4. DEAD IN LOVE: A TALE OF THE THIRD GIRL (February 2008)

“A treat for the emotionally retarded,

sexually inadequate and dimwitted…a

greviously sick melange of hyper-mammalian girls…a totally degenerate enterprise.”

n  LA Times critic Charles Champlin on Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

Dead in Love

A Tale of the Third Girl

February 2008

‘Ten thousand is a lot of money.’

            ‘Not for what I’m providing, it isn’t.’

            ‘What’s your name?’

            ‘Pumpkin.’

            ‘Bullshit.’

‘Why would I make up an alias?  What would be the point?’

            ‘Okay then, Pumpkin.  Explain it one more time.’

            ‘You’re lonely?’

            ‘Yes.’

            ‘You’re utterly suicidal?’

            ‘I am.’

            ‘You want to end it?’

            ‘I do.’

            ‘You’re sure?’

            ‘I am.  I’ve nothing left.  Everything means absolutely nothing to me.   I want it all to be over.’

            ‘And you don’t want to be alone?’

            ‘I do not.’

            ‘Then, for the final time: I will die with you.  We will make our grand exit together.  I will hold you while we overdose.  I will suck your cock while you drive over a cliff or smash us into a wall.  I will dangle alongside you with matching manchester wrapped around my neck.  However you want to do it.  Pick your poison.  For a measly ten grand.  I will hold your hand into the afterlife.’

            ‘I have a question.’

            ‘Sure.’

            ‘What good is the money if you’re dead?’

            ‘That, Dear John, is none of your concern.  If I have a starving child to feed.  If I want to donate it to some kind of animal shelter.  If I want to buy components and send an elaborate bomb to the White House, it’s none of your concern.  We’ll breathe our last breaths together.  That’s all that counts.’

            ‘You’re pretty enough to raise the dead.  Why do you want to do this?’

            ‘Because.  Whatever your misery, it’s a theme park of fun compared to mine.  When do you want to do it, Dear John?’

            ‘Thursday.’

            ‘Thursday’s cool.  Do you have the money?’

            ‘Right here in the gym bag.’

            ‘Cool.  How do you want to do it?’

            ‘I want to leap off the top of my ex-wife’s office building.’

            ‘Cool.’

            ‘Mid-coitus.’

            ‘Going out with a bang as well as a splat, huh?’

            ‘I want to cripple that bitch’s brain.’

            ‘Dealing out some hardcore psychic revenge, huh?’

            ‘You’re in high spirits for a girl whose life is about to end as a wet splatter.’

            ‘In my experience, the end is never the end.’

            ‘Isn’t that a Bond movie?’

            ‘Possibly, Dear John, possibly.  I couldn’t say for sure.  I mostly watch horror films.’

            ‘No shit?’

            ‘Hmmm.  No shit.  I find I can relate.’

***

Pumpkin smiled and laughed at things that weren’t funny.  She rolled her eyes and lifted the tip of her nose with an index finger when deep in thought.  She curled her lip up into an angry sneer when drunk.

            Pumpkin had eyes as large and hair as dark as Barbara Steele.  She liked earrings that dangled.  She liked battered jeans.  She wore her sandals even in the rain.  She had tits like Ingrid Pitt.  She wore T-shirts that hugged them tight.  She was tight as a mouth clamped shut.  She tasted like springwater. 

            Pumpkin turned heads.

            Pumpkin clouded minds.

            Pumpkin broke hearts.

            Pumpkin was twenty-four.

            She wasn’t going to get any older.

            Pumpkin slept rarely.  She read classics.  She watched B-grade.  She ate only for taste.  She loved the smell of bakery, coffee, ripening fruit. 

She slept with men when she felt like it.  She was good at it.  She enjoyed it.  Even if she was self-conscious about the coolness of her touch.  But men never cared.  They rarely even noticed.  When they did, she blamed it on a poor circulation problem.

            Pumpkin, she talked a lot.  Pumpkin, she smelled pretty fine for a dead girl.

            Pumpkin, she was the world’s hottest zombie.

            Pumpkin didn’t remember much about the night she died.  She remembered pitching a tent.  She remembered picking mushrooms.  She remembered a night like a warm black glittering nothing.  She and Adam, they wrapped themselves up in it.  Tripping gloriously.  All was going as it was indented to go.

            Then there was blood.  The smell of shit.  Severed glistening parts of people she’d never met.  Parts of Adam she’d never seen before.  Broken parts.  Red parts.  Inside parts. 

            Somehow she ran.  Pumpkin Dwyer: Instant Scream Queen.  Just add blood.  She tore through the woods wasted and wearing only bits of her boyfriend.

            Some would say she never looked so beautiful.

            Pumpkin ripped herself apart running through the woods. 

            The monster came after her.  Of course.  He loved her.  Instantly.  At first sight.  He didn’t know why.  His mother would have been ashamed.

The monster was calm.  Methodical.  Barely breaking into a jog.  He tracked her.  Axe in one hand.  Adam’s head in the other.  He just wanted her dead.  Like he was. It was something they could share.

            Bizarrely, Pumpkin flashed back to one Valentine’s Day, eight years earlier.  Some misfit with a hang-up threw a plastic bag through her window.  The bag held:

            his own piss

            shit

            semen

            a hunk of meat rotten and crawling with maggots

            a whole trout so decomposed it had partially liquefied

            roof tiles

            a photo of his erect penis

            a love letter.

            The bag burst on impact.  Splattered all over the room.  Pumpkin was terrified her cat was inside.  She mustered up the moxie to check before the smell made her puke. 

            This is what Death must smell like, she thought.

            Her parents came into her room.  They fought dry heaves.

            The smell stayed in Pumpkin’s house for a week.  No amount of scrubbing or spraying or disinfecting could dissipate it.  No amount of vacuuming or shampooing could deodorize it.  For seven days, Pumpkin picked fish scales the size of her father’s thumbnail out of her carpet.

            As she climbed up a gnarly old tree.  On the night she died.  Reeling and shocked and stoned.  Pumpkin remembered the smell. 

            The monster of a man who would kill her – he wore it.

***

Pumpkin found them in strip clubs.  With eyes deader than the strippers.

She found them alone in parks at night.  On wooden benches.  Sobbing into their hands.

In restaurants staring into half-empty coffee cups.  Lit but unsmoked cigarettes burning down to their fingers.

In supermarkets wheeling empty carts down aisles. 

Picking at stained shirts in Laundromats.

At subway stations.  Toes edging off the platform.

Her Johns.

She knew they wanted to die.  She knew it.  She felt it. They were tractor beams of sorrow and they drew her in.  They would invariably look at her as she got near.  They would invariably see past her unbelievable beauty.  And they knew too:

Pumpkin wanted it as bad as they did.  Maybe even worse. 

Pumpkin figured it thus: Death is so much easier when someone goes with you.  It’s far less tragic.  It’s far more rock and roll.  It’s almost heroic.  It’s nearly noble.  There’s a comfort in the company of someone beautiful checking out beside you.  It feels fated.  Pre-destined.  It feels subversive.  World-beating.  Order snubbing.  An anarchic embracing of The End.  A beautiful ritualistic erasing of all.  Romeo and Juliet.

Juxtapose with the lone suicide:

Sad.  Pathetic. 

Weak.  Spineless. 

Shameful.  Selfish.

The only suicide that Pumpkin really rated was Elliott Smith’s. 

Although inconclusive, there was talk Elliott Smith tried to stab himself in the heart. 

In the heart.  

Imagine the sorrow that forced such poetry.

The first one, after she came back, she met in a bar.  His name was Pete.  Pumpkin didn’t want to know his name.  Pete told her anyway.  She did the job for free.  She didn’t give a fuck about money.  She didn’t think she’d come back again.  She didn’t give a fuck about Pete.  He was lonely and sad and smelled like unwashed hair.  All Pumpkin wanted was to die again.  One more time.

Pete’s bathroom: 

Pumpkin and Pete got naked.  Pumpkin cut Pete’s wrists wide open.  Blood came out in gouts.  Pumpkin gashed open her own soft white flesh.  Pumpkin watched as the blood spilled around her.  Around him.  Hers and his commingling. 

They kissed.  They grew paler and paler.  Pete said, thank you.  They collapsed.  They died. 

Pete stayed dead.  Pumpkin woke several hours later.  The cuts in her wrists gone.  Healed completely.  She woke with a dryness in her throat.  She woke with a dull headache.  She woke with unspeakable sadness in her heart.

Jerome.  He had robbed her of her own death.

***

Pumpkin clung to the tree.  She hugged a branch tight.  She let out whimpers.  She let out the soft, throaty mewlings of the terrified.  She closed her eyes.  The tree shook.

Below her.  Monster:

He punched the tree.  Kicked it.  Wrapped his massive arms around it.  Tried to uproot it.  Failed.

He rocked it back and forth.  Incredibly, the tree swayed some.  He let out the loud, anguished screams of the homicidally frustrated.

He began to climb.  As slowly and methodically as he walked.  He dug his fingers into the bark – self-made handholds. 

Pumpkin opened her eyes.  Saw the monster coming for her.  Heard his grunts.  Heard the scrape of his body against the tree.

He was slow.

Pumpkin dangled herself from the branch.  Dropped.

The monster stuck out an arm.  Caught Pumpkin as she fell.  By the throat. 

His legs were wrapped around the tree.  One hand was drilled into the trunk.  The other near circumnavigated her neck.  He hauled her up to his eye level in one slow easy move. 

As she hacked and choked, he examined her in the moonlight. 

The nostrils of her sharp nose wide and flaring.

The large round wetness of her dark eyes.

The tightness of her full lips, pursed and full.

The quivering of the soft cleft in her chin.

The movement of her breasts as she squirmed.

The tightness of her thighs as she kicked.

He was not ready to end it.  He was puzzled by his reluctance. He needed to think…

He dropped her.

Pumpkin fell again.  She landed on a thin but sturdy branch.  It snapped under her weight and velocity and she continued to fall.  She hit the ground hard.  The fall knocked whatever wind she had left from her.  The broken branch lay beneath her. 

The monster climbed down. 

The girl: 

Hair as black as his heart.  Eyes as wild as his thoughts.  Skin as pure and white as he believed his motives. 

Pumpkin: wild and dangerous and destructive. 

Pumpkin: everything his mother ever warned him about.  Everything his mother taught him to hate.  Everything his mother instructed him to destroy.

Pumpkin:  just about the fairest thing the monster had ever seen.

He had never before given much consideration to beauty.  Beauty was something he had been told and taught to eradicate.  Exterminate.  Erase.  Beauty was always ugly to him before.  He was indoctrinated so. 

On the ground, Pumpkin fought for breath, fought her fear.  She got to her feet.  She held the branch.  She used it as a crutch.  She limped along, refusing to look behind.  She jammed the branch into the ground. Dragged herself after it.  Jammed it into the ground.  Dragged herself after it.  Over and over. 

She was the Blood-Red Queen crippled in a Black Forest Wonderland.

The monster found the spilling of blood beautiful.  The removal of limbs sexy.  The flaying of skin gorgeous.  The dealing of death erotic and sensual. 

He slaughtered because people were simply too beautiful to live.  The meek weren’t to inherit the earth.  The ugly, the monstrous were.

Now.  Now, he just felt confused.  Pumpkin, she looked like death embodied.  Bold and dark and ethereal.  Beautiful.  There was something inside her… 

He got to the ground.  He saw Pumpkin.  She had a broken leg.  A shard of bone stuck out from her shin.  She trembled and shook.  She was blood and filth coated.

He plodded after her.  He punched himself in the forehead as he walked.  He thought about killing.  The pleasure it gave him.  How good he was at it.  There was doubt, however.  Doubt his mother would find shameful.

Pumpkin heard him coming.  Utterly bewildered and tripping furiously, she knew nothing but to go onward. 

The monster’s footsteps got close. 

Pumpkin turned.  She raised the branch.  She pointed it at whatever it was that pursued her.  She said, ‘Stay away.’

He walked right into the sharp broken end of the branch.  It pierced and popped his left eye.  It entered his brain.  He pulled back sharply.  Twenty-five inches of branch stuck out from the weeping mess. 

With his good eye, he looked over at Pumpkin: 

Her hands clasped over her breasts.  Her breath coming in heaving gasps.  Her long dark hair flowing all around her.  Her gore-stained nakedness. 

He lunged forward.  He grabbed her.  He pulled her towards him.  The other end of the branch punctured her throat.  It ripped through the back of her neck as he pulled her ever forward.  Pumpkin spat up blood. 

She spat it all over her own face. 

She spat it all over his. 

The monster twisted his head on the branch that sat in his ruined eye.  He pushed it further into his own head. 

Her lifeblood, hot and red and fresh.  His undead blood, black and putrid and rank.  They spilled and mingled. 

He forced himself forward. 

He pulled Pumpkin forward. 

He looked down at her a final time.  He wanted to tell her how much he loved her.  He wanted to share things with her.  He couldn’t. 

Instead, he bent his neck awkwardly. 

He kissed her. 

She tasted his foulness.  He, her stale but sweet spit.

She noted the dry roughness of his blackened tongue.  He noted the soft pink fleshiness of hers.

She breathed in his final foul undead breath.  He breathed in her last gasp.

Together they fell.

Together they lay dead for twelve months.

Alone, she woke.

She lay paralyzed for some unknown time as her body knitted itself back together.  She felt nothing.  Then she felt pain and stiffness.  The sun scorched her re-grown eyes.  The sounds of the woods reached her re-grown eardrums.  The wind touched her re-grown skin. 

When she could move, she touched her throat.  She found it whole.  She shed tears.  She screamed out a birth cry that sent startled birds flapping into the sky.  She rolled to her knees.  She got to her feet.  She lurched tentatively forward like the zombie she was.  She felt the coldness of her creamy skin.  The stillness of her dead heart.  She breathed deep.  Sucked unneeded air into unnecessary lungs. 

She looked around.  Bodies lay haphazardly around her.

A slaughter had brought her back.

It was a family.  Backpacks ripped open.  Drinks and dehydrated foods scattered.  Tents and sleeping bags in disheveled rolls.

They must have stumbled upon the monster.  Upon her.  They roused them both from death like light sleepers from a nap. 

Pumpkin sank to her knees.  She cried almost until the sun went down.

She found the woman’s pack.  Took ill-fitting clothes from it.  Dressed.  She drank from a water bottle.  She sensed she didn’t need it.  She wasn’t thirsty.  She just wanted the sensation.  The smoothness of the water moved her to cry anew.

Alone.  Unable to look upon the slaughter.  She walked.  She walked aimlessly through the woods.  Never tiring.  Never hungering.  Never thirsting.  Feeling muscles loosen.  Noting new patches of skin.  Eyelashes.  Fingernails.  Hair growth.

Noting new thoughts in her head.  Thoughts not her own.  Memories never experienced.  There was a name:

Jerome.

Jerome.  Whatever was his life, he left it in her mind.

Pieces of it came to her.  Fractured memories migraine-stabbed her.

Images of a mother’s desire.  Images of a monstrous birth.  Images of a tortured hate-filled childhood.  Of a creature without empathy.  Without emotion of any sort.  Except hate.  Always plenty of hate. 

His hate made her reel.  His hate made her cough and hack.

Still the images continued.  Images of hot and bloody murder.  Images of him reborn again and again. 

She felt the curse of immortality.  She felt the slow retarded birth of his feelings.  His growing love of slaughter.  For the dealing of death.  Like a tumor in his heart, his death-love grew.

She saw herself amongst them.  Amongst the blank, featureless faces of the massacred.  She felt his love for her.  She saw the apocalyptic pedestal he placed her on.  Built on the bones of all.

All of this and more.  It gave her a realization:

Jerome was his mother’s instrument.  His mother’s vile and heated curse.  Her genocidal fever dream.  Against a world she hated.  A reality she wanted torn down.

The ugliness of it caused her to faint.

Before she blacked out – a second realization.  More sickening than the first:

Jerome was an anti-life virus.

His love for her was an infection.  A mutation. 

A gift.

***

Pumpkin didn’t feel guilty about Pete.  About her survival.  She just felt cheated and empty.

            She tried again.

            If at first you don’t succeed and all that.  It became her motto.

            She walked in front of a truck.  She woke up in a cold morgue drawer.

She O.D’d in a nightclub bathroom.  She came to being raped in a stall.

She jumped off a building.  She peeled her broken body off the road before shocked and vomiting cops.

Emptiness turned to loneliness.  She thought of Pete.  Of how comforting it was to be with someone at the end.  Of how easy and right it was.

Loneliness turned to a sense of purpose.  She’d comfort, guide and navigate the willing to the other side.  Just like Charon.  Only sexier and more motherly.  Just like the Christopher Cross song.  Except she’d be paid before getting to the other side.

A zombie’s got to live…

She began seeking them out.   It wasn’t hard.  She was drawn to them and them to her.  Her price was a fixed ten grand.  Except in special circumstances.  Except for special customers.

An AIDS sufferer once got a freebie.  A cancer patient once paid a dollar.

An sense of purpose grew into a facsimile of life.  Lost pleasures were recovered.  Empty hours were filled.  And then.

She met a man.

***

A memory not hers.  Whole and unabridged.  In her head like she lived it.  Like she remembered it with loathing:

The young boy listened.

The old woman spoke.

‘In the Renaissance, dear dream of mine, monsters were spawn of God or Devil.  Twisted offspring of twinkling star or angry, hurtling comet.  They were the creation of foul, inter-species fucking.  Created by other.  Created by outside forces.  Heavenly forces.  Satanic forces.  Cosmic forces.  Just like in those comics you like.  Monsters were loyal guardians of treasure, mindless destroyers of trespassers, tragic creatures lost and alone.’

The boy nodded.  He didn’t understand.  He nodded anyway.  He feared the result of any other action.

The boy wiped the girl’s blood from his nose.  He struggled for understanding.  For concentration.

‘But, but, but, dear dream, there came a new idea, a convincing and fascinating philosophy of monstrosity.  Do you know what it was?’

The boy shook his head.

‘Monsters.  Monsters are born of a woman’s fancy.  They are twisted sculptures of misshapen flesh skin and bone, infused with a mother’s living will, a mother’s purpose, a mother’s desire.  This is why I call you, ‘dream,’ John Jerome, for you are mine.  My dream.  My vision.  Sculpted in my womb by the metaphorical hands of my very imaginations.  Did you know, John Jerome, that Aristotle, considered a great man, a great thinker, considered woman monstrous?  It’s true.  This great thinker.  This great imaginer, he said, ‘Anyone who does not take after his parents is really in a way, a monstrosity.’  Think on that, my son.  He said, ‘The first beginning of deviation is when a female is formed instead of the male.’  He said that the female is a deformed male.  He said that I, your mother, am a monster.’

The boy looked away from his mother. 

He looked down at the dead girl in front of him.  Her young flesh torn up and leaking red.

He looked at her twin brother.

The open slash across his throat nasty and seeping.

The blood fascinated him.  Its viscosity.  Its redness.  Its ceaseless flowing.

‘Look at me, John Jerome Mitchell.  Look at your mother.’

He did.

‘If I am a monster, is it not natural, is it not inevitable, is it not the will of the universe, that I produce a monster?  If I am abnormal in my womanhood, what abnormality, what deviance will be my offspring?  More wrenching still: if I am a monster, do I deserve life?  Do I deserve to breathe and eat and fuck and shit and breed in this world of normal, ordered men?  Does any woman?  We are taught that monsters should be destroyed.  And they should be.  For monsters stand against nature.  But what of the normal, ordered men?  What do they deserve?  Do they deserve to live and breathe and prosper while they mark me and mine with the stigma of monstrosity?  Do they deserve to lay claim to the territory of the imagination, the territory from which I birthed you?  Do they?  They do not.  So.  What are we to do?  You who are truly monstrous, free from trappings of gender, labels of rationality.  You, who inspire fear and paranoia and loathing in those who behold you.  You who inspire these primal emotions because you show them the absurdity of it all.  You must kill them all.  The women must die because they are Other.  They are monstrous.  They are abominations.  By the logic entailed, all they produce is abomination.  Son or daughter.  They both come from monstrousness.  They both inherit monstrousness.  Their ugliness, their deformity, their abnormality is always on the inside.  They wear their hideously perfect flesh as a cheap parlour trick.  As slight of hand.  As soft pink, newly shorn sheep skin over the fang-bearing wolf within.  Look.  Look at the perfect dead children at your feet  --‘

He did. 

‘-- They should be your friends.  Your peers.  But you, you are honestly and immaculately monstrous.  So, what were they these still, unbreathing little humans?  Your bullies.  Your tormentors.  But they were more monstrous than you.  They, born of monstrous man and monstrous woman.  Born of sweaty gasping fuck.  Born of mere biological function.  You were born of flesh and fuck and fever dream.  Look how right it is that they are dead.’

The old woman kicked at the dead girl’s head.

The boy stood transfixed.

‘Look on the perfect wonder of it.  Boy and girl.  Brother and sister.  Born of the same deviant womb, deviant by its own very nature. By its own otherness.  You, John Jerome, are my monstrous dream.  My breathing manifesto of hate.  You are your mothers imagined champion.  Her Knight.  Her savior.  You will rise again and again from death.  This is the gift I give to you.  You will rise from death so you can give it to any and all who cross your path.  Any and all except your family.  For the work we do, we do all together.  So, you look upon these children we slew and you smile, my son, for today, we have begun the work of your many many lives, your many many undeaths.’

*** 

There was a loneliness about him.  That was the first thing Pumpkin noticed.  The first thing she felt.  It drew her to him.  Not happenstance.  A fated glance. 

            He vibed Loss.  Capital-L loss.

Not in a desperate, blinding apocalyptic way.  Not in the way she was used to.  There was nothing bleak about him.  Only sad.

He vibed human.

Pumpkin ignored the usual clutter of the horny, the lost, the nihilistic, the stoned.  Pumpkin watched him.  He was:

Ambivalent to his surroundings.  Oblivious to the music.  To the jostling he received from buzz-hungry drinkers at the bar. 

He was:

Handsome.  Blue-eyed.  Natural dirty blonde.  With the toned physique of the fit.  Without the muscles of the vain.  He wore a thick brown leather cuff watch.  A black ropy string tied around his neck.  He wore no rings, marriage or decorative.  Pumpkin liked that.  She didn’t like rings.  He was served a beer.  He raised it to his lips.  Sipped.  Savored it.  Stepped away from the bar.  Left Converse sole-tread patterns on the beer-soaked floor.

Something squeezed tight inside Pumpkin.  Something strong and large. 

She fought it back down.

She closed her eyes.  Tight.  She bit her bottom lip.

She fought tears back down. 

She counted to ten.

She opened her eyes.

She’d lost him to the crowd.

Pumpkin went to the bathroom.  Splashed cold water on her face.  Looked at herself in a cracked mirror.  Fought a flush it was impossible for her to feel.

Some chick with asked if she was alright.  Pumpkin couldn’t look her dead in the eyes.  She managed to say yes. 

She rubbed her face and thought of Adam.

Adam.  Taken by Jerome.  Taken.  Such a strange expression.  He was taken from us. 

Adam was hacked into bloody chunks. 

The only part of Adam that was taken was his head.  Carried away by his killer like a trophy.  Dumped at the base of the tree she climbed to escape him.

The killer whose life was like a shit inside her head.

Adam was sweet and Adam was cool.  But Pumpkin never loved him.  Not really. 

She wondered if she had ever loved anything or anyone.  In any true way.

She loved the end.  The great rush of the final moments before her own existence ceased.  She loved slipping into blackness.  Consciousness fading.  Erasing. 

Pumpkin’s life never flashed before her eyes.  In her experience, that idea was bullshit.  Pumpkin found that the end erased not recalled.  Thankfully.  Mercifully.  There was a great comfort in the nothingness.  A greater kindness.

The only life that ever flashed before her was not her own.  An abominable life.  A life so hateful, its recollections brought her to her knees.

She walked out of the bathroom.  Already doubting what she’d felt.  Already forgetting the feeling.  She tripped over her own loose sandal. 

The universe, in an astounding confluence of events, sent her lurching into the very source of her bewilderment and her confusion.

He grabbed her.  Steadied her. 

She looked up at him. 

She said, ‘This is a shamelessly huge Dickensian coincidence.’

He said, ‘Hi.  The music’s so loud.  You might want to repeat that.  All I heard was dick…’

                                                             *** 

Pumpkin spent two days walking through the woods before she found her way to a road.  She had no idea where or when she was.  But a lonely trucker was happy to help the pretty zombie girl out. 

The truck driver commented on the leaves in her hair.  The dirt on her skin.  He said she looked like something Elemental.  He had some Swamp Thing issues in the back.

Pumpkin managed a smile.  She told him she’d just come back from the dead. 

The truck driver laughed. 

He took her to the nearest town.  From there, she used the dead woman’s cash to get on a bus home.

            By the time she reached her parents’ door, she’d caught up.  On the year. On the time.  She’d caught up, but it hadn’t sunk in.

            A year.  A whole year lying dead.

            She couldn’t knock on the door.   Couldn’t blurt out the plot of her life in trite exposition:

Hi.  Remember me?  It’s Pumpkin.  I know you’ve possibly had me declared legally dead, as obviously no-one found my remains, but it turns out that the homicidal maniac who killed me was some kind of immortal and because he loves me or thinks I’m the manifestation of death or something, he bestowed his gift of undeadness upon me.  Can I have some coffee, please?  Wow, Dad, you’ve got a bit paunchy…

            Pumpkin couldn’t see them.  She couldn’t speak to them.  She wasn’t even sure that she wanted to.  She came home because that’s what you do.  You go home.  She felt oddly numbed and detached and uncaring.  Another symptom of the Jerome-virus.

            Pumpkin hid in her mother’s carefully tended garden.  It smelled like her grave, rich and full.  She curled up into a ball.  The damp earth soaked through her borrowed clothes.  Touched her skin softly and wetly. 

            She cried again.  She cried for what she couldn’t feel.  She cried so hard the irony was lost on her.

            She cried herself to a calm sleep filled with nothing but darkness. 

            She awoke.  New shards of poisoned memory sticking in her head. 

            She saw:

            Death upon death.  A twisted old man.  Proud of the monster.  Proud of the destruction. The waste. 

            She saw:

            The mother.  Aged and frail.  Mind slipping.  Still potently venomous.

            Pumpkin screamed and screamed.

            It was early morning.  Mr and Mrs Dwyer woke with the screams.  This was the suburbs.  Nobody screams in the suburbs.

            They raced outside.  They ran to their garden.

            They saw:

            They saw their daughter’s ghost.  Writhing and thrashing upon their herb garden. 

            Their daughter’s ghost looked up at them.  From this unkempt grave.

            Their daughter’s ghost said, Mom.

            Their daughter’s ghost screamed again.

            This time.  So did Mr and Mrs Dwyer.

            They ran.  Mr and Mrs Dwyer.  They ran like the Letzes from Amityville –

            Empty-handed

Terrified

            Never to return.

***

‘Nevermind.  What I said.’

            ‘Huh?’

            ‘Nevermind.’

            ‘Okay.’

            ‘Sorry.’

            ‘What?’

            ‘Sorry.’

            ‘For what?’

            ‘SORRY.’

            ‘No, no.  For what?’

            ‘Oh.  Umm…for falling on you.’

            ‘It’s ok.  As far as people falling on me go, it could’ve been a lot worse.’

            ‘Ok.  Well.  Sorry.’

            ‘No problem.  I said, “It’s ok.”’

            ‘Oh.’

            ‘You keep saying that.’

            ‘What?’

            ‘You keep saying that.’

            ‘Yeah.  What do I keep saying?’

            ‘ “ Oh.” ‘

            ‘Oh.’

            ‘See?’

            ‘Yeah.’

            ‘Well.  It was nice to meet you.  Take care ok?  Maybe buy some tighter sandals.’

            ‘Sorry, what?’

            ‘Take care.’

            ‘You’re going?’

            ‘Uh huh.’

            ‘Oh.’

            ‘There you go again.’

            ‘Right.’

            ‘Right.’

            ‘Look, this might sound a bit…weird, but I feel bad about stumbling into you like some soused bimbo and maybe, if you’d like, I could maybe, you know, buy you a drink or something…’

            ‘Sorry.  I didn’t catch any of that.  Look, I have to go now, ok?  Have a nice night.’

            He left.

            Pumpkin wondered what the hell was wrong with her.

She felt it again.

Something within her.

The loss within him.  Palpable behind a smile.  Behind a carefree demeanour.

Pumpkin followed him.  Past a parade of hungry looks.

She came right through the doors and out into the night.  She knocked a bony bitch on her bony ass as she did so.  She managed to say sorry.

The bony bitch scowled.  The bony bitch bitched at Pumpkin.  The bony bitch’s boyfriend checked Pumpkin out.  The bony bitch looked up at him.  Expecting some display of chivalry.  Expecting a hand.  Expecting anything but her man staring at Pumpkin.  The bony bitch said, Hey.

Pumpkin ignored it all.  Went out into a quiet street.  Looking for the man with the quiet sorrow.

He stood several blocks away.  Staring at an empty can in the middle of the road.

He turned to her.

He said, ‘I don’t have anywhere to go.’

*** 

Her parents left the front door wide open. 

            Pumpkin walked through it with hesitation.  Like an uninvited evil thing.  Like a dead girl returning home. 

She smelled the house smell.  The smell of the life that was.  She noted it with familiarity.  Not sentimentality. 

She recognized it. 

She registered it. 

She was unmoved by it. 

She walked through the house silently.  Like her feet weren’t touching the floor.  Like all the noise in the world had somewhere else to be.

She ran her fingers along walls.  Feeling the coarseness of the paint.  Oddly surprised by it.  She felt like a specter made solid.

She sat on the floor of her room.  She glanced around.  She was moved more by the titles of books long unread than the photos stuck to her walls.

She studied the faces in the photos.  She wondered why she didn’t feel anything.  Anything beyond the recognition of the facial geometry within them. 

Again she cried for what she couldn’t feel.

This time, the irony was not lost.

What has he done to me?

Frustrated and pained, she packed a bag.

She packed clothes.  She packed soaps and scented oils.

She packed a notebook.  Her favorite fountain pen.  Some ballpoint back-ups.

She packed paperbacks.  The only books a dead girl needs:

The Black Dahlia.

The Guards.

High-Rise.

A Thousand Plateaus.

Moby-Dick.

Crime and Punishment.

The Complete Short Stories of Franz Kafka.

Her neighbors came cautiously to the still-open front door.

They said a half-hearted hello.  They said a frightened are you all right?

Pumpkin slipped out her bedroom window.  Out and away.

To begin her new undeath.

*** 

They found a place to have coffee and breakfast.  They talked as new couples do, until the sun came up.   The dawn lit him warmly.  Created a glimmer in his red-rimmed eyes.  The dawn accentuated her etherealness.  She glowed in her paleness.  Starkly black.  Starkly white.

            Him: ‘If I may make an observation.’

            Her: ‘Please.’

            Him: ‘If Guido Crepax drew Ingrid Pitt, the picture would be you.  Does that make any sense?’

            Her:  Not really.

            Him: ‘Ingrid Pitt starred in loads of old Hammer Horror movies.’

            Her:  ‘Ah.  Her I know.  The vampire with the cleavage.’

            Him:  ‘Yeah.  The vampire with the cleavage.  Guido Crepax was an Italian artist.  He drew erotic comics.’

            Her: ‘Oh, really?’

            Him:  ‘Yeah. Foxy chicks.  Rendered in black and white in sweeping inky lines.  Like black carved out of white.  So stark, at times it’s like they’re not even there.  He did Valentina, a strip about the horny musings and fantasies of a photographer.  Finally I can sleep, Valentina says, and dream my story.’

            Her:  ‘I don’t dream.’

            Him: ‘Maybe you are now.’

            Her: ‘That’s so corny.  You’re so corny.’

            He laughed.

            She laughed.

            Her: ‘So, what you’re saying is, I resemble a buxom B-movie actress and the splotchy renderings of a porn artist.’

            Him: ‘Well, when you put it like that, I guess it doesn’t sound as complimentary as I’d hoped…’

            Her: ‘It is a strange compliment, you have to admit.’

            Him: ‘Yeah.  Well.  I guess I’m out of practice.  Least it’s different.’

            Her: ‘That it is.  That it is. You going to tell me your name, man of the unusual compliments?’

            Him: ‘Simon.’

            Her: ‘Hello, Simon.  I’m Pumpkin.’

            Him: ‘Pumpkin.’

            Her: ‘Thank you for saying it with a perfectly straight face.  Even if there is laughter in your eyes.’

            Him: ‘It’s cute.  I was just hoping you don’t turn into one at midnight.’

            Her: ‘Oh, Simon.  The corniness continues.’

            Him: ‘Sorry.’

            Her: ‘Besides.  It’s six a.m.  I’m still here.’

            Him: ‘So you are.’

            Her: ‘So I am.’

***

The desire for sex came back.  Once she had become accustomed to her new existence.

            Soft, tender sex.

            Rough, painful sex.

            Short, nervous sex.

            Long, passionate sex.

            Each encounter calculated to provoke.  To stimulate.  To encourage.  Something in herself.

            The rough, painful sex was the most successful.  The hurt and the pain were felt.  Felt deeply and authentically. 

            But Pumpkin hated the men.  The sad, sad men.  Actualizing horrid lusting nightmares upon her.  Until their knuckles were bruised.  Until she was swollen and red and purple and torn.

            The other kinds of sex weren’t unpleasant.  She never came.  But the men and the women always did.  Pumpkin felt:

            Visible.  Corporeal.  Whole and beautiful. 

            The sex made her real.

            To those she fucked:

            It made her alive.

            To her:

            It kept her alive.  If only in the memories of her lovers.

            They all wanted to see her again.  The brutal and the gentle alike.  She captivated them.  She seized and occupied a deep, primal part of their minds.  Stimulated it.  Gratified it.  With only her presence.

            She was the ultimate dark and mysterious beauty.  She birthed fantasies in the minds of others.  With a look.  A glance.  A shake of her hair.  A brush of her cool hand. 

            But they never loved her as much as those who paid to die with her.

            Her customers.  They knew.  They understood.  How special she was.  How generous and merciful she was.

            Jerome made her monstrous.

            Those she died with.  For the timeless moments before death.  When their eyes met and their ghosts touched.  They made her divine.

***

It was in bed, one morning, when he told her.

            ‘I loved her.  I really did.’

            ‘I don’t doubt that, Simon.’

            ‘Do you want to hear this, I mean really?  It’s not a…pleasant story.  You might think I’m…I’m…’

            ‘I won’t judge you.  I also will not force you to tell me. You want to unburden yourself of it, you tell me…if not, well, that’s up to you.’

            ‘I want to tell you.  I just worry about the ramifications of telling you.’

            She stroked his face.  ‘There isn’t much you can tell me that will shock me.  I’ve seen some things that…well, I’ve seen some things.’

            ‘Will you tell me?  About these things?’

            A sound escaped her lips.  She clamped her mouth shut.   ‘Maybe another time.  I’m reluctant to…I’m reluctant.’ 

            Pumpkin raised herself up.  Looked Simon over.  Took note of his stress.  ‘If I may ask.  Before you start…’

            ‘Go ahead.’

‘Why tell me?  You don’t have to.  You certainly don’t owe it to me.’

He sat himself up.  Brought his knees up to his chest.  Clamped his arms around them and held himself tight.  ‘You’re curious.  About my past.  About the way I am.’

‘True.  But that means nothing.  As I said: you don’t owe me anything.’

‘I want to tell you.  I feel like I can’t go on with this…with us unless I tell you.  It feels…dishonest.’

Pumpkin laughed.  ‘Christ.  First time anyone’s ever said that.  In my experience, secrets are hidden away in dark locked rooms up here,’ she tapped her temple.  ‘They get confessed before a body cools or they get taken to right to the grave.’

‘That’s mighty dramatic.’

‘Yeah.  Yeah.  It is.  I know.  But, fuck Simon, people like to share with me…people like to tell me things…Look, I’m making a complete mess of this.  Please don’t get all hangdog on me.  What I’m trying to do is compliment you, because no-one’s ever really been this…considerate…before and, and well, people tell me things out of darkness, not, you know…love… or whatever positive emotion motivates this…this…okay.  I’m going to shut up now. Just tell me.  In your own time.  If you still want to.’

‘I do.’

‘Okay.’

‘Okay.’

Pumpkin waited.

Simon rubbed his face.

Pumpkin waited.

Simon said, ‘I killed the love of my life.’

***

One night, in a bar dark and filled with dispossessed and wannabe-dispossessed punks and masochists, a handsome black man dressed entirely in grey approached Pumpkin.  She felt the size of his heart, the warmth coming from him. 

            Pumpkin wanted nothing to do with him.  She was working.  She had Jerome’s blood-red memories pumping through her.  She felt death and cruelty around her.  There was a client here somewhere.  The black man was not him.

            He smiled at her.  She looked him up and down.  Short-trimmed hair.  Cleanly shaven.  Broad grin.  Expensive grey two-piece.  Grey shirt. Grey tie.  Black loafers.

            Pumpkin tossed back what remained of her beer.  ‘You slumming?’

            ‘Actually, I’m here for you.’

            ‘That’s pretty weak.  Beat it, huh?  You’re not my type.  I don’t do smiles.’

            He smiled even more broadly.  A skinny mohawked kid in a Damned T-shirt looked him up and down.  Grey suit ignored it.

            ‘No, really.  I’m here for you.  My name is Clayton Loft.  A mutual friend sent me to find you.’

            Pumpkin got Mohawk to buy her a beer.  He still had some youthful optimism in him, despite the palpable disaffection.  Maybe in a year or two he’d be ready.  Still, beer’s a beer.

            ‘I don’t have a whole heap of…friends.’

            Grey suit kept smiling.

            It bugged her:

            ‘You’re a real mystery man, huh Clayton?  Well, I like my mysteries with lurid titles and tough, no-nonsense attitudes.  You’ve got neither.  Fuck off.  I’m busy.’ 

She looked Mohawk dead in the eyes.  ‘Where’s your friend?  The one with the cobweb tattoo and the serious depression?’

Mohawk: ‘He’s busy.  The barmaid.  Alexis.  She’s his bitch.’

            Pumpkin: ‘I’d say death’s his bitch, the look on his face…’

            Grey Suit: ‘You’re a pretty girl, Pumpkin.  I’m amazed how well the scars on the insides of your wrists healed.  Thought for sure they’d be all, you know, lumpy and red, like bits of cord against your skin.  That was messed up, honey, seriously.’

            Grey suit gestured to the big-titted goth barmaid.  ‘Whiskey Sour.’

            She looked blank.  ‘Mister, I have no fucking idea what that is.  We’ve got whiskey.  We’ve got ice.’

            Grey Suit: ‘Shit, honey, and I was starting to like you too, T-shirt that tight, but whiskey will do, honey.  That will do.’  He turned to Mohawk.  ‘I buy you a drink, son, will you take your ass off to the little girl’s room and fix your mascara?’

Mohawk: ‘No.’

Pumpkin was far too startled to say much of anything.  She unconsciously rubbed the soft skin at her wrists.

Grey Suit slipped a card out of his breast pocket.  Pushed it across the bar towards Pumpkin.  ‘You want to solve this mystery, call.  Really would be worth your while.  It’s pretty lurid, I believe, and I can be as no-nonsense as a Stark novel.  Mohawk here may find that out, he doesn’t back the fuck up a bit.’

Grey suit slammed back his whiskey.  Burned a death stare and beamed telepathic waves of impending violence at Mohawk. 

Mohawk stepped back.   Good for him.

Grey Suit spun and walked away.  Without looking back, he said: ‘This music really is the shits. Call me.’

Pumpkin looked at the card.  It read:

Clayton Loft:

Private Investigator

A cell phone number followed. 

Pumpkin slipped the no-nonsense piece of card into her ass pocket.  She finished her beer.  She brushed past Mohawk and traced the radio waves of emptiness vibing from his friend with the cobweb tattoo across a punk-filled dancefloor. 

Cobweb didn’t have much money.  Pumpkin didn’t really care.  The urge to deathtrip with someone was too strong.

***

Simon sat up in bed.  Pumpkin did the same.  There they sat.  With knees hunched up to their chests.  With arms wrapped around themselves. 

Simon scratched at his stubble. 

Pumpkin continued to wait.  Deathly curious as to the tale’s telling.  She didn’t push it.  She breathed deep breaths of air she didn’t need.  She brushed long black bits of hair away from her pretty face.  She formed a look of kind attentiveness.  And waited.

‘It was…It was a weird thing.  It was surreal and it was horrible and I carry it around with me always.  Her ghost sits inside my chest, inside my lungs and my heart and she squeezes, from time to time she squeezes.’

Pumpkin scratched her cheek against her raised knee.  She formed a look of empathetic sadness.

‘We fought a lot.  I don’t think that’s anything…too unusual.  But we fought a lot.  She was passionate and fiery and she hated it when I drank.  And I drank a lot.  I used to hide bottles outside by the trashcans.  I used to hide them under and around the house.  It’s such bullshit, you know?  How many times have we all heard this story?  How many times have you heard someone swear to clean up?  And fail.  And swear again.  And fail again.  I felt like a cliché.  I felt like a caricature.  I never really denied the problem.  I knew it existed.  I knew I needed the help I did actually seek when she threatened to leave.  Long story short: I fucked it up.  She came home and found me drunk.  Like, fucking out of it.  She said she’d be gone for the weekend.  She was testing me.’

Simon reached over to Pumpkin’s bedside table.  He shook a bent cigarette loose from a soft and battered pack.  He fired it up.  Dragged back long and hard. 

‘I resented it.  The test.  I fucking hated that she didn’t trust me and that she set me up in order to catch me out.  I hated the fact that she didn’t trust me enough to go two fucking days without a drink.  I loathed the fact that she was right.’

He passed the cigarette to Pumpkin.  She smoked some.  Passed it back.

‘She raced upstairs.  I lurched after her.  She started throwing things into a case.  She started screaming.  She came out of the bedroom.  I was still finding my way up the fucking stairs.  She had, you know, she packed so fast there were bits of dresses and socks and shit hanging out the sides of the case.  I made it to the top and she stared down at me and she swore at me and she said that she was leaving and I stood there and swayed like the drunk fuck I was and shook my head and said no over and over again.  She came at me then.  She swung the case at me.  It caught me here,’ he stroked his left cheek, ‘and cut me.  I came at her and grabbed her and shook her and told her she wasn’t going anywhere.  She fought and slapped at my face and I kind of swung around and tossed her.  She went backwards down the stairs.  She tumbled on down and landed horribly on her head.  That was it.  That was it.’ 

He butted out the cigarette in an ashtray made up like a vampire bat.  He wiped away a single tear that rolled down his face. 

‘I escaped a jail term.  I have no idea how, but I did.  I didn’t deserve to.  I tried to punish myself in other ways.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Three failed suicide attempts.’

‘Three?’

‘If at first you don’t succeed.’  He forced a laugh.  ‘Seemed the thing to do at the time.’

Right then and there. 

Pumpkin fell in love.

***

The bagels smelled fresh.  The coffee less so.  Still, Pumpkin savored the aromas of both.  She had her nostrils flaring over the bagel when Clayton walked in.  He wore grey again.  Tiny bells attached to the door signaled his arrival. 

            He sat down next to her.  Smiled his smile.  ‘Yeah.  The bagels are good here.  I come to this place whenever I’m in town which is a bit since I’ve been tracking you.’ 

He smiled over at a waitress.  She put a little more oomph into her hip swing as she brought him a menu.  He ordered same as Pumpkin.  She sat, smelling her coffee.

‘Okay, mystery man.  I’m here.  You’re here.  I’m curious and kind of nervous and I don’t like strangers knowing my name and certain things about me.’

‘You are, of course, referring to your immortality, Ms Dwyer.’

‘If that’s what you think it is, then you don’t really know me that well after all.’

His coffee came.  So did his bagel.  He added way too much sugar for her liking.  He stirred and sipped.  ‘What, then, would you call it.’

‘What I would call it really is no business of yours, Mr. Loft.  You’ve got me here, sir.  I suggest you do not push your good fortune in finding me and get to the point.’

‘Wasn’t fortune had anything to do with me finding you.  Me finding you had to do with considerable man-hunting ability and a rather large amount of time in seedy places with people I’d consider all round pretty low on the scale of what separates folks from animals.’

‘Okay, Mr. Clean Cut.  Let’s lose the judgement.’

‘Fair enough.  I apologize for that.  You clearly have an…affinity…for people on the way down and all the way out.  They want to clock themselves out early, it’s no beef with me.  You want to exploit that with your…gift that’s –‘

‘Gift?  Again you’re revealing your ignorance, Mr. Loft.  I’m sick of this shit.’

She stood. 

Clayton Loft took a bite out of his bagel.  Licked a small blob of cream cheese off his lip.  Pumpkin still stood but didn’t move.  Clayton decided to call this stand off a draw.

‘I sought you out, Ms. Dwyer, because my client, a Ms. Maggie Janson, wishes to speak with you.’

Pumpkin still stood.   ‘She wants to hire me, this isn’t the way to go about it.’

‘She doesn’t want to hire you, Pumpkin, she wants to speak with you.’

The bells over the door tinkled again.

‘What about?’

Clayton turned around in his seat.  Nodded up at the attractive middle-aged woman standing beside him.

He said, ‘Ask her yourself.’

The woman said, ‘Clayton.  I’m so sorry I’m late.  I couldn’t find a spot.’

‘It’s the bagels.  Place packs out for the bagels.  We should’ve made this meet for later.  I’ve offended this fine young woman with my procrastination.’

The woman looked at Pumpkin.  She smiled.  Extended a hand.  ‘Hi, Pumpkin.  I’m Maryanne.’  Pumpkin didn’t shake anything except a smoke loose from her softpack.

Clayton stood.  Offered his seat to the woman.  ‘I believe that’s me done here.’

The woman said, ‘Thanks Clayton.’

‘Pleasure, Ms. Janson.  I’ve got a lead on Fourth Girl, ma’am.  I’ll be in touch.’

The woman smiled at him.  Clayton walked off.  Bells tinkled again on his departure. 

Pumpkin watched the door sway shut.  Exhaled smoke.  ‘Captain Mysterio didn’t pay for his food.’

Maryanne smiled at her.  ‘That’s ok.  It’s considered part of his expenses.’

‘What the hell is going on here, lady?’

‘ I’m here about John Jerome Mitchell.’

Pumpkin split some coffee.

Maryanne said, ‘By my reckoning, you’re the third girl.  Me, I’m the first.’

***

 In the bathroom Pumpkin cried and clutched her chest and felt some of the weight of her sad destructiveness lift.  She wiped her eyes and raised her head and looked up at the mirror.  She looked at herself and looked at Simon behind her.

            ‘Are you okay?’

            She didn’t know how to answer.  She wanted to tell him she loved him.  She wanted to pull the ghost of his dead from out of him.  Send it dissipating into the atmosphere. 

She wanted to heal him. 

The virus in her wanted to do this through death.  He’d be agreeable, there was little doubt of that. 

They could take kitchen knives and mortally wound each other.  Each stab a gift of devotion and love. 

They could take pills and drift off together.  Entwined, floating away on clouds of numbed tragedy.

            She said: ‘Yes.’

            However they chose, they could be together.  But not forever.  She’d be back.  She always comes back.  He’d stay right where he was.

            He stroked her back.  Smiled at her wistfully.

            She rued the day they met.  Yet she wouldn’t change her clumsy nightclub fall if she could. 

            Him: ‘Do you love me?’

She wasn’t sure how to answer in the positive without the shedding of blood.

She broke a disposable razor.  She snapped out the blade.  She sliced the top of her index finger.  She squeezed forth blood.

He stood silently.  Watching the red run down her finger.  Watching it drip down past her wrist.  Down off her elbow to the floor in big, dark tear-shaped drops.

She approached him.  She put her bleeding finger to his chest.  She traced a heart-shape over his left breast.  She tilted his head forward.  She stood on the tips of her toes. She kissed him deeply.

He pulled away.  He smiled.  He said, ‘I’ve something to show you.’

***

Jerome stood rigid.  At attention to his mother’s philosophizing.  He caught his reflection in his machete blade.  Further warped and stretched on the length of its virgin steel.

            Ma Mitchell said, ‘Kindness is dangerous and love is fatal.  Love is the downfall of many.  It is the rescuer of many.  Those who are lonely seek it.  Many who have it want to shake it loose.  I send you now, off into the world, inoculated against this contrary emotive disease.  Beware it.  Never fall for it.  Be forever against all love except for that of your mother and your family and for the taking of life.  That is all the love that you need.  Lady Death shall be beautiful and true to you and you shall see her dark lovely and mysterious face in those of the slaughtered.  All love outside of this and all untruth bed down together and you are nothing if not honest, John Jerome.  You are an honest expression of my hate.  Your love is death.  Your truth is me.’

            He struggled to understand.  His mother was filled with spiteful contradictions.  With ill-defined concepts.  But he would not let her down. 

He looked still at his blade.  Created by his grandfather with hot affection and murderous incantation.  Hilt bound in the soft, beaten leather of his first victim.  It was a tool built for the kill.  A farewell gift from the old man in the basement.

            ‘Do not be deceived, my dream.  Express my will through your blade and your power and never be deceived.’

*** 

Pumpkin was puzzled but dressed quickly at Simon’s eager urging.  He kissed her earlobe and patted her ass softly as they left her apartment.  He held her hand as they neared his car.

            Pumpkin liked his car.  Old muscle cars fit her retro aesthetic.  Fluro tubes lit the underground garage and several flickered and blinked over the car.  She stood by the passenger door.  Simon said no no and signaled her to join him by the trunk.

            He stuck his key in the lock and turned it.  A familiar smell escaped through the crack.  ‘I think you two should meet.’

            ‘What?’

            ‘I think you two should meet.’  He smiled still. 

            He opened the trunk.  The smell got bad. 

            Inside: something long dead wrapped in plastic sheeting.

            She said fuck.  She took steps back. 

            He smiled still.  ‘That’s her.  It didn’t quite go down like I said, but that’s her.  Her name’s Penny.’

            Something broke inside her.  Inside her head and inside her chest. 

            She turned.  She stumbled into a man behind her.  He smiled too.  He said hi.  He stuck a needle in her neck and injected something into her. 

She felt hot and loose and knew she’d been overdosed.  She slumped into the second smiling man.  He said: ‘Seth.  Grab her fucking legs.’

            Before she died again Pumpkin saw the girl in the trunk. 

Close enough to kiss. 

So kiss she did, through plastic sheets. 

One dead sister’s welcome to another. 

The trunk shut loud. 

Pumpkin crossed over.

***

She came to, groggy and bewildered and convinced all was dream.  She opened her eyes and felt aching pains in her arms.  She realized they were strung up above her.  She felt the plastic ziplock bite into her wrists.  Saw the rope looped through tied to a bolt to the dark ceiling.  She moved her legs.  Realized they were treading air.  Looked down, saw her toes, inches off a concrete floor. 

            She tried to speak. Words came out muffled mumbled sounds.  Realized there was something over her mouth.  Felt like tape. 

            Breathing heavily now through flaring nostrils, she looked around and about.  Appeared to be an old warehouse. 

Pigeons fluttered in through broken arched windows and cooed and shat from beams above. 

Light came in at awkward angles.  Shining down in dust-filled beams on bits of broken brick. 

            A rubble and rubbish filled space stretched out before her.  Her muted grunts echoed pathetically through the space.  Reaching the ears of no-one helpful. 

            Thoughts coming together now in semi-coherent bursts.  Better than a minute ago where she had all the cognizance of an empty thought balloon in a comic book.  Ideas began to glue together in her head. 

            Simon.

            The name stabbed her in places she didn’t think she had any more.  Places he gave back to her. 

            Footsteps click-clacking in distant echoed reverb reached her ears. 

            Someone said, ‘Great set, huh?’

            Woman.

Pumpkin strained to see.

‘Tough, you know, to find a good set.   I’m all about interior, babe.  But you’d know that if you’ve seen my film.  You have seen it, haven’t you?  I think you have…or maybe that was Selina…I don’t know…’

Her hair was shorter than Pumpkin remembered it.  But the round face, the arching eyebrows, the defiant grin.

Elisha.

Pumpkin strained against her bindings.  It just made her swing a little bit.

‘Oooh.  I do like that.’  Elisha began setting up a tripod.  ‘I think what we’ll have to do here, babe, is start off with a close up on those tootsies of yours.  Maybe, like, if you can keep them still for a minute to open.  Give the impression that you’re dead.  You should be pretty good at that by now, eh Pun-kin?’

A single tear broke loose and rolled down Pumpkin’s cheek.

Elisha formed a triangle with her thumbs and forefingers.  Shut one eye, squinted the other through it. 

‘Then, I’ll slowly pan up, yeah, fuck, don’t cry now.  Shit, you better be able to do that on cue or my producer will shit.  He’ll shit in ways normal producers won’t.’

Elisha stepped back.  Reached into the black bag that dangled over her shoulder.  Pulled out a small digital camera.  Fixed it to the tripod.  She pressed a button.  The thing beeped and started recording.

            She stopped.  Looked at her feet.  She rubbed her face.  Breathed deep.  Said: ‘Excuse me, babe.’

            Pumpkin looked on as Elisha walked into the shadows and vomited.

            Elisha came up to Pumpkin, wiping puke from her full lips.  ‘He made me cut my hair.  He says it’s time for a latter-day Romay look.’

            Pumpkin looked at Elisha.  The blurred mascara.  The snot and vomit running from her nose.  Far-away look she’d seen countless times before.  The look of the hopelessly drug-fucked. 

‘He’s making me do this, Pumpkin.  He followed me, he found me, he took me, he’s punishing me.  They’re all punishing me.  They’re going to punish us all, Pumpkin.  Maggie’s dead.  They fucking killed her parents.  They fucking gunned her down.  We’re all going to pay, Pumpkin.  They’re putting the bits back together again.  Those bits in bags we took as fleshy trophies – they’re taking them back.’

Elisha stepped close.  Pulled aside long dark hair.  Whispered.  It’s all a movie, Pumpkin, all of this.’ 

Elisha stepped back, spun around.  Came back to Pumpkin’s ear.  Her bottom lip brushed softly on Pumpkin’s lobe.

‘There’s cameras all around.  It’s a film within a film.  Yeah.  Another one of those.’ 

Elisha laughed loud and long.  Calmed herself. 

‘Wooooooo.’  Deep breath.  ‘Right.  That’s my scene, Pun-kin, that’s my scene.’

Elisha stepped away.  Stopped.  Snapped her fingers.

‘Oh yeah, Pun-kin, yeah.  I was supposed to give you this…’ Elisha pulled a folded piece of paper from her jeans pocket.  Opened it.  Squatted down at Pumpkin’s dangling feet.  Unfolded it.  Left it on the cold concrete open and ready for reading.

‘You can see this yeah?  Yeah.  You got good peepers for a dead chick.  I remember that.  I tell you Pun-kin, back in two thousand, you know, when we took Jerome and we hacked him into pieces, you know.  I wanted to bring a camera.  I really really did.  But I didn’t in the end.  You know why?’

Elisha stroked Pumpkin’s face.  ‘Because I remember everything up here.’ she tapped her temple.  Hard.  ‘Here.  And I remember you, I got you framed exquisitely, babe, up here.  You topless, luring that fucker towards the fucking bear traps, babe, toward us with our Jap knives and our roll of bags.  You were fucking magnificent.  Magnificent.    You were an icon that night.  We all were.’

A breeze came in through the broken windows.  Threatening to carry off Elisha’s typewritten message.  ‘Whoop.  Can’t have that, Pun-kin.’  She got back down on one knee.  Weighed the thing down with brick chips.

She got back to her feet.  ‘Oh.  I’m taking direction horribly today.  I needed more prep time.  I got to take the tape off your mouth.  Don’t scream or blah blah blah…I’m not reciting that bit of dialogue.  You know the drill, right?  Yeah.  Actually, between us girls, there’s nobody around to hear you anyway…the tape’s just for…you know, it fit the part.’

Elisha ripped the tape off Pumpkin’s mouth.  The ripping sound echoed about.

Pumpkin fixed a death stare on Elisha tighter than a headlock. 

She said, ‘I never liked you.’

Elisha went hmph.

‘Right from the start.  I thought there was something extremely fucked up about you.’

‘This from Dr Kavorkian with tits.’

‘Fuck you.’

‘Well, I always liked you, Pun-kin.  I liked your sploitation star cleavage and your little ski-jump nose.  I always liked you.  I was going to look you up.  Invite you to the premiere…’

‘You’re leading them all to us, aren’t you?  How could you do this?’

Elisha began to cry.  ‘They are making me.  They are forcing me.’

 Pumpkin: ‘Do you know what they did to me?  Do you know how they fucking played me?’

Elisha: ‘Did you know that Lina Romay isn’t even Lina Romay’s real name?’

Pumpkin: ‘You’ve fucking lost it.  I don’t give two ass-fucking chimps about Lina Romay.’

Elisha: ‘Lina Romay’s real name is Rosa Maria Almirall.  Isn’t that lovely?  Rosa Maria Almirall.  Shit.  I wish I could roll my R’s right.  Apparently, Lina Romay was a Cuban singer she liked a lot.  So, she took the name.  We’re all playing parts, Pun-kin.’

Pumpkin:  ‘Do you know what they did?’

Elisha turned, walked away.  ‘Of course I do.  I wrote the script, didn’t I?  I’m writing all the scripts.  It gets a bit complicated on a –day-to-day basis, you know, I’m handling so many parts.  Have a look, Pun-kin…’

Exit Elisha.

Pumpkin turned her eyes to the paper bricked down in front of her.    She read.

***

SIMON CAMPBELL

A (ROUGH) CHARACTER PROFILE

By

ELISHA MAHER

Simon Campbell, Pumpkin’s love interest, is a tall, handsome, effortlessly cool sort of a man who must possess the type of brooding, smoldering charm and the tortured past that would draw Pumpkin inevitably to him.

He must be sympathetic, worldly, darkly humorous and magnetically mysterious.  Given Seth’s actual acting range, this may be something of a problem, but with limited resources and limited cast, Seth is the most likely to pull this role off and, given his actual grief, does possess at least the emotional hurt vital to the success and believability of this character: Pumpkin will feel his pain and loss and this is crucial.

Simon’s grief will stem, like Seth’s, from the loss of his one true love.  Unlike Seth, however, Simon’s one true love will have been killed in accidental circumstances.  To keep things simple, we’ll call her Peggy, should the need arise to speak this character’s name.

Pumpkin is attracted to sorrow.  Her emotional radar is kind of backwards, and for this to be effectively reversed, Simon must show her that perhaps living with sorrow is better than dying with it. We must play on Pumpkin’s natural empathy towards

(CONT’D)

***

Pumpkin hung her head.  Pumpkin cried.  And inside, she died again.

                                                                      ***

‘We had to do it this way.’  Simon.  Seth.  Whoever.  ‘We tried to do it all guns and gore last time.  We kind of fucked that up.’

            He stood in front of her.  Armed with a smile and some kind of knife he was trying to catch the light with.  ‘We had to think of other ways to bring the pain.  From the looks of you, we brought it.’

            He laughed.    

Pumpkin looked at him.  Beamed missiles of hot, napalm-sticky death at him.

‘I love her you know.  Penny.  I love her so much I beat her to death with a beer bottle one night.  The fighting part of the script – that much was true.  The drinking and whatnot, that was all Simon, you know, Elisha put all that together.  Anyway, I loved her so much I beat her brains in.  She won’t leave now.  She can’t.  I take good care of her, just so as you know.  I pick the maggots off of her every day and, as you would have seen, I keep the trunk of my car pretty cold.  Dry ice and shit.  The decomposition still happens, you know, but I’ve slowed it.  Clive and I, we make films.  This one, this one we’re doing now, that’s our main project.  We’re also doing one on Penny.  I called it Penny.  Seemed to make sense.’

Pumpkin tried to wad up some spit in her mouth to launch at this asshole.  It came out in dry foamy flecks like shaving cream can dregs.

            Seth didn’t even notice.

            ‘We film her.  Every day.  We pull in real tight on her face and we film it for three hours.  When she’s gone, like finally gone, nothing left, we’re going to splice it all together, speed up the film a little bit, so it goes all fake time-lapse and watch her decompose from beginning to end. We’re going to put titles up of the places we were on this trip, when and where we filmed, as it goes along.  It’s a tribute and a travel diary all in one show.  God, I love her.’

            Pumpkin: ‘You are the sickest of hundreds of sick fucks that I’ve ever met.’

            Seth laughed.  ‘Shit, you haven’t met Clive yet.  He’s all kinds of sick.  You haven’t met Joanie yet.  Oh man, your girl, what’s-her-name, Maggie?  Yeah, well, she killed Joanie’s fucking husband, man.  You know Hunter Thompson?  You heard of him, right?  You know what he said?’

            Pumpkin dangled silently.  She thought of Maggie.  Tough, gun-toting Maggie.  She wouldn’t have fallen for the soap-opera bullshit trip these fuckers laid on her.

            ‘Fucking no less of an authority than Hunter S. Thompson said,  “The man who transforms himself into a beast delivers himself from the suffering of being a man.”  You want to see someone who’s delivered themselves from suffering, I’ll introduce you to Joanie.  She’ll come and see you soon enough, I’m sure.  You might want to gnaw your own wrists off and make a fucking break for it first though.’

            ‘You’ve already done your worst to me.  Bring her on.’

            ‘Made you suffer like a woman, huh?  Yeah.  I was good, huh?’

            ‘You were. So good, I’ll kill you for it.’

            ‘How are you going to do that, pretty dead girl?’

            ‘I can’t die.  You know that.  Kill me.  Over and over.  I’ll keep coming back.  Again and again.  I’ll keep coming back, Simon, for you.’

            ‘My name’s actually Seth.’

            ‘You’ll always be Simon to me.’

            ‘Right.  Whatever.  Who says we want you dead, anyway?’

            ‘If not dead, then what?’

            ‘That’s not for me to say at this moment.  Comfortable?’

            ‘No.’

            ‘Compared to what’s coming, you are.’

            ‘Fuck you.’

            ‘You like drugs?  Have some more drugs.’

            Seth took a hypo.  He stuck Pumpkin with it.  ‘Enjoy the high, baby.  Things for you are about to get mighty low.’

            Nodding out, Pumpkin said, ‘You were shit in bed.’

            ‘That’s cheap and weak.  Anyhow, pussy cold as yours, what do you expect?’

            ‘Simonsimonsimonsimonsimoooooooooooooooooooon…youuuuuuuuuu…arrrrrrrrrrrree…miiiiiiiiiiiiinnneeeee…’

***

Her foot felt wet.

That was her first though when she came around.  Wet and warm and sticky. 

She looked down. 

Her little toe lay a good six inches away from the rest of her foot.  Blood pumped out.

She looked up.  The camera Elisha set up earlier watched patiently.

‘Hey.’  A man.  Another fucking man. 

His nose was broken.  His scruffy dark hair stuck out in tufts from under his cap.  His lips were kind of fat and overly wet.  He wore a black T-shirt.  It read, THEY’RE COMING TO GET YOU, BARBARA.  His eyes were dark and beady and seemed to glow. 

Pumpkin thought that in another movie, he might be handsome. 

But not in this one.

He held up a pair of blood-greased secateurs.  Blood-greased all the way to his wrist.

‘That’s good, look at that.  That’s good.’  He yelled over his shoulder.  ‘We getting all this?’ 

Seth, behind the camera now: ‘We are.’

‘Cool beans.’

He met Pumpkin’s eyes.  Raised his secateurs.  They click-clacked in his grip.  ‘Snip-snip.’

He moved around her.  He left bloody converse prints wherever he walked.  He said: ‘She stole my life, you know.  She stole our time together and she perverted it and contrived it and she turned a profit on it. She exploited the exploiter…’ 

He knelt down.  Denim soaked up her blood at his knees. 

He click-clacked the secateurs again.  Made a popping sound with his lips.  Put the next toe between the open blades.  He grimaced as he forced his way through bone.

Pumpkin screamed, but her mouth was taped shut again.

He got up.  He held up her toe.  Held it right in front of her streaming eyes.  He smiled.  Dropped it into his mouth.  Swallowed.  Tried to hide a look of disgust behind killer bravado. 

‘But she is my muse.  What am I going to do?  Chop her up into little pieces?  No, wait, wait, wait, that’s what I’m going to do to you.’ 

He coughed.  Rubbed his throat.  Working through the toe.

‘Blegh…that was gross.  Still, you ain’t getting that digit back now are you.  You’re officially disfigured, baby.’

He winked at Seth who asked if he was alright.  Needed a beer or something. He shook in the negative.

‘She had a hand in my brother’s death and she turned a profit on that too.  Movie magician that she is.’

Pumpkin bit back the pain.  Bit it back so hard she chewed through her lip.  Through blood-smeared teeth she said, ‘She’s a cunt.’

He laughed.  ‘Yeah.  Yeah, she is.  Absolutely.  But she’s a bona-fide genius, you know.  If only she didn’t look so much like Lina Romay…if she didn’t look so much like Lina Romay, I could maybe move on with my life and…anyway, listen to me, blabbering on about my personal life and shit…’

‘Whatever you’re planning on doing, you best rethink it.  I can’t die.  You know this.’

‘Who said anything about death?’  He turned to Seth.  ‘Seth, I say anything about death?’

Seth said, ‘No, no, Clive, I don’t believe you did.’

Clive turned back to Pumpkin.  ‘See?  Nobody said anything about death.  Now, Pumpkin, and I’ll be fucked to death by a fat-o-gram if that isn’t the cutest damn name I ever heard, what we are doing here is a two-fold plan of action dressed up as a nasty survivalist flick.  Of course, whether or not you survive is up to you.  Part one of the two-fold plan is to get you to tell us where you’ve got my brother’s arms stashed.  Part two of the two-fold plan is to exert some poetic justice by cutting you in to little bits just like you did my brother.  The longer you hold out on us, the more pieces of you there will be.  We can stretch this out for as long as you like.  Die on us if you want, that’s fine.  We’ll go out for a smoke and wait for you to come on back to us.’

Pumpkin gritted her blood-pink teeth.  ‘I’m not telling you anything.  Think I’m going to let you put that fucker back together?’

            Clive smiled.  Pumpkin lost another toe.  She screamed.

            ‘You best worry about who’s going to put you back together, you don’t tell us what we want.’  Clive stood.  Did a wobbly pirouette. ‘We’ve got you from every angle and I like to shoot a location out.  Think we’ll let you bleed and ponder for a while.  Smile for the cameras, if you can muster it through the pain.’

*** 

Sounds startled Pumpkin awake.  Strange smacking sounds.  Wet gurglings.  Spit bubble pops.  Teeth on tongue squeakings. 

Pumpkin awoke unsettled, befuddled and in exquisite pain.  Her bladder gave way and her waste ran down her thighs.  It dripped on the drying pools of blood around her feet. 

Dry sniffing sounds were heard.  Her scent snuffled in though clogged rasping nostrils. 

Despite herself, Pumpkin was freaked out.  She felt oddly mortal.  The sounds in the echoing dark amplified the dark spots of her imagination.  Terror upon terror sprung forth from her mind.

‘Who’s there?’  She felt herself slipping into a role not hers.   Weak and afraid and human. 

She vowed never again to feel anything.  Never again to be taken in by hope and warmth and men wearing masks of kindness. 

‘I know someone’s there.’ She tried to squeeze forth some confidence.  Wring out some bravado.  ‘Simon.  I’m going to kill you Simon.’

But it wasn’t Seth.  She knew it.  It was someone who had been even closer to her than Seth had.  She forced her wide flickering eyes shut.  Tried to stop her ears from picking up the slobberings and snufflings somewhere near. Tried to put off the reunion she knew that dawn would force. 

She smelled the familiar smell.

Jerome was here.  And he was eager.

***

And so the dawn came.  With it horrors reserved typically for the meeting of night and mind.

            The head was on the floor in front of her.  Resting on a thick stump of a neck.  Yellow and rotting skin bursting open to reveal what lies beneath.  Eyes bloodshot and wet unmoving and locked upon her.  Hair in long frail tufts, clinging by god knows what.  Teeth mashed through lips.  Swollen, black tongue poking through lip gashes.

            Jerome opened his mouth at her.  He stretched his jaws open wide and lashed out his tongue.  He wanted to taste her.  He tilted his head on his neck stump.  Tilted it so hard he tipped himself over.  He tried to roll towards her.  Being just a head, he couldn’t.

            ‘He looks like something pickled in devil’s piss, huh?’  Clive. 

            Pumpkin had been so focused on Jerome she hadn’t noticed his entry.

            ‘I mean, fuck, he was always hog-fuck ugly, but he’s sure looked better.  Guess being hacked into twitching, undead pieces will do that to a guy.  See what you’ve got to look forward to?’

            Clive picked his brother’s head up by some clumps of hair.  The hair ripped free.  Clive caught Jerome like a bowling ball slipped from his grasp.  ‘He’s a slippery noggin, my brother.  Take a closer look.’

Clive held the head out to Pumpkin’s. 

            Jerome licked her cheek.  Let out some kind of pleasurable groan.

            Pumpkin upchucked bits of stomach lining.  It hit the ground and frothed.

            Clive pulled the head back.  Grabbed it by the neck stump and balanced it on his open palm.  ‘Alas, poor Jerome.  I knew him well.’  He got close to Pumpkin himself.  ‘But not as well as you, girl.’

            Clive put his brother’s head back down on the concrete. 

Jerome tried to moan his disappointment: he wanted Pumpkin bad. 

He settled for the puddle of her bodily fluids he was placed in.  He tipped himself over again. 

His tongue lolled out of his ripped rotten hole of a mouth.  It wriggled as it tasted her juices.

            ‘Why you, huh?  What is it about you?  When Elisha told me about you, my mind did everything but have an aneurysm.  What is it about you that he likes?  Why are you the way you are, Pumpkin?  Do have any answers for me?’

            Pumpkin sighed.  Tried to avert her eyes from the slurping head.  ‘We died together.  Same time, same place.  We killed each other and we died together.  I always figured that had something to do with it.’

            Clive shook his head.  ‘No, no, no, no.  Well.  Maybe.  I don’t know.  That’s probably part of it.  But he feels connected to you.’

            Pumpkin smiled.  ‘Well, you had to be there.  It was a special night.  My first time, you know…’

            ‘First time?  First time what?’

            ‘The first time I died, Clive.  Man, Elisha was right.  You are slow on the uptake.’

            ‘Elisha didn’t say that.’

            ‘Oh, yes, she did, Clive.  She said shit worse than that.  She said –‘

            ‘Don’t change the subject.’

            ‘Who’s in control here, Clive?  Really.  She’s got you.  She’s got you all twisted around.  She’s unspooling you like a roll of 16 mm.’

            Clive laughed.  ‘What?  You trying to create some…some fucking tension between Elisha and me?  There already is tension, you stupid bitch.  You say she’s trying to play me?  Who cares.  She’s the one locked up in the back of the van with Joanie and my mother.   They’ll sniff out her bullshit even if you say I can’t.  Which I can, by the way, just so you know.’

            ‘You’ve driven her mad, Clive.  I think…I think what you’ve done is, you’ve turned her into you.’

            Clive sighed.  Took off his cap and ruffled his shaggy hair.  ‘Okay.  Look.  We’ve gone and made this all about me, when it really should be all about him.’  He pointed over to his brother’s slavering head.

            ‘It’s time for a re-union, baby.’ 

            Clive looked at the bit of his brother on the floor.  ‘You like her, huh, buddy?’

            Clive tore off Pumpkin’s shirt.  He said, ‘Shit, I can see why.’

            Clive picked up Jerome’s head.  ‘Time for me to chaperone this little re-union.  Ma doesn’t want the two of you getting too fresh.’ 

He brought Jerome back over to Pumpkin.

            ‘Me?  Me, I don’t personally care.’

            Clive held the head level with Pumpkin’s right breast. 

            Jerome’s tongue shot out.  It sandpaper-rasped its way over her nipple.

            Clive kissed Pumpkin on the cheek.  He pushed his brother’s head into Pumpkin’s breast.

            Pumpkin screamed as Jerome’s teeth bit into her and drank deep.

            Pumpkin’s blood dripped through the gory end of Jerome’s neck stump.

            Clive said, ‘It’s true love, baby.’

            Pumpkin felt herself near obliterated inside.  ‘I’ll tell you.  I’ll fucking tell you.  Please.  Please.  No more of this.’

            ‘Tell me what?’

            Jerome made choking noises.  Still he drank on, blood pouring now from his stump.

            ‘Where the arms are.  Where his arms are.  Just get him away from me.’

            ‘His arms?  Jerome’s arms?  Shit, honey, we’ve already got those.  Seth found those in a weird hollowed out spot under some skirting board.  We’ve had them for days.’

Clive worked the head free.

            Clive worked the head downwards.

            Pumpkin had never wished for death so strongly.  But, as usual, death didn’t come to her this day.

                                                                                 ***

The old woman in the wheelchair looked up at Pumpkin with malice and hatred and bile.

            Pumpkin recognized her within a beat of her undead heart:

            The woman who gave birth to monsters.

            Clementine Mitchell.

            The old woman oozed potent strength.  Strength re-inforced by the crazed will of the maniacal.   Ma Mitchell’s stare was one part magnet one part apocalypse.  It was as contradictory as she was.  It was ugliness and allure.

            Ma wore only a nightdress.  It was flimsy and thin.  Diaphanous and lacy.  Ma’s nipples were erect on her sagging, wrinkled tits.

Ma held Jerome’s head in her lap.

            She stroked it like a cat.

            Jerome stared at Pumpkin too.  Eyeing off her left breast for another feeding.

Pumpkin forced her eyes away from the caricature of mother/son bonding.  She looked, instead, at the woman pushing the chair.  Pumpkin recalled what Simon-Seth said:

Joanie.

Joanie’s hair was torn out in patches.  Joanie had deep self-inflicted crevasses in her head.  Angry, bubblegum-pink blobs for scars caused by scalping pieces of herself with something sharp and dull.  Joanie periodically punched herself in these scars.  Re-opening them when they shut.  Causing fresh trickling rivulets of crimson to spatter down her face, over her chin and fleck her heavy exposed breasts.

Joanie’s once pretty head lolled to the right.  She had a blood-smear on her shoulder.  Her naked torso was covered in cuts and sores, open and infected and oozing.  All over except for the skin around her swelling belly.  A perfect white oval unsullied by scab or sore or wound.

Pregnant. 

Pumpkin looked at Joanie’s face.  She would lose this baby.  She would have to.  The damage she was inflicting upon her own body would not allow a child to be carried to term.

Joanie’s gaze was as unsettling as Ma’s.  Nobody home behind eyes so blue they were virtually fluro in their glare.  Eyes so blue they stood out starkly from the red muck of her flesh.

‘Look at me, girl.’  Ma.  ‘I take great pleasure in knowing that I have a personal hand in your end.  I take supreme enjoyment in knowing that I can mete out revenge for what you did to my boy.’  She ran her hand over Jerome’s ruined face. 

Joanie laughed through her nose in hot rushing huffs. 

Pumpkin looked Ma in the eyes.  Fought the rush of nausea the contact caused.

Pumpkin:  ‘I have memories of you, Clementine.  Deep in my head.  I have memories of you with Jerome.’

Ma: ‘Is that so?’

Pumpkin:  ‘It is.  See, I know what Jerome is.  He’s an idea.  He’s a phantom philosophy made real through you.’

Ma drummed her fingers on the arm of her chair.  Shifted in her seat.  Jerome’s head near toppled.  After a moments sour discomfort a sickening smile cracked her face open.  ‘Everyone wants to know why you.  What makes you so special?  But I know why.’

Ma ran her finger over Jerome’s cheek.  ‘He saw something kindred in you.’

Joanie punched herself in one of her head wounds.  Licked the blood off a knuckle.

Ma:  ‘You went out there, in the woods, that night to kill yourself, didn’t you?  You and your pretty boy…’

Pumpkin went cold inside.

Ma continued.  The fucked-up smile widening.  ‘You went out there and told nobody where you were or what you were doing.  You got bug fuck mental on shrooms and went on a big final goodbye cruel world trip didn’t you?  And your plan was that when you come down, you’d do it, you and the boy, together.  But my boy, he got there first.’

Jerome’s head made a strangled orgasm noise.

Ma: ‘He felt the death urge in you and it made his dick hard.  He wanted to share it with you.  He wanted to show it to you.  He was looking for you for a very long time.’

Joanie wiped some blood out of her eyes.  Flicked it off her hand to the concrete.

‘See, I prepared him for everything except you.  I inoculated him against all human bullshit except suicidal urges.  How could he not dig that?  Him being who he is.  Doing what he does.  So he wanted to lay there with you, in death, for as long as he could.  And when he couldn’t stay there anymore, when his work stumbled into your path, he brought you back with him.’

Ma stroked Jerome’s head harder now.  Too hard.  Bits of him came off with her rubbing.

‘All that he did for you.  All that he showed you and all that he gave you…’

Ma passed the head up to Joanie. 

Joanie held the head between her breasts.

Ma wheeled herself forward, pulling aside flimsy folds of nightdress.  A butcher knife lay in-between her legs.  She said, ‘And how do you repay him?  You repaid him with this.’

Ma thrust the knife out.  Embedded it in Pumpkin’s guts. 

Ma stabbed and stabbed and hacked and slashed.

Jerome’s head made urgent noises.  Pumpkin thought she saw regret in his eyes.  Joanie put a hand over the monster’s mouth.

To Pumpkin’s trussed up corpse Ma Mitchell said, ‘You should have come to me, Pumpkin.  You should have come to me and embraced me, but you didn’t.  So I will rest and sleep until my son’s gift to you brings you back to me again.  And then I will kill you some more.  And we shall repeat this process until I can no longer grip the handle of this here blade or until my heart can no longer keep up with my will.’

And so Clementine Mitchell did.

Her heart kept up just fine.

***

Joanie circled Pumpkin.  Joanie jabbed at the dangling undead girl.  Joanie worked Pumpkin like a heavy bag.  She pounded Pumpkin with fists bound in leather straps.  She worked so hard all her cuts were open.

            Joanie liked sweat-stinging cuts.  They focused her.

Pumpkin thought she could smell Joanie’s blood.  Taste it.

Turns out it was her own.

Joanie kept working.  Pausing only to coo at the growing bulge in her belly.

Joanie pounded Pumpkin until her own hands were mangled.  Until pieces of Pumpkin stuck from her fists.

***

Ma watched on as Joanie and Seth held Pumpkin down.

            Pumpkin said nothing as Clive taped her mouth shut.  She shot Seth a look that said it all.  It said: I will come back for you.  This is not over.

            Clive fired up the small chainsaw.

            Seth turned his head as the blood splatters came.

Joanie did not.

            They put Pumpkin’s pieces in black bags.

            They buried them in nearby but separate locations.

            They loaded up the van. 

            They loaded up the coupe.

            Seth looked in on Penny.  Pulled some maggots off of her.  Winked at her before shutting the trunk.

            Clive and Elisha shared a look.  It could read in many perplexing ways, but could also be summarized as love/hate.

            Ma lay back on her mattress.  Took a pull from a bottle of scotch.   

Clive said to his mother, ‘You happy, Ma?’

Joanie rocked back and forth.  Muttered indescipherable things to her belly.

            Ma said, ‘I am, child.  I am.’

            Ma held one of Jerome’s severed hands.

            ‘But we’ve a long way to go.’

‘That we do, Ma, that we do.’

Clive slid shut the van’s side door.  He and Seth shared a joke and a smoke.  He climbed into the driver’s seat of the van.  He fired it up.

The Mitchells rolled out.

                                                                 ***

Things were white. 

Bright clear reflective virginal pearly white.  Pumpkin thought she’d crossed over for good.  Relief hit her like morphine: the rumors were true…

She heard a voice.  Didn’t sound like God.  If God was a chick, she’d be hip to that.  But she doubted God had a mouth as foul as this.

‘Holy fuck.  Hey.  You opened your eyes.  Shit, man, I’m so fucking relieved.’

Pumpkin felt a hand on her head.  It turned her away from the white.  Pumpkin looked up into the cheeky grin of a tattooed teenaged girl.

‘You’re in your bathtub.  I know, it’s fucking gross.  But you’re, like, leaking everywhere, you know?’

The girl lit a smoke.  Inhaled.  Pumpkin saw the girl was sitting on one of her kitchen stools. 

‘Found the smokes by your bed.  Hope you don’t mind.  I’d give you one, but like, you’re not exactly attached to your lungs yet.  Going to quit soon anyway. Excuse the poor choice of words, but you’ve got to pull yourself together.  Watching you heal is like watching one of those sped-up films of something decomposing.  But in reverse.  It’s fucking nightmarish, but it has a kind of car-crash appeal. I think I’m becoming desensitized.  Just as well, really.’

She ashed in the sink.  ‘ We don’t have a lot of time.  Selina’s getting cranky and I’m mad as motherfuck.  So hurry it up.’

Pumpkin looked the girl over.  Pumpkin gave her the rub.  Pumpkin proclaimed the girl:

All-business.  Genuinely dangerous.  Ball-drainingly sexy.  As fatal as femme gets. 

Even without the name-drop, Pumpkin sensed the hand of Selina.

The girl wore a tight T-shirt hawking some band.  The boys didn’t look fit to hook up her bra. 

The girl had her long dark hair hanging over half her face.  A .38 sticking out of her jeans.

Pumpkin blinked her eyes.  The girl looked like a parallel universe version of a no-nonsense inspiration she heard was dead.

Pumpkin looked at the ink on her arm.  Colourful and poppy.  Cartoonish but dark.  Vibrant.  freshly etched.

Amongst the tats.  On the inside of her arm:

Names:

JOANIE

RICHIE 

SETH

MITCH

CLIVE

CLEMENTINE

Pumpkin smiled.

One name in particular grabbed her eye in ECU:

SETH

            Pumpkin tried to laugh.  Couldn’t.

            Her Supervixen punk bodyguard waited.

            Pumpkin got on with the business of healing.