The Morning After…
5.5.9
6.0.0
click!
“GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD MORNING, CONEHEADS!"
"YOU’RE LISTENING TO BILLY WILSON AND THE BULL!” “The Bulllllllll.” "
TIME TO GRAB THE DAY BY THE HORNS!” HONK HONK! “Now Bull, I know you’re dying to finish telling us that story about who tried to ride the Bull last weekend, but first, tragedy struck yesterday as…”The thing in her bed was still there. It was coalesced darkness, about the size of a man if that man had been sawn off at the waist, with a few wisps of black strands on its head that might've been long hair. Pom had watched the shadow all night, watched its shoulder rise and fall like it was breathing, watched the moonlight carve through its back and fall on the wall beyond it. Her eyes stung like she had gotten smoke in them; her chest was tight and constricted. Had she blinked? Had she breathed? If she had screwed herself up on some freaky psychedelics she couldn’t be certain that what had felt like a few hours had really only been a couple of moments. Why the fuck wasn’t it gone? And why had she tried to flush her system by drinking so much damned water last night? Pom squirmed and tightened her legs. The first movement she had made all night.
She braced herself for what was to come, but the shade didn’t move.
She knew that back. Of course she did, she had looked at it for half a century. The first time she had seen it in a bed like this was the last time she’d ever thought about slipping away from it. Since then the back was ever present. Pom had watched the hairs on the head above the back thin out after the first kid and go gray after the second. She had watched the broad shoulders wither away over the years at a pace that had started gradual and had become frightfully rapid. She had cried into it more times than she would ever admit and once she had punched it so hard in her sleep that there was a fist sized bruise on it for the better part of two weeks. But mostly she’d just talked to it. Told it stupid shit that nobody else would listen to or that she didn’t feel comfortable sharing with anyone else.
Shit like this.
“Hey Bo,” said Pom, the words escaping out of her throat like grave dust from an exhumed coffin.
“I know I traumatized you endlessly over these years, so if you’ve come back to haunt me as revenge then I accept. But you’ve been waiting all night, so if you could wait just a few minutes I’d really appreciate it. You know I can’t handle that jump scare shit, man, and I really gotta pee right now. I can’t be pissing the bed at my age, man. The racketeers running the retirement hellholes around here can hear those drips from miles away. Sounds like the cha-ching of a cash register to them. There’ll be orderlies dragging me outta the house, dosing me with a buncha opioids disguised as vitamins in a cute little Dixie cup, and forcing me to watch reruns of Matlock while they bleed our bank accounts dry with “assisted living” fees in minutes, Bo, in minutes.”Pom shifted her legs again and winced,
“And if you think that sounds funny to you, Bo, lemme remind you of how much the Catholic church loves trolling around those places. Eight year olds and eighty year olds, man, that’s their bag. They got a chapel in every retirement home and a cross in every room. The Kennedys did that shit. You try and haunt me there and they’ll call in a whole crack squad of exorcists to get your ghost ass. They’ll bust you faster than a teen on prom night, Bo. So do we gotta deal?” There was no response from the shade. Instead, the radio replied.
“Now Bull, normally when there’s a gas leak I just assume it’s you.”
HONK HONK!
“HEY BILLY I’VE DROPPED SOME BOMBS IN MY LIFE THAT CLEARED OUT A ROOM, BUT NEVER A WHOLE CITY!”
“Deal,” said Pom to herself.
She quickly shot out of the bed and darted to the toilet. As promised, Bo didn’t move. As the flushing subsided and she washed her hands she could hear the radio reporting on the destruction in cities across the world. Pom shook her head and huffed. The Man was already changing the story from the early reports yesterday. Give it a week's time and gas leaks would become a coordinated terrorist attack from some country that had refused to a trade agreement some years ago and was just begging for its natural resources to have their destiny manifested. Pom lowered her head and splashed her face, looking up at the mirror. She furrowed her brow and pulled at the strands of her hair that had been dyed blonde yet were now back to their original inky black. What kind of cheap, knockoff product?
