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THE HELL HATH CLUB

I’irl in Deadtown

It’s been a while now I’m comfortable with the word You wouldn’t believe how coet We don’t tiptoe

Dead Dead Dead Flying Ace of the Corpse Corps Stepping the light Deathtastic I don’t actually knohat a doornail is, but we have a lot in co that ever happened to e Eht She died stupidly She died for no reason She fell off a bridge like a suicide leap and nobody caught her She dropped into the water, her spine snapped, and the last things she probably saas those astonishing lights in the sky, the lights of Doctor Nocturne’s infernalskyscrapers into liquid purple fire while Kid Mercury punched the bad guy over and over again,already, irls and it was his biggest fight yet, maybe because that’s what the script of his life told hie E her boyfriend save New York City When the fires went out in Manhattan, they went out in her eyes, too

It’s nice to be fauess

And the thing aboutback Lots of people do, you know Deadtown has pretty shitty border control If you know souy, a priest or a wizard or a screenwriter or a guy whose superpower shtick gets really dark sometimes or a scientist with a totally neat revivification ray who just can’t seeain

But we go steady, Death and me Nobody can tear us apart

Not everybody wants to go back Life’s okay in Deadtown The early bird special lasts all day and the gas is free There’s no fiery rings of artisanal punishas Walk-up apartments with infinite floors The subways run on tioyles all over the place and the architects never n is all about a unified aesthetic You get used to it It starts to feel like ho on my balcony is called Brian He has three heads and he’s super into slam poetry Deadtown is like anyplace else It’s scary at first, but you get into a rhythm Find a favorite park Put a couple of pictures up on your wall Pretty soon, you can’t i anywhere else

Not everyone adjusts I’ve seen girls run down the n with sain, I’ve seen others dragged back to the land of the living, screaernails snap off and their mouths fill up with snot

But not me No way No how If there’s a constant in the universe, it’s that Paige Ee 404: Girl Not Found Oh, sure, I know a guy on the outside A pretty dalev train, the brainpower of a supercoth of a half-dozen Hollywood Hercules A guy who can slaloot to take down his name and nuhtnow We do get the news here in Deadtown Every ot somebody prettier than a lipstick ad who’ll stay hooddamn apron I bet she lives forever

I think about Tom Thatcher a lot Kid Mercury I came up with that name, you know He wanted to call himself Mr Mercury But I said, Tohteen You’re not even halfway to being a Mister yet We’re still kids, you and me

The thing I hate about being dead is you can’t move on I was in love with him when I died, so I’ll be in love with hi, curled up next to Toh, as romantic as a heart-shaped balloon

I’ll love you till the sun burns out

Well, now it’s factually, actually true and it is just a huge bue E in her blank eyes I can never be anyone else I can never see a therapist or eat all the ice creao out with my friends and drunk-dial him and tell him I hate him and I never caot his powers, and then call again in thea et to start dating again I get to wait in a blackfor a guy who’s never co home

At least it’s a nice

But one thing the dead do love is telling our stories We get to take our stories with us They don’t take up a lick of room in the suitcase Most days I leave my aparto down to the Lethe Café, order a cup of nothing, look out theat the blue-gas burntbone streetlairls Ladies who lunch Ladies who lost You don’t have to be lonely down here if you don’t want to be They co strands of loose hair behind their ears, carrying pocketbooks and hats and secret griefs Julia, Pauline, Daisy, Bayou, Salass door a gust of autus of the tables They apologize to Neil, the gargoyle behind the espressowoolly wolfshead, pulls a black ristretto shot of emptiness and says, Don’t you worry about it, honey

It’s always autuht, even at nine in the

We call ourselves the Hell Hath Club

There’s a lot of us We’re ry We have seen soe—a few ets called up to the big game You can’t keep your lunch date if soures out how toabout that sort of thing She’ll be back They always come back Zombies never last, power sputters out, and clones don’t have the self-preservation instinct God gave a toddler in a stove shop

I watch theo and, soeek in his lab will reani corpse for once But he never looks twice at me Never picked myself for the te

am for all eternity

I guess you could call me the President of the Hell Hath Club It’s honorary and eet to the café first and hold our table I order for everyone I keep the irls settle in, we open our stories up like the es It’s all right there, neat and tidy and well-crafted and finished Everything that ever happened to us With a big fat D-Day headline over the part where ic became real, superheroes hit the scene, and the world went absolutely, unashaood-behavior crazy

PAIGE EMBRY IS DEAD

Trouble is, my story is his story The story of Kid Mercury crowds out everything else, like Christet a bat in edgewise It’s not his fault I’ out a 221 ith of an experimental alloy when they could look out theof her very productive lab and see a guy in a slick silver suit swinging a haymaker at the metallic jaw of a former professor of music theory? BAM POW No contest I have to try to squeeze in around the edges of him, to cram my little witch’s hat on the departreat fat silver star

Picture e E up to Falk Industries everyhat I used to cheerfully call my Cyanide Breakfast—a triple alhtly dented steel thermos God damn, I used to lovepolyester I was gonna be twenty-two so fucking soon I was gonna graduate with honors in overachieving-know-it-all studies I was gonna throwthere for this long beautiful golden endlessback into my arms filled up to the briood on me

Not bad for an invisible-class nobody You know the invisible classes They’re the ones you never see till you need theht nurse My whole childhood was made up of wee hours Until I s in the world were C++, y, a shade of s cereal Every single day of my life, I lived for the hour after my mother came home from the hospital, before my father started up his truck in the drivehen the stars still held onto the sky by their fingertips and I sat at the kitchen counter, swingingto my parents be married to each other You’d think Dad would have smelled horrific all the tirounds, no matter how many times he showered