He does have an obsessive eye for beauty. Molded to his tastes she allows for the moment of elusive perfection, mirroring his darkest desires, to be captured precisely. It is the beauty of art, he thinks. To allow for feeling, or intuition to be expressed. The little limbs of perfection are positioned in just the right way easier now that the struggling has stopped. The textured silkiness of her hair fanned on the still damp grass, her carmine mouth his alone. He works with a passion radiating from his eyes and an insatiable hunger fueled by the moment. This is a beautiful location. It mirrors a town that does not tell its name or its past, thought the photographer seeking inspiration. That's when he noticed a beautiful little doll nestled in the grass. It sparked his eye, and he started capturing the image. A man's rapid, desperate voice is heard. The sound radiating from a soulless room, mirroring an ugly reality. The voice stems from a bruised and bloodied face. His expression desperate and with the look of murder in his eyes, he tells, bored from depersonalization, how it was his job to protect his younger sister. An entire wall in this place covered with the grainy photographs of missing persons, all but one or two, are beautiful, young women and girls. The police pin the latest one. She was a commodity. An asset. Her trafficker exists in a place where humanity is lost. She was desperate, used and abused in unimaginable ways and, she is not alone. My sister, says the man, was carrying a little doll. ~ Kalahari

Driving along the love lane, waiting for the inspiration to find him, he sees the woods and concealed amongst the trees, recognizes a true map of the universe, just as it is, a dirty green that spreads out shapelessly, with narrow paths and screams in the darkness. It all blows up in the mind of the artistically insane. She is bored, mindless, soulless and ugly in her flawless beauty until that moment of interaction, business connection, lustful love that they are both ignited, just as quickly gone. Creative inspiration is a fucking fantasy come to life. Dark, delicious, dangerous, delightful, ethereal. It has a pornographic effect on him. Ecstasy of the mind, a type of alive that is a fleeting flash of fantasy more palpable than reality he is alive only when stirred. "I fear the death of inspiration, the death of thought that exists in the collective mind of a numbing mass mentality," he thinks. I would rather burn alive with living. The mind of a madman is a dark maze of intensity. The girl, her carmine lips bringing to life his monochromatic existence. She is his to possess. His to capture, to enjoy till it's time for the next one. Ruthless, evil incarnate they dine with the devil who serves red mouths for appetizers. "Souls for dessert," smiles Lucifer as he looks the madman in the eye. ~ Barbie Q

Valeria does not wear a watch but she always gets to the essential places on time. She is adventurous and not particularly quiet. She was reprimanded in grade school because she could not sit still all day long. Valeria needs to move. She thinks with her body. Even when she goes to the library, she starts reading out loud and swaying with the words, and before she can figure out what is happening, she is asked to leave. As you might expect, Valeria is a disaster at office jobs. Veruschka has exquisite skin and she appreciates it in others as well. There are other people whose skin is soft and clear and healthy but something about Veruschka's skin announces that she is alive. When the sun bursts forth in May, Veruschka likes to take off her shirt and feel the sweet warmth of the sun's rays brush across her shoulder. This is not intended as a provocative gesture but other people are, as usual, upset. Veruschka & Valeria love to sleep on the beach and to wake up in the middle of the night to look at the moon. Both like to make love at the border where time and space change places. They do not understand why everyone else is so disturbed by them. "Just in our summer dresses, barefooted, wild-haired, in the red fire dark, singing, jumping, running. Happy. That's the way to live!"

So how did a doll like me end up dress-ripped with legs splayed, used up and forgotten on yesterday's photograph? My crime was to love a man like the nightingale in Oscar Wilde's imagination. Listen to its story. A student asked his beloved to a dance who refused unless he brought her a red rose, but he had none. The nightingale overheard and saw him suffering for love so decided to help. "Give me a red rose," she asked of the rose bush. "I can't," said the old bush. "The winter has chilled my veins and faded my petals." "Please, there must be a way," begged the nightingale. "Yes, but it is terrible," said the bush. "I am not afraid." The wise bush sighed, "come back at night and sing the most beautiful melody that nightingales know while pressing your breast against one of my thorns. The blood will rise through my sap and color the rose". Convinced that it was worth sacrificing her life for love, she did. With the rising moon, she pressed her breast to the thorn till it pierced her heart and began to sing as the most beautiful rose of the bush was being crimsoned by her blood. "Faster," said the bush, "as the sun will rise soon". Still, she continued to sing till her work was complete. With her last breath, she delivered the rose to the man who gave it to the girl who said: "It's not exactly what I wanted". Devastated the man discarded the rose where it was forgotten and trampled. ~ Barbie Q

It is about that moment. The perfect moment, stolen to tempt the appetite of time. The allure is in detail. The stillness. The light. Light is the way the story is told. It is the narrative, and in certain moments its effect is poetic, and that fascinates giving a transformative quality, a power of turning ugly, the ordinary or the insignificant into something scintillating. It interests. Feel the nostalgia that exists somewhere between the beauty and sadness, create the suspended tension of the stolen moment as you feel the longing of time searching for that which you've taken. This photograph tastes like the back of a fucking L.A school bus crushed up with leaves and mice leaving a taste of rancid tar and turpentine bullshit. Fuckin' Raid, but a sensation that to time becomes insatiable in its unattainability. A photograph fuels the hunger, and this is delightfully naughty. How arrogant to dare to flirt with the monster of time. Pictures allow us to savour. To slow down. Go back to it again and again. Let a photograph affect you and do not anticipate. It will resonate long after you walk away.

Monsters are real. They live inside us, and sometimes they win. She was indeed a girl of exquisite grace, a rhythmical creation of beauty. She was one of those languid women made of honey: smooth and sweet and terribly sticky. He had not intended to meet anyone, see anything. He had withdrawn solely for his personal pleasure, only to be near to himself. No longer distracted by anything external, he basked in his existence and found it splendid. "I want to drag knives over my skin, just to feel something other than shame, but I'm not even brave enough for that," she thought as she walked along the path, away from the small town where people scent the wind with noses of uncommon keenness. When she saw him, she trusted him because he knows all too well that the trust of the innocent is the liar's most useful tool. It was not a very good thing to withdraw he thought while drinking in her innocence. No. I was too busy listening to other voices to listen closely to the true one. The one coming from inside. "The death of a beautiful doll is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world," he contemplated as his thoughts turned to fantasy, his monstrous heart started evolving into a beast of burden beating in the cage of his ribs. Demanding escape. "Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality," he thought as the silence surged softly backward while he wore his wickedness as a smile and hers ran away from her face.

Below the surface, the force driving noir stories is the urge to escape: from the past, from the law, from the ordinary, from poverty, from constricting relationships, from the limitations of the self. With this desire for autonomy comes a corresponding fear of loneliness and exile. The more we crave success, the more we dread failure; the more we crave freedom, the more we dread confinement. Noir is about people who break the rules, pursuing their own interests outside the boundaries of decent society, and about how they are destroyed by society - or by themselves. Noir springs from a fundamental conflict between the values of individual freedom and communal safety: a fundamental doubt that the two can coexist. Noir stories are powered by the need to escape, but they are structured around the impossibility of escape: their fierce, thwarted energy turns inward. The ultimate noir landscape, immeasurable as the ocean and confining as a jail cell, is the mind - the darkest city of all.