Pale Carnations -ch.4 Up.5- -mutt Jeff- -

“Yeah,” he said to the empty street. “Same.”

The name had stuck after the war. Before that, he’d been just Jeff, or Private First Class Jeffries to the men who didn’t know him well enough. After the Armistice, after the gas had finished its slow work on his lungs and the nightmares had carved out a permanent home behind his ribs, he’d come back to the city and found it didn’t want him. Not the way he was. Ragged. Unhousebroken. A creature that had learned to bite first and ask questions never.

He crushed the cigarette under his heel and tucked the carnation back into his pocket. The stray dog had moved on, disappearing into the mouth of a storm drain. Jeff wondered if it had found a place to curl up, or if it was still running, still looking for something it couldn’t name. Pale Carnations -Ch.4 Up.5- -Mutt Jeff-

“That’s you,” Jeff muttered to himself. “Mutt Jeff.”

The carnation had been left on the bar. A message, maybe. A taunt. Someone knew he’d been there. Someone wanted him to remember that even the flowers in that place were bred for one purpose: to look beautiful while they rotted. “Yeah,” he said to the empty street

He lit a cigarette with trembling fingers. The smoke tasted like the inside of a hospital tent. He didn’t mind.

The pale carnation pressed against his heart like a promise. After the Armistice, after the gas had finished

He turned his collar up and walked toward the river. Somewhere down there, a woman he’d once loved was probably dead. Somewhere down there, the man who’d made her that way was still breathing. And Jeff—Mutt Jeff, the dog with no master and no leash—was going to find him.

The rain had stopped sometime before dawn, but the streets of the Bottoms still glistened like something slick and unwholesome had been washed to the surface. Jeff stood outside the chain-link fence of the old rail yard, watching a stray dog worry a piece of discarded leather. The animal’s ribs showed through its patchy coat, but its eyes were bright—feral and undefeated.

From his coat pocket, he pulled the pale carnation he’d taken from the parlor last night. Its petals were already bruising at the edges, brown creeping inward like decay remembering its purpose. He’d been inside the Velvet Thorn again—not as a customer, never as that—but as muscle. As the thing the madam called when a gentleman forgot that no meant no, or when a working girl tried to run. He’d never hurt the girls. That was the joke of it. He’d hurt the men who hurt them, and somehow that made him a monster too.

Chapter 4, Up.5, ends.