Rain in Skeleville doesn’t wash anything clean. It just turns the grit into a slurry.

Cold, sideways rain. The kind that makes my joints throb. I pull my peacoat tighter—the heavy wool soaked through—and adjust the brim of my cap, letting the saturated rainwater fall off the edges. Underneath, my hoodie clings like a damp second skin. Better than letting the chill whistle through my ribs.

Another goddamn night.

The Southside Docks are a special kind of hell on Wednesdays. That’s when the canneries change the water, if you could call it that, from the vats, and the air turns into a thick soup of fermented fish guts and industrial runoff. A smell so potent you can chew it. I step over a puddle reflecting the bruised purple neon of a nearby “Live Nudes” sign—though in this neighborhood, “nude” just means you lost your clothes along with your hope.

My boots crunch on broken glass and wet gravel. I’m two blocks from my office on Bleaker Street when the shadows near an alleyway start talking.

“Steve! My main man-dible! You’re looking a little damp, pal. You leaking or is that just the weather?”

Don’t stop. Don’t even slow down. I just reach into my pocket, pull out a crumpled pouch of shake, and start rolling a joint one-handed. “Go home, Knucks. Too cold for your kind of stupidity.”

A large frame steps into the light of a flickering streetlamp. Knuckles. Football jersey three sizes too big, number 10 hanging loose over his ribs. The irony isn’t lost on me.

Trailing behind him like a nervous shadow is Ribsy. Backwards cap, shivering so hard I can hear his teeth clacking from five feet away. He clutches a half-eaten bag of bone-dust chips like a security blanket.

“We got business, Steve,” Knuckles says, falling into step beside me. Ribsy scrambles to keep up on my other side. “Pro-fessional gang business. We’re the Southside Boys, remember? We got a reputation. Pay up, bud, we’d hate to see what would happen without our protection,” 

“Your reputation is built on stealing hubcaps and losing fights to one-legged pigeons,” I mutter. I strike a match against the underside of my thumbnail and light my jay. A muted green tinge flares in the cherry, and a thin trail of canna-scented smoke drifts into the rain.

“Aye, don’t be like that,” Ribsy pipes up, spraying chip crumbs. “We’re legit now. Ya gotta pay up at some point, dude. Tell him the news, Knuckles. Tell him about the strategy.”

“Yeah, the strategy.” Knuckles puffs out his chest. “We’re expanding, my good Steve. Gonna run the whole corner of 4th and Main by next week. We’re talking ver-ti-cal integration. We’re talking neighborhood watch,  with teeth. Real protection. Real bid-ness” 

“Your strategy involves sharing a brain cell between you,” I say, turning the corner onto Bleaker. “And I’m pretty sure the it’s on leave. Go play cosplay gangsters somewhere else. I have real work to do…”

“Work?” Knuckles laughs…sounds like dry sticks snapping. “The Higgins parakeet? We saw you looking at the flyers, Stevie-boy. You’re chasing a ghost bird…we building empires.”

My left hand, pocketed, cumples the “lost bird” flier shoved down there with the last of my ambition. The boneheads follow me right up the barely-sound, creaking stairs of my building. Maybe this was once a respectable place to live. I dont think so anymore. The Southside Boys clammer behind me, giggling over pipe-dream gang riches.  I don’t have the energy to kick them out, and frankly, their idiocy is a marginal improvement over the deafening silence of my office. 

I unlock the door—frosted glass pane that still says STEVE – PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR in peeling gold leaf—and kick it open. It hits the filing cabinet with a metallic clang that echoes in the hallway. A skellie-vagrant at the end of the hall looks up from his burnt lightbulb. 

The office is a graveyard of my life’s ambition. A shitty desk fan oscillates on low, pushing around the smell of stale weed and damp wool. The water stain on the ceiling has spread, already. Everything in Downtown Skeleville leaks. The Tears of the City, they call it. I call it another daily inconvenience. 

I throw my wet peacoat over a chair and sit down with the weight of a thousand worlds. The springs scream in protest before adjusting. I slam the crumpled flyer on my desk atop a coffee-stained pile of casefiles curling in the humidity. A missing parakeet. Not a whole parakeet. Just the bones. A delicate little assembly of brittle twigs. Mrs. Higgins is convinced the neighbor’s cat ate it and, well, coughed up the evidence. Higgins runs this little slum, but I’m not sure for who since she ain’t what we here refer to as “management,” more of an ancient bone-witch with blackrose shrines in a garden she built from what used to be a pool. 

