Aerosol

Aerosol

Banner by Deebelle Onefic

Waste your heart for the aerosol art.

At 11:47 on a Tuesday night, Bella Swan met her match.

No copyright infringement intended.

I own nothing. Not even a gas mask.

That’s a lie. I do, but it makes me hyperventilate. I don’t like wearing it.

ONE

At 11:47 on a Tuesday night, Bella Swan met her match.

She had been doing this for years and tonight was no different. The practiced ease was becoming nearly therapeutic. She could feel something urgent and unfulfilled building within her when she went too long without releasing, like a smoker addicted to the burn in their lungs.

A drinker lusting for the fire in their belly.

Yearning for something that was probably bad for her health, but felt too good to quit.

She wore a mask, but secretly loved the stench.

She had watched the wall for nearly two weeks before she decided that it was safe enough to attempt. Lodged between a toy store and a high-end clothing boutique, twelve square feet of perfectly smooth concrete that had her fingers itching before the idea even really formed. The upscale business district sported only a few security officers who seemed to nap more than they secured, and the only traffic through the alleyway was delivery vans and trash trucks. Even in the middle of the night, the spot was shadowed from the street but still had decent light to work under.

It had taken her nearly four hours, but would have taken much longer in a different location. She didn’t have to duck the searching lights of cop cars every twenty minutes or hide from random, stumbling drunkards looking for a place to piss. Didn’t have to wait while busboys emptied trash as she crouched in the dark on the other side of the dumpster, holding her breath and her nose. Four unbroken hours that gave her enough time to paint an ocean, the entirety of which had used up the last of her favorite can of indigo blue. Four hours of spraying graceful tendrils of water over and under and around towering columns of kelp, fondling leafy fingers in a mesh of blue to green. She’d started an octopus but quickly banished the idea, letting the water trail its limbs instead. Letting each shade of blue curl around itself in a languid tangle, almost like hair underwater. Letting the pressure from her finger be the only say she had.

Letting the can lead.

Letting the paint speak.  

She had climbed up onto the dumpster to add a whale, grey and white and barnacled, floating up out of the water as though it was headed for the sky.

She didn’t bring her supplies tonight, she was only back to get a look at her latest piece. To check on her ocean and she brought Edward with her. He was tall and lanky and and almost too good looking for her tastes. He smiled more often than she thought was really necessary and laughed out loud a lot more than she did, but he was her trusty partner and partners usually came along for this kind of thing. They met in an alleyway on the corner of Hudson and Maple nearly four years ago. He watched her paint from the dark for nearly an hour before she knew he was there, nearly scaring her into a heart attack when he emerged from the shadows, complimenting her work.

They’d been painting together ever since.

He taught her about lookouts and stakeouts, watching walls and traffic schedules and deciding when to finally fold on the perfect stretch of brick. Planning escape routes and what to say if you got busted. She showed him stencils and how she used a tiny little spiral cut out of a piece of vellum a hundred times over to make the chaotic leaves of a tree. How to slap a sticker down on a wall, spray a giant bloom of color down over it, and then peel the sticker away to find art in the hollow space left behind. How to use your chosen canvas to your advantage, roughly poured cement with shapes already hidden in the texture if you looked hard enough.

How to give it up and just let the concrete speak.

Because even buildings can tell stories.

The alleyway was not deserted when they arrived, like Bella thought it would be. A girl stood in front of the wall, her hand splayed against the paint as though she was trying to push through the concrete and into the water.

She was nearly done painting a mermaid.

Right in the middle of Bella’s ocean.

“Uh oh,” Edward muttered beside her, fully aware of what was about to unfold.

“Hey!” Bella shouted, the silence shattered as her voice echoed against brick and stone. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

The can of paint dropped from the girl’s hand with a clatter, rolling to a puddle gathered in the low center of the alleyway. She glanced over her shoulder at Bella and Edward, half of her face hidden beneath a cheap blue mask, the kind you got at the hospital. Her hands fisted at her sides, fingers covered in paint, and she bolted, quick as a flash.

Dressed all in black and shifty as a shadow.

Bella chased the girl for two blocks before she lost her.

Edward was waiting for her at the mouth of the alleyway when she returned. He was holding a black backpack that look just like hers. Smoking a cigarette, three butts already littered at his feet as though she’d been gone for hours.

“Didn’t catch her?” he asked, though he knew the answer. Bella wasn’t the type of girl to return empty handed if she could help it.

“Obviously not,” Bella panted, hands to her knees as she tried to catch her breath. She was out of breath and lightheaded. She might not smoke, but the paint fumes probably didn’t do her lungs any good.

“She left this.” He held out the backpack and Bella took it from him, starting to unzip it. “There’s nothing in there with a name. I checked,” he shook his head.

“Figures,” Bella muttered and shouldered the pack, following Edward home a lot more slowly than usual, her legs feeling like jelly.

“I really thought you were the only chick painting this city,” Edward mused as he unlocked the front door ten minutes later, letting her enter the building before him. Up until about an hour ago, she had thought the same thing too. She thought that most girls were too scared to get caught, too timid to venture out on their own, too small to run with the big boys who slathered this town with their tags.

She’d obviously thought wrong.

She had only caught a split second glimpse of the girl’s eyes, but they were the same shade as the indigo blue she had exhausted on the ocean wall.  

TWO

Edward’s apartment smelled like a rose garden had died and gone to hell.

Perfumey and sweet, with the faint hint of spray paint. There were crates of paint cans near the front door and the six pairs of color-dipped gloves in a basket nearby. Gas masks hung next to sweatshirts like it was normal for people to have those kinds of things just lying around. Rolls of vellum were piled on the kitchen table, stacks of art rags sprouted from the floor, and an army of paint pens had taken over the countertops.

Genius thrived on clutter, but the life of an artist was a clusterfuck at the best of time.

Jasper emerged from the bedroom with his hair wrapped up in a pink towel and an old flowered bathrobe around his shoulders. Bella found it in a thrift store a few years back and gave it to him for his birthday, thinking it would be good for a joke.

The real joke was that Jasper loved the robe and managed to look better in it than any woman ever could.

