Maybe someday he’ll find a version that can get free.
• • •
2:02 AM
I am Julia Ash. I dye my hair cranberry red and live in a trendy suburb with three cats, two teakettles, and one first edition Jane Eyre on which I have never once spilled ramen broth.
Lucas is coming home from work early today. It’s his birthday. He called from the train.
Can’t wait to see you, Jules!
I start slicing onions for pasta carbonara, his favorite. I glance nervously at the clock. I don’t know if it’ll be ready in time. I start to tremble. Lucas hates it when I’m late with dinner.
The cake rises slowly in the oven, filling the apartment with the smell of home.
THE HELL HATH CLUB VS. THE EVIL CLOWN
The dead do eat.
Some habits are just too hard to break. Besides, the infinite wasteland of linear time would well and truly suck without the occasional Taco Tuesday. Gotta pass the time somehow. The trick of it is, the only aisle in the Deadtown Grocery is Extinct Meat and Veg—we can’t have it down here till you’re done with it up there. The milk Julia gets delivered every week? That’s fresh, creamy quagga milk, with a side of great auk eggs over easy. I know a gargoyle named Dave who’s got a big black cart down by Elysium Park and sells triceratops pies and white rhino po’ boys with a side of hot fries made from a Peruvian blue potato that peaced out before Columbus was a twinkle in Queen Isabella’s eye. Dave fucking loves pop music, and he’ll swap you a saber-toothed burrito for whatever sweet, sweet lyrics you’ve still got banging around your skull. And Dave don’t discriminate—Duran Duran, Les Miz, Streisand, Weird Al, he wants it all. So, good news! All those earworms and cheesy choruses that soaked up valuable brain space and kept you from remembering even one single phone number will, eventually, be worth their weight in beer-battered coelacanth.
But we don’t have to. You can’t exactly starve in Deadtown. We don’t even really have appetites, and even Dave’s prehistoric fish and chips don’t make us feel full. Everything tastes a little thin, a little slight. It’s more like we were buried with the memory of the idea of hunger, and now it’s stuck to us like old toilet paper.
So, it’s weird how much Pauline Ketch eats.
She orders everything and just goes to town, powering through medium-rare thylacine steaks and blue amaranth waffles and deep-fried dodo, Taliaferro apple pie with mammoth-milk ice cream, velociraptor corn dogs and corned-aurochs-and-hash and thunderbird piccata with Babylonian lemon sauce. Neil can barely keep up. Sometimes, I think she must have been a binge-and-purger when she was alive; she’s skinny as a matchstick. Now that she’s dead, it’s all binge. The big purge has already come and gone. Pauline grins at us over her plates; juice drips down over the scars on her chin. She winks one of her crazy eyes at me. She got them tattooed and painted to look like a commedia dell’arte puppet three weeks into a zombie plague. Pauline tears into a pan-seared fillet of Steller’s sea cow and moans with pleasure, as though it tastes just the same as supper back home, as though she isn’t a ghost gobbling up ghosts. She makes a pouty face at Julia and bats her eyelashes.
“Cheer up, chickies! Just ’cause you’re dead don’t mean you gotta be so damn dull! Waa waa, my boyfriend didn’t save me! My husband was a meanie! Who cares? I ask ya! Lookit all these blubberin’ MUGS! Why the long fuckin’ faces, Mrs. Horsey and Miss Nag? Halfa you got mouths like sour candy and the other half’re gonna bust somethin’ if you don’t catch a train to Coolville on the lickety-split. You wanna Valium? Percocet? Xanax? Ativan? Oxy? I think I got some in my purse.”
A blond girl named Daisy and my friend in the green gloves shrug and hold out their hands. Pauline giggles.
“Naw, I’m only foolin’. I got nothin’. Pockets like a hobo clown. They don’t let ya bring the fun stuff down here to D Ward! Deadtown Pharmacy only has one prescription and it’s for Mr. Place E. Bo, and that guy is a dick. What I wouldn’t give for a nice bouquet of benzos with whipped cream on top, am I right, ladies? Ladies?” Pauline throws down her fork. “This is the worst group therapy ever. You’re all against me, and WHY? ’Cause I’m a bad girl. Ooooo, so scary! You’re all so pretty and perfect and tragic, aren’t you? Not me. I’m a cherry bomb with a go-fuck-yourself fuse and a soul like a stubbed-out cigarette. Well, what’s being good ever got ya? Huh? That’s what I thought. Sorry, we’re full up on Madonnas around here. Time for the whore to come out and slay.” Pauline slings her arm around Julia’s pale shoulders. “Aw, come on! Didn’tya ever wanna try it? Just the once? Oh, baby, everyone’s doin’ it. It feels so good. If you loved me, you would. I promise I’ll still respect you in the morning. Don’t you listen to those prudes. It doesn’t hurt. Just slip on something black and low-cut, carve yourself the biggest goddamn slice of whatever cake they said you couldn’t have, and be a VILLAIN for a night! Come on. You know they deserve it. You know they ALL deserve it. What’s the use of all that rage you got if you don’t take it out for a spin? You just sit here by me. Pretty Polly knows how to drive stick.”
