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2:00 AM
Two minutes left. I am Julia Ash. I am Julia Ash.
I am Charybdis.
I am so hungry.
This was Lodestone’s plan. He used me no more or less than Professor Yes. I have been nothing but a gun all my life.
I ate a star. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I was starving. The whirlpool inside me could not keep going with only a roast beef lunch and/or the phantom tapir jerky of another lifetime to fuel it. When you’re hungry, really ravenous, you eat everything in sight. You barely even taste it. Your whole body is a mouth. I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t see anything but the famine of my personal universe. I couldn’t see anything but that blue star, hanging in the dark like meat. I opened my jaw as wide as light-years and bit into it. The star-juice ran down my chin. I couldn’t hear the screaming of planets suddenly freezing in the void, careening in the release of gravity’s hand brake. I couldn’t hear it, I swear. Charybdis was so much bigger than a planet’s weeping.
And then it was gone. The Galapagos-colored thing that had filled me up for so long. It was satisfied. The red dust and the coffee and David Bowie and green in the Antarctic and the flower on fire in the sink. All gone. All the lights gone out in Georgia. I began to fall out of the sky.
I fell a long way.
On Sunday nights, at 1:47 AM, for fifteen minutes, I know what happened. They had to punish me. Of course they did. But they never understood. There may have been a universe in which Crucible was vulnerable to fire, but Retcon couldn’t really move everyone there wholesale. He and Lodestone planned it so beautifully. Retcon dropped me into a bubble of experience, a bubble of grief in Buenos Aires, broken slot machines, Clara Y. Xenophile’s face staring at me out of a rabbit-eared television, untouched pampas and wild capybaras and the majaguillo tree. Retcon knew I would do anything to save Henry, to avoid living it all again, to spare everyone,
to save everyone.
All I ever wanted to do is save everyone.
And that’s how Lodestone aimed me, cocked me, and fired me at a star on the other side of the galaxy. God knows who he hated enough on those planets to turn off their sun, but he got what he wanted. And after it was all done, Retcon, a new player, ready to consider his allegiances objectively, could come humbly, hat in hand, to St. Ovidius and that big mahogany desk and the lumps of exploded bronze phoenix and offer to take care of the Julia problem as only he could.
After all, he was on reality’s side.
On Sunday nights, at 1:47 AM, I know I have lived in Retcon’s prison for seven years. Flickering through recycled realities, losing myself in myself, over and over. I know that they’ve all forgotten me. Redemption is for other people. For literally everyone else. Mockingbirds fuck things up. Occupational hazard. No one locked up Avast when he inundated Los Angeles to get at one lousy shark. But I am the Wayward Child of St. Ovidius. I was used and tricked and thrown away, but I cannot be forgiven.
It’s a funny thing. You go your whole life thinking you’re the protagonist, but really, you’re just backstory. The boys shrug and go on, they fight and blow things up and half of them do much worse than a star and still get the key to the city, and eventually you’re just a story your high school boyfriend tells the kid he had with his new wife.
Every day, Retcon crosses out my past and rewrites it, drawing a furious black X over me again and again. Some days, he even lets me be innocent, lets Charybdis take the blame out into the black and set it on fire. He can probably do it without thinking, like a digestive process. Lucas Fawn goes about his day, redeemed, eating and drinking with my friends, in my house, and some autonomic system erases me for the thirteen thousandth time, while another builds a new Julia or a new Charybdis to play with in his private dollhouse. Some guilty, some innocent, some powerless, some young, some broken, some dead.
Maybe someday he’ll find a version that can get free.
• • •
2:02 AM
I am Julia Ash. I dye my hair cranberry red and live in a trendy suburb with three cats, two teakettles, and one first edition Jane Eyre on which I have never once spilled ramen broth.
Lucas is coming home from work early today. It’s his birthday. He called from the train.
Can’t wait to see you, Jules!
I start slicing onions for pasta carbonara, his favorite. I glance nervously at the clock. I don’t know if it’ll be ready in time. I start to tremble. Lucas hates it when I’m late with dinner.
The cake rises slowly in the oven, filling the apartment with the smell of home.
THE HELL HATH CLUB VS. THE EVIL CLOWN
The dead do eat.
Some habits are just too hard to break. Besides, the infinite wasteland of linear time would well and truly suck without the occasional Taco Tuesday. Gotta pass the time somehow. The trick of it is, the only aisle in the Deadtown Grocery is Extinct Meat and Veg—we can’t have it down here till you’re done with it up there. The milk Julia gets delivered every week? That’s fresh, creamy quagga milk, with a side of great auk eggs over easy. I know a gargoyle named Dave who’s got a big black cart down by Elysium Park and sells triceratops pies and white rhino po’ boys with a side of hot fries made from a Peruvian blue potato that peaced out before Columbus was a twinkle in Queen Isabella’s eye. Dave fucking loves pop music, and he’ll swap you a saber-toothed burrito for whatever sweet, sweet lyrics you’ve still got banging around your skull. And Dave don’t discriminate—Duran Duran, Les Miz, Streisand, Weird Al, he wants it all. So, good news! All those earworms and cheesy choruses that soaked up valuable brain space and kept you from remembering even one single phone number will, eventually, be worth their weight in beer-battered coelacanth.
But we don’t have to. You can’t exactly starve in Deadtown. We don’t even really have appetites, and even Dave’s prehistoric fish and chips don’t make us feel full. Everything tastes a little thin, a little slight. It’s more like we were buried with the memory of the idea of hunger, and now it’s stuck to us like old toilet paper.
So, it’s weird how much Pauline Ketch eats.
She orders everything and just goes to town, powering through medium-rare thylacine steaks and blue amaranth waffles and deep-fried dodo, Taliaferro apple pie with mammoth-milk ice cream, velociraptor corn dogs and corned-aurochs-and-hash and thunderbird piccata with Babylonian lemon sauce. Neil can barely keep up. Sometimes, I think she must have been a binge-and-purger when she was alive; she’s skinny as a matchstick. Now that she’s dead, it’s all binge. The big purge has already come and gone. Pauline grins at us over her plates; juice drips down over the scars on her chin. She winks one of her crazy eyes at me. She got them tattooed and painted to look like a commedia dell’arte puppet three weeks into a zombie plague. Pauline tears into a pan-seared fillet of Steller’s sea cow and moans with pleasure, as though it tastes just the same as supper back home, as though she isn’t a ghost gobbling up ghosts. She makes a pouty face at Julia and bats her eyelashes.