“Welcome back kids,” he crooned and settled himself into his favorite chair, the one with the high curved back and the old fashioned brocade upholstery. He crossed his legs and examined his nails, sounding uninterested, as usual. “How’d it go?”

“B’s got some competition,” Edward grinned, handing Bella a beer and plopping down beside her on the couch. Jasper propped his feet up in Edward’s lap and took a sip from his own beer, pinky raised in civilized salute. Bella knew that it would forever grate on Jasper’s last nerve that Edward participated in these less than savory activities, ones that could, and had, land both of them in jail. If Jasper had his way, Edward would be playing bridge with him at the old folks home every Saturday night instead of illegally painting buildings in the middle of the week with her.

“She’s not my fucking competition. She’s a damn troll,” Bella grumbled and chugged half of her beer, the bubbles in her throat matching the bubbles in her belly. She burped loudly, unable to help it. “That toy is just biting at my work.”

“Gross, Bella.” Jasper wrinkled his nose and sipped his own beer, glancing over at Edward who was absentmindedly digging his knuckles into Jasper’s insoles and staring off across the room. “And you, baby? What did you do tonight?”

“Waited for Bella to get back from chasing down her new girlfriend.” Edward smiled easily, chuckling a little under his breath.

“You chased her?” Jasper arched an eyebrow at Bella. He had always treated her as though she was a little odd, the funny little planet that orbited around their mutual sun, and she hated giving him proof. Running down some random girl did not necessarily work in her favor.  

“She was painting over my wall!” Bella screeched, flinging her hands out and spilling a few drops of beer on the edge of Jasper’s robe, dark splotches appearing on the green fabric. He didn’t seem to notice, gazing dreamily at Edward instead, so she didn’t say anything about it.

“She wasn’t painting over it,” Edward mumbled around the mouth of his bottle. “She was adding to it.”  

Bella shot him a glare. “Fuck that. How would you like someone adding to your zebra down on Market? I could go down there right now to give her a frilly red tutu and a sombrero, since you obviously wouldn’t mind.”

Edward shook his head, looking nearly hostile. He had done the piece last month and it had gotten him featured in a local city art rag, even if wasn’t his real name that got the credit. The creature was beautiful, nearly ten feet tall, stark black and white over a wall of grey. Staring off toward the park around the corner as though it longed to break free from its trapped second dimension and escape into the green grass. It had taken a crew of four, Bella included, to help him tag the enormity of it and the entire thing had been finished in under eight minutes. Edward and Bella were getting pretty good at this, appearing only long enough to work and scuttling away before anyone noticed, basking in the anonymous glow of praise long after they had completed their pieces. The girl in the red mask that Bella had done on the side of the public library was still burning on Main Street two years later, preserved by a group of community members who fought to save it. She went to their meetings, but never spoke up. Playing silent spy, letting it warm her up from the inside out as they talked about the validity of art and how to measure it.

Just because the medium was spray paint, doesn’t mean it didn’t count.

“I’d rather you didn’t,” Edward said, gulping more beer and wondering when Bella was going to leave so that he could get that robe off of Jasper. By the time Bella had finished grumbling to herself about the girl with the mermaid and the strange eyes, about that emptied can of indigo paint she already missed, Edward was leaning toward Jasper. They were having one of those silent conversations they always did when there were other people in the room. Just eyes and noses and lips that didn’t even touch, though they were practically licking each other clean.

“Will you guys cut it out? It’s not fair to make me watch you slobber all over each other,” Bella groaned. Her heart had just been freshly broken open by a too-young boy she met in a record store on the other side of town. He was eager and excited and reminded her of having a puppy, which got old when he started teething and chewing things up. Complaining about her nightly absences and how tired she was during the day. That she smelled like paint thinner all the time and that he could never introduce her to his mother with the evidence of her activities all over her hands like that.

She bought herself a pair of gloves and broke up with him the next day.

“Can’t help it, look at this face!” Edward grabbed Jasper by the chin and forced his boyfriend to look at Bella, both of them a little too pretty for their own good. Which was a devastating combination, the butch and the Barbie doll. “What is there not to love about it?”

Sometimes, Edward really pissed her off.

THREE

Bella saw the girl again a month later.

In nothing but jeans and black electrical tape.

Two strategic Xs right there over her nipples.

Bella was driving home, stuck in the traffic that crowded around the giant white capitol building, trying to avoid hitting any of the thousands of protesters who were gathering on the steps. She wasn’t entirely sure what was going on and was really only concerned with getting back to her apartment to get ready for her excursion later that night. She had a cardboard box on the back seat with fresh blue and green paint inside, a new can of gold, and a big fat-tip marker to replace the one she lost sometime last week. She was only a third of the way through painting a giant fish on the south side of the brick wall around the public park when someone must have alerted the cops. Two cars showed up within twenty seconds of eachother and she should have known better than to try to paint in the Cherry Hills district. Those people had too much money and too much time, eyes always peeled. She’d barely managed to skirt a chain link fence in time to fall flat on her belly as a flashlight beam bounced above her head.

Her marker was probably lying in someone’s pristine backyard.

Tonight would be different. Tonight she was headed far enough out of town that the city cops wouldn’t bother her and the country police had better things to do, chasing down drunken teenagers on back roads with six packs and death wishes instead of looking for urban vandals. She was planning the spiral-leafed trees she was going to paint on the side of the old abandoned chemical plant down at the end of Webber Road when she saw her.

The dark haired girl from the alley who ran too fast and had the audacity to add her own touch to Bella’s completed piece of work.

She was standing on a street corner with a poster board sign held up high over her head that said I can’t believe we still have to protest this shit. Jumping up and down and screaming something that Bella couldn’t hear with the windows rolled up. She probably wouldn’t have even heard with the windows down either, considering how intently she was watching those Xs bounce every time the girl jumped.

She was slim and tiny.

Indigo blue eyes and jet black hair.   

Fingers stained blue and yellow, gripping her sign.

Bella still had the girl’s backpack. She had gone through the contents that night, admiring her selection of tips and wondering where the girl had found a particular shade of pale purple. There was a battered notebook full of sketches that Bella begrudgingly admitted were just as good as her own, the girl working far more realistically than Bella herself preferred. The drawn faces were done in exquisite detail before a manic splatter of paint was thrown down around them, blue blotched over ballpoint eyes. Yellow smeared over ink-stained studies of hands. There had been two bandanas, a collection of half-used markers and an almost empty pack of cigarettes in the backpack. A water bottle with a flower drawn on the outside, the inside smelling faintly of vodka.