Pom grabbed the hand towel, dried her face, and screamed as a black shadow darted behind her in the mirror and out into the hall. She swung around, heart racing out of her chest, hands up like a boxer that immediately dropped to her knee as she banged it hard against the sink’s cabinet. Pom doubled over, eyes watering, and looked out the door to see that there was nothing. Her panicked breathing soon gave way to a nervous laugh. The corner of her mouth twisted up into the kind of smile she hadn’t had in years. The radio played an ad reminding the listener to tune in to tonight’s episode of Two and a Halfling. Pom stomped into her bedroom, shaking her head, unable to even pretend like she was angry.
“You son of a bitch, you got me!” She sounded angry, but she was beaming. The smile quickly faded as she looked at the empty bed.
“Bo?”“YOU KNOW CONEHEADS, IT’S TIMES LIKE THESE THAT YOU REALIZE HOW PRECIOUS LIFE IS.
ANY OF THESE MOMENTS CAN BE YOUR LAST.
WHICH MAKES EACH MOMENT TRULY SPECIAL AND MEANINGFUL.” “Now Bull, that’s surprisingly deep keeping from a man like you.” “FUNNY, YOUR MOTHER SAID THAT SAME THING TO ME LAST NIGHT!"
"HEY-OOOOOOOO!”
HONK HONK! “Bo?”
A week later, maybe. Who knows? Who cares?
13 Mourningdove Lane. Time is a weapon wielded by the Man to kill the moment. Let’s just call it late.
Pom had made a few discoveries in a week's time.
The first discovery was Bo’s routine. He appeared in her bed between eleven fifteen in the evening and twelve after six in the morning, but only when she laid in it. Otherwise he was gone, doing who knows what. He hadn’t tried to scare her since the first time. He didn’t have a front. Wherever she viewed him from it was always just his back, and not the fun part of it either: head to just above the waist. He wasn’t solid and he was ice cold, an observation she had made when she’d tried to hug him the next time he had shown up.
The second discovery was that she was younger. It was impossible, but that was what happened–well, that or the Man had cloned her back in the forties or the fifties back when they were running Project Artichoke and had just decided to cut her brain out of her old body and put it in its new shell. It wasn’t only the hair dye that had gone away. The wrinkle on her brow, the gray in her hair, the stains on her teeth, the scar on her abdomen, the embarrassing tattoo on her lower back that would never be talked about ever again, the decades of gravity’s pull and time’s turmoil, the ache in her knees, the pain in her wrist from the sprain that hadn’t healed right, the cut on her finger from last week, all gone. It was like seventy-something years of questionable maintenance had just been undone. Pom had redyed her hair. She liked the blonde.
The third discovery was that Jim Fletcher was dead. He’d been found by a neighbor in his La-Z-Boy recliner, wrist slashed by broken glass from a beer bottle. A gnarly way to go. His death was ruled a suicide, although some people whispered that Missy finally stood up for herself. If anyone had seen Pom go inside then they hadn’t said anything to the cops. She still didn’t know what had happened after she picked up the bottle. She had an inkling, she could draw a clear conclusion, but it was something she would never do, something she thought she was incapable of doing. The mere thought of it made her sick. Usually, anyway. She didn’t feel anything when she thought about Jim except that Missy had deserved better and that she felt bad for the kids.
The fourth discovery was that she was definitely, absolutely, positively, totally, wholly, and completely fucked in the head. Pom was seeing ghosts, the whole world had become schizophrenic painting, and everyone looked like they had been swallowed up by the little globules in a lava lamp. She had heard about this kind of shit happening from a man in a Volkswagen van in the seventies. Acid back then was the actual real shit, the kind the Man experimented with in his attempt to mind control the masses. The trip seems like it ends but really it just retreats, lingering in the spinal cord until decades later you turn sharply the wrong way and it shoots straight up into your brain, only it's been compounding over the years and you spend the rest of your life in space until your brain leaks out your nose. Only she wasn’t sweating constantly like when she had tried LSD, but then again Jam Lemon wasn’t currently eating the soul of a flower child in front of her.
