few months.
She believed it was shock that allowed her to speak to calmly to him. Also shock that prevented her from seeing – until he told that she was to work in one of his clubs and his alone, only that would satisfy the debt – that he was one of her regulars at the club.
From one of the top clubs in town she fell to a skeevy little bar right at the outskirts of it. The countertops were sticky and foul, the sound system of static and the poles stiff and unloved. The bouncers had little pride in keeping the girls safe and she learnt to be even quicker at dodging out of the way of the clienteles greasy, grasping fingers. She knew that she’d never earn enough to escape from here.
She also knew that was the point.
She would have considered killing herself, had she not wanted to grant the boss the opportunity to defile her corpse.
She had existed in a state of resigned despair, right up until a dreary Wednesday afternoon when the devil himself had come up to her and asked for a dance.
Or, to be more correct, he had asked for seven.
Back when she was first learning, back when she took a sort of pride in her dancing, maybe even when she still had a sense of humour she had come up with a long and complex dance routine entitled ‘The Seven Deadly Sins’. Few could afford to pay for it – the routine itself was too long, so she mainly danced it for herself, for her own amusement and perhaps salvation. It was this dance that had gotten her noticed by the top clubs.
She did not want to dance it anymore. The devil, sensing her hesitation, said
‘I can pay for it.’
And held out enough money to pay off a third of her debt.
Her mind made up she took him to one of the private rooms. He did nothing but sit there quietly, with a small smile, watching her dance. When she was done, he laid the money on the table and left equally quietly.
For soliciting a private dance, she received ten lashes of the whip from the boss. His face incoherent with rage. She was laid up in bed for two weeks from the pain, the pus seeping from her wounds to the sheets, staining them.
When she returned to work, the devil was there.
He asked for a dance. She accepted.
When the dance was over, instead of leaving immediately, as before, he asked her,
‘What do you want, more than anything?’
She felt the pull of breath in her lungs, choking on the fetid air of the club. The feel of blood mingling with her sweat as the exertion had reopened her whip wounds. She felt herself stand, in this dingy little room, in cheap and tawdry underwear in front of a man she didn’t know and said:
‘To see this city burn.’
She received 20 lashes this time.
After a week in bed, the postman delivered a parcel. A book, handwritten, full of strange symbols and dance routines. She looked at the illustrations.
She looked out the window of her tiny bedsit apartment. At a city that had never once loved or cared for her.
She stared again at the illustrations.
---
The gravel was almost comforting against her cheek. Why was there gravel against her cheek? Ah, she must have slipped and fallen from the pole; her limbs did feel suspiciously light.
She blinked, her vision blurred, there was a figure before her. The devil. So he had come for her soul after all. Very well, it was a fair bargain and he had held up his end admirably – even now, when everything was fading round the edges, she could still hear the city being devoured, as it had devoured her.
She smiled up at him, her devil, her saviour. His dark figure reaching down towards her the last thing she saw before her eyes eased shut.
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