Daisy laughs, a short, sharp bark, but not because anything’s funny. She laughs because she finally remembers where she’s seen Pauline Ketch before. Pauline drinks that hollow laugh like root beer.
“Yeah, that’s me. You want my autograph, hot stuff? I’m famous! Pretty Polly, born Pauline Ketch, High Hellion of Guignol City, bank blower-upper and cop knocker-downer, professional punk, voted Most Likely to Piss in Grimdark’s Sad Black Cornflakes, and the hottest little bat in Mr. Punch’s belfry. I’m not like the rest of you. Deadtown’s a pit stop. I’m in, I’m out, PRESTO-CHANGO! Poof! Now you see me, now I’m back in Alivetown, putting on my stockings. My man’s coming back for me. He’s nothing like your sad-sack pizza delivery boys, over it and dancin’ on yer grave in thirty minutes or less! My baby’s not gonna forget about me, no siree! Any minute, you’ll see. Mr. Punch is gonna grab onta me and never let go.”
THE TRAGICAL COMEDY OR COMICAL TRAGEDY OF PAULINE KETCH
I met my baby the old-fashioned way—in prison! Good ol’ Sarkomand Sanatorium, my home away from home. Aw, I still miss Christmases in B Ward! Candy canes, sleigh bells, and Santa Claus the electroshock therapist! He brings suction cups and pretty blue wires for ALL the good boys and girls! B Ward is the Extra Very Doubly Special Barbie Dreamhouse for Violent Offenders, and golly, the whole gang was there! Rat Bastard, Miasma, Doctor Nocturne, Six Figure, the Fearwig, Megalodon . . . all the greats!
Now, you might think I’m nothin’ but a coupla guns and a silver medal in gymnastics, but I got me a superpower, too.
I can make anybody like me for about five minutes.
Ten if I try hard. It always goes to shit after that. Can’t help it, the real me just squirts out all over the place, and the real me is real hard to get off your shoes. But you can get crazy far in this world on the back of somebody thinkin’ you’re just the best girl ever for five minutes a pop.
Never worked on my dad, though. I guess that’s what you call a weakness. Like what’s-his-name and those stupid green crystals. Daddums took one look at me in the nursery and knew everything he needed to know: I wasn’t a boy and I was bad. Buh-buh-buh-bad to the bone. He told the doc: Better not turn the lights off in there at night. Anything could happen. Thanks a bunch, Daddy Ketch! Oh sure, he was right, but maybe he wouldn’ta been if I hadn’t heard that shit with my cute little baby ears, you know?
So, naturally, I burned our fancy house down when I was twenty-one. Anything can happen if you believe in yourself! Then I ran away and burned some other fancy-people stuff down, and just when I was settlin’ into the arsonist’s lifestyle real nice, some dumb ox in body armor knocked me on the head while I was enjoying a nice post-exploded-country-club cigarette. But rich girls don’t go to jail! Rich girls aren’t criminals, don’t you know? They’re just troubled, poor things. So, Daddy’s fat shiny name got me shipped over to Dr. Leng’s personal freak show.
Pops walked me up
the garden path to Sarkomand. Used to be some other richie’s pad, tacky fake-Greek statues all over the place, full of filthy old windows, roof all scrunched up like there was a going-outta-gables sale. I skipped along and laced my fingers in his and swung our hands and said:
“Aw, Daddy, d’ya think the other kids will like me? D’ya think I’ll make a friend on the very first day? D’ya think I’ll be the teacher’s pet?”
And he didn’t say shit because he never even liked me for five minutes in my whole life. He is a Bad Daddy.