Nothing else.

Bella parked the car, managing to find a spot that was only three blocks away and joined the throng of people marching toward the capitol. Everyone was talking excitedly to one another, toting signs and wearing sloganed shirts, sporting the feral exhilaration of a fight against “the Man.”

The girl hadn’t moved. Still on that same corner, still yelling, still holding her sign. Still half naked.

In broad fucking daylight.

Bella had the inexplicable urge to take her own shirt off and make the girl cover up, but had no idea why and definitely didn’t act on it. The girl was halfway through a rhyming chant when she noticed Bella and she clammed up mid-word, resting her arms with her sign hung limp at her side. She stared at the girl who had chased her from the alleyway last month and Bella stared at her big blue eyes.  

Better than the two big black Xs.

“Are you here for the protest?” the girl asked and Bella shook her head.

“No, I was driving by and saw you. I’m not staying.”

“You don’t care that they’re trying to take away your freedom? That your cat has more rights than your pussy?” The girl sounded nearly astonished, as though Bella had up and declared that she didn’t like air or water.

It wasn’t that Bella didn’t care. It was that she had better things to do, like painting trees on places that were built to create the very chemicals used to kill them. She might not hold a cardboard sign, but she had her ways.

“You left this.” Bella held the backpack out between them and the girl eyed it solemnly for a moment before she reached out and took it back. She didn’t snatch it away like Bella thought she would, didn’t check the contents either.

“You better be careful with that book of yours. That shit’ll get you busted.” Bella’s own blackbook had almost lead to her demise on more than one occasion, falling into the wrong hands. Drawing  a big red line from a few choice pieces to her otherwise inconspicuous self. The two girls stared at each other, the crowd milling around them, but all Bella could hear was the other girl’s breathing. All she could see were her next-to-naked breasts and her bottomless blue eyes, squinting in the sunlight.

She had to get the fuck out of here.

“Stay away from my walls.”

FOUR

“She was naked?”

Edward was gaping at her and Bella shoved pizza in her mouth so that she wouldn’t have to acknowledge him. Or the fact that Jasper was smirking, blotting his own pizza with a napkin until it was a soggy orange mess. Bella preferred grease on her pizza and not on her napkin.

“No. She had tape on . . .” Another massive bite to shut herself up.

“On what?” Jasper asked but Bella didn’t answer, blushing up the neck when she thought about it, much less said it out loud. It looked as though Jasper knew the answer and just wanted to watch her squirm. She eyeballed the door, already jittery with anticipation. Or lust. Or maybe both, but she needed to get her hands dirty and she needed to burn off some of the mad rush with a healthy dose of paint. She abandoned her food, shouldering her pack and glaring at the two boys still flirting over their pizza at the table.

“I’ve gotta get a move on. I’d like to be in bed by five.”

“Hey,” Edward’s voice stopped her in the doorway. “You think she’s done it before? You should check your other work.”

Bella shrugged and tried not to let her face turn sour. That girl was splattering crayola crap all over her masterpieces and just from the look on her face as Bella left her in the swollen crowd, she knew that it definitely wasn’t the first time.

---

Bella went back to every piece she’d done in the last six years and the girl was in every one of them.

At first the changes were small and almost childish. A spray of purple flowers added to the meadow scene on the roof of the red brick building on the corner of Hallam and Orchard. A splatter of stars to the nightscape behind the thrift shop on Steeple road. Hearts bursting from the chest of the girl Bella had painted on Larimer, between the Catholic church and an apartment building.

Then everything started to change.

Bigger and better quality.

Her elephant in the alley between Josephine and Seventh Avenue was now wearing an elaborate padded seating area on its back that looked like a gilded birdcage. The pyramids behind the liquor store on Fillmore were suddenly basking underneath the watchful green eye of a silvery UFO. The giant letters of her tag name, which sat squat along the low stone wall that separated the river from the walking path, were now flowery and embellished with ribbons of color.

By the time Bella reached the chemical plant, some time around one in the morning, she was livid.

She came into painting blind, by herself and unaware of the rules. It only took once. She accidentally sprayed over something that looked so old that it had to have been completely forgotten and she almost learned the hard way that you didn’t slash someone else’s tags unless you wanted trouble. When she came back the next night to finish, there was a group of six boys waiting for her in the alleyway. She had pretended to loiter on the corner with her phone for a minute before walking away and never went back for that piece, sure they would be watching for her.

Either this girl was just as fresh, or she just didn’t give a fuck.

Bella snuck onto the property to drop her gear and went back for her short ladder, hauling it through the grassy area and propping it up against the side of the building. It was so dark out here that she could actually see stars and there was a rhythmic purr of crickets pulsing from the woods. The whole building was covered in a layer of shitty tags, done haphazardly and four times larger than necessary, just to take up space.

This was the type of urban art that gave her a bad rap.

Twenty years of abandonment was now a monument to the halfhearted street writer.

Bella had only ever thrown her name up like that once, on the now beribboned wall along the river. She preferred to add her tag name only her finished pieces, which would be the case tonight. There was one lonely stretch of wall left that she planned to fill up with something completely unlike its neighbors, none of this alphabet nonsense. Edward had fashioned her a tool belt of sorts that she’d been using for two years now, a pouch that slung around her waist and held up to four cans at a time. She could stuff her entire collection of pens into her cargo pants and nearly always wore a vest, pockets for stencils.

She pulled a glove over her left hand, her gas mask over her face, and sprayed down the trunks first.

The white paint glowed nearly neon under the moon, an army of slender ghosts sprouting from the dirt at the base of the wall. She eventually climbed up the ladder and spent a long quiet stretch of time alternating between shades of yellow and red, using one of the three different leaf stencils she had cut last night to fill in the tops.

All alone, overlapping flaming leaves until the cherry red spluttered to a tired end but when she tossed the empty can over her shoulder, someone yelled.

“Ow!”

