061. The last of the Free-Dancers

Mike finished his orange juice and moved towards the centre of the lounge. There was no point taking the temperature of the room – he knew it was too early in the night for what he was about to unleash. He just didn’t care.

Slowly at first, then growing quicker and bolder, he began shaking his body to a beat nobody else could hear. His gangly arms swung from one side to the other, and his legs jerked a kind of joyous death throe. He thrust his hips back and forward, flicked his ponytail to an imaginary bass-line and smiled. People were staring, but if he swayed a little bit, he couldn’t see them.

There used to be Free-Dancers at almost every party – busting their moves long before the speakers were plugged in or a playlist was selected. It was like they could hear something the rest of us couldn’t, a distant beat they couldn’t ignore. So they danced – part sweat, part spectacle, part magic – and we watched, until we were brave or drunk enough to put on some music and join them.

But somewhere along the line, the world got louder. Free-dancers couldn’t hear whatever it was that told them to move. They became endangered. Tall, gawky Mike – a software engineer from country Australia – was one of the last.

So when he took over Kim and Tony’s lounge, a crowd gathered to watch him. At first they were sceptical. He was all limbs and jerks and hard angles, and without the music the whole think hung like an echo without its origin-sound. It seemed weird. But there was a jubilation to it that was somehow mesmerising. People started clapping. Eventually, they joined in.

Dancing is stupid, when you think about it. It’s just two moves. You can bob your legs. And you can flail your arms. But that’s it.

Of course, you can change the order, the speed, the direction – and you can do the whole thing with choreographed grace or finesse – but when you really thinking of it, you’re just boobing and flailing, bobbing and flailing. Bouncing around trying to land somewhere higher.

060. Man's best undead friend

Not everyone was happy to have Booster back.

Tim's English bulldog had chased a rubber ball over the hedge, into traffic and onwards to puppy heaven no less than a week ago. So when he showed up at their front porch, drenched in rain and accompanied by a thunder storm four days later, Tim's parents greeted the dog with a guarded distrust. They'd seen Pet Sematary, the 80s horror flick where animals came back to torture their owners, and they were both well-versed in Zombie-lore. Tim's dad was still banned from Pacific Fair for asking too many questions about mall security.

"We'll go to Robina, Mary" he'd tell Tim's mom, "it'll be less crowded and easier to secure".

It was fair to say that neither of Tim's parents had much trust for things that came back from the dead.

But resurrection didn't bother Tim. He'd gone to Sunday school and Zombie-Jesus sounded like a nice guy, if a little preachy. Tim didn't care that Booster looked a little ragged these days. Or that his eyes were yellow and non-responsive. Maggots had chewed up most of his ears and all the way to the bone on his right back leg. He smelled a little weird and he'd changed his awkward run, a forward-falling rolling heap of fur, to a noiseless levitation.

Since Boosters return the neighborhood cats had started to spontaneously self-combust and his parents had to travel to the Post Office to retrieve their mail. Their last mailman was still in therapy. Switching his genitals and his nose back to where they belonged was going to cost Tim's parents a lot of money.

Tim's parents had the cultural background to be suspicious of Boosters return. They also had enough grown-up sense to fear his abilities. But Tim was just happy to have his dog back.

He grabbed a stick and let it fly. It sailed across the backyard and landed near the pine tress. "Go get it, boy!" Booster panted with excitement, his big pink tongue rotting outside his mouth. He squinted his dead eyes together, as if he focused really hard, and then the stick evaporated with a flash only to appear again a lightning-moment later between Boosters teeth. "Good dog! Such a good dog!" Tim buried his face in the dog's fur and Boosters barked with delight.

059. Ralphie was a good bird

It was raining the day they held the funeral. Everyone said that’s what Ralphie would have wanted. He loved it when it rained.

They didn’t have a back yard in the tiny townhouse they rented week-to-week, so they gathered on a median strip to commit the shoebox to the earth. Rosie had asked to give the speech, and Amy’s mum had packed her a packet of lamingtons, to cheer them all up.  Margie was the only one who had brought an umbrella, so they shared, the tree of them huddled against the wind.

“Ralphie was a good bird,” Rosie started. “He was always happy, even though he was disabled and flew into walls sometimes and bit Dad on the ear.”

Rosie sniffled.

“He died from eating paper.”

Tiny hands covered the box with dirt.