A pool. In Downtown. Imagine that. 

What the Southside Boys haven’t figured out is I’m already on the Higgins case. Grabbing the flyer was a way to ease competition. 

Five dollars a day. That used to buy a decent bottle of rye. Now it buys enough used motor oil to keep my knee from locking up when the rain gets this bad. 

It’s locked up, now.

I pick up a pencil and tap it against my teeth—clack, clack, clack—staring at the bird.

What is even the point of a goddamn bird?

“You guys still here?” I ask without looking up. Smoke seeps from my nose-hole like a kitsch incense burner at your local herb-shop. 

Knuckles swaggers over and sets a lukewarm, dented can of Calc-Cola on my desk with a flourish. “Courtesy of the SSB. We look out for our local business owners. Plus, eh, you look like you need the bubbles, my good Steve.”

I eye the dented can. They’re chumps. Neighborhood kids turned adult-children with too much time, and no prospects, costuming around as tough guys in a town that doesn’t care if they died tomorrow. They spray-paint warehouses, and argue over nicknames. They’re loud, they’re clumsy, and right now, they’re entirely without malice. I’m fine with em, anyway. They’re fine with me.

“Thanks for the Calc,” I say. “Fuck-outta here. You’re blocking my light, and I think to figure out if this…sigh… cat had an fuckin’... accomplice.”

Ribs chuckles a bit at my dismay, that’s fine. Knuckles opens his mouth to argue…probably something about respect… but the atmosphere in the room takes a sharp, icy turn. Ribsy and Knuckles clam up.

The smell hits first. Intoxicating. 

Wet bone, weed, and cheap chips vanish. Replaced instantly by something heavy, expensive, cloyingly sweet. Hothouse funeral lilies and cold silk. The smell of the Upper West Side, where skeletons wear diamonds and the dead pretend to be alive.

Knuckles and Ribsy freeze. Their bickering dies mid-breath. They back away from the center of the room, instinctively pressing themselves against the moldy wallpaper like they just saw a Ghost—which, in this town, is saying something. Ya never want to see a Ghost.

I don’t want to look up. I know already what I am about to see…

Three centuries of being dead, and I’ve gotten good at not feeling. Not needing things. Not drowning in someone else’s bullshit.

I look up.

Yup…

Skelette.

The fur coat is new. Massive, dark, makes her look twice as large and ten times as lethal. The cloche hat pulled low, delicate veil obscuring the upper half of her otherwise gorgeous, glowing face. The flapper-style dress of charcoal silk. All new. All paid for… not by her.

But the way she holds her left shoulder slightly higher than her right…like she’s still bracing for a punch from a father who’s been dust for thirty years…that’s old. That’s the tenement girl I used to know, buried under silk and diamonds. 

My jaw locks. Not metaphorically. Actually locks. I have to consciously force it open to speak. Another dent to my broken ego.

“Skelette.” The name tastes like mold in my mouth. “You’re late.”

“I’m exactly on time, Steve.” Her voice is frosted glass and ice…smooth, cultured, capable of cutting to the bone. “You’re just still here.”

That one lands clean. I crush my cigarette into the hubcap I use as an ashtray, harder than necessary. 

“What do you want?”

She glides into the room, the fur coat brushing against the grime-streaked walls. Her gaze sweeps over my office - the water stain, the peeling gold leaf, the parakeet photo. “Ah, I see you’ve really made something of yourself.”

“The view’s better down here,” I say. “Garbage don’t lie.”

Her eyes narrow behind the veil. “Neither do I.”

“Sure,” I say. “That’s why you’re wearing a mask.”

A muscle in her jaw tightens. For a second, the polish cracks like a porcelain doll. Then it’s back, smooth as glass.

“I need you…” she whispers from behind her furs.

“As I said… you’re too late for that, kid”

“I need to hire you, Steve.”

