Text of short teasers for the Video-Book format of Apricot Eyes by Rohan Quine

On this page are the full texts of the teasers excerpted from Apricot Eyes’s video-book format. On this page is a list of the teasers’ headings only. On both pages, the headings are linked to the teasers on Vimeo.

 

Teaser 2(i), eyes burn soft

—Well, just give me one quick moment. Whenever I do this kind of unplanned tune-in, I have to psych myself up for at least a few seconds. I mean, I can’t just jump straight into it with zero run-up. Let’s see. The psyching-up should be appropriate to the target.

I know: Scorpio is perhaps the most urban creature I’ve ever met. He used to say he finds the countryside creepy and depressing! That is so him. OK then, so I’ll whip something up from the flesh of the cityscape, to help us get the right frequency here … and thinking so, I let my gaze float across the burning lights of windows (some with insect figures bobbing inside), the slopes of floodlit spires, glowing stores and the cells of moving cars; and I draw forth the frequency of each through the sticky air, teasing up their sounds through the russet-brown city-hiss, all minutely audible and independent elements that multiply in rising, till the cityscape seeps from three dimensions into four. I snake my slender hands around in slow-moving spirals against the panorama, stroking with my copper-coloured nails the web of light that stretches up in strings squeezed out as if from squinting eyes and lashes wet with tears. “Flesh-pain strung in wires of ecstasy,” I say, and pull the sounds and strings together with the eye behind my forehead. They bend in, converge a mile ahead of me and rise as an edifice that soars to the sky like a tower of the gods, made of radiating energy and light. Music rises, cars whine, window squares flicker with their insect dwellers caught as ants in amber, and the tower spins its shafts across the roofs of New York City as my eyes burn softly and wide to the night, Forever’s now…

 

Teaser 2(ii), silver high-heeled boots

—And we land beneath a grainy television screen. A speaker plays a drumbeat cut with whips and moans, an endless soundtrack piped to this room tucked away on New York’s West Side, where Scorpio works beneath a camera’s eye. The screen goes black, the soundtrack silent; then a harsh intake of breath.

A second loud breath—then a cone of light falls upon a small pair of breasts, each stroked by a hand of silver fingernails. Each hand’s ring-finger lifts up and pokes through the thin steel ring that pierces erect the tiny meat of its respective nipple. Now the camera rises, shows the whole seated body from above, clad in nothing but a pair of silver high-heeled boots. The head looks up from under long black hair, and Scorpio’s eyes smoulder at the lens and through the screen, into us (though this last is an illusion, as I know he cannot see us).

The image of his skin is burnt out, as through over-exposure in a photograph. The hair of his crotch is a nest of black, in which a shape stirs. The shape seems to wriggle, as with legs—and now it twitches, and a black-thighed scorpion the size of a hand breaks free and sets off up his stomach, gentle on his flesh with its little claws and curling up its bulbous sting.

 

Teaser 3(i), under the Elevated Expressway

Again I board the carriage just in front of Kev’s and filter down the length of it, out of his sightline, where I find myself facing through the windows in the doors. Dusty grey pipes, cables, pillars and occasional dim caverns streak by me.

Then the train emerges above ground and onto elevated tracks. The stations, mostly empty, give little clue to the gangland below. One-Hundred-Thirty-Eighth Street, Brook Avenue, Cypress Avenue, East One-Hundred-Forty-Third Street, East One-Hundred-Forty-Ninth Street, and now Longwood Avenue. I check a map above the windows. It’ll be three more stops before we reach any place where a self-respecting televangelist would live—but no, for there in the next carriage Kev is getting up and leaving the train.

With great care and a bit of luck, I follow him undetected through an almost deserted station. Where on earth are we going here?

Outside the station Kev sets off without a pause, not west into the night-lit throb of Mott Haven, but east across Bruckner Boulevard and under the booming truck-roar of the Elevated Expressway. From here on, civilisation ends, for beyond this echoing space of concrete columns stretches the industrial district of Hunts Point. As Kev exits the Boulevard up Lafayette Avenue, I glance down at the rusty railroad in the cutting beneath us. From what I know about this grimy peninsula we’re heading into here, I decide we’d better conclude there can be no redeeming purpose whatsoever for Kev’s journey tonight. I follow him nevertheless, right onto Tiffany Street, keeping my distance.

