I didn’t drop out of art. My editor intoned content like a priest with a mouthful of wafers, and I needed to cook up a new flavor of influence for this century, something that would glue itself to my bones and vibrate beneath my skin, a tune I couldn’t shake.

The city corralled me, sly as a pickpocket. First, the soft lies: billboards peddling velvet euthanasia in three easy payments, influencers decanting enlightenment into thirty-second ampoules. Then the side streets, where asphalt shed its skin like a snake with amnesia, and the air traded its cologne for hot metal and the sigh of wet plaster. Every block bred a new genus of regret, mapped in the worn soles of my shoes.

The flyer was a pixelated crime: VALESKA: 1F, migraine-font, coordinates scrawled like a dare, and a promise, “A rupture in the spectacle.” The kind of phrase that makes grad students faint and my tax bracket itch.

The building draped its abandonment like a bespoke suit, seams gnawed by focus groups who once argued how to market decay. Bricks had bled out their color, windows shellacked in soot, haunted by the ghosts of startups that never even made it to the pitch. The buzzer spat static and nicotine phantoms when I pressed it, a cough that still remembered how to hope.

A lock snapped, a signature forged in someone else’s muscle memory, granting me passage into a narrative I never signed for.

The elevator ditched its dignity after two floors, hacking and rasping like a lounge singer with a nicotine debt and a vendetta. By the third, it shivered, spat out a final rattle, and died under my feet. The doors stuttered open onto a hallway that felt like a memory I’d rented by the hour.

The stairwell was the city’s guilty conscience, pooled and curdled. The air refused to budge; it simmered, hoarding flavors, industrial dust, the ghost of energy drinks, and cheap liquor fossilized into resin that glued itself to my soles. Somewhere below, a subwoofer was busy fracturing time into jagged shards.

Step by step, the light leaked out. Beige soured into grey, then into a purple you could taste before your eyes caught up. It started as a bruise blooming under the skin of the air, then swelled until it was the only color left—a fever that crawled under my nails and rewired my compass.

At the landing, the wall hissed "1F" in black stencil. Lie. This wasn’t a floor; it was a prognosis. I turned the corner, and the violet devoured me. It didn’t just light the space; it pounced.

The color knifed through my pupils and exploded behind my eyes, flooding my throat with a hot, metallic aftertaste, grape cough syrup steeped in old coins and burnt wiring. I blinked, and the world melted, edges blurring, shadows sprouting personalities.

And then I saw her.

Valeska didn’t stand in the doorway so much as she edited the space around it, a jagged interruption in the hallway’s geometry. The “1F” marker floated beside her head like a museum label for a piece that wasn’t for sale.

She was barefoot, planted, rooted in the sticky varnish of the floor like it was hers by adverse possession. Torn jeans slouched low, hanging on to the sharp line of her hips with the desperation of a lover who knows the eviction notice is already signed, above that, skin, angles, unfiltered architecture.

The violet light traced every contour with forensic interest, picking out ribs like tally marks on a prison wall.

She held the waistband of the jeans in one hand, fingers curled as if gripping a weapon. Not modesty. Control. A temporary treaty between gravity and willpower.

Her face was what happened when someone weaponized fatigue. Not the Instagram kind, the deep, marrow-level erosion that comes from being looked at too much, for too long, by people who only see a surface. Hair is an exploded cloud, shadow, and motion, eyes: two black wells where light went to confess.

“You’re late,” she said. Her voice didn’t travel; it sliced. A faint rasp on the edges, like tires kissing wet asphalt right before everything goes sideways.

“I got held up by reality,” I said, because I’ve made a career out of abusing metaphors and lying to dangerous people. “Traffic on the bridge. Existential gridlock.”

One eyebrow twitched, a small, surgical resection of my ego.

“You’re the one writing the obituary,” she said. Not a question.

“I prefer ‘pre-emptive ethnography,’” I replied.

“Of course you do.”