I laugh. Short, sharp bark that makes Ribsy flinch. “Hire me? Lady, your fur coat costs more than this entire building. You have a legion of suits to do your dirty work. Why come down to the Southside to find a guy working on a missing parakeet?” Ego takes another shot. I defend it. 

She reaches into a small, beaded clutch and pulls out a thick, cream-colored envelope. She tosses it onto my desk. It lands with a heavy, satisfying thud right on top of the parakeet photo.

“I lost something,” she says.

“Your fuckin mind? Another husband? The way home? Fuck off,”

“A ledger.”

“Thrilling. Try the library.”

“It has shipment records,” she says, her voice dropping an octave, losing the high-society polish. Revealing the gritty girl from the slums I used to know. “Relief supplies for the Southside zones.”

I lean back. My chair groans in agony. “You always were sentimental about charity work.”

“The routes were real. The supplies were real.” She pauses. For the first time, genuine fear flickers across her features. “What I was tracking inside them… that was real too.”

The office goes quiet. Even the fan seems to stop.

“You were running Exo,” I say. Not a question.

“I was tracking it,” she says, stepping closer to the desk until the lily-scent is almost suffocating. “Trying to cut the supply before it drowned the neighborhood.” She meets my eyes through the veil. “Someone found out. Now the book’s gone. And whoever has it knows every route, every drop point, every…”

“Every way to flood the Southside with more poison,” I finish.

She doesn’t deny it.

I glance over at Knuckles and Ribsy. They aren’t looking at me. They’re staring at their worn-out sneakers, postures slumped, the lovable energy drained out of them.

Exo. A whisper in the alleys. A shadow in the slums. They say it makes your bones feel like steel. They say it makes you feel like you’re breathing again. But I’ve seen the addicts in the Docks—skeletons with a faint, sickly blue luminescence radiating from their ribs, eyes vacant, moving with robotic, mindless precision.

“Have you heard the word on the street?” Skelette whispers. “About what the kids in the lower districts are getting into? The blue glow?”

I look at Knuckles. He’s chewing his lower jaw, looking terrified and oddly guilty.

“The ledger tracks the precursors,” Skelette says. “I was trying to find the source. To cut it off before it swallowed the neighborhood. Someone found out. Now it’s gone, and I think one of your ‘lovable’ Southside neighbors has it.”

She gestures with a gloved hand toward the two boys by the wall.

I stare at the envelope. Thick enough to fix my knee. Pay rent for a year. Maybe buy something that doesn’t taste like failure.

“No,” I say.

“No?”

“I don’t work for you. I don’t work for people who wear fur and lie about good deeds. Find another stooge.”

Silence.

Then, very quietly: “The blue stuff won’t stop at the docks, Steve. It’ll hit the corners. The schools. The kids who think they’re tough because they stole a hubcap and gave themselves gang names.”

I look at Knuckles and Ribsy. Ribsy is shaking. Not from cold. From fear. Knuckles is staring at the floor, his jaw working like he wants to say something but can’t find the words.

Goddamn it.

I pick up the envelope. It feels heavy—heavy with the weight of a dozen bad decisions.

“If I find out you’re lying,” I say, meeting her gaze, “I burn the ledger. And you get to explain to your society friends why half the Southside went up in smoke.”

“Find it first, Steve,” she says, her voice returning to its frosted-glass shell. “Then we’ll discuss my sins.”

She turns toward the door, fur coat swirling like dark smoke. She doesn’t look back. Glides out of the office, leaving the smell of lilies to battle the stench of wet bone and fish.

The room feels smaller after she leaves. Colder.

I look at Knuckles and Ribsy. They’re still pressed against the wall.

I stand up. Grab my peacoat. Still damp. Doesn’t matter.

“Alright, boys,” I say. “Who’s pushing the blue on your corner?”

They look at each other. The look says: we know, and we wish we didn’t.

“We don’t know his name,” Ribsy whispers. “Just… the Chemist.”

“Where?”

“The old phosphate plant,” Knuckles says. His voice cracks. “Down by the—”

“The place Skelette’s husband fell into a vat and melted,” I finish.

They nod.

Of course it’s there.

I have a ledger to find. And if I have to dig through the ashes of Skelette’s marriages and murders to get it, well—

I’ve been burning for fifteen years anyway.

What’s one more fire?

