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Scene #77
I wasn't what most people would consider beautiful. Too tall at
5'11”, too big-boned and hippy (I believe the term used to be
called “full-figured”). I had no fashion sense, preferring a pair
of comfy jeans, a t-shirt and boots to anything else; and my choppy
shag haircut had turned away even the most adventurous-natured of
men. I'd been called stunning, exotic, and even
occasionally beautiful (by drunken men at two a. m. in a dark
alleyway)…along with haggish, homely and downright ugly depending
on the day and the person bestowing me with such descriptions.
Women tended to see me as a threat whether they thought I was
attractive or not. Go figure. But no matter what anyone
thought I looked like, I certainly got attention. As a child and
teenager it sometimes bordered on stalkerish and tip-toed just on
this side of the line of pedophilia with some men. I was never
touched in that way, mind you, but the attraction made my skin
crawl. All people had a fascination with my face. Not
because I had flawless skin tone or because of the exotic slant of
my eyes. Or even the color of my eyes (blue-black with a rim of
gold circling the pupil.) That wasn't a gross exaggeration either.
Alien eyes, demon eyes they called them; how apropos. People stared
at me because of the birthmark on my face. Right smack in the
middle of my forehead; the placement couldn't have been more
unfortunate. I'd tried to cover it with my hair but it always
seemed to peek out between my bangs so I just quit trying.
The mark was a discoloration in the shape of a spiral. It wasn't
but an inch across but on my caramel colored skin it stood out. Oh,
did I mention that the spiral was woad blue? Kind of hard not to
notice. It wasn't a tattoo; at least that's what my mom told me
when I was old enough to ask and know what a tattoo was. (Who
would've done that to a five year old's face?) It seemed too
precise to be a birthmark but I was told I'd had it since birth.
Maybe I was a unicorn in a past life. That would've been exotic.
I'd come across all kinds of folks from all walks of life;
from the very rich to the very poor, the ugly and the beautiful.
And no matter how pretty the wrappings, I could always see the
ugliness just beneath the surface. Demons. The one thing that
connected them. They all had that little touch of freakiness about
them and I'd resigned myself long ago to the fact that I was a
freak magnet. It was as bad as it sounded; sometimes worse. But it
was my job. I was a Cleaner; I purged demons from people. I had a
special talent for it. I wouldn't have chosen this line of work but
I was born to it. At least that was what my grandmother always told
me. Storm Parker, at your service. I'd been a Cleaner for
ten years. My partner was Keiran McKenzie. He was a bear of a man;
tall, broad of shoulder, long of leg and by anyone's standard,
gorgeous of face. His dark brown hair fell to his shoulders in
thick waves perfectly framing his olive skinned face and hazel
eyes. His angular features looked chiseled from granite which made
a lot of sense to me because he was often quite hard-headed. He had
the body of a Greek god that made you just want to touch it. And
after ten years of making sure I awoke everyday, I considered him
family. The town I lived in, Cottonwood, was small to
middling and you wouldn't have thought that there'd be much use for
someone with my talents but I made a decent living. I wasn't rich
by any means but my bills got paid and I wasn't starving.
Demons attached themselves to a person's addictions. The worse the
addiction, the stronger the demon. There wasn't a type of demon
that I hadn't cleaned and there hadn't been any that I couldn't
clean. I was pretty proud of that fact. I'm not the only cleaner in
town but I'd like to think I was the best. Lately though, the
things that had come easily for me before were getting
progressively more difficult. Half of me wanted to shrug it off as
age, I was thirty and I knew I wasn't as quick as I'd once been in
my late teens and early twenties. The other half of me said fuck
that, I was in my prime. Cleaning was hard on my body physically
but I usually bounced back fairly quickly. But lately… I hated to
think that I was already slowing down; I was no fitness junkie but
I took care of myself. I tried to eat right, took my vitamins and
stayed active. For the past several weeks the clients I'd
cleaned had some serious issues. It wasn't unheard of to have to
clean a person twice in one week but for me it was rare. I'd been
getting some hard core addicts as of late and the faces were
becoming familiar if not the names. And the demons themselves were
harder to handle too. Something had become misaligned in the
universe; I was still batting a thousand but the odds were rising
in the demons' favor. It was just a matter of time before I came
across a demon that I wouldn't be able to clean. Definitely not
looking forward to that day.
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