“It’ll be hard to get in, but patience pays off...” Kendra knew as much as anyone about The Shadows and where to find entry; she was a tour guide—the kind of guns-and-leather woman who took you where you wanted to go. Her operation wasn’t the sort to remain above the table and on City-Law grid, and it was this challenge to business that made her the ideal contact. “I can take you in,” she’d said over scotch on the rocks in a dark pit of a bar called The Bad Woman. But Asher Rowe declined her offer. He needed a trip into The Shadows for reasons beyond black market tourism, and so the risks were different—for him, and for Kendra. Even if she was the kind who could drink with the toughest street thugs at a place like Bad Woman, she wasn’t someone Asher wanted to risk. She was a friend, in God’s-honest truth, and there were some things you’d never ask a friend to do. Things you’d never force a woman like Kendra to see. It was the seeing that scared Asher: those things in The Shadows that crept into the brain like the oldest deep-nich memes: insanity as old as God, the Devil, and every sublime horror in between. But he had to go: he needed Kendra’s skills in getting there, but he couldn’t ask her to guide him like some Girl Friday. And so, on the grime-coated streets of Chinatown, he made his way to the nearest Shadow Nexus. He could feel it over there: a troubling existential doodle that struck him like an itch in the deepest meat of the brain. Nervous energy danced through his fingertips. His toes went cold. And it would only get worse as he neared the end-point of this month’s journey. The Shadows. He needed to go there. Alone. For a friend as close as Kendra and closer in other ways. He smiled in wry irony as he ambled past a skin/hair parlor advertising this season’s fad: Sunny Matsunaka—the download queen. Her hair, her face, her eyes stared at Asher from advertising posters and from the sculpted features of women (younger girls, mostly) who greeted the world with Sunny’s face. Any girl (or guy) could be Sunny Matsunaka for $250 a month and Asher shivered at the thought. The Shadows he told himself. Just focus on that. Forget the Download Queen...she’s not worth the brain space. And so he walked—past Sunny Matsunaka in skin-parlor windows, shoulders squared and spine stiff. Tonight, he hoped, patience would pay off and the nearest Shadow Node would accept his entry. *** This picture was originally made when Corey and I indulged our desire to visit Chinatown, eat good food, and go in search of the all-illusive vertical lift railroad bridge. The original picture was perfectly good, perfectly "normal" in terms of photography, and it was worthy of a post here, but there are times when postwork makes all the difference in the world, when a recorded (and almost journalistic) image becomes something else...a subjective and less-literal thing. I rather like that, and so here is yet another Chinatown tweak. As always, thank you for viewing, reading, and commenting, and I hope you're having a great week.