Rain in Skeleville doesn’t wash anything clean. It just turns the grit into a slurry.

Cold, sideways rain. The kind that makes my joints throb. I pull my peacoat tighter—the heavy wool soaked through—and adjust the brim of my cap, letting the saturated rainwater fall off the edges. Underneath, my hoodie clings like a damp second skin. Better than letting the chill whistle through my ribs.

Another goddamn night.

The Southside Docks are a special kind of hell on Wednesdays. That’s when the canneries change the water, if you could call it that, from the vats, and the air turns into a thick soup of fermented fish guts and industrial runoff. A smell so potent you can chew it. I step over a puddle reflecting the bruised purple neon of a nearby “Live Nudes” sign—though in this neighborhood, “nude” just means you lost your clothes along with your hope.

My boots crunch on broken glass and wet gravel. I’m two blocks from my office on Bleaker Street when the shadows near an alleyway start talking.

“Steve! My main man-dible! You’re looking a little damp, pal. You leaking or is that just the weather?”

Don’t stop. Don’t even slow down. I just reach into my pocket, pull out a crumpled pouch of shake, and start rolling a joint one-handed. “Go home, Knucks. Too cold for your kind of stupidity.”

A large frame steps into the light of a flickering streetlamp. Knuckles. Football jersey three sizes too big, number 10 hanging loose over his ribs. The irony isn’t lost on me.

Trailing behind him like a nervous shadow is Ribsy. Backwards cap, shivering so hard I can hear his teeth clacking from five feet away. He clutches a half-eaten bag of bone-dust chips like a security blanket.

“We got business, Steve,” Knuckles says, falling into step beside me. Ribsy scrambles to keep up on my other side. “Pro-fessional gang business. We’re the Southside Boys, remember? We got a reputation. Pay up, bud, we’d hate to see what would happen without our protection,” 

“Your reputation is built on stealing hubcaps and losing fights to one-legged pigeons,” I mutter. I strike a match against the underside of my thumbnail and light my jay. A muted green tinge flares in the cherry, and a thin trail of canna-scented smoke drifts into the rain.

“Aye, don’t be like that,” Ribsy pipes up, spraying chip crumbs. “We’re legit now. Ya gotta pay up at some point, dude. Tell him the news, Knuckles. Tell him about the strategy.”

“Yeah, the strategy.” Knuckles puffs out his chest. “We’re expanding, my good Steve. Gonna run the whole corner of 4th and Main by next week. We’re talking ver-ti-cal integration. We’re talking neighborhood watch,  with teeth. Real protection. Real bid-ness” 

“Your strategy involves sharing a brain cell between you,” I say, turning the corner onto Bleaker. “And I’m pretty sure the it’s on leave. Go play cosplay gangsters somewhere else. I have real work to do…”

“Work?” Knuckles laughs…sounds like dry sticks snapping. “The Higgins parakeet? We saw you looking at the flyers, Stevie-boy. You’re chasing a ghost bird…we building empires.”

My left hand, pocketed, cumples the “lost bird” flier shoved down there with the last of my ambition. The boneheads follow me right up the barely-sound, creaking stairs of my building. Maybe this was once a respectable place to live. I dont think so anymore. The Southside Boys clammer behind me, giggling over pipe-dream gang riches.  I don’t have the energy to kick them out, and frankly, their idiocy is a marginal improvement over the deafening silence of my office. 

I unlock the door—frosted glass pane that still says STEVE – PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR in peeling gold leaf—and kick it open. It hits the filing cabinet with a metallic clang that echoes in the hallway. A skellie-vagrant at the end of the hall looks up from his burnt lightbulb. 

The office is a graveyard of my life’s ambition. A shitty desk fan oscillates on low, pushing around the smell of stale weed and damp wool. The water stain on the ceiling has spread, already. Everything in Downtown Skeleville leaks. The Tears of the City, they call it. I call it another daily inconvenience. 

I throw my wet peacoat over a chair and sit down with the weight of a thousand worlds. The springs scream in protest before adjusting. I slam the crumpled flyer on my desk atop a coffee-stained pile of casefiles curling in the humidity. A missing parakeet. Not a whole parakeet. Just the bones. A delicate little assembly of brittle twigs. Mrs. Higgins is convinced the neighbor’s cat ate it and, well, coughed up the evidence. Higgins runs this little slum, but I’m not sure for who since she ain’t what we here refer to as “management,” more of an ancient bone-witch with blackrose shrines in a garden she built from what used to be a pool. 

