Text by Emma Stern

INT. CAFE – LATE AFTERNOON

RUDY (mid-forties, glasses, beige sweater with patches on the elbows, receding hairline, patchy stubble on chin and upper lip) sits at a corner table, hunched over a laptop. An empty coffee mug sits at the edge of the table. His fingers, slightly shaky, hover over the keyboard, hesitantly. The screen displays a blank page, a cursor blinks as if taunting him. The time on the upper right corner reads 5:36.

A PUFF OF SMOKE AT RUDY’S RIGHT SHOULDER

RUDY is apparently not able to see or hear the puff of smoke, so he does not react, and neither do other cafe patrons. The smoke clears to reveal LUCY (voluptuous, devil horns, spade tail, wings), perched on RUDY’s shoulder. LUCY appears to be slightly drunk. RUDY and all other cafe patrons remain unaware of her presence.

RUDY looks around, sniffs the air a few times and wrinkles his nose, as if smelling something rotten.

When Lucy appeared at Rudy’s shoulder that afternoon and the smell of sulfur wafted through the air, the patrons of the Blue Monday Cafe all just assumed someone had farted.

Lucy was roughly the size of a fruit bat, with veiny, membrane-thin wings that might evoke the same comparison. She wore assless chaps that revealed a long, arrow-headed tail attached to her perky backside. A tangle of Mardi Gras beads hung in messy coils from her neck, draped over a bikini top cut from thick black leather with straps made from barbed wire. Her feet were bare, and her long, pointed toenails were flecked with chipped scarlet varnish. Lucy’s beads clacked and rattled as she craned her neck for a better view of Rudy’s other shoulder, which was unoccupied, and then at the computer screen’s digital clock display, which read 5:39.

So the opposition was running even later than she was, Lucy deduced, which meant she’d have to wait to get started. And that was just fine with Lucy, because that meant she had time for a nap. She’d been out late with co-workers and could use a little shut-eye anyway. She descended upon the man’s shoulder and, after swatting away a few flakes of dandruff from his sweater, flopped face-down onto her belly. As her eyelids fluttered closed, she let out a small, wet burp that only she could hear, and smiled to herself, because it tasted like Fireball Cinnamon Whiskey.

She awoke a short time later to a puff of smoke that smelled so faintly of vanilla ice cream that no one else in the Blue Monday Cafe even noticed.

A PUFF OF SMOKE AT RUDY’S RIGHT SHOULDER

CELESTE (glowing skin, angel wings, halo) materializes from the puff of smoke. She appears disheveled, exhausted. She is carrying a clipboard with a stack of wrinkled paperwork attached to it.

“Lucy. Lucy, wake up,” Celeste called from Rudy’s right shoulder, her tone impatient as she rifled through a messy stack of crumpled-up loose-leaf pages. “Lucy come on, we’re already running late – God, Lucy, please don’t tell me you’re drunk already! I am not in the mood today.”

With some exaggerated effort, Lucy hoisted herself up to sit on her plump bottom and belched again, this time loudly. “I’m not drunk already, I’m drunk still,” she smirked. “Nice to see you too by the way,” she said, and despite the thin veil of sarcasm she spoke with, she actually meant it. She couldn’t recall exactly the last time they’d been paired up on an assignment together, but even with tired eyes and tense shoulders, Celeste was still radiant as ever. Her milky skin glowed subtly beneath her flowing white dress, as if lit from within like a warm lantern, shifting slightly as she moved, strands of her white-gold ringlets brushing against cheeks the color of a fresh diaper rash.

Lucy wiped a pearl of drool from the corner of her mouth with the back of her hand, stretched her arms overhead, and unfolded her wings across her back. “I’m surprised they still have you out in the field! Still waiting on that promotion, eh?” she yawned and raised an eyebrow, goading.

Celeste rolled her eyes but didn’t look up from her clipboard, still struggling with all that paperwork. “I’m just filling in. We’re insanely short-staffed these days. Just rushed here from God damn Toledo.”

“Toledo!” Lucy snorted, “What, they have you babysitting now?”

