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[Uleni Athram]

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Purple Prose (1):
Gangster Glamour
YLENNO
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Skin the color of amber; hair the color of smuggler’s gold; cabochon eyes as glittering and as unfeeling as the grey-iron surface of a prison knife ready to wound. Born from metal, the way he bends light around him; his entire being is liquid imperfection, chrome fire tamed and beaten into a seamless vessel worn by this thug, this lowlife who recalls the repugnant beauty of those exiled kings and cruel kratocrats.

Pale-snake trophies openly on display; across his nose, below his left eye, just above his lip, a hundred more in other places— medals, he says to himself, medals gifted to him by the underworld through endless gang feuds, alleyway bushwhackings and urban war-waging he openly embraced before the age of fifteen.

He is proud of these scars. They tell his courage and story.

His every movement is wild lightning. His every smile is cut with poison; it shines like baby diamonds in the dark and carries a thousand different secrets. When he speaks, he speaks with the weighted wisdom of the street-meats and the demonic persuasiveness of the drug dealers; he can talk you into tying the noose around your neck, he can talk you into snorting the white sugar off the table, he can talk you into selling yourself for strangers — and you’d do all these things with a smile, if you let him.

Ink. He wears his victories on his skin. On his back sprawl the Prince of Cats and the Goblin King, locked in eternal combat and hateful intercourse— his reward for four hundred straight wins in the underground fighting pits of the Cheydinhal Orums. Across his chest rise the spindly Towers of Miscarcand, five wretched things with Stars at the top of each; one Tower speaking for a year in prison, one Star signifying a successful escape. On one side of his neck, a decapitated Boethiah; on the other, a Fleur-de-Lis pierced with a dirk; on his throat a cracked Amulet of Kings — sigils. Sigils of syndicates now extinct by his hand. Under his right ear a Dragon pierced with eleven arrows; his quota of assassinated legion captains. Under his left a Rose with four Crying Eyes for petals; the number of whôres he liberated from abusive pimps. A smiling mouth shaped like a tear just under his right eye — a gift from his inmates when he turned eighteen inside.

He is proud of these tattoos. They proclaim his power and authority.



This post has been edited by Uleni Athram: Jun 24 2018, 01:18 PM