Julia crouched behind the dumpster in the narrow alleyway.  A few murky tears escaped her eyes as she began to have an asthma attack, brought on by the dragonfly wing of panic beating just behind the tea-saucers that half the world would recognize as her eyes.  Once they catch you it's all over, her asthma told her, fanning itself into a full-scale asthma invasion.  The roles, the cars, the friends, the fans, Danny… they'll even take your children.  Julia felt Asthma's gigantic hands tighten on her chest, underneath her ribcage.  She could visualize his grey fingers and dinnerplate-sized palms, not necessarily wanting to hurt her; just attempting to squeeze her heart and lungs into a universe the size of a marble because that's what he did, that was his nature. 

    She coughed; a sudden, violent exaltation and Asthma saw its chance, tightening quickly so that there was no recoil to the cough, turning it into an explosive wheeze.  Her nose and mouth suddenly turned into a one-way street for air.  It had gone from full-scale invasion to Asthma occupation.  She made her trademark cutesy squeak as she marshaled her strength and attempted to suck any air through the pinhole which had just replaced her windpipe.  The lights…remember the lights a-and the cheering, and the orchestra, right after they announced your name...
   
    She found herself slipping back to the Academy Awards ceremony in 2001, waiting, shaking, as they announced the nominees for the Best Actress award.  Asthma tried to sidle up to her then and sneak its steely hand around her waist and under her breast, but she was focused.  When they didn't call her name she was going to look soooo proud for whoever was called.  Julia was fully prepared to give an Oscar-worthy performance that night; first, there would be her surprise face, paired with a little scream.  A surefire recipe for cute that she had discovered while working on Mystic Pizza, which was then refined and sculpted by Garry Marshall for Pretty Woman.  She owed Garry her career because he had her combine her gasp/scream with a gut-busting laugh, a maneuver that she had gotten to use in damn near every one of her movies since.  It was an alchemical formula for building trust, melting hearts, and winning an audience.  As she got older, she and her directors learned that she had to add a snort to the laugh to keep it fresh and bankable.  The day before, Julia had rehearsed following her trademark with clapping and beaming her even more famously symetrical smile at the winning actress as though she had predicted the name to be drawn months beforehand.  She might even throw in a little bounce of a cheer as though she had been rooting for this woman all along as an extra measure of goodwill, but she thought that might be overdoing it.  You never wanted to be the happest one to lose.  But then, her name was called, and for the first time in her life, she genuinely and unthinkingly did her scream-gasp-laugh move.  As the music swelled, Oscar stock, not an orchestral snippet from the twangy Erin Brockovich score, she strode toward the podium concerned with only two things: whether or not she would trip and if the audience here and at home would be able to see her diamond hard nipples through her lavish eleven-thousand dollar Oscar gown.

    She was using a sense-memory technique to calm her asthmatic mind, pushing out the screaming sirens, the squawk of police radios and the shouts and clapping footsteps of the canvassing cops.  No one would have guessed that she was a pure Method worker, drawing deeply from the well of Stanislavsky's teachings.  They didn't see your face, that's all that matters.  They couldn't see your face...  The mask she had worn was gripped tightly in her left hand.  Then she heard something that gave her hope:  "I think he turned up this street," one of the officers shouted to his comrades.  Her grip on the mask loosened slightly and her airway expanded even more; then a thought ambushed her, and like the flip of a switch her body resumed its previous tension.  You didn't leave anything by the body, did you?  Just as she started to investigate this fresh avenue of worry, Julia heard a voice to her right.  "Hey," it called, not even ten feet away.  Julia was so on-edge that before she could even turn her head to assess the threat, the wet warmth of fear-pee was spreading across her bottom.

    The voice was a thick biscuit batter made of gravel, phlegm, screw-top wine and a shitty existence; as she took in the stew bum who mixed it she saw a face that matched the voice in every respect.  Eyes almost swollen shut with recusant alcohol-puff, a face like the aftermath of a sandblasting experiment carried out with buckshot, patches of mostly gray facial hair that would never grow into a full moustache or beard, now gone to pot like an abandoned farmyard.  Though she was covered in blood (Melanie Griffith's), sweat and urine (her own), her heart genuinely went out to the ugly little man on the cardboard bed who was so close to her that she could have given him a foot-massage were she so inclined. 

    Julia suppressed a gag at the idea of what shape his feet were in before offering a kind smile and putting a bloody finger across her lips.  The man closed his eyes and began to smile, content with his hallucination.  He swayed a bit as though he was about to pass out again and Julia relaxed, unconsciously licking what was once Melanie Griffith's essence from her lower lip where her finger had deposited it seconds before.  She could hear the cops slowly moving further away, not that they would completely desert the crime scene for the sake of pursuing a suspect, but if she was careful, there was an opportunity to make it home to her husband, Danny, and curl up with her beatuiful twins.

    Julia exhaled a bit, dropping her shoulders, sitting more deeply into her wet and rapidly chilling haunches.  She looked right to check in with the homeless man.  His sway, instead of dropping his head back onto his arm and his mind back into whiskey and urine scented dreams, had strengthened into a steady head bob.  With his eyes still closed, his smile broke into a full-out grin showcasing teeth that looked as though they were mortared to his diseased gums with chocolate pudding and soot.  The healthiest teeth ranged from the deep yellow-orange of a new school bus to a mossy green that seemed seconds away from turning black.  She figured that they hadn't been cared for since Clinton was in office.