In the daytime this corner of the Bronx is dominated by the rumble of trucks along Hunts Point Avenue to the wholesale food market at the end; and by traffic connected with the numerous chop-shops engaged in the business of breaking up stolen cars in order to sell off their components, many such establishments being staffed by mean-looking guard-dogs at the entrance, to ensure an attentive front-of-house welcome. By night the peninsula’s main trades are drugs, and sex for drugs.

 

Teaser 3(ii), forsaken grid of avenues

Flitting through the shadows in between these yellow street lights, I keep a block behind Kev. Turning left on Randall Avenue, we pass a little corner bar whose name, Manny’s, shines green and red on two young prostitutes, one black and one Hispanic. Their painted faces smile and coo, first at Kev and then at me. But Kev never wavers in his single-minded, lumbering progress: turning right on Barretto Street, passing other whores who stare at us and whistle; left up Oak Point Avenue, right onto Faile Street and down past a few tent homes and past the very last diner on East Bay Avenue, a tiny shack with diner-style metal on the outside; heading then in silence to the most forsaken reach of all, the grid of avenues by the waterfront.

The darkness and my soft-soled boots make me able to follow him undetected, but my nerves jangle with every block we travel, past rank black alley mouths and chain-link fences. At the bottom of the hill Kev turns to the right, down the last wide, sad strip, Ryawa Avenue. A sewage plant hums on the left, behind a barb-topped fence and a row of dark conifers. Beyond surprise, I find my luck yet holds, as I follow him unseen along the two last blocks to the furthest cul de sac, where the avenue slopes to a slimy pool of water, slick with oil and littered with the crescents of abandoned tyres.

 

Teaser 3(iii), North and South Brother Islands

Kev heads on and turns left into shadow. I tiptoe to the corner, peer round and see him stride across a stretch of waste ground to an area of trash heaps and rotting metal bins, step up onto a heap and down the other side, veer to the right and disappear. I glance back, squat down and wait for a minute, but see no further movement. I slink around the corner and follow the fence of the sewage works, on the other side of which stands a line of plastic and brick cylinders, the last one topped by a turret sprouting a thick white tube. A hum hangs thick upon the air, as of engines underground.

Beyond the undergrowth ahead is the gleam of the East River. Craning up to peer over the reeds and across the water, I see Riker’s Island, where the grey-striped façade of the prison is lit up yellow-white, near a plume of steam and two tall chimneys. Over on the right the small hump of North Brother Island sprouts another pair of chimneys; and beside it, the smaller bare blip of South Brother Island breaks the moonlight on the water. Locating a dip in the ground, I huddle down in it and wait for Kev to reappear.

 

Teaser 4(i), arrows flare and fall

A deafeningly amplified intake of breath cuts the lights and the voices in the nightclub dead. Scattered yells spurt—silence for a second, then a simmering of murmurs and talk between the candles. A cone of empty white light falls through the dark to the stage-floor. Catcalls, applause, and collective attention. A second loud breath stabs out from the speakers, anatomical and harsh. A scent of burning dust coils out across the room, then a white-lit face flicks stark and disembodied through the wall of the cone, as a guitar riff slides to a heartbeat of drums. Hanging still, the face lets its eyelids slide up; ringed in black and silver, its eyes blaze wide under heavy dark lashes, scanning slowly right to left across the crowd ahead. Its scarlet lips pout out a kiss, then draw back to let a hiss snake through its teeth. The drum-thunder roars, guitar squeals and feedback screams—then fingernail by fingernail, limb by shiny black limb, puncturing the white cone at points around his grinning face, Scorpio injects his body into the spotlight, in spiked black leather drag. He draws on his cigarette, bares his teeth, exhales, and a sudden cruel, strangely refined faint line runs down through the skin beneath his make-up, from beside either nostril to the corners of his lips. Eyes burning through the smoke, with a strength dark and delicate at once he lifts the whip, like a partner in the dance. As the layers of the music peel away to leave a skewer whine, he freezes; a sudden flow of red spills across his face, washes past the spikes around his neck and gushes down his slender chest, past the silver rings through his nipples. He cracks his whip, the light flicks, red is wiped to white again—but strobing, so his snake-coils click-stop in frozen frames. His voice cuts clean through a rich swell of bass, like a blade pushing tight through the pulse of a fungus. His hands and arms caress his body, flow around and seem to cut it softly, stroke its pressure always in and turn its spines upon themselves—delicate, relentless, till the crackle of his charge makes arrows flare and fall. And he dances every night: framed in candles and white white light…

 

Teaser 4(ii), convulsive grace on Tenth Avenue

A black ghost-truck, full of carcasses of meat, rolls past them in silence.

