Samantha Dane is almost melted enough to stand. We all help her up, even Pauline. Bayou drapes one of her arms over her shoulder. Daisy gets the other. Julia kisses the top of her head. Nobody says anything about her wearing nothing but a refrigerator. When they find her body, they’ll put her in something nice and modest that has nothing to do with her and she’ll wish she’d stayed like this.
It’s all right. The dead don’t do shame.
The Hell Hath Club walks its newest member out into the Lethe Café, into music and moonlight and steaming cups of nothing that taste like remembering. Her frozen blue skin gleams like the bottles behind the bar. We help her into the booth, hold her hand, slip her a joke or two to make her smile.
What’s the difference between being dead and having a boyfriend?
Death sticks around.
She smiles. Samantha’s smile is as strong as a superpower. Neil brings her a drink and waggles his claws shyly. When she lifts it to her chapped lips, there’s a key in the cup, attached to a novelty skeleton keychain that says Elysian Arms Apartment 14.
“What do you know? You’re just downstairs from me,” I say. “The neighborhood’s gone to hell, of course.” I wink. She winks back.
Quarter Inch Bleed starts up a new song. The crowded dead roar joy. Gail steps up to the microphone, her tinsel-wrapped rhino horns proud and thick as horns of plenty, her long, sleek black fur gleaming like ink in the stage lights.
She starts to sing. By the time the chorus rolls around, we’re all singing together, the infinite dead and the gargoyles and the evil clown and the scaly punk princess and the star-eater and the porn star and the science-queen of hypermercury and the girl in the refrigerator, giving no fucks for the hackneyed, predictable tales steaming on without us, full speed ahead. We escaped. The Deadtown moon turns all our faces into four-color saints, and for a moment, this moment, every night, we all feel almost alive again, dancing together at the end of the story, where nothing in heaven or earth can hurt us anymore forever.