B Ward’s got a common area we called the Pool. Used to be a natatorium. That’s how ya say giant fuck-off swimming pool in richie-speak. Still covered in tile from floor to ceiling, only now green and blue mold has crapped up the caulk, layin’ down a fuzzy, scuzzy grid of filth like the rot wants ta play tic-tac-toe with the ghost of dead ol’ Mrs. Sarkomand, who went totally bug-faced whacko and told everyone she was a mermaid and had to stay WET, don’t you understand, WET, WET, WET! So Mistah Sarko built the natatorium to keep his wife wet. Hot. I swear, rich folks’ lives are so dumbfuck deluxified, they read like dirty fairy tales. And I oughta know! I ain’t nothin’ but a porno starring Hansel and Gretel and a big bad hungry creature in a candy cane house.
The Pool is a giant, damp, echoey dump. Long grimy windows let about a loogey’s worth of light in. All the good boys and girls lay around on long chairs like a boy’s gonna bring ’em a daiquiri any minute. The bad boys and girls get their shit wheeled on down to the bottom of Mrs. Sarkomand’s therapy pool and parked till some fat fart factory remembers to come back and get them. They spend all day just starin’ at the tiles and rusted ladders dropping down three steps into the air. The water’s long gone, but Dr. Leng does love what’s left—nine and a half feet of slick moldy unclimbable blue tile. Get down and stay down, puppers! I usedta see Miasma walkin’ up and down the lanes like he was swimming laps. That dude’s a freak, I’ll tell you what.
But I hadn’t done anything naughty that first day, so I got to stay up top in Club Meds. All us well-behaved bitches drugged to the gills and layin’ out like crazy could give us a tan. When ya think about it, people on the outside pay good money to get that wasted and have that little to do. I figured I could swing Sarkomand, no problem. Wasn’t much going in the Pool when I made my grand debut. A coupla dead ferns in one corner, an old Candy Land game nobody played, and a soggy paperback library fulla murderbooks and fuckfic potboilers donated by some League of Old Ladies. Old ladies and young punks don’t love a damn thing but sex and death. All the rest of this garbage-can world is for the dorks in between.
Gosh, I wasn’t anybody then! I didn’t even have a nom de crime picked out or nothin’! Just an eager-to-please firebug with a nice haircut and manufacturer-warranteed daddy issues. I checked out my new digs—what a buncha heartthrobs! Of course, they were pretty much compost mentis. The Arachnochancellor had some drool plopping out of one side of his mouth. Dinochrome was all glazed over and rusted straight to hell. I knew ’em all by name.
Except the fella in the corner by the ferns. Mistah Man over there was one long, tall, funny-lookin’ drinka water! Hair like radioactive lemonade and red eyes—really red! Like two big beautiful stoplights burnin’ up his skull. But no light in the world ever stopped me. He stared straight ahead, slumped over like a puppet after the big show, with that dreamy Thorazine gaze I’d come to love. What can I say? Damaged calls to damaged.
I sauntered on over to the night warden, Nurse Happy. Honest to lollipops, that actually was her name! Said it right on her badge: Wilhemina Happi. Finnish or somethin’. Anyways, I put on my superpower like a paira specs. It’s easy. Like when you wanna pet a fella’s dog but the dog’s growlin’ and puttin’ his ears back so you hold your hand out for it to sniff and talk real sweet. ’Cause everybody’s somebody’s dog, you know. It’s even easier for girls. Daddy never got that. Never clocked how being a girl is a sneaky kinda mutant power. Pops was stuck in the old world, where the only superpower worth having was being a white straight boy. And fuck me if I still wouldn’t take that over some doofy bow-and-arrow tricks. But I work with what I got. See, people got this bright, shiny picture of what a Friendly Girl looks like in their head. Funny thing is, everybody’s got the same picture! All you gotta do is shimmy till you look like the picture and presto-chango, you’re a Friendly Girl! Folks just give you their love in a basket. And when you’re done takin’ it all, you can just go invisible and fade away—all girls come with that power preinstalled. Watch me do my thing, kittens! I made my eyes all big and wide and glisteny, slouched so I didn’t look so tall, dipped my head down so’s nobody could feel threatened by little ol’ me, showed my open hands—no tricks, Ma! Sniff it up! I finished myself off with a shy little schoolgirl smile, the kind that makes teacher wanna give ya some special attention so you can reach your full potential. Then I blushed—I can do that anytime I want. Like puttin’ on paint. What’s a girl like me doin’ in a place like this?
Nurse Happy ate it all up with a shovel. I scrubbed my voice clean and pink before I said anything.
“I . . . I think it’s time for my medication, Nurse Happy.”