A pool. In Downtown. Imagine that. 

What the Southside Boys haven’t figured out is I’m already on the Higgins case. Grabbing the flyer was a way to ease competition. 

Five dollars a day. That used to buy a decent bottle of rye. Now it buys enough used motor oil to keep my knee from locking up when the rain gets this bad. 

It’s locked up, now.

I pick up a pencil and tap it against my teeth—clack, clack, clack—staring at the bird.

What is even the point of a goddamn bird?

“You guys still here?” I ask without looking up. Smoke seeps from my nose-hole like a kitsch incense burner at your local herb-shop. 

Knuckles swaggers over and sets a lukewarm, dented can of Calc-Cola on my desk with a flourish. “Courtesy of the SSB. We look out for our local business owners. Plus, eh, you look like you need the bubbles, my good Steve.”

I eye the dented can. They’re chumps. Neighborhood kids turned adult-children with too much time, and no prospects, costuming around as tough guys in a town that doesn’t care if they died tomorrow. They spray-paint warehouses, and argue over nicknames. They’re loud, they’re clumsy, and right now, they’re entirely without malice. I’m fine with em, anyway. They’re fine with me.

“Thanks for the Calc,” I say. “Fuck-outta here. You’re blocking my light, and I think to figure out if this…sigh… cat had an fuckin’... accomplice.”

Ribs chuckles a bit at my dismay, that’s fine. Knuckles opens his mouth to argue…probably something about respect… but the atmosphere in the room takes a sharp, icy turn. Ribsy and Knuckles clam up.

The smell hits first. Intoxicating. 

Wet bone, weed, and cheap chips vanish. Replaced instantly by something heavy, expensive, cloyingly sweet. Hothouse funeral lilies and cold silk. The smell of the Upper West Side, where skeletons wear diamonds and the dead pretend to be alive.

Knuckles and Ribsy freeze. Their bickering dies mid-breath. They back away from the center of the room, instinctively pressing themselves against the moldy wallpaper like they just saw a Ghost—which, in this town, is saying something. Ya never want to see a Ghost.

I don’t want to look up. I know already what I am about to see…

Three centuries of being dead, and I’ve gotten good at not feeling. Not needing things. Not drowning in someone else’s bullshit.

I look up.

Yup…

Skelette.

The fur coat is new. Massive, dark, makes her look twice as large and ten times as lethal. The cloche hat pulled low, delicate veil obscuring the upper half of her otherwise gorgeous, glowing face. The flapper-style dress of charcoal silk. All new. All paid for… not by her.

But the way she holds her left shoulder slightly higher than her right…like she’s still bracing for a punch from a father who’s been dust for thirty years…that’s old. That’s the tenement girl I used to know, buried under silk and diamonds. 

My jaw locks. Not metaphorically. Actually locks. I have to consciously force it open to speak. Another dent to my broken ego.

“Skelette.” The name tastes like mold in my mouth. “You’re late.”

“I’m exactly on time, Steve.” Her voice is frosted glass and ice…smooth, cultured, capable of cutting to the bone. “You’re just still here.”

That one lands clean. I crush my cigarette into the hubcap I use as an ashtray, harder than necessary. 

“What do you want?”

She glides into the room, the fur coat brushing against the grime-streaked walls. Her gaze sweeps over my office - the water stain, the peeling gold leaf, the parakeet photo. “Ah, I see you’ve really made something of yourself.”

“The view’s better down here,” I say. “Garbage don’t lie.”

Her eyes narrow behind the veil. “Neither do I.”

“Sure,” I say. “That’s why you’re wearing a mask.”

A muscle in her jaw tightens. For a second, the polish cracks like a porcelain doll. Then it’s back, smooth as glass.

“I need you…” she whispers from behind her furs.

“As I said… you’re too late for that, kid”

“I need to hire you, Steve.”

