[Marioninyc]

Ok, did the word, literary, scare any of you? It's pretty accessible. Here's a tiny excerpt from somewhere after the sample:

These days she called herself Raven and her hair was black. She was sweet fifteen, but her ID said different. Five-three, ninety pounds the last time she got on a scale. Blue-lensed round wire-rimmed glasses, very sixties from a flea market, black lycra top with a feather collar from Canal Jeans, the tightest jeans she could find and boots from the seventies with big glam-rock platforms. But what she really wanted was a kick-ass pair of Doc Martens which was why she was going to the city – to shop.
Shop and cop.
There weren’t any seats on the PATH train, so she took hold of the pole, reminding her of work.
Couple of homeboys got on. Scanning the car for potential victims. She flashed a smile. They moved on. She had $300 in her boot. Pay plus tips from the club where she stripped.
She lived in Union City with an old guy in his thirties. He was cool. She didn’t have to do much to stay there and he even let her bring her friends. Still, she dreamed of living in the city, Loisaida. Sometimes she could spend a whole day and night at Tompkins Square. People talked. It was a community. Not like home. She used to be Jill and had red hair and played the cello in the high school band, but nobody liked her. The boys thought she was a brainiac and the girls were jealous, and she was daddy’s favorite which meant her mother hated her, and it was all so boring she wanted to puke just thinking about it.
She got off the train in the West Village. It was raining, so she found a cab. She thought she’d drop by Kyra’s. Maybe Kyra was holding or they could make some calls from the house.
Out on East 11th. The downstairs building door was open. A guy she knew from the park as Lobo, followed as always by his blue-eyed, shepherd-husky mix, Shaman, was coming down the stairs holding a filled up black plastic garbage bag. Which she might have thought was strange, if she’d thought about it, because he didn’t live in the building.
“Hey, how’s it going?”
“Okay.” He looked like he was about to say something else. She started up the stairs. Turned around, saw him staring.
“You got a problem?”
“You going to Lenny’s?”
“Yeah, so?”
“Nothing, man. Nothing.”
Weird. She passed the second floor, then onto the third. Somebody cooking something. Heavy smell. Some kind of meat.
There was a hole punched right through Kyra’s apartment door. Raven reached through and turned the lock not bothering to knock. The first one she saw was Lenny, joint in hand, sitting on the couch, muttering. An old hippie looking guy with a bandanna wrapped around his head was also sitting, staring off into space. She closed the door behind her and saw the others in the kitchen.
“Shit. It’s like Grand Central in here,” a light-skinned black man said. She’d seen him around. Didn’t know his name. Not much taller than she was, kind of nerdy looking, glasses, but solid, muscular, something scary about him, the way he was coming toward her.
“She’s cool, Joe,” Kyra said standing in her bedroom door. Cigarette in mouth. Looking like she’d been through some kind of scene.
Raven checked out the blonde at the kitchen table. For a moment, she thought it was Ingrid who’d been living there the past few weeks, but then realized this woman was even prettier, softer looking. The guy sitting next to the woman, she’d noticed before. He lived in the building. Thin like from AIDS. Dressed all in black, except sometimes when he’d wear a theatrical red cape. Called himself the Magus and looked like the decrepit older brother of the image from the Ryder deck.
“What are you cooking?”
“Soup for the people in the park,” the blonde said.
“Cool.” Everyone felt solidarity with the homeless. The pigs trying to throw them out of Tompkins Square, especially since the riots.
Lenny said, “I fuckin killed her, little girl. I fuckin killed her and chopped her up.”
She looked at Kyra, the way she sometimes did for a translation of Lenny talk.
Kyra let out a deep drag. “Ingrid’s dead.”
“I got her body in the bathtub. Some of it. Wanna see?”
“Yeah, okay.”
She could feel the others watching as she followed him to the bathroom.
What was left in the tub was hardly identifiable as human. The head was in a bucket. Lenny lifted it out by the hair so she could get a good look.
“I strangulated her. Joe says we gotta clean it up. Wanna help?”
“No.”
Joe came up behind her. “You know you say anything to anybody you dead.”
“Yeah,” she said. Maybe the first time in years she answered somebody in authority without mouthing off.
Kyra said, “Let’s get the fuck outa here.”
“Minute.” Raven headed toward Ingrid’s room. “I wanna check out her shoes. It’s not like she’ll miss them, right?”