The letter did nothing to help calm these paranoias. If anything, it only convinced Pom more that the Man was the one pulling the levers behind the curtain and she was one sequence of numbers away from carrying out an assassination mission. Maybe she already had gone through with her first hit. Jim could’ve been an enemy of the state. Magic is real is just the thing the Man would say if magic wasn’t real. Besides, she wasn’t doing or seeing magic. She was just hallucinating. Thank god Shelly was kind and had told Pom to take a few days off after what had happened at the diner, even if they were starting to get their yearly uptick in business. She couldn’t imagine pouring coffee when the trees outside looked tangerine orange and everyone was lemon yellow sun.
The final proof that she had officially burned out before fading away was that for some damn stupid reason she had acquiesced to the wishes of the letter. A white carryout box from Norm’s Diner hid the requested cherry pie, carefully cradled by Pom’s arms against her brown fringed jacket as she rushed out of the store. Did she think to ask for some paper plates and plastic utensils? Absolutely not. She was eager to get out of Norm’s as quickly as possible after the younger, orange and yellow part-timers made to work the late shift started shooting her judgmental looks aimed at the pair of floral-trimmed sunglasses. She wore them for their actual intended purpose–nighttime was much brighter than before now that grass actually shined green as well as every other color of the rainbow–but they were probably thinking that she was trying to hide that she was stoned.
Which she was. Stoned, that is. Just a little. She wasn’t trying to hide it. It was just after a whole week of freaking out and going full cold turkey there had been no break in the hallucinations, but with the added bonus of her anxiety peaking through the roof. Whatever she was about to walk into, she didn’t want to be a nervous fucking wreck for it. Whomever was waiting for her–this Archivist, the Man, a blackmailer, a bunch of kids playing a fucking mean prank–she wanted to be loose and cool for them. She just hoped it wouldn’t be like that time she’d tagged along with Dolores to Edith’s weird little club under the false pretenses that it was, quote-unquote, like a book club of sorts. Should’ve realized something was up when Pom hadn’t even been told to read anything beforehand.
Mourningdove Lane wasn’t a long walk from the diner but it had still taken Pom a long time and the pie was getting heavy in her hands. During the day the colors were noticeable, but at night they were so much more vibrant. Several times she had stopped, lowered her glasses, and stared absentmindedly at someone’s landscaped lawn and freshly blooming flower bed, the psychedelic lights blending together like a work of abstract art or a magic eye image. Occasionally she’d catch the shine of a raccoon hiding underneath a porch or a bat flying through the air. Earlier on all of the lights had been distracting and kind of scary, but now that Pom was a bit more relaxed she found them kind of groovy. Not that she should be relaxed, she reminded herself. Twin Pines was a small, safe town during the off-season, but they still got the occasional stranger. Not that Pom typically minded strangers. She just minded them when she was walking around alone at midnight armed with nothing other than a pie.
At that moment a car’s headlights appeared as it turned onto the street. Pom felt her feet take over as she immediately beelined it up a driveway, making it look to the driver like it was her house by ducking behind the SUV parked in the drive like a totally normal person. Okay, maybe she wasn’t so fucking relaxed after all. Was this the third or fourth time she’d dodge up a driveway when a car approached her? The car didn’t notice her, or if it did it didn’t care, as it continued down the road and turned on Mourningdove Lane. Pom shook her head. She probably knew the people in the car and could’ve gotten a lift. Better than walking the rest of the way, and much safer than her driving. She was dangerous behind the wheel before her vision had become permafucked. Pom crept down the drive, praying that nobody in the house had seen her, and walked in the direction of the car.
The mansion loomed eerily on the hill. All it was missing was the pipe organ music and bolt of lightning. Has that house always been that creepy or was it only due to the hour? Pom racked her brain, trying to remember who owned it. She saw an orange glow enter the house. If other people were going into the house then it made it much less likely to be some kind of trap set by the Man because any form of unity was his biggest fear. With her own fears pacified for the time being she approached the door, which promptly swung open for her like it had the others. She jumped back and nearly lost the pie as she let out a pitiful eep.