“Are you absolutely certain?” he asks. She nods. “OK. What d’you need?”

“I’m going to pick him up,” whispers Echo, “lure him under the bridge, knock him cold and do my own piece of knife-work, and I need you to watch my back and help me if I need help. I’ve asked two other girls but they’re just stalling, and we don’t have the whole fucking night because he may just leave. So Scorpio, my honey, you may be half my height and half my weight, but you’re lethal. Can you help me?”

“It’s done. Go ahead, I’m right behind you. He’s lived.”

“You’re one of us,” she says.

“Yes I was.”

She flashes him a smile, heads across Fourteenth, has a word with another girl, wanders to the corner and catches the man’s eye.

The man approaches her; they chat. Echo’s laughter tinkles out across the cobbled street. She lightly takes the man’s arm and they wander west towards the elevated tracks before Tenth Avenue.

Scorpio follows at a discreet distance.

Once the traffic on the Avenue has passed, the couple veers right. Disengaging her arm from his, Echo points with one hand at the Liberty Hotel on the island diagonally across the intersection, while her other hand draws forth a short thick metal bar from her handbag. The man peers over at where she’s pointing, then begins to turn his head back to her, about to speak. She smiles, peals laughter out, and slams the bar down with convulsive grace.

He staggers, half looks up, makes to lunge at her. She strikes him with the bar a second time, then a third, and he falls.

Scorpio darts up and helps her haul the man behind a pillar at the rear of the space beneath the elevated tracks.

 

Teaser 5(i), mouths silent-screaming

Back home again, I sit, close my eyes and try to work out what to do. Perhaps a jaunt to West Fourteenth Street, to get relaxingly embroiled in police enquiries? No; me neither.

But I ought to do something here, surely. Do what, though? I get ready for bed, lie back and set out to think this through. My sight drifts up and hovers over the Lower East Side, then down to float above a black tanker that’s sweeping north between the high-rise projects and the East River. High smoke coils from the generating station, up ahead and to the left. On the right shines the East River, jagged with reflections of white and red and yellow lights burning on deserted warehouse buildings on the far Brooklyn shore.

Beside the black tanker, from a golden limousine, leaks gasoline, streaming out unseen upon the concrete.

A guard-dog howls somewhere, unheard by the drivers.

The limousine erupts with a dull boom, swelling to a fireball of orange flecked with scarlet. Cars scatter, screeching. Regardless of the road’s swerve left at East Fifteenth Street, the ball hurtles on, hits the barrier and bounces up and outward, raging and spinning.

Through the roar of dirty flame and bursting glass, a flail of tiny hands and mouths silent-screaming trapped in buckled metal flash, then they fall to the river with a crunch and hiss of steam.

The dog howls again among the yellow-lit projects, while the black tanker clanks on undaunted, up the East Side Highway towards the Bronx.

 

Teaser 5(ii), gold amid the grey and red

Over the great town of psychiatric compounds and hospital blocks between the river and First Avenue—high above that blast of pain cushioned in the soft wink and hum of shiny buildings—my vision soars again, shoots uptown a mile, then plummets in a graceful arc, down to Sixty-Third and a sleeping Kev, down to his bedside Bible and the long fat water-bug sitting on it, licking clean its feelers as it paws at the book.

The longer I tune in to Kev, the more I see about his life: the passionate sincerity and energy he brings to his campaigns and plain-speaking rhetoric; his pleasure at the growth in small-town support across the States; and the practical effects of isolation and despair in the intended populations, leading to suicide or to violence from others, as appropriate. Always hard to quantify, but growing, growing steadily! I find myself snatching single images of individual human pain—nails sticking out red and jagged from the grey flood of pain that is caused or increased by him. I catch in particular the pain of the few who are always targeted and damaged by the rest, to the music of his preaching. I feel for the nails, as they poke from the surface and get bent out of shape. Then, among these nails of pain, I focus on the golden nails of hard-won magic, and I cry at the beauty of them, sticking out against the light, against the odds, against the flood, in triumph: pinpricks of gold amid the grey and red…

I long to stop this man from inflicting any more: his hate must come back on him, as deserved.