Up close, the hallway revealed itself as a crime scene for taste. Cables crawled along the ceiling like overfed centipedes. A humid mist clung to everything, with audience sweat and fog-machine residue having formed an uneasy coalition. The bass from the room beyond the doorway wasn’t just sound; it was a physical object. It climbed up the bones of my ankles and began rearranging my blood pressure.

Valeska shifted, just slightly. Denim rasped against skin, dry and rough, an audible boundary. The sound landed in my ears like a match being struck in a warehouse.

“You brought a notebook,” she observed.

She said it like an accusation. Like a weapon.

“I brought a nervous system,” I countered. “The notebook is just where I dump the evidence.”

Her gaze swept over me, coat, shoes, press badge ghosting through the pocket lining like a bad conscience. I could feel every seam of my clothes, every cheap stitch, the off-the-rack failure of my whole presentation. Under the violet, my skin itched with sudden awareness of pores, scars, spilled coffee I hadn’t entirely scrubbed from my cuffs.

“Here’s how this works,” she said. “You’re going to try to turn this into a story about the death of something. ‘Scene,’ ‘subculture,’ ‘movement,’ pick your noun. You’ll describe the light like a bruise. You’ll mention my ribs because patriarchy taught you that exposed bones mean authenticity. You’ll pretend you’re disgusted by the spectacle so your readers can feel absolved while they consume it.”

“I haven’t written a word,” I said.

“You’ve been writing since you walked in,” she replied. “I can smell it.” Ever since I made my first sound, the narrative has always been DOA. It’s all good; it makes me the asshole I am today."

The air between us tightened. Somewhere behind the doorframe, a cheer rose, muffled and grotesque, like someone drowning in velvet.

“You asked for press,” I reminded her. “Your people sent the invite.”

She nodded once, clipping the air.

“I asked for witnesses, not stenographers. There’s a difference.”

We stood there, locked in a stalemate so electric I could taste burned circuitry on the back of my tongue. I became aware of the building itself, how it creaked around us, how the concrete sweated under decades of broken air conditioners and burst pipes.

The hallway carried a faint sweetness under the grime, as if someone had spilled cheap floral detergent years ago, and the molecules were still fighting a losing war.

Valeska angled her shoulder against the jamb, free arm stretching up to rest on the frame. The pose was lazy and imperial at once, exposing her torso to the full assault of the purple. Every shallow breath cast a fresh map of shadows on her chest. She looked like a figure from a forgotten religious icon that a bored adolescent with a neon marker had vandalized.

“Tell me the angle,” she said.

“On the piece?”

“On me. On this.” She flicked her chin at the door, the invisible party, the light, the accumulated grime, the failure of building codes.

“I don’t know yet.”

“Liar.”

I cracked the notebook, not to write but to keep my hands from confessing my pulse. The paper sweated in my grip, already swollen with the room’s fever, bracing itself for whatever I might carve into its skin.

“Fine,” I said. “You’re the patron saint of burnout, the face of Collapse as Lifestyle. The show critiques how late capitalism eats trauma and sells it back to us as merch. You’re the martyr and the marketer, crucified on a hashtag.”

Her mouth twitched. Not a smile. More like a muscle remembering how to be one.

“Too easy,” she said. “You write that and everyone will clap themselves on the back for recognizing the system they refuse to leave. Try again.”

I swallowed. The air was doing that thing where it got so thick it felt like drinking other people’s exhalations. Somewhere, a pipe rattled, shaking out rust and ghosts.

“You’re not the victim,” I tried. “You’re the warden. This whole thing is a trap. You lure in people who want to be transgressive, then show them they’re just another product demo. It’s not a performance; it’s a mirror.”

“Closer.”

Her hand flexed on the waistband of the jeans, knuckles whitening, then relaxing. I could almost hear the fibers strain, like a rope bridge in a storm.

“You’re missing the part where you’re in it,” she said. “Where your gaze is the problem and the material and the audience all at once.”

She stepped half a pace closer. Not enough to close the distance, just sufficient to reconfigure it.

The violet halo painted a phantom version of her on my retina. Even when I blinked, she stayed. Sweat, hers, mine, the building’s, had turned the air into a trembling veil that distorted everything behind it.

