A DARKNESS PALE

ALIVE

…Jacob thought his new customer, the lady with the awful blonde hair, might make a good mark, while his roommate, Husker, continued to fail in his efforts to become a psycho killer…

Alive

Reba didn’t have to work if she didn’t want to. After they’d settled down in Portland, her husband Clay lucked into a roofing crew right when snow started eating roofs. He made so much money he didn’t know what to do with it all. She could have easily just chilled all day and partied all night. But Reba wasn’t like that. That first week in Portland she’d marched into the supplement section of Whole Foods and gotten a job. She’d grown up on a hippie goat farm in Yreka, California, where she learned all about plants and herbs and natural medicine. With all that knowledge and her natural aggression, there was no way they could say no.

Tonight, having just completed her shift, she strapped on her skies and asked herself what she wanted to do. At work she kept it together, kept it professional – respect to the Whole Food gods. All other times she gave herself permission to take the great life experience as far as she could. She decided tonight she wanted to promote being alive. She didn’t want to go home, where Clay would be, drinking and feeling sorry for himself, the king who’d lost his kingdom.

She’d met Clay on the trail when she was sixteen, another run away, another gutter punk traveler. He was the king of the scene, and she became the queen. Surviving outside with the Big Dip was no joke. Only the smart and the most hardcore made it. Ten years out, she and Clay felt they’d exhausted the thrills of Mother Nature and decided the new adventure would be living inside again. Clay was still having trouble with the transition. Instead of embracing change, he’d chosen to double down with his darkness and bullshit. In her estimation, he’d stopped being alive and she’d basically given up on the idea that he ever would be again.

She was heavily into what she called being alive. Jacob, her current lover, was alive. He was rude and blunt and affected and somewhat creepy, but the tantric sex he practiced sent her to the moon and back. All that passion and fury. All that energy and activation, like finding your super powers. The more she fucked him the more the big picture came together. When she’d first gotten back inside she’d been insecure that insiders somehow knew better, or were better. But insiders didn’t have a clue. They were trapped in a fucked up bubble of manners and greed and competition. She wanted to help them. Get people positively activated. Combat all this dumb Moluxhc bullshit.

Where was Jacob? Tonight was Thursday, which was one of the days Jacob wasn’t available. Reba decided tough shit. If the little weirdo wasn’t into tapping her pussy tonight they could have it out. Being alive meant not being dependent. Being alive meant charging forward.

She skied to all the bars he liked to hang out at. In one of them she got into an argument with someone over something completely random and was taken aside by the bartender and told if she came in again he was going to call SA and get a mediator. There were a handful of other bars that had effectively banned her like this. Fuck LIFE NOW and all their bullshit. They were as dumb as the Moluxhc scene.

Jacob couldn’t hide from her. She knew where he lived. One time he’d complained about how far away he lived, whining his full address. She skied with determination, coasting away from flickering streetlights into the dark suburbs. There were no sidewalks and she skied in the tread ruts. Using a mini propane lantern she read the street signs. The address was in a neighborhood of big fancy houses – show off houses - all of them set back from the road on these long winding driveways. This was a part of town hit hardest by the death quake. Most of the houses were ravaged by the snow, the walls and roofs done in.

His place looked all right. There was a good tarp over the roof, and while clearly no one was treating the walls they looked to be still intact. The front windows glowed dully through the falling snow. The front door was unlocked. She found her flask, full of mudka, a combination of a hundred proof vodka and mud. If she downed half of it she’d be racing. If she downed the whole thing she’d vomit volcanos and fart nuclear warheads.

Anticipating a righteous fight, Reba downed the whole thing.

In the mudroom she removed her snow gear. There was parlor connected to a living room with one of those tubular wood burning stoves, a merry fire dancing behind the glass hearth. Junk and trash in piles everywhere, generating a concentrated funk of mildew and rot. A hoarder house – those people who didn’t know what they were about so they couldn’t throw anything away. The scene reminded her of the dumps and junk yards she and Clay used to camp out in.

She could hear someone talking with great animation. Must be Jacob’s roommate, she told herself, the one he’d come up to Portland with and complained about constantly. Reba padded away from the voice, down a hall and found Jacob in a massive closet. He’d made a nest in the refuse, like a rat, Jacob stretched out on a mattress playing with action figures.

He looked up. Zero surprise.

She was shocked he was alone. She’d been expecting to find him with another woman. She was ready to kick some ass. “Having a hot a date, huh?” The mudka nicely insinuated into her synapses. She was basically out of her mind.

Jacob rolled his eyes. “Waiting for you. What took you so long?”

Reba snorted. “That’s why you dropped your addy, huh? You’re running some sort of game? Games are bullshit.”

“Bitch, maybe you can help me stop playing.”

She crawled on top of him. It was cozy in here as long as you didn’t breath through you nose. She said, “I feel like doing crazy things when I think of you. I don’t know, like going forward. I got a plan for the revolution, like a campaign I think. I got the funding, my husband has all this fucking money, you know?”

“He’s a roofer, so duh.”

“He’s just letting it sit there. You know, light the fire, but don’t light the fire. Shit, man, I don’t want to just sit there. I want more life. I want to get people into being alive.” She thought about the bar tonight where she’d gotten into trouble. “Not here. Fuck this town. But I don’t know, we could go somewhere else.” She thought about telling him more about the revolution, but the truth was she wasn’t sure about the details yet. Fucking and fucking with people and turning it into a movement and overthrowing LIFE NOW and Moluxhc. The rest should come together pretty soon. She really needed more fucking.

Reba stayed quiet and watched him play. They weren’t action figures. They were ceramic figurines. Two blue fairies.

“You find those here?”

“They found me. These are my fairy guardians. They’re gonna help me fly.” Jacob cocked his head like a cat. “Oh shit, you hear that? It’s court time.”

“What’s that?”

“I gotta go listen to Husker’s dumb stories. You should come too. You came here to fuck with someone, you could fuck with Husker. That’d be pretty cool.”

“I’m feeling frisky. I’m feeling crazy.”

“Yeah,” Jacob said. “And he’s a pussy. Plus, you’re a women. I think he’s totally fucking afraid of women.”

…Husker makes the wrong call…