The darkness of my feelings stands bare, like those sudden hanging severed legs, side-lit in the moon-glimmer coming through the windows in his high-ceilinged, claustrophobic bedroom right now…

My vision rears up beside the preacher’s bed, turns around and shoots across his room at shoulder height, bursting through the window pane to fly across a roofscape of chimneys, dusty parapets, aerials and water tanks.

 

Teaser 6(i), who is that inside me?

Approaching the Midtown recording studio, I psych myself up for my weekly show: my shadow flicks aside to kiss a male neck, slides ahead to stroke a female back, then vanishes beneath me as I pass below a street light, causing those it touches to pause in their speech or look behind them. Who is that attached to me, who interfaces for me and moves as I command, but whose style and pain are self-made? Or who is that inside me, protecting me and driving me, whose willpower I hope will never turn itself upon me? A puff of air, accompanying me into the heavy old revolving-doors at the building’s entrance, whispers its answer during the few seconds we are revolving together, sealed inside our metal and glass segment: You’ll never know!

 

Teaser 6(ii), dark flame on Forty-Second

I still can’t pick up Kev’s own frequency, however; so I scan the city, seeking Scorpio’s instead. My vision streaks high above the bright Midtown skyscrapers, drinking in their beauty for a moment. Then it zooms down between them, plunging down and further down, and isolates and enters a small slim figure flitting fast through a neon pulse of lights near Times Square.

Scorpio glances up, as if to find a scrutiny of eyes from the air. Something infuses him; his taut, nervy body feels something comparatively sweet and light, something or someone he has known before. It’s sought him, he feels, and investigates him now: gentle and soft, but undeceivable; watchful and silent and invulnerable to him.

Stepping east on Forty-Second Street in glamorous black drag, he’s such a dark flame that I keep him in my sights quite readily. He crosses Eighth Avenue. Though delicate of movement and frame, he is sending out a presence like a shadow-play of knives now: sensual contempt and a penetrating scepticism burn out from in between his long mascara’d lashes, lit from within by a pent-up violence. He starts, as if a finger has tapped on his forehead, but sees there is nothing there and puts it from his mind. He looks around. “People, for the most part,” he thinks, “deserve to die.” Walking, he imagines that he stands upon a roof here, holding a giant metal whip whose wire lash he cracks hard, so it shoots through the air at his targets, straight to where he’s known they will run for escape, till it finds them and coils around their necks, coiling tight and ever quicker so it cuts through cleanly, the streets awash with blood and rolling heads and running torsos—

 

Teaser 6(iii), that was way too naked

The images produced by my sight through the television cameras are less photographic than suggestive of their subjects, like abstract portraits. Yet so true are they in essence, especially when I’m seeing a person, that a vivid stab of Scorpio is slicing out its sultry vibration from all the connected TVs in New York that are currently displaying this online show. Ten such TV screens happen to be banked in a window on his left now, every screen alight with the image of a mesmerising black pulse cutting through a lurid coloured flicker as of neon…

He halts and stares, twanging with a shocked self-recognition. Straightaway, a section of every screen—the section where the eyes of that churning and terrifying shape would have been if the picture were less abstract—becomes not just fully figurative but even photo-realistic, as his recognition, unforeseeable by him or me, reaches out and grabs my sight and makes of our connection a conduit so clear that for one long moment ten pairs of Scorpio eyes stare down at him, pin him to the pavement, enter him and peer around his mind.

Raped by his own gaze, he shivers, looks away, then back again defiantly at me, through the screens; but I’ve turned the heat down for a moment, so those Scorpio eyes melt back into the surrounding blackness of the shape that quivers snarling on the backdrop of the neon swirl.

That was way too naked.

Now he knows it’s me; I know he does. Although we’re no longer staring at each other, our connection is now re-established after all these months of separation.

I continue to observe him. He can sense this and, excitingly, he feels a subtle thrill that I can feel as well!

