Take Me Dancing Tonight

Prelude:

Frank had a secret for no real reason. It wasn’t even his to keep, but he kept it all the same. Not to be special, not to be different, not even because he was unable to speak it, just because.   

Frank was a slight man, not tall, not short, but thin. Though young, he hunched forward, shoulder blades harsh, even under his long, heavy, wool coat.  His hair was black, shapeless and orbited about his head like a hallo of darkness. His eyes could have been green, they could have been brown, deep-set as they were, they never caught the light. His nose stretched forward and down into a point, his cheekbones were sharp enough to cut hollows in his long face. There was a discernible birdlike quality to his overall appearance. He was not a person for whom the sun-shone, there was a sense of tragedy about him and he knew it. Much like a bird, mucky from a life lived unnaturally in cities, you wouldn’t notice he was there until you did. And when you did, you might find your body awash with the chill of some nameless omen. Like a mysterious spec which haunts the periphery of your vision (which when caught for that fraction of a moment appears as if to fall and fall forever) the more you tried to focus your gaze on him, the less Frank was there. 

Frank had recently taken up smoking, for no other reason than he was in Paris and wanted to look the part. He was twenty and ignorant of most things.

His friends were all more fashionable, affluent and beautiful than him.  Photographers, models, and random rich Parisian kids who’s wealth afforded them even greater beauty than that which fate had already bestowed. Though being with them would on many sober occasion make Frank feel ugly or like an imposter, at other, more affected times, their company was like being high on good cocaine.  So as many times a week as he could, he would slump in corners and stand in darkened rooms across Paris watching perfect people trip-over VIP stalls, vomit on their expensive shoes, scream at bar staff and give their sex away for cheap. 

On this night they were at another hush-hush, fashionable, euro-trash dive. Frank had been so drunk as they landed that he now remembered only snatches of their arrival. A taxi door slammed. Somewhere he saw a man slap a girl across the face. A dropped cigarette rolled into the gutter to a chorus of dismay. Did that photographer guy hurtle jump over the homeless man passed out on the street? Or had Frank only imagined it? There had been a bouncer in the elevator who had looked the group up and down before taking particular issue with Frank, which he indicated with a sort of disapproving snarl.  He remembered this because Colette, had responded by drunkenly throwing an arm around him and slurring;

 “C'est mon petit ami“

And for a few moments Frank had decided that he was absolutely in love with the tiny blond haired model.  He found pity a turn-on.  And she had kept her arm around him the entire elevator ride. She had pushed her little weightless body against his and he had felt his mouth fill with spit as he envisioned flashes of her Disney-princess eyes looking up at him, lips around his cock. Now in this space, Colette was nowhere to be seen and Frank was wincing away the aftertaste of a shot Michael had bought for him. Michael was the first person Frank met when he arrived in Paris, he had been a friend of a friend who had offered him a couch for a few days and Frank had imposed himself on him ever since. 

Michael didn’t mind and Frank knew why.  

Presently Michael was showing off photos of the 15 year old Dutch Model he’d been dating for over a year to a heavily tattooed woman who’s neck he’d just spent the last 20 minutes or so sucking.  She looked bored.

Frank swiveled, to lean his back against the bar top and surveyed the scene around him. In a room with music this loud, the world becomes a silent movie. People communicate in pantomime and react in hyperbole. Lasers, smoke, flashing colorful lights, a rhythmic hum, and whispers of human beings all in a weird techno soup. It was less reality than what it might look like if a Television could dream. He remembered this thought later as he stared down at vomit in the toilet, which he assumed by the taste of socks and arsenic in his mouth, he had likely put there.  He wanted to sleep. How long had he been in here? What if everyone’s left? Where the fuck was he? How would he get home? Where was he spending the night? Fear and sadness passed over him with a cool familiarity.  He’s life was meaningless, he was alone in a strange city with people who didn’t care if he lived or died. He felt a tear gathering and decided not to stop it. It rolled down his cheek.  His noes became a rich fount, he batted drunkenly at the toilet roll dispenser, balled up a handful of paper and emptied his face. 

“prenez-vous une merde ?’’

Came a familiar voice. Michael was outside the door. Frank flushed, wiped his face and opened the door.

“Frank!?’’

It became immediately clear that Michael had not known Frank was the person in the stall. Michael looked completely fucked. As Michael was an incredibly beautiful man, Frank assumed he himself could only look much, much worse. Michael moved in thoughtful slow-motion as he pressed his palm into Frank’s chest, pushing him backwards, back into the stall, and with some difficulty closed the door behind them both.

‘’voulez-vous une ligne ?’’

Michael reached for a little glass vile he wore on a chain around his neck. The top of the vile unscrewed and attached to the inside of the lid was a spoon not much bigger than a matchstick for sniffing the cocaine off.

“il vous dégriser’’

Frank knew it would sober him up,  but his nose was too full of snot and sadness to snort anything.  Michael had a sniff, while Frank blew his nose and wiped his face once more.

“do you have a mint, or some gum?”

Michael, laughed. Screwed his vile closed and reached into his front pant’s pocket. He struggled to get his hand in, his jeans were skin-tight and the stall didn’t give them much space to play with. Michael stared at Frank and used his free hand to cup the side of his wet face.

“pleurais-tu?”

Michael ran his thumb across his face,  just under Frank’s eye where moment’s ago a tear had indeed been. Frank looked up into Michael’s eyes, they were beautiful. Looking back he couldn’t remember if they were blue or green. Just that they were stunning, and as full as they were empty.  Michael smiled;

“trouve’!”

He pulled something from his pocket and Frank remembered he had asked for a mint.  Michael looked thoughtfully into Frank’s unfocused eyes and used his finger to insert the small white disk deep into his mouth.

Frank felt Michael’s finger linger. His mouth filled with spit once more.

Michael very slowly pulled out his finger and said in a thick French accent;

“no more tears.”

Frank swallowed and realized he couldn’t taste mint.  

 Back on the dance floor, the Television’s nightmare suddenly started to become soothing. Frank couldn’t help but move his body, despite not really being able to feel it. He kissed a girl who’s likeness disappeared into the surrounding soup. He felt like his entire mind and body was a hard dick and even the tiniest bit of stimulation was enough to bring him close to the brink of bliss.

He didn’t want to leave when he was thrown in a taxi.  The sky was still dark but beginning to show the stains of a new day. He got to Michael’s and they collapsed onto his bed. They undid each other’s pants, pulled up their shirts and pushed their stomachs together while they jacked each other off. There wasn’t any conversation, no real kissing, just some grunting, before they came, and collapsed into sleep. It had happened before. First on the night they met. Frank didn’t really think about it. Michael slept soundly, but Frank soon found himself snapped awake once more, desperate with thirst.  He walked naked through the apartment. Michael’s place, much like Michael himself, was beautiful, rich, classically French and pretty much empty. A single antique armchair sat in the sitting room which opened up into a modern kitchen at the other end. Frank filled a glass with water and gulped it down, then filled it and did the same again. He immediately felt the lights starting to switch back on in his brain. In the corner of his eye a curtain curled to a gentle wind. Frank approached it and found the door to the balcony agar. He stepped out onto it and looked out at the incredible view of Paris that only a foreigner could truly appreciate.  Michael’s place was on the fifth story of a neoclassical apartment building, two streets back form the Seine. The apartment was on a corner and gave near 180 degree views of the city beyond. The sun was rising and painting the city with impressionist strokes of dusty blues and harsh candle flame yellows.  This isn’t really Paris, he thought to himself, this is the way people who dream of Paris imagine it to be- it’s rich private views like this that lead to visitors being perpetually disappointed with the reality of this place. Frank looked across the road to where he could see directly into the tiny kitchen of a far more modest home. As he looked, as though by the power of his gaze, a light came on. A woman, young, thin, with shoulder length, blonde, bed-messed hair floated into the kitchen wearing an old fashioned cream colored satin slip. Frank watched as she opened the French door from the kitchen and stepped out onto a balcony barely big enough, even for someone as tiny as her. She was smoking a cigarette which Frank had watched her skillfully light off the stove top. Accustomed to being invisible, Frank watched her, oblivious to his own nakedness and without fear of being caught. There was something about her, something which seemed to vibrate the space between them. She was plain, and frail, in a way much like himself, she was perhaps his age, maybe older, late-20s or so. He watched her smoke. She would take a drag, then open her mouth agape just long enough to let some of the smoke dance about her face, in the still morning air and then inhale deeply. After a while Frank became aware that he could hear ‘Wham!’ playing. There was a news seller setting up down on the street bellow who was listening to the radio unsuitability loud given the early hour.

  ‘… Wake me up, before you go, go…’

The music was ill fitting for the scene Frank was watching.  The upbeat pop melody filled his stomach with vinegar.  It was wrong. Off. And it made him feel sick.

The tiny woman on the tiny balcony tossed her cigarette away using only the tips of her fingers as though disposing of some small dead creature. She carefully watched it fall to spark the sidewalk and then looked up at Frank. There was no shock or fear in her expression, she seemed to look through him. He might have believed for a moment that he was indeed invisible, if it weren’t for her stare being too precise. It was directed at the exact position in space where Frank would have been, if he were indeed there. Her gaze lingered on him for a moment, devoid of feeling but full of knowing, as though she had felt him there, naked and watching, all along.  She swung a leg out over the cast iron barrier which separated her from the sky. Turned her back on Frank and, spreading her arms open like a dead bird, let herself fall backwards, gravity pulling her headfirst out of the window.

“…take me dancing tonight…” 

He was an anchovy of a man. Small, hairy, greasy and definitely not to everyone’s taste.

Cake Pops and Nosebleeds

“Listen up guys, forget everything you thought you knew ‘bout health insurance. I’ve got some really exciting stuff to share with you today.”

‘The worst part’, thought Tash was that he genuinely did look excited.

His face flush, mouth dry, eyes popping out of his plump muffin of a face, he was bursting at the seams to tell them about health insurance.

“Done,” she said without emotion.

She hadn’t really noticed she’d spoken. It took no time for her to forget ‘everything’ she knew about health insurance, given that during the time she had ‘worked’ there she’d actively done her best to learn nothing, sell nothing and make no improvements. No one laughed. Nobody ever got the joke, no one else ever recognized how ridiculous it all was.

Tash narrowed her eyes to better inspect the ‘Steve’ before her.

Maybe he wasn’t named Steve, but eight out of every ten times they were, and those other two times it was usually a Johnno (and once a Megan).

He wore the standard grey suit, blue tie combo, though this particular Steve was wearing black and grey Nike runners.

‘Quite the rebel,’ she thought, usually it was black square-toed shoes all the way for ‘Steves’.

She stared at his face. It was fat compared to his thin frame. Tash thought he looked like one of the ‘Cake Pops’ he would undoubtedly dish out at the end of his seminar, or whatever the fuck this thing was.

Cake Pops, by the way, are balls of cake on a stick. Someone broke the mold and started handing them out after business seminars a couple of months ago and the suits went crazy for them. Now they’re so commonplace that it’s created a sort of Pavlovian connection between PowerPoint presentations and Cake Pops.

Tash guessed Steve’s background was English or Irish. These guys were almost always Anglo’. His hair was thinning on top. He couldn’t have been more than 30, but he looked like shit. She figured he was probably a drinker.

Then, she pictured him having sex.

Tash always pictured men she met having sex. Not necessarily from the perspective of them being on top of her. Sometimes it was just a few close-ups of their faces in horrid ecstasy or the shape of their back from across the room. It was a peculiarity which had developed in her long ago with the planting of a single idea. At some point in her early teens, it occurred to Tash that every single man she ever met, from classmates to friend’s dads, to priests, teachers and even sweet little old men on the tram, any and all of them, who laid their eyes on her for more than a few seconds, would inevitably imagine her in a sexual way – they couldn’t help themselves. The revelation had made her feel so vile, so often, for so long that she wished every day since that she hadn’t thought it, but wished even more that it hadn’t been true.

As a response, she accidentally trained herself to do the exact same thing back. Not that she ever enjoyed it, it was simply an evening of the scores.

Now bloody Steve was ‘at it’ in her mind. Sweating, all awkwardly placed elbows, hairy shoulders, and grunts. Her eyes rolled involuntarily up in her skull. She tasted old spoon metal and the image passed.

Back in the boardroom, Tash looked at Steve and his assembly of vacant-faced contemporaries and pondered;

‘Who the fuck are these people? Who pays them to come up with this drab shit? Pointless graphs, mnemonics, and models? Oh god! And the acronyms! The endless. Fucking. Acronyms!’

Behind Steve was a poster that read ‘C.A.R.P’

‘Snappy name.’

She figured Steve would tell them what it all meant soon enough.

Or maybe he already had.

It was a gloriously warm, vivid, summers day outside. So they had done all they could to mask the windows. Black blinds blocked out all but thin slivers of blue sky near the floor. The room was white walled, grey carpeted and devoid of any embellishments. It was just like every school, hospital, and jail Tash had ever been in. She figured these sorts of spaces were deliberately designed without character. As sterile surrounds were known to subdue dissidence. Just outside her office building, across the street, was a park filled with old avocado trees and lush green grass that nobody ever sat on. The park was surrounded by offices and office employees who took lunch at their desks. Tash wanted to run out of the room screaming, kick off her shoes and sink her toes into that cool, itchy grass.

It was becoming increasingly difficult for her to determine the difference between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ behavior. It was ‘wrong’ to be trapped and shelved in office buildings without sunlight and freedom, it was ‘right’ to have a job. It was ‘right’ to be true to yourself, it was ‘wrong’ to sing on the tram or slap your boss across the face.

The pressure was building in her skull.

She looked around at the bored faces of her colleagues.

‘You couldn’t have found an uglier group of people if you had tried,’ she thought to herself.

‘Maybe they’re all morons. Maybe that’s why this sort of thing doesn’t make them want to dig their nails into their thighs. Maybe that’s why they can’t see what’s happened to them? Or maybe they just don’t care?’

She felt dizzy, there was a knee in her chest. Her head was filling with steam.

‘Ah!’ If only she could give herself a nosebleed.

Tash had never had a nosebleed. She’d hit herself in the face enough times as a kid that if it were physically possible for her to have one, she would have by now. She often thought of the ‘nose bleed kid’ from her first primary school. A lucky, shaggy-haired boy named Ryan Davies, who’d seemed to get one every day. There was usually ‘a nosebleed kid’, ‘a shit-their-pants kid’ and ‘a vomit kid’ at every school. Anyway, there were so many things that could set this Ryan kid off that he could practically have a nosebleed on command. He once even claimed to have gotten one from touching velvet. Tash and the other girls were all banned from wearing the fabric to school. Which was a real bummer, because it was the mid-nineties, and velvet was tre’ chic. Tash used to love watching him. So. Much. Blood. And from his fucking head! Everyone else would just throw him a tissue, scoot over a seat and go on with the important business of colouring. As if someone’s skull hadn’t started leaking! Tash would ask him about it, if he enjoyed it, if he ever stared at himself in the mirror and just let it drip, if he’d ever collected it in a cup to measure. She can’t remember if he ever answered, or just gave her a weird look. Probably the latter. It seemed so incredibly unfair to Tash that this kid, this Ryan kid, who didn’t care about anything, who didn’t feel the way she knew she was able to feel, got to indulge in such a spectacular release whenever he pleased. Tash once mixed up fake blood (she found the recipe in a book called ‘movie magic’- it was just corn syrup and food colouring) and filmed herself as she shoved it up her nose with her head back and then tilted forward to bleed for her camcorder. She’d had to go to the supermarket with her mum in order to sneak the corn syrup into the trolley. For years after the corn syrup sat hiding amongst the jams and spreads looking as odd and pathetic as the entire attempt to create some somatic emotional release had been. At some point in her 20s, it was finally thrown in the bin, one of her parents (after over a decade) had finally noticed it. She looked up one day and it was gone. And all she could think was that after all those years, she wished she’d been there when it went.

“We at A.G.N recorded a 20% increase across all K.P.I’s after introducing C.A.R.P at A.A.M.I…”

She had made the mistake of tuning into Steve’s voice for a moment and instantly had to fight a very real need to run screaming from the room.

If only she could will that nosebleed.

She tried to imagine a situation, a time and a place where the room she was in, the words she was hearing would have sounded as absurd to everyone else as they did to her. In her mind’s eye, she conjured someone with whom she could share what she was seeing and feeling. She settled on a Somali refugee who she’d probably seen in a commercial as a kid.

A girl, younger than her, barefoot, with a kink in her back and a jug on her head, now stood in the corner of the boardroom. Impossibly thin, flies sucked the water from her eyes, but yet she managed to stare at Steve with an expression that was half quizzical, half disgust. The girl clearly felt as Tash did, that this was absurd and gross, its own type of horror. She narrowed her shimmering black eyes at Steve, the air between them vibrated as though she were willing something to happen, anything.

Tash breathed out slowly.

‘That’s better.’ She thought.

She knew she was usually alone in thinking the way she thought, yet never doubted that she was correct in feeling the way she felt. She knew that even if she had been able to, she never would have trained herself to think any differently. She hadn’t fallen victim to the hypnotic effects of routine, or this illusion that there was a ‘normal’ way to be. She’d never stopped questioning and distrusting what need not be believed as truth. Her mum had described her as belonging to a subculture of one- and she had learned to accept that loneliness and anxiety were symptoms of deep thinking.

Tash was a vegetarian. She first heard the word ‘slaughterhouse’ when she was six years old and found out what it meant. She decided she didn’t like it and would rather not be a part of it thank-you-very-much, and, just never ate another animal ever again. Upon discovering this fact about her, people would make fun of her, or worse still often want to argue. As a child, it was other kid’s parents more than anyone else who seemed to take issue with her eating habits. She thought it strange that what she did and didn’t eat should be anyone’s concern, mainly because she knew it really shouldn’t. Ultimately the conversation would always go the same way;

“why don’t you eat meat?” Random kid’s mum or dad would ask;

“Why do you eat meat?” Tash would ask, knowing full well the answer she would get.

“I like the taste,” they would chort.

“Does it still taste good even when you think about the fear and pain of the animals? How unnecessarily filthy and disgusting their lives and deaths are? Does it still taste good then?”

She would then stare up at them with her big green eyes, blink her long lashes innocently and patiently wait for their answer.

“Well… I don’t think about that,” they would respond, smile gone.

“Well, I do. And if you could think beyond what’s right in front of you, you wouldn’t eat that shit either.”

She’d stopped bothering with this and other similar exchanges by the time she was eleven years old or so, it wasn’t a conversation anyone wanted or needed to have, least of all her. She figured dumb people could save their breath, she wasn’t a child anymore and what little chance anyone had ever had of making her feel like she was wrong to think and do as she did, had long since passed.

Her vegetarianism had become an allegory for the way she thought about the world.

‘Why should she pretend to be ignorant of the reality of something just because everyone else did?

Why would people train themselves to not feel and think less?

Just to make their daily life a tiny bit easier.

Just so they could enjoy slamming that disgusting ‘Maccas’ burger in their mouth like a fucking idiot’.

Tash didn’t like it. But that’s just the way things were.

‘Don’t think, don’t feel and go with the flow.

Oh, and don’t forget to attack anyone who’s different’.

It’s was simply more important to people for them to look ‘normal’ than it was for them to be real.

‘Grim’.

Steve was still talking. Tash realized it had been a while since she had escaped to the bathroom. So, without a word, she stood up and left the room. When she had first started this awful job, she had found it near impossible to sit for any real amount of time at her ‘pod.’ (Not a desk, more like part of a desk sectioned off with a foot high partition- presumably so she and the other employees couldn’t peck each other’s eyes out.)

She found it uncomfortable to stay podded, for many reasons. The main one being that it was horrible. As it was a call center, her headset had to be worn at all times. She’d look down and see cords leading from her face and connecting directly into a computer. It would make her feel sick. She was literally tethered to her desk by her fucking head.

She and her fellow hens had no way of controlling the calls that were continuously auto-dialed and force-fed into their ears. A short, shrill, electronic tone would sound to give her a much needed second of dread before the next awkward sales call. It reminded Tash of a seal she’d seen as a kid. It would ‘talk’ whenever a whistle was blown. She wasn’t sure if she had seen it at a theme park, or if (more likely) she had seen the seal on TV at some point, but she pictured that pitiable animal every day. Forced to perform. A brilliant, wild beast in a swimming pool. A fierce hunter handed limp dead fish from a bucket. With a sore on the end of her nose, that nobody told her, little Tash just knew, it had developed from bashing its head against the sides of its Blue Heaven Milkshake coloured enclosure.

The calls were almost constant. You would get off a call and then ‘bweeeep.. Hello?’ You could, however, while on a call, change a ‘setting’ so your phone would ‘fall’ into ‘bathroom mode.’ Bathroom mode was timed. The moment your previous call ended, you would see the numbers start to clock away on your screen, demanding your return. Nonetheless, within a day Tash started drinking glass after glass of water- liters, and liters of the stuff and heading off the toilet for snatched moments of silence and solitude, all the while thinking of those numbers counting away screaming to her to hurry. She realised after a few weeks that she could just cut out the middle-man and slip away to the bathroom, lock herself in a cubical and take a moment, without actually needing to pee. She would pass the elevator on her way to the toilet and each and every time she did she would fight the very real desire to just get in and leave.

Now she had been in the job for seven months she went to the bathroom during the day less and less. The gravitational pull of those elevator doors had become so strong that she preferred not to put herself through the discomfort of resisting them. That, and at her first I.R (Internal Review apparently being too difficult to say) an Obese 22-year-old manager named Danielle had worked out how many minutes a day on average Tash had been in ‘bathroom mode’ and informed her that 12 minutes a day was;

“Really way too much.”

Danielle didn’t need to take calls herself anymore, and instead spent most of her time eating cold Dim Sims and pizza from Tupperware containers designed to hold party sized salads and wiping crumbs and oily skid-marks all over her black covers. Other times she would lumber gracelessly around the office staring at people like a shadowy ghoul, haunting their periphery and feeling important.

“How do you think you can improve on this?” She’d said, staring down at her 50 cent clipboard.

Tash had felt her face flush, not with embarrassment (which would have been warranted) but with rage. Not only were her toilet visits being recorded, but that information was now being used by this fucking slob to try and shame her. And for what? So she would spend an extra couple minutes of an eight-hour shift literally tied to her desk?

“I guess I could stop drinking water…” Tash had responded through clenched teeth. Danielle didn’t look up as she excreted an effortless;

“ah-ha,” and filled in the section on her worksheet under the heading ‘how staff member will improve.’

Tash’s eyes were boring holes into the dandruff encrusted part in Danielle’s greasy black hair. She clasped her knees and fought her hands not to fly up and slap Danielle’s blubbery crème caramel of a face.

‘This is hell’ she had thought to herself.

‘Hell is a fat disgusting face you can’t slap’.

She became aware of the fact that her expression might give her violent intentions away. Her eyes were burning with an unrelenting stare she had focused like a laser of pure hatred at Danielle’s dumb head.

She dragged her eyes down to the floor where she saw Danielle’s feet were testing the limits of a pair of tortured ‘flats’.

‘Those poor flats are the flattest flats I’ll ever see,’ she thought to herself.

‘No matter how bad things get, my existence is still better than those poor brutalized shoes.’

She had then swallowed hard and tried to will a nosebleed, which right on schedule had refused to come.

The moment she was out of the boardroom she felt her nerves begin to settle, she made her way to the bathroom and let her eyes fall on the elevator doors just long enough for her stomach to ache. She pushed the ‘ladies’ door open with the force of her entire body and heard it slam against the bathroom wall behind her as she hurried into a cubical. She then lined the toilet seat with paper, pulled down her paints, closed her eyes, stuffed her fingers in her ears, held her breath and peed. For years, including the entire time she had been in school, she’d had a fear of using public toilets. She found everything about the experience confronting, revolting and above all embarrassing. It seemed completely unnatural to defecate close enough to another person so as to be able to hear and smell the entire process. It opened you up to germs, but worse exposed you to the possible judgment and ridicule of others when at your most vulnerable and disgusting. For years she used only her bathroom at home, and if she needed to go at any other time. She would hold.

Until one day, in first year Uni’ Tash left the house early in a rush and forgot that she needed to pee. She spent the next 12 hours in varying amounts of agony. When she finally returned home to pee, she wept in pain and realized she’d likely done her body some damage. She promised herself she would get over her anxiety and devised the aforementioned method of sensory deprivation to deal with it.

She had learned over time to enjoy these precious seconds of escape. While everyone else looked at the back of toilet doors and attempted to time their bodily functions with the intermittent drones of the hand dryer, she floated into deep space and hovered amongst the stars, or sank into secret oceans to float amid neon creatures and seals without scars.

She washed her hands without looking in the mirror. She hardly ever looked in the mirror. You can’t change what you find there, and she felt people were most at peace when they completely forgot they had any outer-shell at all. So she tried her best to avoid reminders. It wasn’t that she thought she was unattractive, in fact, she really didn’t know what she looked like. It was just that she always felt sort of surprised and disappointed by how static and ordinary her reflection appeared. It was a shock for her to see that all that she was, everything she knew and thought and felt could fit into such an ordinary, unassuming casing. She understood punks and Goths who tried to realise ways of externalising their insides. She had even spent some time as a teenager hanging out with a group of old school ‘crusty’ punks. Only to quickly discover that these types of sub-cultures just created their own constitutions to follow, their own laws to abide and her freedom to think and do as she thought best was even more restricted within the confines of a micro-society then in the outside world.

She walked back to the boardroom with labored steps. The grey carpet was wet cement, she felt her feet sinking and sticking. She wanted to run but couldn’t. She didn’t even know why she had been invited to attend this thing. Somehow her email had fallen in with the suits’ about four months ago. She had already attended twelve P.D.’s (Professional Development seminars) since then. She went to the first one because she had heard there would be free food and she was allowed to be off ‘the phones’ for an hour to attend. The first had carried the catchy title ‘Leadership Development for Core Business Function in the 21 Century’ and had essentially consisted of a Steve re-ordering the words in the Seminar’s title over and over again for an endless hour. Tash had questioned from then on whether it was a fair trade but reasoned that anything was better than actually doing her job.

She got back into the boardroom just as Steve was handing out the Cake Pops.

“Ok ‘P.’ Who can tell me what the ‘P.’ stands for?” He addressed the crowd with a Cake Pop in hand.

There was no answer.

“Think about it guys…. The ‘P.?’”

Silence. He cleared his throat.

“In C.A.R.P.?”

Sweat was visibly starting to build on old Stevie's head. He waved the Cake Pop at the silently staring crowd.

“I guess I won’t be handing out any Cake Pops today,” his voice quivered, he was beginning to sound desperate.

‘This is getting sad’ Tash thought to herself.

Even to a ‘Steve’, who ate suits for breakfast, the ding-dongs she worked with were pretty lame. Tash looked around the room at the sea of faces. They were all fixed on the Cake Pop. As Steve waved the treat, their beady eyes followed it.

“How about you madam?” The poor bastard had chosen Danielle.

‘Good choice old boy…’ Tash thought to herself

‘…that beast would step on her own grandmothers face if it meant she could reach a ripe plum… well maybe you’d need to throw a pizza and a can of coke up a tree, Danielle hasn’t eaten a piece of fruit in years…’

Tash laughed.

Not a discreet giggle.

It shot out of her short and loud like the honk of a goose. Danielle was trying to climb a tree, while Steve, pink-faced and sweating, was trying to tempt her to the top.

“P. what does the P stand for Danielle?” he yelled down at her, his voice echoing ghostly.

Danielle stared up, her expression hungry, “P.P.P…Pizzzzaaaaa…..”

Tash cackled. She might have been able to stop herself if it had occurred to her that she should. Instead, her laughter got louder, her body heaved with joyful convulsions. Something was happening, something had happened. The absurdity of it was all too much. All eyes had now graduated from staring blankly at the Cake Pop to blankly at her.

“What the fuck is all this?” Tash managed to say through fits of laughter as she began to shake from her seat, eyes filling with tears.

“What’s happening?” she screamed hysterically, crying with laughter.

Steve held a wilted smile for as long as he could. He looked at Tash and across the room. Some people were giggling. At what? He wasn’t sure. Others looked confused.

He was losing them. He felt sweat pouring down his head and into his eyes. They burned. His face was on fire. His head was throbbing. His shirt was growing damp.

The laughter continued.

He had lost them. His face was so wet he could feel it dripping. He looked down at the Cake Pop in his hand to see it’s stick was pathetically bent. He must have squeezed it. He was tense. He saw too that some of the icing must have melted into his hand. The pink and red icing was suddenly everywhere, his hands, his shirt, he lifted a hand to his face and stared down at it – he was covered in the stuff!

‘How did this happen?’ he thought to himself, suddenly feeling faint.

It was a nightmare.

Tash looked up, unsure if she was ever going to be able to stop laughing. When her eyes were greeted with a most incredible sight.

Steve stood before her covered in blood.

He was staring in horror at his own hands, his shirt was saturated, his face completely smeared in blood. She had only looked away for a moment and the surprise of how different he now appeared shocked Tash into silence instantly.

“What’s happening?” screamed Steve in horror.

As he hit the ‘P’ in ‘happening’ he spat blood across the room, spraying a white-haired woman in the second row. The crowd’s attention fell to the front of the room once more, to the horrifically transformed Steve. They gasped in unison. The white-haired woman began to scream, just as Steve choked, sending another jet of blood out into the crowd. No one said a word, rather everyone let out their own primal shriek as they launched from their seats and began to scatter. Danielle’s oversized form instantly caused a traffic jam in two directions. People attempted to climb over the folding chairs, which collapsed beneath them and sent them flying in every direction. No one knew what was happening. Steve looked monstrous and nobody wanted him near them. Steve made a run for the door only to have members of the panicked crowd push him back into the room. Everywhere you looked you could see more and more people covered in blood. Danielle, bombarded her way towards the door, flicking subordinates aside. She lumbered with effort, as though she were moving at great haste, but her massive size made her appear to be moving in slow motion. It was in slow motion that Tash saw her ‘flat’, finally succumb to its injuries. As she attempted to pivot her body, the seam of one of her shoes tore and out exploded an angry red pinky toe, as plump as a steamed Dim Sim. Danielle tripped on her own toe and began to fall forward, slower than what gravity should have allowed, her nose hit the door and she slid down to the ground, causing a sore on the end of her nose. Someone kicked a table sending the Cake Pops flying through the air.

Tash hadn’t moved. She sat perfectly still watching the scene unfold. People were screaming, crying, there was blood, fear, icing, piles of people and chairs, arms reaching out clawing to the heavens, desperate, pained faces.

It was a fucking renaissance painting.

Danielle was blocking the exit, she had fallen directly forward and not thought to try and catch herself, pinning her arms beneath her, her hands poked out either side facing up, fingers wiggling pitifully, her head faced forward, her chin resting on the carpet. Winded and dazed, she gasped for air. Tash started at her before her gaze drifted up to the oversized banner above which read ‘C.A.R.P.’

She could have applauded.

“Good one Steve!” she yelled, with the sincerest of smiles.

“My name’s Peter” He gurgled back, staring at Tash incredulously.

Tea and Cigarettes

I hadn’t met him the day I interviewed for the room. He greeted me at the door and introduced himself as Doron. He had a British accent, though he said he was a Kiwi. He was attractive, with a flock of thick black hair pushed back to reveal a slight widow's peak and eyes of mottled, tortoise-shell green. He was not short, but shorter than me. He naturally stood with shoulders back and his chest pushed forward, which, for some reason, always reminded me of Robert Downey Jr. There was an arrogance to the way he spoke, and the way he would trace you with his eyes. He radiated a sort of mischievous-energy which made you want to follow him. And I liked him instantly.

As I awkwardly struggled my way through the front door and down the hallway, hands full of shopping bags and the last few miscellaneous items, he led me through the house. In the kitchen, he oversaw as I unpacked food items and placed them on the counter. I liked that he hadn’t offered to help and that without much chat, had asked my age (I’ve always despised polite pleasantries). I told him I was “26” and he told me he was 29. Later I would realize that I hadn’t quite gotten my ears around his accent yet and he had actually said he was “39.”

Doron looked good for 29.

My mum had gone to Costco and bought a few things for me to donate to the new share house, 24 rolls of toilet paper, 2 kilograms of coffee and for some reason – 4 liters of fucking salsa.

 “We share food which is cool…” He said as I looked inside the fridge in vain for somewhere to put the comically oversized jar.

“Yeah, I’m from a big family so… it’s more comfortable for me to share shit.” I said, before deciding to roll the dice with a little humor.

“Accept for this of course…” I said holding up the 4-liter salsa.

“this is all for me.”

He didn’t smile or appear to read the sarcasm. Instead, as though he had been looking for an opportunity, he said deadpan;

“yeah and that jug in the door… don’t drink that unless you want to throw up, trip for days… and possibly die.”

I looked at what appeared to be home-made Ribena sitting in an antique gallon glass bottle in the door, and then back at Doron.

“Ok. Good to know.” I said without a follow-up question, figuring everyone wants to move into a place with a few mysteries to be solved.

I 100% would have tried that homemade Ribena if he hadn’t said anything though. Say what you will about hippies, they know how to cook, and that delicious purple-durple seemed to be calling my name.

I remember a few weeks after I moved in I was sitting at the kitchen table doing homework when a thin, hippy dude I’d never seen before walked in the front door, made his way to the fridge, took out the big glass bottle and poured a careful shot worth of the purple liquid into an old plastic water bottle before leaving without a word.

A few weeks later Doron invited me to have dinner with him and a friend. They were making pasta at home and I was busy with an assignment so I appreciated and accepted the invitation. The guy was your standard tweaky, hippy type. He wore two thin scarves, had sinewy arms and short sun-bleached hair. He seemed sort of nervous. Doron and I drank wine and chatted almost like his friend wasn’t there.

“Want to do DMT tonight?” Doron asked as I drained my glass of red.

“I really do need to finish this assignment. Maybe another night?” I answered honestly.

“Fair enough. Want to help me then?” he said with a cheeky smile.

“Sure.”

Doron got up and disappeared into his bedroom. I smiled at the tweaky stranger, who sat staring at the space where Doron had been, wringing his hands. He had barely touched his spaghetti.

Doron returned with a glass pipe and some brown resin in one of those tiny jam jars people steal from hotel buffet breakfast tables.

He walked over to the record player and put on some trippy, trance music that I figured would have to sound better under the influence.

He loaded the pipe and lit it for his friend who had made his way over to the couch. The moment the tweaker inhaled the effect was instant. Doron lay him down and stood back. The guy started writhing on the couch, smiling and moaning in loud ecstasy. Doron lit a cigarette and handed it to me. We smoked in the house – something we and our housemates certainly never did and watched the guy on the couch in silence. It was exactly like watching someone have sex with an invisible lover. 10 minutes it was over. The guy was relaxed, elated and most notably visibly cured of his tweakiness.

I went back to my room to finish my assignment and decided I didn’t want Doron to see me like that.

I didn’t know much about DMT. I had never done it myself. My stoner friend Lachlan had because Lachlan will do anything. He described it as “10 minutes in Legoland which feels like hours”. You have a super intense trip with vivid hallucinations which usually involves things appearing to compartmentalize, break apart and move around – like blocks – thus Legoland.

Doron would ‘brew’ DMT in our backyard. I remember once seeing hundreds of what looked like filthy gum leaves lining our spa bath for several days. We all had to shower over them. I assumed they were Doron’s and he wanted to clean them but didn’t want to waste any water (we're in a drought you know). He explained later that he had been forced to gather the leaves suddenly, taking off in the middle of the night – He knew the location of a particular tree – which is the best in the world (according to him) for DMT production – it’s a rare, old-growth Australian native and its location is a closely guarded secret. News had spread that some undesirables had heard about the location of the tree and Doron had set out in the night to gather all the fallen leaves before his rivals could.

“You see you can’t pick the leaves – it upsets the tree – and makes the DMT not chill – you have to ask the plant for its fallen leaves – be a gentleman about it.”

Whether these other people knew about this rule and would struggle their way into the bush, find this mythical tree - see the floor had been swept of fallen leaves – be like “oh no! well no drugs for us then” and then turn around defeated and go home – I don’t know. But that’s the story I got.

According to Doron, DMT enables you to “connect emotionally with the life force of all living things” and over time this develops into (sort of) ‘communicating’ with plants.

I didn’t really get it.

Although, I do have a distinct memory from around that time, of catching myself alone in the kitchen, cutting a carrot, staring at the vegetable thinking about what Doron had said and feeling a sudden, sharp stab of panic.

Sometimes it was a mystery how Doron, under the weight of his thoughts, managed to do anything at all.

Doron would come to tell me that he was, in fact, the leader of the Psychedelic Society of Australia. He said that he had been motivated to move to Australia because he had read that our strange and unique flora meant we had more DMT producing plants than anywhere else in the world.

Doron would also brew Ayahuasca. He claimed to be the only person in the country who had been trained on how to make it. Like the DMT he would cook it in a big, black witches’ cauldron, set above a logwood pyre in our suburban backyard.

I remember I had been sick and in bed for a day –I had a fever, my eyes were puffy, something that always happens when I’m sick. My hair was long and straightened and I dressed in only an oversized T-shirt. I got up and wandered through the house and into the backyard, following the sound of voices.

Doron sat with his back to the house, stirring his boiling cauldron which smelled richly of the leaves and sticks which I could see orbiting the surface of the liquid. He was listening to his digital radio. A man was discussing how aliens had interfered with early humans and the evidence was obvious if you looked for it. I shuffled forward in a daze and circled around to get a better look at what Doron was doing. He had a black scarf knotted over his nose and mouth and wore yellow-tinted oversized 70’s drug-star sunglasses.  It was a make-shift fume mask. He looked at me and screamed and I looked at him and did likewise.

He obviously had thought no one was home.

“fuck me!” he yelled.

“you look like the girl from 'The Ring',” he said as the scarf fell from over his mouth.

I laughed, “yeah I always do when I’m sick.”

“scared the shit out of me” he shook his head and stared back into his soupy potpourri.

“what you doing?” I asked rubbing my eyes.

“Cooking Ayahuasca,” he said – pulling the scarf back up over his mouth.

“has that got something to do with the sticks you got sent in the mail?” I yawned.

“may-bee.” He muffled through the scarf, looking up at me to show his eyebrows raised high over the brim of his sunglasses.

I don’t think I’d ever really heard of Ayahuasca before Doron told me about it. Maybe I’d seen a Vice Media short on it. You couldn’t really get it outside of deepest, darkest Peru, which is where Doron – who I pictured on his arrival to look much like Paddington Bear – had learned to make it.  He told me that he had been living in London and had a successful advertising career, a marriage which was failing and like everyone else in the city at the time a debilitating cocaine addiction. He had apparently been bumming across Europe in his early 20’s when he met a 15-year-old model from an Eastern European Country I can’t remember and had fallen desperately in obsession with her. He followed her around for a couple years partying like a rockstar before the two of them settled in London, married and Doron realized he needed a job. I assume he has no idea how he wound up in advertising – one of those kids of hippy stock, who think they are Communists and want more than anything to have an artistic talent, who make their way into advertising because it masquerades as creative, so they can prove to themselves that, if they wanted to, they too could make stupid amounts of money.

Doron told me that he was in a bad way, living alone, hating the job, his friends, the city – snorting coke and getting drunk every day. When he met a stranger at a bar, an older gentleman who told him that he needed to go to a small village in the Peruvian rainforest and trip on a drug they made there called Ayahuasca. The stranger said that he had been a junky, homeless, suicidal, near death and now he was cured. Doron packed a bag and headed to South America. When he arrived to the location that the stranger had scribbled on a napkin at the bar, he was met by a small tribe of locals, who led him silently deep into the rainforest to a clearing where there was fire surrounded by a couple other foreigners -  Doron said they were likely drug addicts or long-term-depressed. No one spoke. They were met by a medicine man who chanted and blessed them and boiled a pot of what appeared to be scratchy leaves and debris. After a long while, he poured a small amount of the liquid into a tankard and poured it into each of the foreigner’s mouths, chanting and talking unintelligently the entire time. No one knew what was happening or what to expect. Almost instantly they all started violently vomiting. Doron’s stomach cramped in painful stabs, he crawled along the forest floor retching. The medicine man and the tribe members followed him, trying to force him to drink more of the liquid. He did. He trusted them completely. He had given himself over to whatever might happen even before he arrived. As he dragged himself along the ground, vomiting, screaming in agony, the fire cracked, the chanting grew all around him, he was sure he was going to die. And would have welcomed it. As he began to vividly hallucinate he was led to a small shelter deep in the trees. A tent roof against the rain with a cot bed raised a few centimeters off the dirt. There he was left alone in the dark to trip for over 40 hours. He saw and experienced the most intense trip of his life, a lifetime of pain and memories of monsters and madness. A few times a tribesman came to leave him water and a bowl of sliced plantains but otherwise he was alone with himself. He had no idea which of the animal encounters actually happened.

“How long do you do that for?” I asked in amazement.

“You can’t take it every day, but every other day you can repeat the process as needed, generally people are there for three to seven days –”

“how long did you do it for?”

“just over three months.”

Doron.

He was there long enough to earn their trust and learn the secret of how it was made. You needed a stick from a type of native plant called ‘deadwood’ without which the toxin from the Ayahuasca plant will just kill you but that’s as much as I ever gathered from the process. I once looked back through Doron’s Facebook photos to see what he had looked like as an advertising coke-head. I remember flicking back between a picture of a fat, pale, middle-aged, sad nerd and to the next picture of a fit, beautiful, happy young man on top of a mountain. I flicked the pictures back and forth.

I never asked Doron how to brew Ayahuasca or DMT. But he did teach me how to make tea.

You see, my mom was born and raised in Chicago and my dad in Naples (Italy). We were coffee people.  I was born in Australia, and it wasn’t until I moved into this share house that I realized I really didn’t know many of the customs of the Anglo-Australian majority. I’d never really eaten butter, or the cheese that came in a single, solid, yellow brick, or porridge, or Vegemite or tea. 

My housemates loved tea. The old place had no heating. The entire back section of the house; kitchen, laundry, and lounge were most certainly a budget DIY extension by our landlord from years prior. It was little more than a plaster-walled-in carport. It had no insulation and walls which failed to meet, leaving gaps to let the wind in. For months I would wake to the sight of my breath lingering in the air. So I followed my housemates lead and decided to start drinking more tea. To make tea, you shuffle into the kitchen, boil the kettle, but a bag in a mug, pour the boiling water into the mug and shuffle away, letting it get more and more bitter as it gets colder and colder – much like me.

Apparently, I was wrong.

“Thanks for the tea,” Doron called from the couch. I was attempting the ‘shuffle away’ back to my room part of the tea-making process and froze, the mug in my hand steamed like a prop from a ‘spooky house’.

“What tea?” I asked, genuinely confused.

“You didn’t offer.”

For a rebel who didn’t seem to care for polite pleasantries, I was taken aback.

“I didn’t know that was a thing,” I said, feeling my face flush.

“Yeah sure” He quaffed in disbelief. The level to which I appeared to have offended him was something I had never seen in him before. I suddenly felt like I was being reprimanded, told off by an elder.

“This is probably the second time in my life I’ve made tea – it is a mug of brown water Doron – I didn’t know there were rules.” 

“You never make a cup of tea without offering one – it’s rude.”

He went on.

“Especially as you were making it right in front of me – it’s like how you always offer a tea when someone visits your home…”

I had a flash of all the times he and my housemates had done just this, offered me or a guest a tea – it had seemed so … old fashioned? Yet… when they handed it to me, I felt something. A connection, a warmth. I was welcome and comforted.

“well… Do you want me to make you one.” I offered, still unsure how to progress or escape.

“No. I’ll make my own.” He snapped.

I hurried away feeling chastised.

I stared at the mug which steamed like a geyser in the freezing conditions of my bedroom. It seemed so out of character for Doron. Until it suddenly didn’t. Tea it seemed was more about the ritual than the actual drink. There were rules, but they were there for a reason. It was the act of preparing, sharing, warming and comforting – it was about connecting with people – feeling something.  

Which was actually so Doron.

Doron had a beautiful girlfriend named Stephanie, who was a couple years older than me. I only saw her a few times, presumably she had a warmer house to hang out in. One day, out of the blue, Doron told me that he was currently practicing a type of tantric sex in which he wouldn’t allow himself to climax. He said that when a man comes he releases energy into the woman and the woman takes the energy from the man, sucks it up, soaks it in. Even for Doron, it sounded like real' crazy-shit. I’d been smoking weed that afternoon and had to try hard not laugh.

“Why don’t you want to share your energy with Steph?” I asked as a gentile pry, mining for more quotable nonsense.

He laughed as though I were being naive.

“what? And wander around in weakened state?!” he chortled.

I only include this memory because I always felt as though it said something about important about Doron, but I’ve never quite been able to figure out what.

I remember that somehow it became a known fact amongst my housemates that I had never really flirted with anyone or had sex with a ‘random’ before. One evening, Alissa, another housemate was quizzing me on my whereabouts the night before when Doron wondered in to get the goss’. I explained that I had walked up to a guy I knew from Uni’ at a bar and said;

“I find you attractive. I don’t find many people attractive so I think we should at least try and have a conversation or something.” and that I had then decided a few minutes later when we had both agreed that the bar was a bore and the rain too intense to go searching for another.

“I’m going to come over to your house, I’m not gonna sleep with you but I want to see if you’re worth feeling anything for so we should hang out.”

Doron and Alissa thought it was great –one of the only times the two of them agreed on anything. They hassled me to message the dude to meet me at a local bar for a drink.

I was in the shower when the dude messaged back; ‘on my way’ (I guess I hadn’t stipulated a time).

Doron saw the message, and replied ‘easy-there tiger.’ Something I would never say. I went on the date, and didn’t realize he had sent the message for months. I love imagining Doron seeing the dude’s message, looking at the bathroom door, hearing the shower, panicking and deciding on a flirty reply.

Doron and I had tried and failed a few times to organize something to do ‘outside the house’ finally, about three months after I moved in he called me and invited me to join him and a few of his friends ‘for martini’s’.  I rode my bike about 20 minutes and met them just as they were finishing dinner – It turned out to be a wake. No one told me directly but I came to realize that it was the one-year anniversary of a suicide. Someone they had all loved dearly.  Seven of them had decided to take his widow out for the night, eat at his favorite restaurant, drink cocktails, take a bunch of Ecstasy and go out dancing. I had never met any of them before, I didn’t know anyone other than Doron. I wasn’t on or offered any pills and I never figured out if Doron had asked anyone before inviting me to join.

The group were all friendly – I thought the night was a pretty wonderful idea. It was a night of 90’s hip hop, tears, laughter and lots of meaningful compliments. I had a great time. I don’t remember speaking to Doron, with the exception of at one point, in the lights of the dingy night club, I leaned down to grab my jacket next to where Doron was sitting and chatting to someone when he said to me;

“You know you’re beautiful right?”

I don’t remember saying anything in reply, I probably just smiled and offered him a cigarette. They were all super high.

 About a week or two later Doron came home on a Friday and told us he’d found another house - somewhere with Steph and was moving out.  He packed his shit and was gone by Sunday.

**

One thing I’ve noticed in life is that you always see people one last time, usually years later, by surprise and well out of the context in which you knew them.

With Doron, it was two years later. I had returned from living in Europe. I’d studied, partied, loved and lost and returned with no idea what I wanted to do with my life again. It was summer and I’d taken a job as a waitress at a ‘cool’ restaurant on the South Side of the city where I was living with my sister who was in the middle of divorcing her husband of 8 months.

Doron walked in with his wife Steph and a classy set of parents. I didn’t know Steph had come from money. She looked about 7 months pregnant. Doron was talking to her dad about getting a car – 

“a Range Rover or a Jeep? Something new, something for kids and camping.”

I asked one of the other waiters to swap tables with me so I didn’t have to serve them. Pretty standard, no one likes serving people they know – unless they’re crooked.

I said ‘hey,’  he and Steph were courteous, then we ignored each other as best we could, so he could enjoy himself and I could get through it.

An hour or so later I slipped out, into the alley beside the restaurant, sat on a milk crate and lit a cigarette. A few moments later Doron appeared, bent down, took the cigarette and had a drag.

He said; “I don’t’ smoke anymore,” and handed it back;

“yeah me either,” I said, eyes fixed to a bluestone at my feet.  

He disappeared back inside and was gone by the time I returned.

It’s the strangest thing but, I don’t know if he really did meet me in the alley, or if I just imagined it.

Doron likely paid and left without another word.

A Ghost Story

You don't often walk into a space and think; what if I died in here?

But at some point we’re all going to die. In some place. It could be anywhere. It could be here she thought to herself.

She stared suspiciously at the nibbled olive pit sitting at the bottom of her half-drunk martini.

Fuck. Imagine if I just threw that back and choked to death…

Chocking is one of the more embarrassing surprise ways to go.

She eyed the pit with added caution, going slightly cross-eyed as she lifted the glass to take her next thirsty sip.

…on that gross little sucker too. Shit.

She looked around the bar, sneakily scanning the scattering of seven or so faceless people in a new light. 

{Though it should be noted, making sure to once again avoid the gaze of the guy sitting directly to her left at the bar-top. He was the only other ‘lone drinker’ in the dive and the last thing she wanted was to create any unwanted anxiety, which might make him feel like he should talk to her.}

Just imagine dying in this weird bar?
Surrounded by these strangers?

The question was silently pondered and prompted a near immediate response as she had come to expect.

You're death would become just a ‘crazy’ story for these people. Something to whip out at parties. As time went on and their retellings naturally mutated with embellishments to untether from the facts they’d likely pretend to be more disturbed by your untimely demise than they actually were, just to hold the room.

Fuckers!

She was shocked that these people would do such a thing. But on the other-hand she wasn’t the slightest bit surprised. 

Definitely this lot's best anecdote, she thought, considering the characterless forms around her.

She stared down at her drink while her brain looked to her left.

That sad fucker'll probl'y use it to get laid.

She went on pondering and realized what was most shocking about the entire idea was that SHE hadn't thought it before… 

One day she was gonna die 'somewhere.' It could easily be out and about? In some weird, but definitely cool place like this dimly-red-lit bar, playing trippy Indian music with Depression era furniture and a long, gold, tinsel fringe curtain surrounding a window looking out onto Greenpoint, Brooklyn on a chill Wednesday November night.

Considering she was so into ghost stories these days (and whatever other creepy, late-night Internet brainlessness she could get her hands on) she could hardly believe that she'd never contemplated that she herself could some day become the unwitting star of someone else’s scary story.

From now on I'm gonna remind myself that I could die some weird death anytime… She promised.

Imagine… in the end, it turns out that's what you were worth? Fucking-90s-TV-special-cheap-reenactment,-dickhead-BuzzFeed-'reporter'-punchline… She thought.

... you choke like a fool in front of a bunch-a randoms and losers, only to become the ghoul of this dive bar.

She thought it felt disrespectful… then she thought about it a little while longer and figured;
Cool. More than most. Better than forgotten. Being a ghost story might actually be just my style. Become a legend in some homemade ghost Youtube ‘show’. A fanny-tickling, sleepover tale… The excuse bar employees use for every glass they break or thing they misplace - a reason for them to demand not to close alone.

Maybe I should make a note of this idea in future? Whenever I go somewhere new, I’ll consider that I could actually die there and become a ghost story.

It happened. To people. Real people. In the real world. Not often. But it did happen.

You gotta die some time. Getting immortalized in a lame creeeeepy ghost story…
She smiled. It was sort-a right up her street.

Plus, she reasoned, she didn't have that much more going on in [her] life right now anyways…

"I’ve actually never even seen the Matrix."
Said a young woman’s voice from somewhere behind her.

She looked at the couple chatting in the reflection of the mirror bind the bar, directly in front of her.
Two 20 something hipster chicks, probl'y on a date, looks like the Asian chick who said it, erg these people suck… who hasn't seen the Matrix? What a shit date… . She thought.

Then she felt like she had let them distract her from some great revelation, searched her head, saw something about ghosts, figured it was stupid and left it.