“Why did you really come?” she asked.

“The story,” I said.

She waited.

“The money,” I amended.

She kept waiting.

“And because…” I exhaled, feeling the confession scrape its way out. “Because there’s a part of me that wants it all to be worse than I remember. To prove I’m not the villain in my own nostalgia.”

That did it. For the first time, her eyes softened, not with kindness, but with recognition, a priest hearing a familiar sin.

“There it is,” she murmured. “You’re not here to document the fall. You’re here to make sure it happened without you being responsible.”

The bassline shifted, a new track kicking in. The rhythm turned jagged, syncopated, invasive. It crawled up my legs and nested in my spine, vibrating vertebrae like a tiny, persistent drill.

“You talk a big game about power and control,” she said. “Performance, authorship, all your little critical-theory buzzwords. But you still think you’re outside of it. As if that notebook makes you invisible.”

I looked down at the battered cover, edges frayed, pages warped from a hundred bars and bathrooms.

“So what’s the alternative?” I asked. “Refuse to write? Walk away? Let someone else turn you into clickbait?”

She smiled then. Not pretty, not warm, sharp, bright, alive.

“I’m not afraid of being turned into content,” she said. “That part’s inevitable. I’m afraid of being turned into the wrong story.”

“And what’s the right one?”

“That I wrote it,” she said simply.

She let go of the jeans.

Gravity sulked, denied its applause; the jeans clung, borders blurred by a hush that never quite dared trespass. The gesture wasn’t exposure, only trust in drag, zipped into a thrift-store jacket or maybe something sharper, humming with the aftershave of trust’s counterfeit twin.

“You’re going to go back upstairs,” she said. “You’re going to write the piece. Your editor will slap a headline on it about ‘the new underground’ or ‘the last gasp of authenticity’ or whatever test-markets well with your readership’s midlife panic.”

I could already see it: black-on-white, a pull-quote from her taken out of context, sidebar ads for cologne and therapy apps.

She continued. “But before you do, you’re going to understand that this”, she gestured at herself, the door, the color that had colonized my optic nerve, “exists without you. With or without your words, this happens. You are not the officiant. You’re the guy who snuck into the wake because he heard there’d be interesting people there.”

I swallowed. The air fizzed on my tongue, hot metal, citrus, a stranger’s panic dissolving behind my teeth.

“And what do you get out of this?” I asked.

“I get to use you,” she said. “Your platform. Your credibility. The theatre of a ‘serious journalist grappling with the ethics of representation.’ It’s part of the piece.”

“You’re staging me,” I said slowly.

“Of course I am.” Her eyes glittered, two polished obsidian coins. “Do you think I’d leave something as important as my own exploitation to amateurs?”

The laugh that escaped me was half cough, half bark. It tasted bitter and familiar.

“Then take the picture,” she said.

It wasn’t a suggestion. It was a line of code.

I didn’t have a camera. But my hand moved anyway, reflexive, reaching for a weight that wasn’t there; years of documenting other people’s worst decisions had etched that muscle memory into me.

My fingers closed on nothing. The hallway flexed, walls inhaling and exhaling, the light thickening around us like syrup poured over a secret. My pulse stuttered in my throat, a metronome counting down to a crime.

“See?” Valeska said softly. “You don’t need the hardware. You’re already capturing it. You’re turning this moment into a narrative in real time. Cropping, framing, deciding what will survive.”

She stepped back into the doorway, half-swallowed by the ultraviolet. For a second, she looked less like a person and more like an afterimage of one, etched on the inside of my skull.

“Here’s my condition,” she said. “You can write it all. The hallway, the jeans, the bones, the purple that tastes like poison candy, and airport lighting. All of it. But you include yourself. Not as the moral center. As the problem.”

“That’ll tank the angle,” I muttered.

“That’ll make it true,” she replied.

The word true landed between us like a dropped knife.

When I turned from the doorway, the hallway stretched itself, elastic and hungry, narrowing and yawning with every breath. My boots peeled from the floor, slow as old tape giving up its secrets. Behind me, the bass shattered the silence, distant but relentless.