 

Teaser 7(i), the monkey on the parapet

Silent and sudden, then, my eyes ache, streaming tears the scent and shade of apricots. I glance down to see that these are moistening the cracked and dusty surface of the window sill, where someone long ago has carved: “CX—love always—RQ.” With a soft cry at this, my vision rises through the roof, flying out across the East River’s grand width.

Soaring above the cold black water and descending towards the north-west corner of Astoria, I sense down ahead of me a soft muffled roar so deep that the televised image must be shaking as it broadcasts. A huge brick building without any windows looms up beneath me, its red-winking chimney-tops a hundred metres off the ground, belching colourlessly up into the sticky air. Rows of metal boxes, rust-stained concrete and intricate cones set on buzzing metal frameworks stretch to its east on a lonely mile of gravel. I float on down through the heat between the chimneys, nearer to the giant hidden turbines’ hum.

A scrawny shape of white fur leaps at me, gibbering alarm as it senses my intrusion, its eyes red and beady in a flat pink face, mouth agape and tiny sharp teeth gleaming with spittle. It runs along a high thin pipe and gesticulates, caught in silhouette against the Manhattan skyline.

A monkey, albino, on this power station roof, above the rumbling of the furnaces! I land on the parapet and touch its wrinkled forehead. As it leaps away in fear at this, its screech splits the hum, like a nerve-end caught between two continental plates…

 

Teaser 7(ii), a past life of Scorpio’s

The monkey’s sound morphs to the screech of a bird above a scene from a past life of Scorpio’s (I disbelieve in past lives, but up they keep popping, in these weekly shows of mine): for while the bird screeches, the boy Phaon darts from the throng, skipping off between the cracked stone columns of a ruined temple. Half looking back, he raises two slim fingers to his lips and blows a note so shrill that it silences the chanting and the drums and the pipes. The revellers pursue him, as his laughter tinkles back at them, triumphant and flirtatious; then he stops on a wide block of flat weathered stone at the Palatine Hill’s western edge, where the turf overhangs a rocky precipice, and shoots a piercing cry across the city spread below.

Silence. Then his song begins, a song to Cybele—and so softly does it start, that at first just this one band of revellers can hear it, as it trills with a low moan from nothing into voice. Yet within it are the flickers of a hidden power, ramifying, keeping up the low moan but stabbing upward too. The hairs on the listeners’ spines stand, with every stab of sound; time flows slow and fast at once, and soon his voice stretches up to a wail shot with downward stabs—and people hear in streets and buildings out across the city. Surprised in the quiet of the dusk, a disparate multitude halt what they’re doing, lift their heads and hear his song leap in pain and joy, borne over roofs, through window grilles and seeping into courtyards of flower-scented foliage. As it grows in volume, they come out onto balconies or climb onto roofs, where the full blast fills the air, bewitching. In its swoops and falls, its quivers and its clear notes, its fluid modulations and its raw naked shrieks, the priestess-boy Phaon paints a soundscape of what it is to live as us: what it is to know oneself an animal called human in this place in the universe.

 

Teaser 7(iii), on the Palatine in Nero’s day

Then the drums beat anew, he wheels around to face them and he dances, as only Phaon can—hypnotic self-completion, the divine androgyne, channelled pre-gender, pre-Eden, straight through time and ether. And dancing, he begins to spin, just beside the precipice. Inching ever closer to the edge, he gathers speed, so his big brown eyes through the whirl and streak of hands and arms flash toward the band like the wink of a lighthouse. Long-lashed brown light, half-lidded, self-tranced, smiling inside, sweeps over the watchers every two seconds, one second, half-second, less… Red light peeks through the strands of his hair where it streams out long across the width of the sun’s orb, half-sunk now beyond the marches of the city.

His slender frame is sharpened by the dusk to a silhouette, and now the moment comes (though he surely cannot know it), the moment in a life when such perfection is attained that a single fleeting second lodges, swells like a teardrop, gathers weight and falls away, sideways through the centuries—to land here, as lightning earths, captured and framed perhaps awhile, perhaps longer: Roman youth, addressed as Phaon, epicene, of few words and much affection, earlier and later life unknown but glimpsed now, dancing on the Palatine Hill in Nero’s day, for Dionysus—only for a moment and only for a few, but with such heart-captivating beauty both of body and of soul that he rises and dances in the sky for us, for all time—fey black imp on orange sky, dancing with laughing eyes, divinely and forever!