Bella almost fell off the ladder. She gripped hard at the sides to keep herself upright when her footing slipped, nearly knocking her chin on one of the rungs. She knew who it was before she even looked. The girl was rubbing a spot on the top of her head, scowling at the paint can which lay at her feet. Dressed all in black with her hair hidden underneath a knit cap. Looking nearly like a boy, except for those giant eyes.

“Did you follow me?” Bella pulled off her mask and asked, point blank, her heart still feeling a little fluttery, and she couldn’t help that there were suddenly big black Xs everywhere she looked.

The girl shrugged and kicked the empty can. It clattered across the dirt, coming to rest at the wall and she followed, studying Bella’s job for a minute before kneeling beside her open bag. She plucked a can of green from the stash at her feet and crouched in the dirt, adding spears of grass to the bases of the trees.

“Sorry about the mermaid,” the girl said, not faltering in her painting, the sharp hissing spray coming in short, practiced bursts. Bella’s mouth dropped open in shock.

This girl had some balls.

“How about for what you’re doing right now?”

The girl’s hand stopped and she stared at the green spears of grass for a moment before turning her face up toward Bella, round and pale, her eyes blue like the hidden underside of an iceberg.

“I think we could be good together.”

Five

“You let her help?”

Edward looked hurt. Bella knew that he thought of himself as the only one for her, and he was probably already plotting the demise of the girl Bella knew only as dot dot dot. Literally. Splotch splotch splotch, right there underneath her own tag and it looked oddly right.

QueenB 

. . . 

They both stood there in front of the freshly painted trees and Edward had his hands stuck in his pockets instead of touching the fresh paint, which was a sure sign he was taking this personally.

“She’s not so bad,” Bella shrugged and kicked at the dirt. Her tits weren’t so bad either, but she didn’t say that to Edward. He wouldn’t appreciate it anyway.

Bella dug her new fat tipped marker out of the big pocket of her cargo pants and started going at the trunks, half an hour of daylight left to finally finish the black outlines. She hadn’t been back to the chemical plant in three days, hadn’t seen Dot in three days either, and she gave the trunks eyes lined with wrinkles while she tried not to think about her.

Blue flowers tucked into the grass just like her eyes.

---

3:27 a.m.

Bella and Edward were painting the old billboard that had hung empty over York Street for the last three years. An easy combination of Edward’s meticulously cut cartoonish characters and her freeform swirly backgrounds. He’d used nearly twelve stencils to fashion a pirate with a peg leg and a first mate who looked suspiciously like a sasquatch with an eyepatch. A boat was overturned in the crash of waves that Bella was currently outlining, pulling from her ocean wall to give this water the same terrifyingly beautiful look.

At least that’s what she thought she was doing.

Until Edward slapped her upside the head.

“What the fuck?” She held her skull and glared at him, his white shirt splattered with paint and his hair standing on end around the goggles he had pushed up over his forehead, gas mask hanging limp beneath his chin. “What was that for?”

“Because all you’re thinking about is this,” Edward huffed. He grabbed her big black marker right out of her hands and drew an easy set of looping lines across the wall beside them, adding a double circle to the tip of each curve. Turning his doodle into a long row of tits. Bella rolled her eyes and yanked the marker back, walking down the row to add a big black X right over each one of those nipples.

“No. This is.”

“This girl is working a number on you,” Edward muttered beside her.

Six

Bella was walking to the store around the corner the next day when she noticed them.

The dots.

Three of them in a row, dot dot dot, all the way down the block and around the corner. On tree trunks and street signs. Bus benches and trash cans and there was even a set of them in the very middle of the road. Set right down in a white stripe of the crosswalk.

Bella wondered about the girl, dot dot dot. A name that implied an open ending, as though something hadn’t really stopped, only trailed off. Words still left to say, but the mouth had closed. The girl wasn’t the typical tag artist, splashing her name up in big fat color-block letters, or the spidery white scrawls on the bottoms of the coal trains. She appeared in the oddest of places, trailing combinations of words that were often startling and strangely uplifting, sometimes downright disturbing, each little phrase finished with that trio tag.

. . .
hate this world, love this life . . .
thugs get lonely too . . .
waste your heart for the aerosol art . . .
just be thankful for what you’ve got . . .
find what you love and let it kill you . . .
. . .

---

Bella ran across the indigo-eyed girl in a bit of space she had been reluctantly keeping her eye on. It unspokenly belonged to a kid from across town who had tagged his name all up and down this street. Again, she either didn’t know or didn’t care, but Bella thought it was probably the second. Dot was crouched on the damp asphalt, a familiar roll of vellum beside her, one sheet already taped to the wall save for a stray corner.

“Need some help?”

“Not yet,” the girl said and turned back to the wall, securing a last piece of tape before spraying the entire thing down with silver. When she pulled the velum away there was a boy sitting there in the alleyway, knees bent, smoking a cigarette. The next layer gave him wrinkled jeans and a sagging t-shirt. A bottle appeared by his feet with the third. A set of wings with the fourth.

Dot finally stood, stepping away from the wall. Without taking her eyes off her work, she handed her clanking bag of cans to Bella. “Ok. Your turn,” she whispered. Bella usually didn’t work with an audience and Dot’s gaze made her uncomfortable in the strangest way.

Put something fluttery beneath her fingernails that made her hands shake.

Bella managed to give the boy a background, much like she always did with Edward, but also gave him some colored depth. She was impressed with Dot’s stencil, the fine cut lines and the minute details that she had managed to pull from the thin sheets of plastic. The angel’s eyes were closed, fine lines of unease cobwebbing his cheeks. His feathers looked nearly real, ruffled and bent, broken off at the ends. The creases of his jeans were cut deep and hard, and the bottle was dripping the last of its contents right off the wall and onto the asphalt.

Reflections etched into the glass and a fine curling tendril of smoke from the cigarette.

Edward was going to shit himself.

Seven

“You can’t be serious,” Bella whined.

“Oh, I’m serious sweetheart. He’s mine tonight,” Jasper crossed his arms over his chest. The purple button down made it hard for Bella to take him completely seriously, never mind the jeweled brooch pinned to his chest, or the powder pink wingtips on his feet. She had shown up tonight wanting to paint, but Edward was in the shower and Jasper was taking him to the opera.