“Now I hate paper,” she said, in a voice sad enough that even the-rain-Raphie-would-have-wanted and a packet of lamingtons couldn’t wash it away. 

058. A paying customer

"You a drinking man, Mike?" Jody gave him a look that made Mike feel small and naked. A modicum of human warmth had worked its way into her eyes but it only made Mike vary. Hunger still lay behind it. Badly, or barely, masked. Mike fought the urge to turn around and make sure the door hadn't evaporated behind him. 

"Actually, never mind". Jody opened an oddly shaped brown beer bottle named Gustav's Finger and poured half the contents in a long glass for Mike. "I don't trust people who don't drink with me". 

She handed him the glass and kept the bottle for herself. Mike took the glass. Even through the padded, flame-retarded glove he could feel the chill at the bottom of it. He was parched. The room was hot, scorching, and he really, really wanted to chug that beer. Just empty the honey colored liquid down his gullet without even tasting it. But, somehow, he managed to stomp his basic instincts and compose himself. He couldn't drink with the helmet on, anyway.

Jody toasted him with the bottle and a somewhat ironic smile that bared teeth sharp enough to be fangs. 

"Nervous?" 

Mike eyed Jody's shadow as it rose and spread its wings behind her. 

"Cautious", he replied and pushed a button on the chest of his space suit. Air hissed as it escaped into the warm room. More of cave, really, thought Mike and drained half of the beer. He slammed his suitcase on the table between them.

"So, Jody", Mike opened the briefcase and pulled out three glossy pamphlets. "Are you thinking of going for the whole kingdom, the princess and all of the gold or are you just looking for a snack-sized Knight to spare with?"

Mike didn't much like doing business with dragons but he supposed it was just one of those things. He didn't like paying rent either but he very much enjoyed his beach house. It all connected somehow.

057. It's a pretty obscure afterlife. You wouldn't have heard of it.

Just as he was about to bite her neck, she screamed. Not the good kind, either. He’d been hoping for fear – an “I should never have gone for a drink with this man whose face is the last thing I’ll ever see” scream. Instead, he got glee.

“That’s so cool,” she gushed, reaching up to touch a fang. “They’re so realistic. Oh my god, I can’t believe how real they feel.”

Edward sighed. “They are real.”

“And your name – it’s so funny you’re called Edward,” she continued. “I love Twilight.”

“Twilight,” he roared. “TWILIGHT?”

His pale skin turned red.

“DO I LOOK LIKE I SPARKLE?”

In a frenzy of blood-lust and anger, he drained what little life there was in her and left the empty shell on the pavement.  She was food – enough to keep him going for a few days. But without the fear, there wasn’t much joy in hunting.

Edward had become a vampire before it got cool.  Before Twilight, or True Blood, or even Buffy. They were the good days. People had known who you were. They hung garlic, and carried stakes. They didn’t just invite you inside.

Not until the hipsters came along, anyway.

It was bad enough they’d claimed the Smiths and Cather in the Rye – they’d ruined wayfarers and moustaches and having a pet cat. And now, here they were, creeping around the underworld in ironic Twilight t-shirts, pretending they only sucked the blood of organic-eating vegetarians.

How were people supposed to be afraid of that?

The hipsters had ruined everything. And now that they were undead, they were going to ruin that too. 

056. Feds & Martyrs

“Did you ever find anything worth dying for?"

The boy leans forward. He stretches towards me and the chain that links his handcuffs to the tables rattles a little.
"All those places you went to, the years you spent travelling, the people you spoke so fondly of when we first met. Were any of them real? Did anything ever inspire you to think beyond yourself?”
“Sure”, I say, “I’ve got a family”
I brought him in. Betrayed him after three years of living on that farm of guns and pot.

“Wife? Kids?”

“A sister.”

“Blood, then.”

He leans back in his chair and stares at the ceiling as he takes a long drag on the cigarette that’s turned to ash in his hand for the last four minutes. “Blood is an obligation”, he inhales. Exhales “but you can’t pick your family”.
I lean against the one-way mirror.

“Tell me about Rose.” 

“Smith met her in California, I think. Which makes sense, right? The weird ones always has the best pussy.” He smiles at me. Genuinely. It's not a leer but it lingers on his lips a second too long before he continues. “I killed Rose with a hammer”, he says. “In the orange groves. Three years after she first came to stay with us.”

“Why?”

“Doesn’t matter.” He's not smiling anymore. He stares down at the table and I stare down at him. I've been staring down at Will for so long that it's starting to feel like up.