Each step upwards peeled layers from me. First, the violet, fading at the edges of my vision but refusing to leave the center. Then the thick humidity, surrendering to stairwell dust and the faint institutional cleaner from some unseen mop. The building coughed, pipes clanking, as if expelling me like a bad idea.

By the time I pried the front door open, the night outside wore a knockoff face. Streetlights threw sickly halos onto cracked pavement; neon signs bickered in the glass, puddles bruised blue and red on the cheap. Down the block, a bakery burned sugar, its breath curling into the street, apologizing for the rest of the city.

The city pressed itself against me, insistent. Breath on my face: exhaust, fried food, wet stone, distant rain, thinking about making an entrance. My heart synced with the subterranean rumble of a train two streets over, a dull, repetitive thud underfoot.

I walked. My fingertips trailed along the brick, reading every chip and crack, each one a microfilm archive of old collisions. Grit wedged itself under my nails, anchoring me better than any digital meditation ever could.

By the time I reached the main drag, the purple clung, not a color anymore, but a taste, a metallic film lacquered on the back of my tongue.

I slipped into a bar that wore ‘craft’ like a Halloween mask for its own desperation, the kind of place where the wallpaper peels in Morse code and the stools remember every failed apology. I ordered something clear, poured into a glass etched with the ghost of better nights. The ice clinked, each cube a miniature jury, deliberating over the evidence of my intentions.

Notebook sprawled, spine creaking like a confessional booth plotting revenge. The pen hovered, jittery, starving to bleed out what the night had graffitied beneath my ribs, ink scratching at its cell door for parole.

The first line I wrote wasn’t about Valeska.

It was about the fact that I had already decided she was material before I knew her name.

The piece practically wrote itself, which should have been my first warning.

Subterranean violet. Hallway as confessional. Woman as totem of late-capitalist burnout. Ribs as shorthand for authenticity. Jeans as border, as treaty, as last line of self-possession.

It all flowed, a little too well. The metaphors came on like a chemical high; fast, bright, self-congratulatory. I could already hear how it would sound read aloud on a podcast: smug, haunted, aesthetically concerned.

Halfway down the page, I stopped.

Valeska’s demand sat there in the back of my head, quiet and corrosive:

You include yourself. Not as the moral center. As the problem.

You hand is cramped. The bar’s soundtrack glitched from algorithmic pop to something scratchy, maybe jazz, maybe the air ducts confessing. Laughter shattered from a table behind me, sharp as glass poured into a metal sink.

Fine. I drew a line across the page, hard enough to dent the paper three sheets down, and started again.

This time, I wrote the part about how I’d gone there hoping to confirm that the scene was dead, because that would mean I hadn’t simply aged out of it. How I’d rehearsed my own martyrdom: the last honest chronicler of a corrupted underground. How I’d counted on using her as both scapegoat and shrine.

I wrote about the way I’d catalogued her body before her words. The reflex inventory: bruises, angles, visible bones, the subtle tremor in her arm when she tightened her grip on the denim. How I’d filed them under evidence of authenticity instead of proof of a person with a nervous system and rent due.

Then I wrote down the worst part:

I wanted her to be ruined so I could feel clean for noticing.

The line sprawled, raw and feral, a wound that spat out the last of metaphor’s anesthesia, naked and staring, leaking into the paper’s marrow until the page shivered.

I stared until the ink caved, leaking into the paper’s capillaries, the words dissolving like promises abandoned in the rain, or bones steeping in gutterlight.

Two days later, my editor called.

“This is good,” she said. “Dark, but good. We’ll need to cut back on some of the self-flagellation in the middle. Our readers aren’t here for long confessions.”

“That’s the point,” I said. “The confession is the piece.”

A pause stretched, thin and tense, her exhale barely audible, air leaking from a balloon that sulked in the corner, resenting every inch it surrendered.

“Look,” she said. “The stuff about the hallway, the scene, the body horror of nightlife, that sings. The media-critique navel-gazing? Less so. We trim that; this runs on the front page of Culture. You might even get a podcast slot.”

