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And that’s that, e, complete with fatal loins! Not bad, really Maybe I’ll lad that we know each other now, really know each other, companion bosoms, from the heart of my bottom Delilah Daredevil Does Deadtown I love you My dear departed, I love you so

I’ll take the first caller on line one

THE HELL HATH CLUB VS THE GIRL IN THE REFRIGERATOR

The moon strikes the dinner hour and the Lethe Café house band shuffles in, jangling and shattering the shinbone bell over the door No loss—it’ll grow back in the

The whole time I was alive, I never loved a rock star like I love these four onyx-winged gargoyles with Christs running up and down their bri punk sensation

I’m so excited that somewhere up above ives one last thrilling, dusty thump

We don’t have ot a beaded curtain that’s all old-as-fuck Greek drachmas You know, the kind they used to put on corpses’ eyes so they could cross the Styx But the Styx isn’t a river any way since Helen and Medea and Iphigenia and Clyteinal Hell Hath Club Deadtown’s like a dear old grandfather trying to use the Internet Slow as snails on quaaludes, but he does his best to get with the times You can find the Styx in the pipes nowadays Deadtown Municipal Waterworks We drink it out of our faucets, we bathe in it, it shoots out of fire hydrants on warhborhood children come out to ju up out of the drains, float down the gutters, fire like bullets out of the hydrants into the sky So, we do have money, but money isn’t currency It doesn’t matter Not here

What matters is entertainment Eternity takes forever The infinite expanse of time just does not knohen to quit The dead fear boredom the way mortals fear death And it’s not like you can kill yourself to escape Deadtoill do anything for the delight of distraction When you don’t need anything anys, and beauty, and spectacle That’s the good stuff The stuff that reminds us e are Remehbor and a total dick, by the way) brings the dead back to life for about half a second by feeding theht the them his story The blood was his oeird fetish The dead don’t turn out for gore; they come for the show

We get thehtclubs that ever shut, every theater that burned to the ground, every ot remodeled into condominiums, every amusement park sold for scrap or left to be slowly claireat auk eggs over easy The oes out of print, a play closes, sooes out of style, a song gets forgotten, that’s the et Harry Potter and I am not okay about it) The Alexandrian Library has a line around it like Studio 54, you wouldn’t believe it—and Studio 54’s waiting list goes all the way back to the Paleolithic era The gang’s all here, the artists too, writers, musicians, painters, actors I know you don’t want to die and it probably keeps you awake so to be and all your works turning to dust, but down here you can seeGardens of Babylon Oscar Wilde sings Paul’s parts, Sappho hits the drums, Sojourner Truth and Basquiat do spoken hile Joan of Arc and Judy Garland perform an interpretive dance, and Laurence Olivier reads the phonebook during the set break It’s not all bad

But Quarter Inch Bleed is hoood When they play, I feel like they’re playing my life Everyone feels that way They’re kind ofpost-punk post-pop hipster rock sludgee cabaret torch singers You know, soul e, playingof sheetand quiet war of instruarettes and popping of knuckles The four of theue twisters to loosen up their s, tap a few keys with their claws They’re all there, Stan and Jack and Alan and Gail, their brilliant fur shining in the hts

The Hell Hath Club holds down a booth like a fortress No one can budge us from our pri in all the tiles in closer to ar out of her cleavage Under the table, she and Bayou are holding hands Julia flickers in and out in time to the noise and bustle of the café

And then we hear it A soft, awful sound sawing back and forth under the honkings of Jack running through a D scale on his accordion It’s co kitchen doors Crying Wheezing Teeth chattering Neil’s horned head snaps up, his canine ears twitching His boiling red eyes fill with concern But it’s not his business, it’s ours We know that sound The Hell Hath Club abandons their front-row-center seats without a word The bartender holds the doors open for us with an onyx-scaled hand We listen in the kitchen, surrounded by knives

It’s coerator

Bayou heaves the door open with her muscled Atlantean arms The frosted air clears A woe, naked, her dark skin blue and white, her hair frozen, ice clotted around her shoulders, her thighs, her neck Two huge bruises shaped like hands blacken her throat

“Fuck,” Polly breathes Even she feels bad for the popsicle “She’s brand-ne long you been dead, kitten?”