“The details they matter and I remember the details." He turns one hand over, the one not holding a cigarette, so that the back rests on the table and he stares dead-eyed at the palm. 

"There was blood", he says, "There was so much blood and Smithy wouldn't let me wash up before we buried her so the blood mixed with dirt and I had her underneath my fingernails for weeks afterwards. Whenever I saw that streak of black I thought of when she'd rest against me and I'd smell the top of her head and forget where I was. But I killed her because Smithy said I should. That's all there's to it. Rose was no one special when she lived.

“I mean, I loved her but she was no more special than you or me. No more than any of us can ever aspire to be. Rose was just a human girl and Smithy said she was about to ruin everything. When we see each other again she'll thank me. She'll understand. Tomorrow everything will be alright again”.

“What happens tomorrow?”, I ask him.

He grinds the cigarette out on the table and looks up at me.

“Tomorrow we bring her back”

He says it with such conviction I almost believe him. So I stay quiet a little longer than I should and I worry he'll catch me wrong footed.

“You can’t bring her back, Will. Rose is dead. You said so yourself. You killed her. We dug her body up a week ago. It’s been in the ground for more than two years”.

“Vessels”, he says with a hiss and an air of dejection that suggest I’m the stupid one.

“Vessels?”

He shoots me a look of disgust and when he takes a deep breath I can almost see how he’s counting to ten in his mind. To calm himself down. He really wants to explain himself.

“We’ll bring her back and this time she’ll be different”

“Different how?”

“She’ll be like you. In fast forward”

“Me?”

“Well, you in the grander sense. Mankind?”

Obviously not the word he's looking for. But close enough. He doesn’t consider himself a part of us anymore. But to him he’s the human and we’re the monsters. I think he sidetracks that debate because he knows how little time he has left here.

“Everything you could have become. Every potential of you fulfilled. She’ll come back and she'll be you. But complete. Without all the bullshit. She'll rise above it. Get it? Rose. She who rose. Rose will rise. That's poetry, man!”

“You’re going to have be a little more specific than that”

“I cant”

“Because you don’t know, right?”

I feel my temper escape me.

“Giving up where Rose was buried was the last card you had to play. If you can’t give us Smith you’ll be gone a week from now. We'll lock you up somewhere no one will ever find you and then we'll kill you. And no one will ever tell your story.”

This time he doesn’t say anything and I wonder what else we can get from him. I don’t think he’s lying. I just think he’s batshit-crazy. Most of what he says could be true, given who he represents and what I know about them (what I’ve seen them do) it could be true but the context is all wrong. Give them small truths and they can't see the big lie. Wilson used to say that at the Academy. Poor doomed Wilson.

“Can I ask you again”, he says just when the door opens and the men in black come to take him away.

“Have you found anything worth dying for?

They pull him out of his chair.

“A friend? A girl? A cause?

They drag him out the doorway. He struggles just enough to be able to twist around, look me in the eyes and let his last words slip through.

“Because it’s not until you have that you’ll know how to really live.”

055. I thought angels would be prettier

“Did it hurt?” he said, slurring more than he meant to.

“You know. When you fell from heaven?”

It was a terrible line, even he knew that. But it was getting close to closing, and pickings were slim. She wasn’t pretty, but she was just-pretty-enough, and the feather tattoos poking out from under her bra strap had inspired him.

“You know,” he leaned in, attempting what he thought was a whisper.  “Because you’re an angel. It must have hurt.”

He was as surprised as anyone when she said yes.

It had hurt. The first fall – from the gates of heaven – hadn’t been that bad. They prepared you for it with a month of crash training and a set of disposable wings. No, in the end, it was the little falls that got you.

The tacos didn’t taste as good as everyone said they would, and shop assistants were rude. There were awful things scrawled across the back of toilet doors, and the men on internet dating sites always lied to you. They kept showing the same shit on TV – M.A.S.H. reruns and episodes of last year’s Big Brother – and it was hard to get comfortable on a couch you’d picked up on the side of the road.

The worst thing was the grey. There was so much of it. Up there, all anyone could talk about was walking, barefoot, in lush paddocks. But for some reason, they’d buried all that under a blanket of grey.

She looked around. The pub was a dive, and tonight it all hurt more than usual. So she let him kiss her and it didn’t surprise her that he tasted like stale beer and disappointment.

That’s the thing about falling. Once you start, it’s hard to stop.