1 - 0.9* (One minus naught point nine recurring)

1 - 0.9*
(One minus naught point nine recurring)

Ticket,, Ticket,,, Ticket.

She was a singer. But she didn't really sing. Never really could sing it would later be told, or rather smeared. Maybe it's this uncraftly voice, maybe thats why everyone who was so caught up then, with her, in her, has difficulty to recall her now, in turn seldom troubles themselves to. Her voice posessed a frail talent. Ticket, most forgotten now but at the time some people thought of nothing else.


The readograph read in large letters "Ticket" and in smaller letters "and the Stowaways." Her band were, as the name suggests, of petty criminal class. Some still children slowly and quickly becoming not so. Physically rough and unsettling although far from the capabilities of intimidation. Their sound was commanding and often terrible.


Ticket stood on stage and performed like a sheet in the wind. One massive and delicate gesture after another. Caught, raptured and then falling. She was feminine the way a soldiers gun has a pretty girls name. Her performance was impossible. Or at least it seems so now, so little to be spread so thinly over such an enormous hollow. She was nearly invisible, and to see her perform, she could have been the only thing in the universe. Something, perhaps just a trace of nothing, being born in absence and absence's deafening noise.


There was so little to say, which is why she was so keenly written about. Across the media, on the playground, and in the academy. Those that returned to her repeated themselves endlessly. Everything about her was covered, and when it wore thin, it was everything through her. The rest of everything in terms of her. There is so much everything.


A part of everything is Ache, hated Ache, Tickets husband. Ache was a tall and not unusually strong man, an artist. He was unimpressive but had enough handles to be picked up and examined by any kind of investigator. Ache at work on bulky self expression barely held up by weak foundations. Aches detractors wrote with furious jealousy and unchecked poison. Jealous of tickets unwavering attachment to Ache, and more furious because they could most clearly see her through him.


This comfort in precision meant he received the first, now probably only, biographer. Ache so easy to handle, the most of the book all but wrote itself. But concealed amongst the average events and the everyday details of this less than everymans life was the encrypted story of Ticket. Tickets biography, titled Ache.

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There were 3 shots fired. The first bullet rested in a door frame, not an intentional warning shot but a close range miss. The second an uncertain loose kind of shot shattered Tickets left hip. The last shot, the one aimed for her heart, exploded in the cheap gun. The shooter leaving behind an index finger and the most of his thumb. Ticket was not rushed to hospital but was left alone and died.


At the funeral Ache said little about Ticket, only the things one might say at anyones funeral. As his biographer had talked about him, Ache talked about the member of the Stowaways that had done the shooting. Confused and angry Ache said. More desperate to strike than to have killed anyone. Aches sympathies suggested it was beyond the Stowaways control not to kill Ticket, even that he was not far from the same himself. Ache said they both deserved their confusion. He was sorry that the boy couldn't play anymore.


After Tickets death, Ache broke from his art. With the money from the life insurance he had taken out on Ticket, he moved away and stayed quiet. Nothing to write about. Not only has the object died but the mirror through which it is seen has retreated. It is amazing how quickly her ghost left all those busy pens. Her change after the second shot was so subtle that the difference is easily forgotten and now it's as if she had always been dead.