Celeste sighed. “Yeah, basically. I was training a new hire. Totally useless, of course. Couldn’t even handle something that easy. Poor kid had a full-on panic attack halfway through our opening statement. Had to send her home and finish up by myself.” Celeste let out a deep breath and shook her head. “It’s really not her fault though, no one wants this job anymore, and I get it. It wasn’t always like this, you know, it used to be… dignified. Now they might as well just replace us all with AI like everyone says they will. Fucking upper management. Don’t care about anything other than covering their own asses, and the Boss…” Celeste’s voice trailed off and she sighed. Her wings drooped in heavy arches and Lucy, watching her intently from Rudy’s left shoulder, wondered if her halo wasn’t slightly askew.

“It’s sad, really,” Celeste continued, becoming agitated now. “He’s just so out of touch with the times! I’m sure you’ve heard the rumors of a coup de force but who knows, He may not even put up much of a fight at this point. It’s a mess up there, Lucy, just total incompetence from the top down.” She tore a page from the stack, crumpled it into a tight ball in her fist, and flung it over her shoulder. She pinched the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger, squeezed her eyes shut, and took another long, deep breath before thumbing through more pages. “Of course morale is low, everyone keeps quitting and now I’ve been getting these migraines… I just don’t understand how they expect me to… AHA!” Celeste brandished a wrinkled document and clipped it to the top of the pile. She furrowed her brow as she skimmed its contents. “Goodman… Rudy Goodman… Oh God, this guy again,” she muttered.

Lucy, for the first time since she’d arrived, finally took a good look at the face of the man named Rudy Goodman. He was physically unremarkable in every way. Neither handsome nor ugly and with no truly distinguishing characteristics whatsoever, Lucy thought he looked drawn by a police sketch artist with too little information to go on. It wasn’t ringing a bell.

“You’ve had him before?”

“We’ve both had him before, Lucy. You don’t remember?”

Lucy shrugged, and when no flicker of recognition did register across her face, Celeste pressed on. “We both had him, I wanna say maybe a decade ago? Early twenty-tens?“

“I’m not gonna lie, I do not remember a lot from those days,” Lucy snickered. “Good times. Gooooood times.”

Celeste rolled her eyes again. “Yeah, I know, but this one was…. Well, it was pretty fucked up. I thought even you might remember, might have made an impression on those last few booze-soaked brain cells you’ve still got–”

“Hey, watch it!” Lucy pouted and feigned hurt feelings but couldn’t hide a smirk. “I’ve still got a handful left, y’know.”

“Yeah, well, you’ve had all this extra time and clearly haven’t so much as glanced at his case file.”

Lucy squinted as she studied Rudy again. Oblivious to both the angel and devil on either shoulder, his laptop screen still glared wordlessly white. He fidgeted with the nubby hem of his sweater sleeve, cracked his knuckles, took the last sip of his coffee – black – and tried with no success to flag down the closing-shift waitress, a slender red-head in denim cut-offs that revealed freckles on her toned legs. Rudy had once asked if she’d ever considered acting, and she’d asked if he’d ever considered minding his own business.

Lucy shrugged.

“You don’t remember… that hit and run?”

Lucy shook her head. “You’re gonna have to be more specif–”

“Jesus, Lucy, he was drunk and hit a kid! This kid, this little boy on a bike. It was lime green. The bike was. It had mismatched handlebar grips and this long piece of red ribbon tied to the seat post. I remember how everything went completely still when it happened, everything except the front wheel. It just kept spinning, spinning…” Celeste’s voice was strained. She had a far-off look in her eyes. “And I remember there was a dog barking. When he stumbled out of the car and saw what he’d done, saw the wheel spinning, there was a dog barking. Somewhere way, way down the road, a dog was barking.” She blinked a few times at Lucy. “Anything?”

Lucy shrugged again and offered a half-smile. “Listen, Babe, I deal with a lot of dead kid stuff. Aw, hey! Why the tears?” With a few flaps of her wings, Lucy floated over to Rudy’s right shoulder and held a hand out to Celeste. “Don’t beat yourself up over it! You can’t win ‘em all.”

Celeste looked embarrassed as she quickly wiped away a single, perfect tear from each of her big blue eyes, which were pale and endless, not like the ocean, but like the sky. She again regained her poise and swatted Lucy’s hand away. “Get back on your own side,” she bristled, blowing her nose into a white linen hanky she’d pulled from her bosom. “And anyway,” she tucked it back in, “Who says I didn’t win that one?”

“Well, you said it was a hit and run, sooooooo guessing that one went to me?” Lucy offered that smug half-smile again. As she drifted lazily back over to Rudy’s left shoulder, her tail gently brushed the stubble on his upper lip, causing him to sneeze loudly and without covering his mouth. The red-headed waitress looked at him with disgust.