There it was: the future, shrink-wrapped in algorithm, humming behind glass, twitching to be unboxed and lost, a souvenir from a city that never bothered to memorize my name.

“And if we don’t trim it?” I asked.

“Then it runs shorter, online only, and everyone scrolls past after the first three paragraphs because you made them uncomfortable.”

Her tone wasn’t cruel. Just pragmatic. Late-stage media pragmatism: engagement over integrity, clicks over ulcers.

In the silence that followed, I heard Valeska’s voice in my head:

I get to use you.

“Run it as is,” I said.

“You sure?” My editor sounded genuinely surprised. “This is you, on record, calling yourself complicit. It’s…brave.”

“No,” I said. “It’s accurate.”

Another pause. Then: “Okay. Your funeral.”

She hung up. The dial tone lingered, a phantom bassline looping in my ear, the afterparty where my name was always misspelled on the guest list.

The piece went live on a Wednesday.

By Thursday, the comments were a familiar hydra of bad faith and half-interest.

Some called it performative guilt. Some accused me of inventing Valeska altogether. A handful dissected her like a specimen, precisely as predicted: what she represented, what she symbolized, what she did or didn’t say about The State Of Culture.

Almost no one grazed the line where I admitted my gaze was a blade, sharpened and starving, carving stories from the marrow of strangers.

A week later, I got a DM.

You did better than I expected. – V.

No profile picture. No posts. Just that.

I stared at it until the screen blinked first. My fingers hovered, itching to tap out a clever retort, a quip about authorship, co-creation, the old shell game of who’s using whom.

Instead, I closed the app.

Sometimes, late, when the city leans in, and the streetlights blink Morse code insomnia against my eyelids, I taste that purple again, fizzing on the back of my tongue.

It returns uninvited: metallic, electric, humming in the gap between pulse and thought. I’ll pass a boutique peddling curated poverty to trust-fund larvae, and the glass will snatch the light wrong, showing me a reflection that almost fits but never settles.

A doorway. A figure. Jeans held in a white-knuckled hand. I tell myself it’s just a memory. Just one more story in a career of them. But some nights, when the trains rattle my bones from below, and the rain hisses its private dialect in the gutters, I get the itch that I never captured Valeska at all.

She caught me instead. Pinned me to the page, wings splayed, catalogued in a dialect my hands never learned. Somewhere, a basement still thrums in ultraviolet, skin of light sloughing and re-forming over new nights, new bodies, the show molting without permission, too busy existing to notice the lens.

Out here, I live on afterimage. The taste of that purple stains the back of my tongue, a slow bruise I worry with my thoughts until it pulses. Some nights, when the trains rattle my bones loose, and the rain scribbles its alphabet in the gutters, I swear I feel her again, not touch, exactly, more like a pressure humming just under the skin. This heat remembers where it meant to go and never did.

Shop windows toss back a version of me I barely recognize: the witness who thought he was fireproof and left with a watermark. In the glass, the city’s logos run, saints melting on discount altars, and behind my shoulder, there’s always a ghost of that doorway, a flicker of bare angles and denim and a hand clutching a border like it’s the last honest thing left.

I tell myself it’s only a memory, that I’ve just filed her under all the other stories I’ve harvested and abandoned. But the truth moves differently in my body. It crawls. It pulses. It curls itself low in my gut and hums. It’s the knowledge that I wasn’t the one doing the collecting, not really. She read me as easily as a pull quote, underlined the soft parts, and left her annotations in my nervous system.

Somewhere beneath the city’s counterfeit halos, the real show keeps molting, immaculate in its refusal to be archived. I’m not the author, not the critic, not even the audience now. I’m just a footnote, scribbled in the gutter by a hand that never learned my alphabet, a smear of marginalia no one will cite.

And if anything like justice still limps through this counterfeit glow, dragging its bad leg past the billboards and brand activations, then that’s the only ending that makes any sense at all: her stage, her script, her light.

My hunger. My stain. My place, permanently off to the side, pressed flat between the pages while she keeps rewriting the world without ever asking my permission.

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