See him up there on the precipice, right now…

A rush of air cracks out, a flicker and a crackle as of lightning; and then a bell booms, slow and deep, unimaginably ancient and vast, out of everywhere and nowhere at once.

 

Teaser 8(i), across from Riker’s island

I jolt in my trance in the studio, remember what I’m up to, then hurl my attention back down to Ryawa Avenue, Hunts Point, the Bronx, New York City, where a yellow cab purrs to a halt beside a slope leading down to a noxious pool littered with the circles and the crescents of abandoned tyres.

A little dark drag-queen alights, shuts the door, tells the driver through the open window: “Thanks for the Holst.”

She inhales, pauses, scans the pool and sewage works, and nods back gruffly: “We must do this again.”

Then she steps on the gas and is away down the avenue.

Scorpio sniffs the fetid air and looks about him. His eyes grow hard, as an instinct makes his fingers feel inside his leather shoulder-bag and close around the handgun.

He can feel those other eyes again, fixing him from inside or out—the eyes he saw upon the screens on Forty-Second Street, that pinned him down and peered around his mind—my Jaymi eyes shining softly in, through his darkness, like they used to do before.

He sets off down the slope towards the oily pool of tyres. He turns left, slipping through the shadows of the waste ground. He reaches the heaps of trash and steers through them; they seem almost to part for him. He turns, springs up onto a heap and down its other side, turns again and ducks through a half-hidden hatch in the ground.

Soon the walls of earth are walls of concrete, dimly lit. A rumble, as of engines and pumps, joins the soundtrack of thunder in his head. Down stairs and passages he flits, driven on by these other eyes just behind his own.

 

Teaser 8(ii), on top of everything else

Giant pulsing worms maybe two metres long, every worm revealing flashes, through the suction of its mouth, of a full set of lethal teeth.

Scorpio nearly retches where he kneels, then he straightens up, regaining his balance. From somewhere nearby there comes a click, as of a latch. He staggers to his feet through the warped air, slips behind a bank of machinery and peers out between its metal valves.

Kev appears through another door, stands beside the tank and turns a crank in the wall while he watches the ceiling. A skylight rolls aside, and the plastic blonde face of Fernibel stares starkly down.

Scorpio huddles down, feeling the chipped green paint on the valves sweating tepidly against his brow. If she looks over here, then she will see him, the game will be up and he’ll probably end up as worms’ meat. A tense minute comes and goes, while he dare not glance up.

When at last he does so, he sees that her face has been welcomely replaced by a wide rubber tube, which is being lowered into Kev’s waiting hands. As an engine revs outside above the skylight, the tube begins to hiss. Displaying remarkable agility and strength, Kev then proceeds to dance around this ghastly tank, wielding the tube, creeping up behind the longest, thickest worms and then covering their heads with it, one by one. It’s evidently a high-suction device, for no sooner is each worm’s head covered than its excrement-stained body flails in frenzy up through the tube, continuing to thrash away after it’s fully swallowed, so that the tube itself looks like a fatter, dryer, more corrugated worm wriggling up through the skylight.

And on top of everything else, every time the dexterous televangelist sucks up a worm, all its former neighbours punch their eyeless slimy heads up through the air like fists, bare their fangs out of grey blubber-faces and screech like tortured babies.

This last detail, in particular, Scorpio could do without; and by the time the tenth or eleventh worm has been sucked up, he is almost inclined to pass out. —But no, he decides, this would be a mistake.

 

Teaser 9(i), Fernibel’s messianic rapture

Scorpio opens his wild and frightened eyes, slowly gets a grip, and glances about him. There across the waste ground stands a black-painted tanker with its engine running. A big wriggling pipe rises from the earth nearby, travels up to where Fernibel stands atop the tanker’s container, and disappears down into a hatch beside her feet. Silhouetted against the sky, she is bending down, hands planted on her knees, staring down through this hatch with an expression of messianic rapture.

It’s a fair assumption that beneath her, just out of sight from here, there are fat, screeching, sharp-toothed, blubber-faced worms being belched out into the container, through the wriggling rubber pipe, one by one.