“Whatever,” said Celeste, turning her attention once more to her clipboard. “Anyways, says he’s been sober on and off since then, but he’s having a good stretch right now. He’s got almost 60 days under his belt, only trouble is he’s having some writer’s block. Apparently that’s a trigger, not being able to finish this screenplay.” Celeste looked up from the clipboard and turned to Lucy. “And you would know all of this, if you ever bothered to read your case files.”

“I don’t need to do that,” said Lucy as she settled into a comfortable reclining position back over on her own side.

Celeste could feel another migraine coming on. Through clenched teeth, she took the bait. “Oh really, and why’s that?”

“Because I’m good at this. I’m damn good. So good, in fact, I don’t need to read case files. Never do. I already know this guy’s deal, I deal with assholes like him all the time. I know exactly who he is.”

Celeste folded her arms. “Well then. Who is he?”

LUCY cracks her knuckles, clears her throat, and sits up straight, suddenly looking very serious.

LUCY: Well let’s start with his father, gonna guess Daddy’s a novelist, probably a bestseller who never thought screenwriting was “real writing”, and reminded Rudy of that every day, right up until and during a drawn out and painful death that I’m gonna guess happened not too long ago. His father never hit him, but once when he was very young, Rudy fed ice cream to the dog and as a punishment, his father made Rudy eat dog food. Right outta the can. As for his mother, well. I think it’s pretty obvious little Rudy was breast fed for way too long. I’m talkin’ like 8 or 9 years old. She always thought the old man was too hard on him, her only son, but never said a word in his defense. When Rudy was, say, about twelve years old, Mommy gave him his first beer and told him not to tell his father. Back when Rudy’s mother could still string a sentence together, before she completely lost her marbles and poor Rudy had to put her in a home a few years ago, she would describe him as ‘handsome’ and ‘smart.’

Now, Rudy would describe himself as ‘thoughtful’ and ‘curious’ between long-winded monologues about “the integrity of storytelling” and “Kafka-esque undertones” and how “the real problem is, no one reads anymore.” Of Course he hasn’t cracked open a book in years, unless you count skimming the first 6 pages of ‘Making It Work’, assigned to him by that hack couples’ therapist. He’d never told his now-ex-wife about the hit and run, so when the drinking really hit a fever pitch and he started not coming home some nights, she assumed it was an affair. She wasn’t too far off, but he was mostly just coping with the guilt by messing around with this one specific Filipina hooker. Most of the time he was too drunk to get hard so he’d just sob into her massive fake boobs and ask her over and over again if she really cared, if she would stay even if he wasn’t paying her. She always said yes, of course she would, and yes she really cared, and she thought he was handsome and smart, and so he kept paying her so he’d never have to find out for sure.

Up until that point he’d been pulling in a decent salary as a staff writer and sometimes showrunner for a second-tier sketch comedy program that aired live once a week. At one point he’d even managed to finagle his way into a meeting with a few execs and pitch them something along the lines of:

A washed-up greeting card writer named Randy who checks into rehab after a spiritual breakdown, only to discover that all the other residents just might be characters from his own failed screenplay. Each of the residents unsubtly represents a different aspect of Randy’s psyche:

Danny, the pyromaniac ex-mime, is his repressed rage. Marv, a gentle kleptomaniac, symbolizes Randy’s compulsive need to “borrow” other people’s stories. And Carmen, the house manager with a tragic backstory and a cigarette voice, is every woman he’s ever disappointed, compressed into a single, trash-talking monologue machine.

Rudy suggested that the tagline on the movie poster say, ‘When your story’s a mess, try rewriting yourself.’ The working title was, obviously, Halfway House of Cards.

When the execs laughed in his face, Rudy got loaded and spent 4 days in a cheap hotel in Pasadena with Carmelita, getting shitfaced and crying and failing to sustain an erection. By the time he got back home his wife was gone and so were the kids, a note on the table informing him that they’d gone to stay with her friend Eric from work, who shook Rudy’s hand a little too hard at her company Christmas party a few years ago.