“But we had a plan for the-”

“I don’t care. He’s been with you three nights this week. You need to find your own boyfriend.”

“I don’t want a boyfriend. I want Edward.” Bella had always been good at pouting and pulled out all the stops. Puffy bottom lip, set chin, eyebrows pulled down low. Jasper had never fallen for it before, but there was an off chance he might tonight, depending on how much paint Edward was managing to scrub off himself. He wouldn’t take Edward out in public smelling like turpentine, much less with colorful hands, which meant that Bella still had a chance.

“Call that girl,” Jasper huffed and tucked in his shirt.

“I don’t have her number,” Bella grumbled.

“Why not?” He shook his head at her. “You’ve been thrashing around here for weeks over her and you still haven’t gotten her number? Get with the fucking program, Bella.”

“I don’t know what she wants from me.”

“I thought she told you that the two of you would be good together?”

“She was just talking about painting.”

“Sure she was.”

---

Bella found the girl in a coffeehouse. She dragged her outside without a word and the girl followed without protest. They ended up in the back corner of an alleyway that Bella had tapped months ago, but had never gotten around to. The girl threw up a stencil and worked without speaking while Bella busied herself doing something flowery and vaguely paisley-ish. Soft curling teardrops and tiny rows of flowers.

Scalloped borders and dots.

Lots of dots because these days, they were all she could see and she used every color of can she had, which she hadn’t done in a long time.

It was only after they were done and leaning back against a wall to eat some food and study their work that Bella really looked at Dot’s stencil. A girl, nearly life sized with long black hair and a mask to match slapped over her eyes. A ragged red dress was frayed out around her thighs.  

Apples at her feet .

The skin of a wolf around her shoulders.

“You’ve got something special,” Bella gestured toward the wall and Dot rolled her eyes, blushing as she looked away.

“I’m not good at this the way you are. I can’t just walk up to a wall and draw something, your free-hand is fascinating. You make the city beautiful. Tolerable.”

“Well, a picture might be worth a thousand words, but word can change an entire picture.” Bella shook her paint marker as she neared the wall, choosing carefully before she wrote her single word in a flourished script above their completed piece, curled tails and loopy letters.  TASTE.  Dot’s eyebrows smashed together as Bella turned back and held the marker in her direction, an expectant look on her face. “Finish it off.”

It took her twelve minutes.

A long time of just standing there, staring at the word, still as a statue and dark as a shadow. Longer still, her hand hovering just inches off the colorful wall. Her final scrawled script was rushed and urgent, bursting out of her in a nearly frantic rush.

Nothing so sinful as the faint TASTE of love . . .

“See what you just did there? Beautiful,” Bella exhaled. Again with the eye rolling. Dot seemed fully unwilling to take a compliment but Bella could commiserate with the feeling. It took a long time to feel as though you were worthy in this line of work, and the first years were usually just a bunch of self doubt and lessons learned the hard way.

“When they talk about graffiti like it’s a crime, they’re talking about me,” Dot sighed.

“No,” Bella almost snapped, shaking her head roughly. “The people who splash shitty tags up everywhere, one-liners on every every goddamn dumpster in the city . . . We’re both vandalizing, but they’re the criminals.”

“I just trick people into thinking too much, or too hard,” Dot glanced up at the words floating over their heads. “I probably do more harm than good. I watched some lady read one once, and she burst into tears on the street.”

Dot looked almost shameful and Bella knew better than to keep a steady eye on her old work. Watching it get painted over or buffed clean off was one thing, it was the individual reactions that cut the deepest. The looks of awe and wonder far outweighed by scowls of disgust. She’d never seen anyone cry in front of her work and she wasn’t sure how that would make her feel.  

“What did it say?”

“He never loved you.”

“Dot dot dot,” Bella whispered.

Eight

Bella had been convinced before this that boys ruined everything and, that night, they proved her to be right.

All twelve of them.

They ran in a group, dubbing themselves, RatPak, their walls typically rife with soft core porn and shoddy lettering. Half naked girls painted for the shock value, rather than the art of it. Personally, Bella thought that they were a prime example of the kind of taggers that gave people like her and Edward bad reputations. Shallow and single-minded. Pubescent boys trapped in men’s bodies, too much testosterone and too little control. The crew was run by some kid named Felix, who ran a tight ship, so she wondered what the hell they were doing on this side of town.

It was late, the deep kind of night when she did her best work, and the girls were looking for one final spot to paint before the night was over.

Felix was the last person she expected to find in that alleyway.

“Well, hey there, Queenie . . . haven’t seen you around in a hot minute or two. Where you been painting these days?” he leered, sounding sickly. He’d been painting mask-free for so long that his lungs were probably burned right off.

“None of your fucking business,” Bella grumbled and tried to stand up taller, but she didn’t have much more than an inch over any of their shoulders and Dot wasn’t a whole lot bigger.  

“You gonna introduce us to your pawn?” Felix eyeballed Dot greedily, already plotting how to fit her into his group. He needed someone small who could get into tight spaces and she would be perfect. He licked his lips and purred at Dot, “you must be new.”

Bella scowled at him, stepping between the two.. “No.”

“Come on, you don’t have to get all pissy. I’m just trying to be friendly.”

“KidLyon is right around the corner,” Bella used Edward’s tag, knowing that the name would work more in her favor than Edward himself, nearly nerdish with his glasses and his skinny arms. Edward wasn’t actually around the corner, as he was probably half asleep to a lullabye-opera right now, but they didn’t know that. What they did know was that KidLyon painted regularly with this little chick who called herself Bee but had earned the title of Queen.

A duo with pieces that got more attention than the rest of their underground community combined.

“Fine, fine.” Felix threw his hands up and took a step backward, although the twisted smile never left his face. “I know when to take a hint. Tell Kid I’ve been watching him, that set of eyes on 15th did not go unnoticed.”

Of course they didn’t. The pretty peepers in cat eye makeup, glancing sideways over an empty stretch of street right smack in the middle of RatPak territory. She’d tried to talk him out of it, but Edward threatened to go it alone if she refused. They’d nearly gotten busted, not by Felix and his crew, but by the police. But the finished product, lashes dipped in sultry sex and splashed onto the wall in less than two and a half minutes, was so worth it.  

“See ya ‘round, little Bee,” Felix crooned, taking his crew and slinking off into the dark, living up to their name.

Fifteen minutes later, just as Dot finished spraying down the first layer of her next stencil, the alleyway was flooded with red white and blue flashing lights. Bella ripped her mask off in disgust, sure in her heart that Felix had tipped the police. She grabbed Dot by the hand and they scrambled through the backdoor of a restaurant, out onto the dark street, the sound of breaking dishes behind them.

Giggling together the entire false-trail run back to Bella’s apartment.

Nine

“Settle down, you’re making me nervous.”

Dot looked jittery, pacing the floor and wringing her hands.  “I want to paint. I got all excited and then I didn’t get to finish.”

“Sounds like a sex with a boy to me,” Bella chuckled and started rooting through the art supplies piled in the corner of the living room she referred to as craft hell. A mess that rivaled Edward’s, even if was all stuffed in a bunch of little drawers that she’d tried to label, but could never seem to stick to. Every single one of her canvasses were in already in use and the only thing she could come up with was a half used sketchbook, slightly water damaged. When she turned back, Dot was holding something above her head like a prize, smiling slyly.

“Non toxic,” Dot winked at Bella, a box of oil pastels in her hand. Bella sat down beside her, their legs brushing, and watched as Dot pulled open the pack she had bought almost a year ago but had only used once, deeming them unworthy for canvas or wall. The girl fingered the soft sticks gingerly, the pads of her fingers coming away dusted in a rainbow.

“What’s your name?” Bella asked and Dot smiled to herself, choosing a soft purple for her revelation. She pressed the pastel to her thigh and just below her kneecap drew a big A.

Dropped to draw an L.

I

C

Pressed an E into her skin, just above the hemline of her skirt, and handed the pastel to Bella. Bella, breathless with disappointment that the name wasn’t just a letter or two longer, wrote her name down the length of her own thigh, matching Alice letter for letter.

B

E

L

L

A

Alice eyed Bella carefully for a moment before selecting deep scarlet red to draw a tiny heart on the soft inside of Bella’s wrist. She used it to slowly trace a steady line up the length of Bella’s arm and over her collarbone, landing with another bigger heart right above the collar of her shirt. Bella clutched the purple pastel and watched Alice’s eyes as she worked, narrowed with concentration as she haloed the heart with petals of rose and sapphire. Gaze glazing over as she added a smeared stretch of blue up Bella’s neck with a big silvery moon in the middle of it, peppered with a speckle of gold stars. Blinking as she washed a golden splash of sunbeam right below her eye, flowers with big papery petals in baby pink and blood red across her shoulders.

“See, you’ve got some freehand skills.”

“I learned how to paint with you, in a way. It was the first time I did anything other than words and it felt really good,” Alice confided, painting leafy tendrils of vines along Bella’s collarbone

“Yeah, I wouldn’t recommend doing that anymore,” Bella shook her head. “You’ll get your ass beaten out there if you go dipping into someone’s work like that.”

“You haven’t beaten me up,” Dot grinned.

“Yet,” Bella winked. “Slashing could get you busted. Doesn’t matter if it’s a crew in an alley or a bunch of feds in a jail cell, you’ll get taken down. We might seem like some tight, underground army, but we’re really in a war with each other, as much as with the cops. Space and time is limited and we all want a piece of it. You gotta be careful out there, honey, because I don’t want to have to go around picking up your pieces.”

Alice drew a red dot on Bella’s chin before she pressed their lips together, Bella smashing her purple pastel against Alice’s arm when she pulled her closer. Alice dug her hips, craning her head, and coming away with a smear of gold across her eye, the line of yellow she’d drawn on Bella’s cheek now smeared into a fuzzy splotch all down her face. They sat together in silence, faraway traffic hissing through the window as they used each other’s skin to explore the color spectrum of the new and scary. Neither girl had done this before, but when Alice slipped her leg over Bella and pulled the shirt from her shoulders, Bella thought that maybe she had been following her around for more than just spray paint.

“What’s that?” Alice asked, fingering the ragged scar that ran down Bella’s side as she tossed the shirt somewhere behind her.

“Seattle.” Bella glanced down at Alice’s chipped nail polish gently fingering the only real evidence of danger she’s faced on far more than one occasion. “Train station. I was so worried I’d fall, leaning out over the tracks like that. I didn’t even hear them until they were right on top of me and I caught myself on a piece of metal coming down. Took twenty five stitches to put me back together.”

“You went to a hospital?” Alice was shaking her head regretfully and Bella shook her own in response. Even pawns knew to steer clear of hospitals if they were injured in a run from the cops. Every E.R. in the area would be on the lookout for them.

“Nope. Jasper sewed me back up. He’s pretty good with a needle.” He had also complained about it the entire time, and had never let her live it down.

“I never planned on this. I thought you should know that.” Alice kept her eyes on the scar when she spoke, whispering so low Bella could barely hear her.

Bella communicated the best way she knew how, with a flushed magenta color drawn in a steady heart drawn at the inside of Alice’s thigh. She slipped her fingers below the cotton of Alice’s underwear and found a wet,hot slick, a heavy exhale, and they both shuddered in response. She pushed her fingers inside and wrapped a colorful arm around Alice’s waist, pulling her closer while Alice put her lips to every spare inch of skin left on Bella that wasn’t painted over.

The black-haired girl unwrapped the rest of the clothing off her newfound treasure and used her mouth and hands to hold herself to the earth as Bella rubbed her right over the sheer-faced edge of an orgasm. A flash flood of heavy exhales later, Alice slid hot and boneless between Bella’s legs like a waterfall, tumbling down her colorful skin to gather between her legs.

Mouth like a whirlpool and fingers like the gentle ripples around a half submerged rock.

Her own body’s reaction to the act of using her hands and mouth to get a girl off surprised Bella. Alice’s mouth between her legs surprised her even more and she came quickly, forcefully enough to make her toes tingle while her breath come out in ragged bursts of all or nothing. The girl didn’t give her time to recuperate as she clambered back on top of Bella and sat right down over her hips, arching her back to reach behind her, fingers buried deep, and ground her bones down against Bella.

Panting as Bella’s bones ground back.

Writhing as she pumped her fingers and Bella smeared oily colors into her tits.

Ten

Edward showed up unannounced the next afternoon.

The white sheets were still smeared in an oily rainbow that would never really wash out and a girl with her name smudged down her thigh was curled up naked in the middle of them. Bella clapped a hand over his mouth and tried to drag him into the kitchen as Alice rolled over in bed, mumbling in her sleep. Edward’s jaw dropped open. He faltered, staring at the beautiful mess the girls had made of the bed, most of Alice’s modesty hidden beneath paint rather than the sheets. Bella grabbed him by the hair and hauled him the last few steps into the kitchen.

“Is that the toy?” Edward whispered theatrically, hooking a thumb over his shoulder in Alice’s direction. Bella rolled her eyes at him but couldn’t tell him off. She’d called Alice that first, but it didn’t mean she wanted anyone else calling her that.

“She’s not a toy, she’s dot dot dot. You’ve seen her. The words, they’re fucking everywhere.” Bella was starting to suspect that Alice was trying to single handedly turn the city into the greatest quote book ever printed. Or painted. It was hard to miss them now, the thoughtful little quips that appeared in such ordinary places.The one gracing a ragged crack in the sidewalk on Hemingway Street was her favorite so far.

You are a poem . . .

“Oh shit, that’s her?” Edward muttered his appreciation and glanced toward the living room for a moment before leering back at Bella. “She must be damn good in bed. You look thoroughly fucked.”

Bella punched Edward as hard as she could. Square in the chest so he staggered backward, but she didn’t manage to knock the traitorous grin off his face. What she hadn’t remembered yet was that she was still smudged in last night’s activities. To Edward, she looked as though she’d rolled around in tempera paint and tried to turn her sheets into an art project.

The artistic render of fucking, all over that virginal white canvas.

“Yep, really good,” he nodded. “You haven’t had this much fight in you for years.”

“Keep your damn mouth shut,” Bella grumbled. “Felix cornered us downtown last night and I don’t need him on my tail. Or hers.”

“Felix? Where?”

“Southside, which was weird. He doesn’t like the eyes, by the way.”

Edward grinned, looking proud of himself. “Figured he wouldn’t. They haven’t been buffed yet and I bet it grates on him every day.”

“Look, she hasn’t exactly complied with the rules around here and I don’t know what she’s done to other people’s work,” Bella flung her arm in the the direction of the bed. “I’ll let it slide, but you know they won’t. Just try to tame your gossipy-girl side for me, please.”

“Hey,” Edward huffed, sounding a little offended. “I wear the hat. I ain’t telling.” He swung at her, playful, and she nearly fell flat on her face trying to duck his fist, tangled up in her sheet.

“You are such a asshole,” Bella hissed, readjusting the fabric. It wasn’t that Edward had never seen her naked, it was the blank look on his face when he did that she didn’t care for. “What are you doing here anyway, besides torturing me?”

“I came to see if you wanted to bomb the heavens on that bridge over Masen Street,” Edward shrugged. “But now that I’ve got both of you here, I’m thinking the three of us are gonna work some magic tonight.” He clapped his hands and rubbed his palms together, a smirk picking up the corner of his mouth. “We’ve got ourselves a little crew. I know! Let’s slam Rosehill! You know that wall is just fucking asking for it.”

“That sounds dangerous, Edward. Jail time, for sure.” Bella glanced toward the bedroom, Alice and the rainbow sheets she was wrapped up in. “Give us twenty minutes.”

---

Edward was right. Rosehill really was just asking for it.

There wasn’t a single splotch of paint for almost ten blocks in any direction and the botanical gardens sat right there on the top of a small rise in the earth, keeping silent lookout over their neighborhood. Surrounded by a high, pale wall that was achingly free of interest.

“Ok, one at a time, bam bam bam,” Edward whispered in the dark and Bella shot out of the shadows like a misfired bullet, heading straight for a murky section of the wall. She tucked her can underneath her sweatshirt to shake it up, muffling the clamoring ball inside, and started her backgrounds, mindful of the end goal. Swirls of purple and yellow and key lime green. Done more by feel, than by sight, under a deep layer of night which had her following her fingers once again.

Edward stood back with Alice as Bella worked. Neither of them could understand her ability to simply draw from imagination and it frustrated Edward to no end that Bella never made a plan before she ventured out, always leaving her nights up to chance. Alice traveled with her book of words and images and was taken by surprise that Bella floated so recklessly along without rhyme or reason.

“I think you’re good for my girl over there,” Edward nudged his chin in Bella’s direction, though he could barely make out her figure in the dark. “But, if you break her heart, I’ll run you outta the state.

“Is that a threat?” Alice laughed under her breath, unable to wrench her eyes off the dark spot Bella had disappeared into.

“Consider it a dropsy. I’m not a total asshole,” he muttered.

“A dropsy?”

“I’m bribing you, baby. You just gotta take it. Be good to her and we’ll make you famous. That girl is an all-city queen and she earned her name fair and square.”

“And that’s makes you king?”

“In a way,” Edward smirked.

“What’s a toy?” Alice narrowed her eyes at Edward. She didn’t know this guy enough to truly trust him, but his rep alone demanded respect. The fact that Bella painted only with him spoke to Alice even stronger. She hated to ask, but it was burning a hole in her. This was the same boy who had shown up at the ocean wall with Bella, the same one she had seen painting with her, their tags strung together like beads on a string.

She still didn’t know what they meant to each other, but this lion was fiercely protective of his bee.

“Takes time to get up in this line of work, honey, you don’t just become a queen overnight. Bee’s worked hard to get where she is. You gotta sacrifice some blood for that shit,” Edward pushed his glasses back up his nose and darted out into the open, just as Bella skidded to a stop beside Alice.

---

The Rosehill piece lasted precisely four and half hours before the city crews were on it like flies, crawling all over the carcass with their grey paint and spray guns.

ELEVEN

Edward’s heavy breath in the phone woke her up.

“They massacred Fifth Avenue.”

“What?” Bella sat straight up in bed. Her head was spinning. The room smelled of spray paint and sex. Alice burrowed her face into the pillows while Bella clutched her head, already sure what Edward was going to tell her.

