There was a party.
Details are sketchy, despite all events having taken place within the past twelve hours, but the alcohol has since fragmented and misplaced each drunken minute and clumsily misfiled them into some tattered mental scrapbook of half-remembered scenes and images. I had left the house in good spirits. A bottle and a half of Californian red wine had emboldened me and, applying my lipstick in the queue at the off-licence, I felt the familiar facets of my own psyche rise within: a vague and mischievous amalgam of Loki and Set, the Trickster and Bringer of Chaos; and of course Sekhmet, my dear Sekhmet, the Goddess of Sex and War. It was She who looked out from my painted eyes then.
Later, there was annoyance. I remember clearly that I had felt annoyed. I forget now what had triggered it, if anything, but it seemed to flow in the direction of a youngish man, early twenties perhaps, arrogant, with a spherical head and wide bulbous eyes who appeared to be showing off the speed and skill with which he could roll a cigarette. We were outside, this young man and I, in a courtyard garden surrounded by crowds and couples who brought sounds of laughter, the hiss of opening beer cans, the occasional shatter of glass as a bottle toppled from a table or a careless hand. Music was muffled by doors and walls, and it pounded with rhythmic consistancy like a steady heartbeat from somewhere indoors.
“Gimme a light,” he grunted, reaching out, rolled cigarette stuck to his bottom lip.
I gave a withering look. “What?”
“You got a light?”
“You haven’t said ‘please’,” I pointed out, deliberately pedantic. As I have said, he annoyed me. The lioness within had woken and watched him carefully.
“Huh?” he said.
“On your knees, bitch,” I spat suddenly, pushing his head down, and with surprising compliance, he dropped to the floor with a bewildered look on his round face.
“Okay,” he said with something that was almost a nervous giggle. “Please can I have a light for my cigarette.”
I cupped his jaw softly in my hand and stared into his face. “Please Mistress, you mean?”
He was laughing now. People had gathered to watch. There was a little frightened sarcasm in his tone. “Yeah, please Mistress.”
I pulled his head up sharply to face me, and smiled. “Find something funny?”
Whatever his answer would have been, it didn’t come quickly enough. I pulled the cigarette from his mouth and slapped him hard across the face. Several people around us gasped out loud. He looked genuinely stricken. A red mark was already rising on one cheek. A bulge had formed at the crotch of his jeans which had become quite obvious to onlookers.
Ignoring him then, I lifted his cigarette to my mouth and lit it, taking the smoke down, then breathing the serpentine plume down at him. I then threw the cigarette to the floor and stamped on it. It was, it turned out, very badly rolled.