“quick said the bird, shall we follow the deception of the thrush?”
-TS Eliot
Every femme fatale was a teenage girl at some point. Staring at herself in the mirror and wondering what the boys see. Daydreaming and doodling in her journal. Sleeping with a one-eyed bear. Listening to sad songs and scratching out razorblade haikus. Playing with boys and practicing with knives. Doing pushups and learning the rules of etiquette. Staring at herself in the mirror and wondering if her tits are big enough. Feeling guilty about her mother’s madness. Learning survival and combat skills. Navigating the world of predatory men. Learning to be a pickpocket on the train. Dreaming and procrastinating and cutting herself. Not to get attention from her father. Not to punish herself. Not to feel more than nothing but to know how deep to push the blade.
December 1999. Jude Evers walks out of the snow into the Hotel Peacock. She meets an unlucky ex-cop named Phineas Poe, fresh off the psych ward. She chats him up. She eats a piece of ice from his drink. She tells him about Orpheus and Eurydice losing each other in the underworld. She tells him about the velvet. The twilight of childhood memories. The sleep that plays at death. She seduces poor fragile Phineas up to his room where she relieves him of a vital pound of flesh. She kisses his eyes before the fade. She tells him you only need one. She leaves him shivering in a bath of ice with a note saying if you want to live call 911. She leaves a hole in his heart.
That story was Kiss Me, Judas.
The story of Jude Evers begins nine years earlier in a black and white bathroom in San Francisco.
Jude is seventeen. She’s naked and bleeding and it’s a school night. Her mind is hazed and yawning from the drug slipped in her drink but she knows the man on the other side of the bathroom door is not finished with her. She saw the trophies in his room. The pink mp3 player. The baseball glove in a box. The red cowboy boots. The tiny Emily the strange t-shirt nailed like a bug to his wall.
Jude needs a weapon.
Deception of the Thrush is the Jude Evers origin story.
The first chapters of the Jude prequel and cut scenes from kiss me judas and hell’s half acre are appearing now at the velvet substack, where early drafts of the graphic novel Deception of the Thrush will be published in collaboration with the artist Kit Slaughterhouse.
Deception is her first graphic novel.
Nobody has heard of her yet but they will. Kit is going to be a rockstar in the world of comics. Get to know her from first blush and support her work at the velvet stack.
Link below.
Involuntary doesn’t exist without you. 401 family forever.