There’s no numbers on the clocks in Sarkomand. They say it’s easy for people like me to get obsessed with numbers, with time. But it’s pretty much always time for your medication in the Pool. Lucky me, I gotta metabolism like pissed-off volcano. Even Queen Clozapine and all her slutty daughters barely make me sleepy. Shhh. Don’t tell Nurse Happy!
“Aren’t you a dear little thing? So conscientious!” Nurse Happy unlocked the meds closet, her big comfortable ass wagglin’ in her big comfortable skirt. “A girl like you just makes my day shine a little brighter. One nice person who does what she’s told in this pile of devils who’d rather chew off their own tongues—or mine!—than take a silly old pill! But you’re not like these brutes, are you, sweetpea?”
I turned up my blushin’ to eleven. “No, Ma’am. I’m sorry being a nurse isn’t much fun. I wish it were.” I was running out of time. Pretty soon she’d start to see. She’d start to think the blushing wasn’t shyness but a weird, scummy sort of excitement. She’d start to think my voice wasn’t submissive and soft but making fun of her. She’d feel the black mold snaking in around the edges of me. “If you want, I could take a coupla doses around. To help you out, you know? I like to help. I used to help . . .” I let my dimples come out. Gave her a little nervous giggle, all roses and lace at the edges. Aw, Ma’am, I’m mostly joshin’ ya. I’ll still love ya if you say no.
“Aren’t you a dear little thing? What’s a girl like you doing in a place like this? Of course you can help. Work is good for the soul!” And under her breath she added, “Better you than me.” What a peach, Nurse Happy. Oh, don’t throw me in the briar patch, Br’er Fox! “Now, you’d better wear this, or they’ll get upset. They’re like a bunch of old bulls. If they see anything but the white jacket, they start kicking and swinging their horns.” She draped a spare orderly’s coat over my shoulders. And they say only boys get capes! “Try Mr. Punch over there. He’s pretty much on Pluto most of the time. Won’t give you any trouble. Probably.”
Mr. Punch! What a name! What a guy!
Just like that, I had a Dixie cup grail full of funtime candy in my hot little hand. I got out of there before my five minutes ran down and strolled across the moldy tiles—not too fast, not too fast—to ol’ red eyes drooling in a shaft of green-stained sunlight.
“Well, hi there, handsome!” I said.
Our first words! I was all a-flutter!
Mr. Punch’s eyes rolled up to meet mine, peering through that screaming yellow hair. Golly wow! It was love at first fright. My boy was burnt all over. Burnt in patterns, burnt on purpose, fulla welts in spirals and angles and dots. And the biggest, prettiest, thickest scars ran down from the corners of his mouth to the bottom of his chin, just where a wooden puppet’s mouth would hang open. I love me a burnt man! His bloody eyes burned too, scrapin’ over my fac
e, blown pupils snapping in, into focus, into hot, tight, unstoppable awakeness. And then he smiled wide and wicked and fanged and needy. Mr. Punch hissed right at me:
“If I had all the wives of wise King Sol, I would kill them all for my Pretty Poll.”
That’s a quote, that is. Some old-school noise from jolly old London-town. If a man’ll rhyme for ya, he’ll do just anything. From that second, I was Pretty Polly forever and ever amen. I went hot and wet as Mrs. Sarkomand’s mermaid cunt all over. My heart had a party dress on. Play it cool, Polly!
“Time for your medication, Mr. Punch,” I said softly. But soft wasn’t the way to Mr. Punch’s hard wooden heart. His pupils melted out again, the arson in his eyes snuffed. He started coughing. His phlegm looked like anybody else’s phlegm. Dunno what I expected. Liquid gold or lava or tainted heroin.
“Sorry, Doctor,” he slurred. “Thought you were someone else.”
I started to tell him not to be such a silly-head. The little girl giggle started in the back of my throat, a fat wad of demureness ready to hack up out of my lungs. But Bad Daddy didn’t raise no dumb dolly! Never give up an advantage once you’ve got it in your briefcase. I brushed some imaginary lint off my white jacket and settled down in the next chaise. Handed Mr. Punch his strings. Open wide, let Doctor Polly see that you swallowed up all your tranq-tastic medicine like a good boy!
Now, I ain’t sayin’ I’m any great shakes as an actress. But if there’s one thing I know, it’s how a shrink talks. I can do it all day long. I can do ya Freudian, Jungian, Gestalt, a little Cog-Bee, a little Hypno-whatever, pick a card, any card. Tell me about your mother. What comes to mind when I say the word match? I put on my Big Girl voice. Betcha didn’t think I had one, huh? Well, fuck you, watch this: