Cat fell gracelessly onto the bus bench across the street from the Red Room, watching the hookers and bums doing their business amongst the other trash on the street. Alex sat down next to her, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees, looking around as well. After a few moments of silence he glanced over at her.       "Is there something wrong?" he asked quietly, with only the slightest hint of concern. She looked at him for a moment, her face expressionless.       "Tell me of your home world, Usul," she said, the corners of her lips raising slightly at her esoteric joke.       "What?" he asked, frowning in confusion. She shook her head and actually smiled, pleased that she had confused him so easily.       "Tell me about yourself, Alex. I've had you for months and all that I know is your name and a few...," she pauses to smirk. "interesting habits of yours."       He sat there for a moment, then began his story. She listened with half an ear, watching people on the street with detached interest.       He was maddeningly vague, but she put two and two together and realized that her ghoul was infinitely more deranged than she had first though. She nodded every once in a while to show that she was listening as he calmly hinted at killing patients and strangers and his family. He finished his story with his arrival in New Bremen, presumably about three steps ahead of the proper authorities. He sat there as she sat there silently, thinking.       "God damn, Alex," she said finally, her voice dripping with derisive amusement. "You're more fucked up than I thought you were." He looked over at her and scowled.       "What's that supposed to mean?"       "It means that no matter what I've done, you're worse," she told him, not even looking to gauge his response. "At least I was dead when I did all of this fucked up shit... You're just insane." He just glared at her and she smiled back. "What? You are." He looked away, angry at her amusement. This only made her laugh, inflaming him that much more. They sat in silence for a time as he fumed and she watched the crowd.       "What about you, then?" he asked suddenly, startling her out of her thoughts.       "What about me?" she asked slowly, her annoyance with his presumptiveness warring with some foreign urge to get things off her chest. He shrugged, looking down at the pavement.       "You have to have a story, too. What is it?" She sat and thought about that for a moment, then took a deep breath.       She spoke calmly, detached from the story, almost as if she was talking about someone else or wished that she was.       "I was born in Ithaca, New York in nineteen seventy-two." She pauses to smile slightly. "I look pretty damn good for a twenty-eight year old, if I do say so myself." Her smile fades as she continues. "My parents were good Catholic people," she says scornfully. "My father wanted a boy, and my mother only wanted to make him happy. Unfortunately, I was an only child." She turned away from Alex, watching a hooker lean into the window of a car.       She is seven. Jesus loves the little children... She sits at the dinner table, picking at the last of her broccoli and listening to her father scream. ...all the little children of the world... Her mother sits quietly, hands folded in her lap, looking down at the table. ...red and yellow, black and white... The light from the hanging lamp above the table shines down on Elisabetta, refracted by Catrina's tears, making her mother look like a picture of a saint. ...they are precious in His sight... The song spins through her head, the start of this particular fight. …Jesus loves the little children of the world… 'Dirty fucking Protestants' seems to be the phrase of the day, followed closely by 'stupid bitch' in reference to both Catrina and Elisabetta. ...Jesus loves the little children... She chokes down the last of her broccoli and starts to clear the table. …all the little children of the world… She ducks away from her father's occasional half-hearted punches and sometimes actually manages to get away. …red and yellow, black and white… She will always hate that song. …they are precious in his sight…       The hooker climbed into the car. "So, that fucked me up big time. You know, the all-American childhood or something..." Alex nodded slightly, but she didn't see. She was watching the car the hooker had gotten into as it drove away. "By the time I was sixteen, I'd been sick of my dad's shit for as long as I could understand what he was saying. So, my friend and I stole as much money and shit as we could and went to The Big City." She smiles nostalgically.       She is sixteen. She has just stolen her father's wallet and jewelry, leaving the little bit Betta had managed to hide from her husband. She and Eric are outside of a dirty pawn shop, their newly acquired money in their pockets. They are two punks, figuratively and literally. Neither of them had bothered erecting their mohawks, but you can tell by their clothes that they are part of that dying breed.       'Come on, Kitty-baby. Let's get the fuck out of here.' Eric has a deceptively beautiful voice. He could stand there reading a list of the most vile curse words and he would sound as if he were reciting some fruity poem about an urn. She smiles and puts her arm through his as they walk to the Greyhound station. She knows he's a queer, but she loves him anyway and with all of her heart. She has a pretty good idea that he loves her, too. Not that they talk about that kind of wussy shit...       The car with the hooker in it stopped at the light. There was a 'Baby On Board' sign on a suction cup in the rear window. "We lived in some shitty hole in the wall. We both had two jobs and we still couldn't afford to eat. Then he died and I was alone."       She is eighteen. It is six a.m. She gets a call at work from the police. They want her to come downtown to the morgue to identify a body. Eric had cut her hair into a bob to replace her mohawk. She is wearing a Denny's uniform, a damp blotch of coffee is still on her shirt. The guy behind the desk watches as she slowly and ritualistically puts in all of her studs and rings while she sits in the lobby.       After an interminable amount of time, she is taken into a room. The person (man? woman? she was never sure... just a white coat shining under the examination light) lifts the sheet away from Eric's face. It is torn and bruised, but still beautiful. She stands there, still and silent. She is very good at still and silent. She has spent her life perfecting it. She quietly tells the white coat to get the fuck out. The white coat knows not to be offended and leaves. Catrina pulls on the sheet until it falls to the floor and calmly examines his body. Cause of death? 'Massive internal injuries,' also known as getting the shit beaten out of you because you're a queer street walker who got picked up by the wrong guy. She kisses his cold, broken lips, runs her fingers through his bright blue hair, and starts to cry.