In Over Her Head by Elsie Russell - Parnasse.com

was frozen into a cardboard cut out.
"Hey, man, I dunno where the crazy bitch went, oh kay? Why
dontcha try that old faggot she lives with? Hey, I gotta lot goin' on
here, so get the hell outta here!" And he shoved them towards the door,
clomping over the cords in his army boots.
On the street away from the alley, Alessandro, still in shock
mode, pointed to a small café teaming with activity. "Le Temple d'Or"
was the local hive node.
"We go there. I call Max, we eat something, and I need un
demi. If he is home now, he will know where she is. She always goes
there first when she is here, to see Maia, her best friend, eh, her only
friend."
"Max, Maia, fill me in."
"Max is mon copain, em, my 'pal' and also our digital artist, very
good. Maia is Max's sister. The father is Swiss, photographer, the
mother, a princess from Gabon, is lost, long time now. They share a
floor on the Rue du Dragon, just across the Boulevard St. Germain,
near Dick," he explained.
He grabbed her hand and pulled her across the street, slithering
liquidly through the chaos of honking cars and into the noisy smokefilled
café, crammed with a mix of local blue collar workers and those
same pale, trendy Internet types. Just inside the door, a guy in orange
and green camo bungy cord pants and a ratty fur vest with wires trailing
out of his ear shouted into a hidden microphone as he stirred a thimble
of espresso. The café was decorated with framed black and white
photos of movie stars, many of them French film noir stars from the
forties and fifties, and there were some jazz greats on one wall: Ray
Charles, Howlin' Wolf and the only white person, Woody Allen.
At the bar, portly red faced guys downed glasses of wine and
smoked unfiltered cigarettes, spitting tobacco bits on the floor and
arguing about the latest soccer scores that were displayed on the
monitor jutting down from the corner ceiling across from the bar.
Below the TV, framed like religious icons or third world dictators were
large photos of Sting and Arnold as Terminator, both in eerie
chiaroscuro, watching you.
Alessandro's eyes were glued to the scrolling scores. Everyone
cheered for Marseille, the winner, but not him, he just muttered under
his breath in French. She noticed that he switched between the two
languages all the time, often in mid sentence. Every other word of his
now was "Putain," which she knew meant whore in French. She asked
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