0.8

A Year Later or Thereabouts…

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There can be a lot of background to one scene. Consider this one: me being an absolute couch potato, no hair dye, and three new piercings. I could say that my friend Victor Sharpe roped me into it. We had a few unlikely things in common.

He was a redhead, I wondered if I’d look good as a redhead.

His favorite movie was House with No Doors, my fifth-favorite movie was House with No Doors.

He was part-daemon, I was part-daemon.

I thought I hit the lottery meeting him, though my grandma dropped his name during our trip out west. He was the grandson of one of her friends, and the mum in the middle was Louise from my meeting on that strange planet. I should have guessed with the big ears.

How small and strange this world had become for me. I had so many questions about being a daemon, but Victor mostly ignored his background. I told him about my meeting and he laughed…and asked how his mum was doing. She didn’t visit him much. Or raise him well.

So I said nothing about being an immortal. I thought that maybe it wasn’t meant to happen. I wasn’t making any progress on it.

Victor was sitting with a bum who failed his ballet audition. It’s hard to run from that story forever. I didn’t even tell him when we met and I was limping on a set of crutches and loopy on the meds they gave me. Oh, and my dye job was looking terrible.

That story started as a beautiful day at the end of summer, and I made it to the final auditions for the Bridgeport Ballet. It was a lot of work getting there, but easy work. I simply had to be the dancer I always was for the first rounds. Barre and centre work was my entire life. And my physique passed their tests after some planning. I got paranoid about all the street food and sushi places and my guilty pleasure of Devil Dogs. God forbid I start on beer.

It’s easy to think that you can take every precaution in an audition and succeed. Ballet gave me nothing but success after all.

The final audition was to show them five minutes of a contemporary dance. Ruth and I spent months piecing our ideas together. She was a flawless choreographer who wasted her talents in a school, if my opinion meant anything.

Three judges observed me, with reams of notes in front of them. There was no room for thinking about them, or a need to.

On stage, I was flawless and masculine.

But skilled and delicate on my toes.

And my hubris wasn’t nearly as heavy as stage props.

My bad landing and the weight of the stage lamp made it a terrible injury. The lamp was probably gone too which was the only thing Mr. Sleep was yelling about instead of getting me to the hospital. My ankle and foot were both crushed, and two vertebrae ruptured.

Of course I’d walk again. After surgery it was easy to get around on crutches and even those wouldn’t last. But dancing again was far off in the future, once I was too old for any ballet to want me anyways.

So that led to becoming a couch potato with Victor, after I met him at his bartending job one night. I still got around the city on foot as best as I could, but I didn’t think about my future. I was waiting for a miracle so I could have one. Until then, it was horror movies and embracing my natural hair color.

I hated having black hair. But mentally, I couldn’t bring myself to a salon or the bathroom to change it.

There were still some things to clear up about Victor. Did I want to bring him into daemonic life? No. I didn’t feel like a daemon anymore either. The whole idea of becoming an immortal felt like a scam and if Pilona would wither and die…well he should have found me in Bridgeport first.

Was I intent on finding more Twinbrook brethren in the city? Not really, but it’d be nice.

Was Victor my boyfriend? I wouldn’t say no if he wanted it, but he was pretty much asexual. He didn’t use the word, but I told him it was okay to.

Buster wasn’t my boyfriend either, but we got close to make living together a little more fun. He shaved with a dull razor and smelled like onions but I wasn’t gonna be picky. Maybe he was making me into the bum I was, but I held out hope that something would change me.

And he almost never got a knock on the door.

“Alright, you know our guest policy. We put the stolen Do Not Disturb placard out, we were gonna banish Victor to the bathroom,” I said. “Uh, Victor?”

“Probably my grandma. Forgot I invited her,” he said.

“Whatever.” At least Grandma blushed whenever she talked about her. What even happened to her? I tried calling but gave up when she stopped answering and I was in the hospital.

Anyways, I opened the garage door behind me.

“This is why you wanted to see Victor?” Cara asked. My uncle prodded her in the shoulder with his cane. “And get that thing off me. I wanted to do you a favor.”

“Hey meemaw!” Victor said from the kitchen. He must have been microwaving a burrito. We were down to our last dumpster burritos but I couldn’t tell him no.

“Look at this, I didn’t drag you into deep space just for you to live in a dump!” said Pilona. He almost hit me with his cane too. “Who even is that scared man? I surely thought you had better taste than that.”

“Well you should’ve found me in a hospital and paid them with your space dollars. That one really hurt.”

“So I had two of my ladies oil the stage and they failed to follow-up. I have a place to show you and lounges to bribe our way into. It’ll make up for this utter garbage.”