A dreadful empty feeling in her stomach, like a phantom limb that hadn’t been cut off yet.

“It’s gone,” he sighed.

---

The bird wasn’t the only one.

The city had taken out twelve landmarks in under two hours, done in broad daylight as though they were thumbing their noses at the midnight hours it had taken to put the pieces up. There were giant patches over Snitch‘s tags, BOMBR‘s name had been buffed clean away, and the ghost of a piece thrown up by the INRcity crew was still barely visible, sanded down to a specter haunting its home from the afterlife. Twelve pieces in all and Bella could barely bring herself to look at the bird.

Or the big roller patch of grey laid down over the top of it.

End to end, just like those wings, but they’d missed a few of the falling feathers the bird was molting down the wall. Four of them, the only testament to  what lay beneath. Edward’s stencils and her carefully cut lines. The crow that looked as though it had burst from a bucket of paint, dripping as it caught the air. It was the first piece she and Edward had done together and it had been burning for six years, the longest run they’d ever had. Bella bit her lip and tried not to let herself get sentimental. This kind of thing happened and it was stupid not to prepare for it, but part of her had come to believe that the piece might remain permanently, like the girl on the library. That someone would fight for it. She wondered if the Rosehill piece was only the start of the city’s crackdown message to her kind, written in ugly grey paint.

That the streets would be taken back, no matter how intrepid or thoughtful or artistic they were.

---

Alice showed up in tape.

Again.

“Can I ask where you were?” Bella asked in amazement as Alice stomped into her apartment.

“The fashion shows downtown. Two of the designers used illegal fur in their collections and that shit has to stop,” she ranted under her breath.

“And you were wearing that?”

Alice stopped with an agitated puff of air and turned to face Bella. Her tits were taped up a little more thoroughly this time, but not by much. A thin black band wrapped around her torso that left her breasts spilling out on either side and a tiny crescent of her left nipple was peeking out the top. “If you think the tape is bad, then you definitely wouldn’t have liked the flour.”

“Oh god,” Bella sighed.

Alice rolled her eyes. “They deserved it, Bella. They skin bunnies. To make clothing. Little furry bunnies. It’s just fucking cruel and uncalled for, so I gave them a taste of their own medicine.” A manic grin ate up Alice’s face, equally evil and gleeful. “On national television.”

She was right. The news was airing a clip of tiny taped-up Alice darting through the crowd like a pickpocket and then an exploding a bag of white flour in the middle of a lit up runway, six models in fur swallowed in the haze. By the time the melee cleared, the girl was gone and no one had gotten a good solid look at her face.

Bella hated to admit it, but the part that irked her the most was that Alice was letting everyone and their mother get a good solid look at her tits.

“Will you help me get this off?” Alice stood next to the bed, fingering the edge of tape between her tits and eyeing Bella carefully. Bella shoved the laptop away and hung her legs off the mattress with a sigh. She tugged slowly at the tape, Alice spinning in front of her as she unwound, hissing when the last layer peeled off her skin. She clapped her hands over her nipples and Bella pulled her close, pushing her hands out of the way and using her mouth to soothe the ache. Tasting plastic and sweat. Sweet and salt and the kind of want that Bella was just beginning to grow fond of.

“Don’t be mad at me,” Alice spoke into Bella’s hair.

Bella ignored her, definitely a little mad, but not wanting to voice it. She reached under the bed and pulled the box from the hiding spot it had been languishing in for almost a week.  She shoved the box at Alice harder than she meant to, nervous and turned on, yet more than a little unsure about giving it to her in the first place.

“Got you something,” she muttered, bashful and already blushing.

“You shouldn’t have!” Alice’s eyebrows perked and she clambered onto the bed, tearing the box open and squealing with delight.

“Oh, I should have,” Bella snorted. “And I should have done it a long time ago. You’re gonna burn your lungs off without one.” She helped Alice pull the gas mask over her head, her hair rumpled around the straps and her cheeks bulging beneath her eyes. Bella knew she was still smiling under there, even though she couldn’t see it. “Except now that you’ve got it on, I don’t like it at all.”

“Why?” Alice’s voice came out in that odd mechanical hum so Bella pulled the gas mask down Alice’s chin, freeing her mouth.

“Because it’s in the way,” Bella whispered.

A kiss like the first touch of paint to an open, endless wall.

The End, Yo.

Terminology:

tag

A stylized signature, normally done in one color. The simplest and most prevalent type of graffiti, a tag is often done in a color that contrasts sharply with its background. Tag can also be used as a verb meaning "to sign".

bite

To steal another artist's ideas, name, lettering or color schemes. Seasoned artists will often complain about toys that bite their work

burning

Any work that hasn’t been removed. Yet. "That piece is still burning on main street."

toy

1. Used as an adjective to describe poor work, or as a noun meaning an inexperienced or unskilled writer. Graffiti writers usually use this as a derogatory term for new writers in the scene. The act of "toying" someone else's graffiti is to disrespect it by means of going over it.

An acronym meaning, "tag over your shit.”

black book

A graffiti artist's sketchbook. Often used to sketch out and plan potential graffiti, and to collect tags from other writers. It is a writer's most valuable property, containing all or a majority of the person's sketches and pieces. A writer’s sketchbook is carefully guarded from the police and other authorities, as it can be used as material evidence in a graffiti vandalism case and link a writer to previous illicit works.

slash

To put a line through, or tag over, another's graffiti. This is considered a deep insult.

tapped

To watch a potential location. Often a writer will leave a small mark to determine police activity and claim the space from other artists.

crew

A group of associated writers or graffiti artists that often work together.

heaven spots (heavens)

Pieces that are painted in hard-to-reach places such as rooftops and freeway signs, thus making them hard to remove. Such pieces, by the nature of the spot, often pose dangerous challenges to execute, but may increase an artist's notoriety.

slam

To paint an extremely conspicuous or dangerous location.

dropsy

A bribe.

getting up

To develop your reputation or "rep" through writing graffiti.

king/queen

The opposite of toys. Kings or queens (feminine) are writers especially respected among other writers.

all city

Being known for one's graffiti throughout a city.

Acknowledgements:

My dearest, darling Hadley Hemingway beta'd this and giggled the whole time.