At first I would try to pick bottles with the names of dead friends on them, so I’d be too sad to enjoy my addiction. Any time’s a good time to quit.

Somehow I kept buying bottles. At some point I switched categories from ‘dead friends’ to ‘past lovers’ and hoped that the bottled name would start blinking on my phone screen.

But that’s not going to happen.

Grahm found that difficult. Everything he believed in space was new; the cogging went in spirals inward. For a few amorphous months Grahm had gone through every holy book he had ever been taught about, and delved into the library for more. He used them up, quicker than he shed his skin and replaced himself (which for regular humans was the luxurious length of 7½ years).

When he had first been shot out into space there had been food with him, to trick him into thinking he had a supply. In fact, all those paperbags were one and the same bag, and when he opened the first one he collapsed them. Grahm, though advanced enough to eat the starlight shining in through all the windows, had requested this specific food to carry with them into the cold of space and now the bag had gone stale and the smell of Americana was faint enough that it could have been anything.

On a similar trajectory as he was his Chanceone, his choice one, Decarulin, who he was told was beautiful. He did not really care; they were going to fuck. That was the one thought that came back, though it too in different shapes. It was on the list. Some parts of him liked her, others hated her, but his whole being wanted her. That was sensor-proof.

Grahm started making up his own gods, but they lacked in weight and symbolism compared to the old gods and he used them up too quickly. He could spend a month in the intermediary state spoke of in the Bardo Thödol, or six weeks digesting [the footnotes of [the footnotes of [the footnotes of a typo]]] in the Torah scrolls but when worshipping the Eternal Lobster all he could do was shed and empty, all his skin cells aligning to attention. Days flew by, Grahm felt motion sickness from it – or was it the rotation? – and his pantheon thinned to just him, the devil, and the Alien.

“I am chock full of clockwork chemicals,” he said to space which did not reply, but rather looked scornfully back at him, malice in its million eyes. Looked back at them. He tried for a moment to repeat the declaration but started rhyming and embarrassed himself.

There was a chessboard between them, without any pieces.

Death was phosphor-eyed, and her teeth were too white. ”Well?” said Death.

Miriam expected something to happen to the chessboard, but it was ornamental. ”Well what?”

”What is your wish?”

”I’ve always wanted to outsmart death.”

”So tell me a riddle.”

Miriam’s tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth. Time passed.

Death raised an eyebrow, bemused.

”What … have I got in my pocket?” And Miriam Dunkirk’s heart stopped.

”I don’t know,” said Death.

~

Based on this: girlshapedguitar.wordpress.com/2013/05/13/the-floating-blobs-of-self-doubt/

You know exactly how long it has been, you needn’t add another chalk mark to the far wall. You know you ”forgot” to put a mark there eleven days ago.

You must think of it as an open wound and of yourself as someone who has been bleeding too long. It will leave a scar. He is the open wound. This is critical.

People are staring at you, politely, expectantly.

Day; night. The sun races across the sky like it’s got something to lose and hides behind the big blue planet when it can.

Day … night. We grow plants on our bodies and we hold our breaths when we can’t see the light. It burns our lungs. Day, then night. The stars come out to play like fish in the rain. They swirl out here, quite unlike the static sky down on soil. They spin and spin and spin and we are more still than ever. Day –

night. We are never going to go inside again.

I was coming up the stairs out of the Grand Central Bank. Banks are usually styled to look like temples, I’ve heard, and this one was probably for Hades. Big, open spaces, sequoiadendronous pillars, the river Styx running through it artfully under a thick, clear glass floor like Arctic ice. Specks of the colour black in the form of guards in tuxedos.

They say Death is beautiful. She was a plain girl. They say she grants wishes, right before she kills you. A sort of theological apology. “I’m sorry your life sucked,” she had told a stubborn radio reporter. “Have what you think you want, before you stop existing.” Everybody knew the reporter’s name, and everybody knew the number of seconds between that answer and his aneurysm.

Once, we found a man underneath a bridge who had thought he wanted to be able to fly. He had jumped and thought he could fly away once he gained the ability. It hadn’t worked like that; he was dead before he hit the ground. Gorgeous blue-green wings had sprouted from his back and sucked the blood out from his heart to fill their veins. It was really quite pretty.

She passed me on the stairs. And she smiled at me, touched my shoulder the way you do a good friend if you can’t stop to say hello to them. And I could feel her lavender perfume like a crane hitching me up into the air, and underneath it I could smell all the different textures of death itself, soft and yielding like rotting flesh. I guess I don’t actually know how the olfactory sense works, I thought, as she held up a finger to her mouth like, “shh – don’t tell anyone.” She turreted her head back straight forward and kept walking. And so the second wave of her perfume hit me, and it was opium. Underneath it, burning charcoal.

And she walked into the bank and spoke calmly, “listen up, everybody. This is a robbery.”

Two security guards reached for their guns and immediately fell to the ground, their eyes glazed like marbles. They smiled quite widely. One woman wrapped herself in a chrysalis. A few tellers were set on fire and, as previously mentioned, a few dogs shat themselves. They yelped. A lonely, shaggy man was suddenly surrounded by his family and they died together.

The one teller that remained gathered the money quickly, panicking. She had a panic attack and an asthma attack at once, and leant against the wall and lost the use of her hands and for a moment it looked like she would stop breathing there. But she found her inhaler as if by magic and she straightened her back and she straightened her tie. There was a kind of glow about her, now. She walked like a fucking queen – not slowly, not quickly, but in her own time, and she gathered the unmarked black bars used for sensitive money-transfers. She punched in the right combinations, turned the right keys like she’d been doing this her whole life. The bars were completely untraceable, the Grand Central Bank’s speciality. Right after the teller confidently handed Death the bag she collapsed and died.

And Death walked out of there smiling, smelling of hibiscus and sulfur.

This is filling me with dread. I’m going to stop thinking about it. I think I saw a squirrel outside.