“You have a lot to live up to,” I said. Though I got kicked out of enough lounges here to accept that deal.

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“It is a modern home! I bought it from the late Orange Bailey-Moon after he dumped me,” said Pilona. “It is all yours but I do have to take my groundskeepers back.” Two women in black dresses tended to the plants in the atrium. It was a nice atrium and looked…moist. And greener than the hills of Bridgeport.

I saw the outside two. It filled the property and had two floors. Pilona insisted that I could expand it all I wanted as long as the city didn’t complain.

They’d have a lot more to complain about that a five-story house with me there, that’s for sure. I’d just invite Buster to live with me and turn it into a dump. But then again, he liked his little shed and busking on the streets. You had to be a sulking, opulent weirdo to be an immortal, or maybe that was just the Ironstars.

“We also have two studios, I’m not going to waste your time seeing if you’re a skilled painter. I didn’t hire your great-grandfather to do that.”

I rolled my eyes because that story was getting old. I bet Great-grandpa Harwood was awesome. He could carve oak and sandalwood, cut through ice with a chainsaw, and, I dunno, maybe he won a lot of money playing blackjack once. They needed a better biography for him, that was for sure.

“Ah I shall miss this place!” Pilona plopped down in a beanbag chair near my sculpting station. One of his ladies brought me a clay block to work my magic on. “And I dread what you’ll do to the interior, but it must be out of my claws now.”

I mean, I’d keep a lot of the color scheme. But I needed a place for a dance floor, a DJ turntable, and a home arcade like the Ironstars had. Even they were more fun than Uncle Pilona.

Everyone would get customized bedrooms too. Pick the walls, pick the carpets, and pick the mattress firmness. I was getting picky after my injury. A lot of people lived with Vega and almost got to express themselves. Might as well take it from almost, and have more fun stories to give my descendants.

Oh god, I was going to have those? But I’d make a cool grandpa.

I mean, I wouldn’t fall asleep in the middle of the day like Pilona did. And there I was about to ask important questions about the family.

“Alright, I think I got this sexy sculpting gene after all.”

“You’re not even done,” Pilona said. “Do you think anyone in your family leaves sculptures unfinished?”

“It’s not like my mum has the roaring nightlife to look forward to,” I said. “We had a promise you know.”

“Yes, and you’re not getting into the Prosper Room looking like that. And what happened to your unique style? Throw a stone and you’ll hit someone with black hair.”

He thought that teal streaks like my dad had would look the best. I can’t say I never wondered what I’d look like with them! Uncle Pilona at least had some sense of style for a man who seemed to eschew human society. He knew I liked teal, he knew my inseam was 34 inches, and he knew how to tie hair into a bun. Sadly, I almost forgot how to do that.

I looked like a brand new Heathcliff, shimmering with gold-stitched clothes and jewelry. Pilona warned me that they were shooting an episode of Little Celebrity in there, but he knew which contestant was getting voted off that night.

Spoilers please!

“Heyyyyy Uncle Pilona, I thought you’d miss my 21st birthday bash like you did last time!”

Katelyn Missoni, how sad I was to see her go from the screen. I loved her cat fights with Apollo, getting fooled by Kirby’s pranks, dancing off-beat when Suzy got drumming. I never thought I’d be sharing a lounge with her…or that she was related to me?

“It goes beyond blood, she could be your surrogate after all without it being that weird,” said Pilona. “Oh it is a long story about mining and her daemon grandmother. Sometimes I felt closer with her than any Ironstar.”

“Oh that’s funny,” said Kate. “Which one is this?”

“Just one of Vega’s, what a sad state of affairs, isn’t it my dear?”

“Nah, it’s fine,” I said. “Nothing motivates me like being born into failure.”

“Well, you gotta sign a release to be on camera.”

“I have all night.”

“Look, we’ll give you a bottle of champagne as long as you spray some at Kate,” said one of the camera operators. “It’ll go over well in the ratings.”

“Free champagne?”

It wasn’t the moment of acting that would make Pilona say that I shouldn’t be a sculptor. I was probably chained into that so I could save his soul with idol worship or whatever they did. But I had half the bottle left.

“Yeah, old uncle Pilona told me everything he told you,” said Kate, once we sat on the bar with our drinks. “Like, he thought I had the sympathy to save his life and was a secret sculptor?”

“Crazy. Wanna join in?” I asked.

“Can I bring a friend along?”

“How many?”

“Oh there’s that hunk from Twinbrook…not you but Tom Wordy? I bet I can make him do anything. And Matty over there is gonna get voted off tonight too,” she said.

“I’ve heard worse ideas,” I said.

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Heathcliff’s moves inspired by Jorge Barani’s variation on Don Quixote and Roberto Vega’s White Swan variation.