 

Teaser 9(ii), clang of metal bolts

Grabbing his chance, Scorpio scuttles from his hiding place, crosses the waste ground and clambers deftly up between the driver’s cab and the container. Locating an angular space where he won’t be endangered by the movement of the vehicle’s articulation, he plants himself securely there, with his limbs against the black vibrating metal. The engine revs and roars, he holds on tighter and the tanker rolls forward, bouncing up and down across the stony earth and onto the avenue. As it gathers speed, he rearranges his grip, verifies his safety and breathes deep.

Within a few blocks they turn left up Halleck Street, and as they do so Scorpio looks right, towards where the street ends at the waterfront. What he sees from this unusual vantage-point is visible to him for a few seconds at most, but the scene then remains clear in his memory. Floodlit on either side, a high spike-topped steel fence lines the street, whose height is thus greater than its width. At the end of this sinister corridor, floating in the water beyond a guarded gate, is a bleak edifice with small square windows—a huge prison barge. On top of it, another floodlit fence with spikes contains a court where men are playing basketball. Others lean against the fence, staring down towards him. Male shouts burst and spill—perhaps at him, wedged here in full view, or maybe not, he cannot tell. He feels more than hears the slide and clang of metal bolts, the dead weight of concrete bruising blindly into bone, bone, and the hard eyes and hard fists of men bearing down on him, night after night…

 

Teaser 9(iii), passionless, compassionless

I’m deeply relieved to find him still wedged behind the cab of the tanker; though my relief is perhaps greater than his, because the tanker is now barrelling along at what feels to him like an unholy speed, north-east up Bruckner Avenue. Back among cars and activity and street lights now, he is also starting to feel rather too visible. This feeling grows alarmingly when the tanker slows to join the Bronx River Parkway, a car draws up alongside him and he glimpses a horrid vision, down beside him: a large family crammed into a tiny space, with leaping dogs, bawling children and loud inane voices on a radio. “Nightmare,” he thinks. “I’d sooner choose that prison barge.” Even more distressingly, two horrible gum-chewing children in the back seat have seen him and are now fighting over how to wind the window down. They hit each other, then are hit in turn by a parent… Scorpio drums his silver fingernails tightly on a metal strut and listens with impatience for the sound of vehicles moving up ahead. If the vermin succeed in winding the window down and start shouting up at him, then Kev will notice and probably investigate matters and discover him. He glances down, observes that the fight is still in progress, and catches for an instant the grinning semi-focused gaze of one child: passionless, compassionless, thoughtless and sealed-off, without imagination or real curiosity, and safely protected from the danger of wonder, it makes him laugh mirthlessly aloud.

 

Teaser 9(iv), Scorpio’s reflection

Still he drums his fingernails, and still the traffic isn’t moving—yes it is, at last! One more glance down, and this time he catches just his own form reflected on the window, behind which the dreary family squabble carries on: clutching at his metal niche, his long black hair spilling out along his bare arms and round his fully made-up face (now a little smudged), he reminds himself of a manic dark monkey staring hatred out of wide-burning, silver-shadowed eyes. He laughs aloud a second time, and watches his reflected hand dip into his shoulder-bag and reach out a catapult. As the tanker revs its engine in readiness to move, he aims the weapon at the child, pulls back the elastic and shoots the little stone. For a split second Scorpio sees his own reflected face snarling up with a feral sensuality and glee, before it cracks at the window’s burst and falls into the screaming child’s blood-spattered lap, along with a lapful of broken glass.

Firing up its engine, with a roar that drowns the scream and the blaring of the car’s horn, the tanker presses grimly up the ramp to the Parkway. Its slimy cargo sucks hard, swilling at the warm black metal just beside his ears; and close behind his smooth and delicate neck, those screeching teeth…

Now the preacher steps on the gas with a vengeance. Two metres down through the truck’s articulation, Scorpio can see the roadway streaking by at sixty, seventy, eighty miles an hour. On his left, beyond the barrier, white lights zing by at twice these speeds, while the red lights on his right fall slowly behind.

 

Teaser 10(i), shadow of a demon

Kev pauses a moment, triumphant and glassy-eyed, gazing out above Scorpio in the shrubs, southwards from this hill to where the yellow-grey glow of New York City shines enormous off a bank of cloud.

