Tonight, I am ethereal, and I glow. With a midnight blue light stretching across my skin, I am an alien. Tonight, you ask for a shot and a cocktail and a cigarette and a resurrection of your soul. And tonight, I am a human-like alien. In a bar, in the rushed streets of nightlife Melbourne. Serving drinks and misery and staring blankly at the pile of human mass, stuck together like a wave, pushing apart and falling in together over and over to the thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, thump
Thump
buzzbuzzbuzzbuzzbuzz
Alarm goes off again. 3pm.
The fan on the ceiling rotates with ferocity. White streams of sunlight pour into my eyes. I stretch my limbs. Today I do not glow. I am washed out, blood drained. The mind of my body does not want to move, but my body is a machine, mechanical, programmed. I am coded.
I move to the bathroom and I see the alien with the alien body and the alien eyes. Piercing black eyes and the human mould, gripping to the specimen, the animal underneath. I stand against the wall, white and sterile, familiar as if I am safer clinging for something material, hard. The tiles are cold against my thin skin. In the shower, the water is cold too. I must call the plumber. The water is so cold. Hard on skin. How long has it been this way?
I take my coffee outside, lie on the grass under the hills hoist and light my joint. The autumn light is falling, dissolving. Autumn is my favourite season. When I was younger, while my mother stood over the stove, steam rising in the humid kitchen and my father laid passed out on the couch in the living room. The television still on. His beer still in his hand. I would sneak to back door and run to the park. I remember longing to see the leaves glow with amber, gold and red and watch as they fell on the grass around me, circling me like I was the mother of Autumn. The sun was never too harsh in those days. I never had to squint. I was so still all those years.
My mother still calls and sometimes I answer, sometimes the alien does. She asks if I still take my pills? She asks if I have enough money? If I will serve drinks forever? If the city is all I ever wished it would be? Have I spoken to my father? Am I still writing? The questions run on and on and and on. Coded, mechanical. It is the only way our relationship functions. Question, answer, question, answer, question. Until I realise I am at work, I do not know at what point I started asking myself the questions or if my mother was ever speaking at all. The lights brighten, flashing its hot white gaze into me. The noise reverberates, shattering across walls, eating into my skin. I do not know how I got here. Maybe I never left.
Then I see you. I know you. I know you so well. I start making your drinks. You look at me, the same way you always do – so expectantly. My hands pour the poison in fluid motions – mechanical precision. Stab the acidic fruit. Crush its juice. I am stirring and staring, waiting.
I serve you the drinks, you and all and everyone, and you stare at me blankly.
How much does it all cost?
*This was originally published in the ‘Tertangala: Horror Issue’ (2023)
Image Credit: Viktor Talashuk on Unsplash