“Come the fuck on, like really man?” said Pom, looking around for a camera or a sensor or something. She poked her head inside of the door frame to look for a magnetic strip or some kind of doohickey, and then stepped back outside as she closed the door. She reached for it again and let out a little laugh as the door opened on its own once again. She looked around yet again.
“You watching me or some shit?” Pom didn’t go inside. She closed the door yet again and jumped to the side before walking by the door from the right to the left and then the left to the right in an attempt to fake out the poor security guard paid to push a button to slip up and accidentally open the door too soon, but they were on point. It only opened again as Pom jumped out in front of the door with a “Wah!” and struck a palm out at it. Another amused little chuckle, but enough was enough. It was time to go inside.
She closed the door instead.
Pom backed away, giving herself enough distance to really build up some speed as she prepared to charge the door, uncertain of what, if anything, the experiment would prove, but certain that it was of the utmost importance to find out. What most likely would end in a tragedy, at the very least for the pie she was now holding out in front of her like a battering ram, was abruptly put to a halt as Pom noticed, originally blocked from her view by a hedge, an orange glow around the silhouette of a young woman who was staring at her. At first Pom assumed it was in rightful judgment of her fucking around with the door. She felt a wave of embarrassment wash over her followed by a riptide of indignation. She was almost a hundred years old. She could play with magic doors if she wanted to.
“You good man?” said Pom, challenging the sentinel to call her out. There was no response. Pom sucked in her lip, trying to remember the golden rule of don’t start no shit won’t be no shit, when she realized she knew the buzzkill. It was the new girl from the diner. The one she had shown how to cut lemons and roll silverware before one of the other waitresses butted in and showed her how to do it “the correct way”. Bella, right? Or was it Becca? Shit. She slipped into her waitress diner mode, complete with the fake plastic smile as she started to approach the young lady.
“You get a letter too, hon? Sweetie? It’s me, Pom. Pomegranate. Y’know, like the fruit...we work together? I’m the one that got some lemon juice in your eye? You’re not mad about that, are you? Look, I already said I was sorry. Hey, what the fuck is your deal, man? You’re starting to really creep me…” Her eyes, her eyes, what the hell was going on with her eyes!
“...out. Um, are you okay? You didn’t eat the whole brownie I gave you, right? Oh, shit, man. Oh shit. I’m sorry, I figured you were cool and would know not to do it all at once. I totally should have said something. Look, you’ll be okay, it’ll run its course in a few hours. Probably. Hopefully. How about I just take you inside?” said Pom, grabbing at Bella’s shoulder to start guiding her to the house with one hand while balancing the pie with the other.
“Let’s just take you inside. It’s got a radical magic door. You’ll love it. ” Bella sucked in a breath of air as she returned to the present day. She felt dizzy. That didn't happen, right? Or will it? She looked around, eyes clocking Pom. She recognized her, the girl from the diner who trained her first before some pompous know-it-all stepped in.
"Umm yeah, yeah I'm okay. Just spaced out for a bit. Must have been the brownie mixed with other shit. I'm good." How to explain what happened? She'd rather not. The letter was weird enough.
“Oh, yeah, definitely don’t mix it with anything. I’ll bring you another one the next time I’m at work,” said Pom, slowly her pace so that Bella would be the one to approach the door first. A mischievous grin flashed across her face.
“After you…” The door opened up automatically for Bella who walked through completely unphased. Pom’s shoulders dropped as the smirk fell off of her face and followed after the woman who Pom had now determined was decidedly way cooler than her by the way she’d just no sold the door. She stifled a “fuck off!” under her breath as the door swung closed behind her, pausing to study the inside of the door before realizing that she was definitely already late. She ran down the hall to catch up with Bella, unaware that she was the only one whose letter had said to arrive at a quarter ‘til midnight.
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