I laugh. Short, sharp bark that makes Ribsy flinch. “Hire me? Lady, your fur coat costs more than this entire building. You have a legion of suits to do your dirty work. Why come down to the Southside to find a guy working on a missing parakeet?” Ego takes another shot. I defend it. 

She reaches into a small, beaded clutch and pulls out a thick, cream-colored envelope. She tosses it onto my desk. It lands with a heavy, satisfying thud right on top of the parakeet photo.

“I lost something,” she says.

“Your fuckin mind? Another husband? The way home? Fuck off,”

“A ledger.”

“Thrilling. Try the library.”

“It has shipment records,” she says, her voice dropping an octave, losing the high-society polish. Revealing the gritty girl from the slums I used to know. “Relief supplies for the Southside zones.”

I lean back. My chair groans in agony. “You always were sentimental about charity work.”

“The routes were real. The supplies were real.” She pauses. For the first time, genuine fear flickers across her features. “What I was tracking inside them… that was real too.”

The office goes quiet. Even the fan seems to stop.

“You were running Exo,” I say. Not a question.

“I was tracking it,” she says, stepping closer to the desk until the lily-scent is almost suffocating. “Trying to cut the supply before it drowned the neighborhood.” She meets my eyes through the veil. “Someone found out. Now the book’s gone. And whoever has it knows every route, every drop point, every…”

“Every way to flood the Southside with more poison,” I finish.

She doesn’t deny it.

I glance over at Knuckles and Ribsy. They aren’t looking at me. They’re staring at their worn-out sneakers, postures slumped, the lovable energy drained out of them.

Exo. A whisper in the alleys. A shadow in the slums. They say it makes your bones feel like steel. They say it makes you feel like you’re breathing again. But I’ve seen the addicts in the Docks—skeletons with a faint, sickly blue luminescence radiating from their ribs, eyes vacant, moving with robotic, mindless precision.

“Have you heard the word on the street?” Skelette whispers. “About what the kids in the lower districts are getting into? The blue glow?”

I look at Knuckles. He’s chewing his lower jaw, looking terrified and oddly guilty.

“The ledger tracks the precursors,” Skelette says. “I was trying to find the source. To cut it off before it swallowed the neighborhood. Someone found out. Now it’s gone, and I think one of your ‘lovable’ Southside neighbors has it.”

She gestures with a gloved hand toward the two boys by the wall.

I stare at the envelope. Thick enough to fix my knee. Pay rent for a year. Maybe buy something that doesn’t taste like failure.

“No,” I say.

“No?”

“I don’t work for you. I don’t work for people who wear fur and lie about good deeds. Find another stooge.”

Silence.

Then, very quietly: “The blue stuff won’t stop at the docks, Steve. It’ll hit the corners. The schools. The kids who think they’re tough because they stole a hubcap and gave themselves gang names.”

I look at Knuckles and Ribsy. Ribsy is shaking. Not from cold. From fear. Knuckles is staring at the floor, his jaw working like he wants to say something but can’t find the words.

Goddamn it.

I pick up the envelope. It feels heavy—heavy with the weight of a dozen bad decisions.

“If I find out you’re lying,” I say, meeting her gaze, “I burn the ledger. And you get to explain to your society friends why half the Southside went up in smoke.”

“Find it first, Steve,” she says, her voice returning to its frosted-glass shell. “Then we’ll discuss my sins.”

She turns toward the door, fur coat swirling like dark smoke. She doesn’t look back. Glides out of the office, leaving the smell of lilies to battle the stench of wet bone and fish.

The room feels smaller after she leaves. Colder.

I look at Knuckles and Ribsy. They’re still pressed against the wall.

I stand up. Grab my peacoat. Still damp. Doesn’t matter.

“Alright, boys,” I say. “Who’s pushing the blue on your corner?”

They look at each other. The look says: we know, and we wish we didn’t.

“We don’t know his name,” Ribsy whispers. “Just… the Chemist.”

“Where?”

“The old phosphate plant,” Knuckles says. His voice cracks. “Down by the—”

“The place Skelette’s husband fell into a vat and melted,” I finish.

They nod.

Of course it’s there.

I have a ledger to find. And if I have to dig through the ashes of Skelette’s marriages and murders to get it, well—

I’ve been burning for fifteen years anyway.

What’s one more fire?