The Dead Take the A Train

Sure, Julie had a reputation, but there was no need to let whoever was on the opposite side of the door know she was actually three leprous raccoons in a human skin suit.

Her magic was as blunt as she was: like a nuke hidden in a birthday cake.

The world is always a wreck and life is an amusement park you only get to visit once.

a California king that could have fit four Julies with room for tomfoolery.

In their ill-fitting suit and cheap ties, they looked as out of place as a couple of killer whales at a quinceanera.

The gloves are off now, rich boy. I’ll see you in a vat of boiling shit with little devils flossing your taint with razor wire.

In its place: an abject chill, a cold like an ending, worse still than the grave. It had a pang of salt to it, an abrasiveness, like a jaguar’s tongue rasping the ligament from a knob of bone;

New York might run on Dow Jones, lattes, dollar signs, and neon lies, but what beats in its breast is it’s people: it’s hip-hop, it’s bodegas, it’s art, it’s Union Square grifters, it’s subway mariachi, it’s two-jobs-and-night-school-thank-you-I’m-fine mothers, it’s daughters full of dreams of making it big, it’s multicolored sons and their hopes blazing bright as a meth tweaker’s eyes.

Julie felt its hunger ripple eover her, listened: It was waiting for the city to die. It would wait forever. It did not need this to come to pass now. It was used to waiting. It knew, in the way of green things and deep earth, that a day would come when humanity's heart stuttered to a halt, and then, it would eat. It would sink its roots into Man's bones; it would eat and it would grow and it would spread until even the memory of what it had become was engulged in green. Until then, it would dream of that slow apocalypse.

Relationships didn't always last. Sometimes, they fell apart for the pettiest reasons. Julie once walked away from a two-year relationship because she caught her then-boyfriend belting out Figaro while on the can. He hadn't been a bad singer, either. In fact, Julie remembered fondly how golden his voice had sounded, the acoustics of their closet-sized bathroom stripping away whatever imperfections there were, verdigrising his bright copper tenor. She just hated opera.

There were few things in life Julie Crews enjoyed more than bachelorette parties. They were, by design, one of those rare events where women weren’t just permitted but encouraged to throw off their inhibitions. No matter the amount of booze or the quantity of strippers, the drugs or the homoerotic shenanigans, the shrieking, the woo-girling, the balloon penises, the everything, it was all waved away as girls being girls, a bacchanal of the stupid, like oblations for a twenty-first-century neon Dionysus.