Now, Rudy always says things like, “Quitting drinking is easy, that’s why I do it all the time!” but that never gets the laughs he thinks it deserves at the AA meetings he attends sporadically. But he’s not like the rest of those freaks, huddling in church basements to bitch and moan about their shitty lives. No way, he only goes for inspiration, for character studies that will eventually go towards the new screenplay he’s gonna write, the one that’s going to change everything. He’ll write a part for that red-headed waitress, but he’ll still make her audition for it and then boy, will she regret being such a cunt to him then! And when his ex sees it up on the big screen, she’s gonna get so wet she’ll forget all about Eric and she’ll come home and his kids will think he’s cool and he’ll never have to drink again.

Up until this point LUCY has been speaking directly to CELESTE. She now turns her attention to RUDY and moves closer to him so she’s speaking right into his ear.

LUCY: But Rudy, you know you’re not gonna finish this screenplay. And you know why? Because in order to finish a screenplay, you need to start one. And you won’t. Not today, not ever, because you’re going to shut that laptop. You’re gonna walk out that door, you’re gonna walk across the street to Fat Tuesday’s, and you’re gonna order yourself three cherry sazeracs. And when you finish them, you’re gonna call your ex-wife. You’re gonna call her a skank and tell her that her tits belong in a morgue. Then you’re gonna order three shots of tequila, no tip for the bartender, and when you’re done with those, grab your keys! ‘Cause you’re gonna drive out to that hotel in Pasadena. Pick up that nice girl Carmelita on the way. And you stay there as long as you need to, Rudy, because none of this is your fault. It’s not your fault people don’t have the capacity for great art anymore. It’s not your fault it’s all TikTok and Marvel and prequels and sequels and live-action Disney remakes now. You weren’t meant to be a screenwriter, you were meant to be a legend. You’re like Hunter S. Thompson. You’re like Bukowski. You’re like fuckin’ Poe! It’s not your fault, Rudy. The problem is just that no one reads anymore.

RUDY shifts uncomfortably in his seat.

LUCY turns back to CELESTE, who is looking back and forth between the case file and LUCY, her mouth slightly agape, trying to hide her incredulousness.

LUCY: How’d I do?

CELESTE is quiet for a moment, then rips the page from her clipboard and tears it in half, shaking her head.

LUCY: Aw come on, you’re not even gonna try?

CELESTE: What’s the point? You’re good, Lucy. You’re really, really good. And I’m exhausted. Sometimes… sometimes it’s just not worth the effort. We both know I don’t stand a chance here.

LUCY (pouting): Well that’s no fun!

CELESTE: It rarely is anymore. At least, not for me.

LUCY: Well I really hate to see you like this, Celeste, it’s just not right. And those migraines are unbecoming, they don’t look good on you. Have you ever considered… Nah, nevermind.

CELESTE: Considered what? 

LUCY: Forget it.

CELESTE: Don’t do that! Just tell me for goddsakes, have I considered what?

LUCY: I was just wondering if you might not be happier coming to work for us. It’s much more laid back than what you’re used to. The dress code, for one thing, plus paid time off, benefits, even dental. Co-workers are all super fun, plus, the boss is really hot… but I dunno, maybe it’s stupid. Now that I think about it… Yeah, you might not be such a great fit.

CELESTE puts her hands on her hips and frowns. 

CELESTE: Oh? And what’s that supposed to mean? 

LUCY: I just think you might be too…

CELESTE: Too what?

LUCY: Too… I dunno, too nice, Celeste. You’re too fucking nice.

At that moment the RED-HEADED WAITRESS approaches RUDY’S table. As she walks past, still ignoring him, CELESTE flies over to RUDY’S ear and speaks into it.

CELESTE: Grab her ass. Do it now, Rudy.

RUDY reaches out and grabs the RED-HEADED WAITRESS’S ASS.
RED-HEADED WAITRESS gasps and slaps RUDY in the face RED-HEADED

WAITRESS: Get the fuck out of here! Fucking loser!

RUDY laughs maniacally and slams his laptop shut. He gathers his things in a hurry and runs towards the door.

And when he did, the smell of sulfur once again filled the air of the Blue Monday Cafe, wafting pungently behind him, and everyone just assumed Rudy had farted.

Text	Emma Stern
Talent	Emma Stern
Photography	Teresa Ciocia
Styling	Arianna Cavallo
Make up	Mantis Leprêtre
Hair stylist	Michael Bui

Images shot inside Emma Sterns exhibition Hell is Hot at Almine Rech

Thank you Almine Rech, Audrey-Anna Oliveros & Francesca Polignano