He walks to the tanker’s rear, uncoils the tube from its brackets, and stoops to fix one end of it around the container’s closed rear hatch. He returns to the manhole, carrying the other end of the tube, which he hangs into the shaft above the water. Then he scales the ladder on the tanker, walks along the container, unlocks the hatch, lifts the lid up and lays it back.

And now another sound joins the water’s roar—a sticky, chewy, wriggling sound.

Scorpio slinks across the ground towards the tanker, like the shadow of a demon.

With his gun between his teeth, he scuttles softly up the ladder. He tiptoes the length of the container, creeping up behind Kev, who is kneeling through the hatch, savouring what looks to be a moment of messianic rapture not unlike Fernibel’s in the waste ground.

Scorpio claps a hand onto Kev’s shoulder and presses the gun-barrel into the forward part of his temple. Kev freezes, then slowly turns his head to look up. Terror drains his face, at the sight of Scorpio’s eyes. No words are spoken.

Scorpio pushes Kev down towards the reeking hatch, with the barrel digging into Kev’s head ever more savagely. The grisly, blubbery sounds inside the hatch grow louder.

The powerfully-built preacher starts to struggle. If he can only get to his feet again, he’ll gain the upper hand immediately, through brute force.

 

Teaser 11(i), squeezing over gravel

He darts across to the wheel on the tanker’s rear, yanks it around with an access of force, leaps aside and scrambles up to perch on the rear tyre-guard, as the tank’s cargo gushes and slithers out through the hatch.

The worms wriggle out, one by one, dragging broken bits of Kev’s skeleton, which has been efficiently stripped of its meat. They twist in the rough grass, then head for the waterfront by instinct. This takes them straight towards Fernibel, who screams in terror. Though blind, they smell her blood and writhe faster towards her. With the strength of desperation, she staggers half upright, hops in the direction of the hatch she emerged from, and disappears underground, just in time: as the hatch slams, the first worm rears up, steaming in the redness of the tanker’s rear lights, curls back its fleshy lips and slams its head down to stab the wood with vicious teeth. Then losing interest in their vanished blonde meal, the worms coil onward, their slimy meat squeezing over rusty trash and gravel, till they vanish in the shadows of the reeds and slither into the water.

 

Teaser 11(ii), his darkness magnetises

I approach, walking calm across the worm-slicked waste ground, floodlit in the full white glare of the headlights. Scorpio starts, to see this floating figure nearing him. And so he and I meet again at last: one white-lit before the tanker, and one red-lit behind.

The scene glows paler and the soundtrack fades. From my eyes to his, a tunnel spins and locks our gazes. Each of us can see just the other’s burning stare at the centre of a whirlpool of light. As I level with the tanker and leave the headlights’ glare, the tunnel darkens, spinning still. I reach the tanker’s rear, as I near Scorpio, whose darkness magnetises me. The tunnel whirls faster, no longer white but scarlet in the rear lights; and just before I’m plunged into red, I feel my face blush.

Then each of us is touched, in this place of desolation, with a stab of mad clarity, simplicity and calm: we are meant to be together. As the sky glimmers ultramarine over Riker’s, the tunnel fades away. I stop. He comes to me.

 

The above teasers for Apricot Eyes‘s Video-Book are here too:

And in the Vimeo showcase “Teasers for APRICOT EYES by Rohan Quine”.

And in the YouTube playlist “Teasers for APRICOT EYES by Rohan Quine”.
 

Here are the basics of what the novella is all about.

Here are some great reviews of it.

Buy Apricot Eyes in paperback or ebook or audiobook format.

 

To watch any of the 11 complete and unabridged chapters of the novella’s video-book format (for which the above little video snippets on this page are just short teasers), see:
here for chapter 1;
here for chapter 2;
here for chapter 3;
here for chapter 4;
here for chapter 5;
here for chapter 6;
here for chapter 7;
here for chapter 8;
here for chapter 9;
here for chapter 10; and
here for chapter 11.

Buy Apricot Eyes in paperback or ebook or audiobook format.

 

Add Rohan Quine’s Apricot Eyes in Mobi or ePub or paperback format to Goodreads.

 
Rohan Quine, Apricot Eyes, literary fiction, litfic, magical realism, horror, dark fantasy, cyberpunk, contemporary, scifi, gay, transgender, LGBTQ+, New York, Bronx, Hunts Point, Meat Packing District, broadcast, worms, poison, city, evangelist