    A micromoment before it happened, Julia knew that his grin meant bad news.  The man began singing in his cracked, rough voice, "Oh, oh, pretty woman, walkin' down the street..."  Though the first 'Oh' was whisper-soft, the rest came out as though all the phlegm in his throat were a sonic amplifier, blasting Julia's calm back into the unreachable crevasses of her subconscious.  She lunged from her squatted position to try to cover his mouth, but her knees had locked and she succeeded in doing nothing more than depositing herself into her own urine puddle.  She gasped at the sudden cold and realized that her old grey-handed friend was back, slipping his gibbeting mitts under her shirt once again.  She scrambled to recover, reaching to put her hands over his mouth, but as she braced herself, beginning to stand, her hand slid on a mystery muck clinging to the wall that her already beleaguered mind wouldn't even allow her to contemplate and she fell again.  This time her mind screamed in revulsion; her internationally recognizable lips were currently pressed to the crotch of the homeless man's grimy slacks, stiff with months of wear on the streets.  Although she didn't want to breathe at this particular moment, Asthma (or maybe Julia's inner masochist) was cruel enough to open her airway for the moment and her air-starved lungs eagerly lapped up whatever scraps it could wrest away from her erratic mind.  She inhaled deeply through her nose and the the dense gumbo of smells caused her to add her fresh vomit to the bouquet of the filthy man's crotch.  Julia made a noise, a scream, trapped behind her adorable, albeit bloodspattered nose and somewhere above her a dog on a balcony absorbing the night air whined back.  "Heeey," said the man between phrases, not appalled at the vomit, not even aware of it, but pleased with the contact and the warmth. 

    Julia hoisted herself up and didn't even bother to wipe the residual retchings from her mouth, desperate to stop the man's cawing.  "--I really do... Nobody looks as good as you," he continued.  With the last line, though his eyes were closed he managed to scrunch his right eye quickly, winking at the Julia on the back of his eyelids.  She attempted to cover his mouth, but he batted her hands away and launched into the "Mercy" section, singing them up the/an octave like he was trying to get her goat.  She rained down weak, untrained punches on his filthy, knotted face, feeling the carbuncles on her knuckles, but he just chuckled in between phrases and didn't stop.  Julia reached for her knife pocket, damp with Melanie's blood, but her knife wasn't there.  And though she wasn't aware of it at the time, her mind's eye was showing her the knife slipping out of the hip pocket and falling soundlessly onto the plush carpet floor of the budoir as she squatted down again after the kill to wrap Mrs. Banderas-Griffith's intestines around her neck.  Fuckinggodcocklickingdamnit, she thought.  Then it came to her.  Oh, I'm gonna hate myself in the morning, she thought and she had to chuckle for a moment, as she was wont to do whenever an idea occurred to her that she could immediately recognize as abjectly psychotic.  She leaned down, thanking the gods of celebrity dentistry, and sank the main feature of her world-famous cakehole through the patchy, scraggly beard into the man's neck.  She chewed at him and blood squirted into her mouth.  Now it was his turn to bat at her, and though his blows landed with force she had two key factors on her side: a fierce rush of adrenaline and the best dental care that money could buy. 

    Julia could taste the taint and hard living in his blood, she could taste the nicotine and the gin and the cancer and the resignation.  Then one of his fists connected with a vulnerable spot and she felt a rib fracture underneath her taut intercostals.  Instead of opening to scream, though, her jaw snapped shut carving out a small chunk of his Adam's apple.  It only hurt for a few seconds as more adrenaline flooded the pain center of her brain allowing her to unclench her eyes and jaw.  She spit the chunk of esophageal tissue back down at the man and it hit him in the face, leaving a bloody 'J' shape on his cheek.  The man twitched weakly underneath Julia as he gushed thick, dark blood onto the gravel in the alley and she remained alert, straddling him, a knee to either side of his bloated gut until the blood stopped burbling from the fresh hole in his neck.  Then she sighed and dropped her weight onto the man's lap where she felt a more than decent length of firmness pressing against her.  EWWWWW, the thought, but did not move.  Something had caught her eye.  Not in a direct way, but she realized that she could read the graffiti on the side of the dumpster just ahead of her. 
SeR
was emblazoned on the side of the large metal box in over-stylized, almost unreadable letters.  Julia pondered why the 'E' was lowercase when she saw the light shift, and then she noticed her own silhouette projected onto the alley in front of her and bleeding onto the dumpster.  She turned around to look toward the mouth of the alley.

     The officers holding the flashlights jumped back and one almost dropped his flashlight when he saw the over wide eyes and blood-smeared mouth of his wife's favorite actress.  He recognized her immediately; they owned almost every one of her movies.  The other officer just wasn't sure what he was seeing; his mind wouldn't separate what was directly in front of him from flashes of Gollum squatting and eating a fish from the Lord of the Rings films.  Then the two images merged, the fictional character disintegrating while reality settled deep into the overstuffed armchair of his consciousness; "Mike, M-Mike," nudging his partner as a third officer approached, "…is that--?"
"Oh, holy night," the third officer said breathlessly.