Page 2 of Fed By Fear

A drop of wine slips from the corner of his lips, instantly giving me the ick. Learn how to use your mouth, dude.

“I have a friend who does tattoo removal. I bet he’d give you a great deal if you mentioned my name.” Bitcoin-boy’s eyes are adhered to my neck.

My coffin-shaped black nails reach up instinctively to touch the tattoo he’s fixated on. The two-headed bat is one of my favorite pieces. I was on a waitlist for three years before I got the chance to fly to London to get in the chair of this artist. “I love all my tattoos.”

“Yeah, but what about when you’re older? You’re not going to want your kids to see them.”

A snort-laugh slips out of me.Dude, if you knew how messed up I really am you would realize that kids are not in my future. Instead of trampling down the childless-by-choice path, I hit him with a perfunctory, “I prefer to live in the now.”

“Your face… I can tell you’re beautiful underneath all of that. The tattoos are distracting.”

Now he’s referring to the tiny bat tattoos that dot my nose and across my face. They’re my cheeky take on freckle tattoos. From far away, they look like simple natural markings. Up close, they’re a colony of my own personal teeny-tiny vampire bats.

“I’m very happy with the way I look.” My mouth turns up into a toothless grin. It’s the kind that says,quit while you’re ahead you pretentious shit.

His nostrils twitch slightly. But then he recovers, and his gaze flicks between my hair and my ears. Which will he comment on next? The large gauges in my multi-pierced ears or the green tips of my dyed-black bob? What a boring idiot. To think, I left my house tonight forthis.

I haven’t commented on his appearance. Preppy chinos that are so tight he can’t possibly have any equipment bigger than a tube of ChapStick down there. A too-bright blazer that, although probably expensive, looks cheap and itchy. If this were a movie and he offered to throw that shit over my shoulders to keep me warm on the walk home, I’d stomp itinto the dirt. The ’stache he’s taken the time to meticulously shape is patchy at best. Andhe’scommenting onmyappearance?

Who even does that?

A thick fuzziness fills my ears at the same time a shadow pushes through the restaurant entrance. We’ve moved on from “people who can’t accept they’re dead” to “people who turn into something truly terrible after death.” I don’t know the proper word. I’ve always called them shadow-people. Usually content with showing up out of the corner of your eye.

It’s when they’re fully unafraid to show themselves that the shit hits the fan.

Ding.An alert on my phone gives me the perfect opportunity to look away from my dreadful dinner partner and our ghostly date-crashers. Maybe it’s Amber telling me the ceiling caved in at our apartment and I need to come home immediately.

To my great dismay, it’s not aget home ASAPtext. It’s an email for an auto-renewal of a streaming subscription.

I feign its importance and abruptly end the dinner. “I’ll take this to go.”

Baffled, shocked, humiliated. Suit-boy’s face flipped through all three emotions when I left without warning. It doesn’t bother me. His feelings are his and I’ve got my own to deal with. Away from the lakefront I go. Away from the waterlogged corpses and graveyard of sunken cars. The closer I get to town, the clearer my head feels.

It’s dark when the driver pulls up to my apartment complex. The strands of pumpkin and ghost lights Amberand I wrapped around our balcony railing blink orange and white. Tomorrow this neighborhood will be crawling with costumed kids begging for candy. Amber will be off at a party, dressed in one of the barely there animal costumes I saw her trying on yesterday. Sales in furry lingerie must really spike this time of year. I’ll be indoors, absolutely enjoying myself, blasting the volume of my favorite classic monster flicks and pretending I’m not home. Halloween night is a self-care ritual for me. Those sticky kids can get their expensive-as-hell candy elsewhere.

A teenager with half a face steps out from around the side of my building. He’s been hanging around here a lot. I assume he’s connected to someone on the second story. He’s always looking up at their window. Behind him, an elderly woman with a severely hunched body ambles past, eyes straight to the ground.

The dead are everywhere tonight.

Clouds part above. Exposing the tiniest sliver of the moon. She’s the reason for the excessive amount of roaming dead. The veil is thin around Samhain. Even thinner when the moon abandons the sky.

It’s time to get indoors.

I avoid eye contact with the faceless teen as I unlock the front door. My key sticks. His figure moves closer in my peripherals.

Eyes forward, door open. The bell dings as I cross the threshold. Its sound is comforting. The simple tone of a bell at the door displaces any energy that’s clung to me during my outing. On top of the bell, I keep a grid of tourmalines in every exterior corner, clean the floors with Florida Water weekly, and salt the doorways on a semi-regular basis.

“You ditched your date, didn’t you?” Amber calls to me from the kitchen.

She’s making spaghetti, again. I don’t think she knows how to cook anything else. The white wine in her glass sloshes as she reaches for a spoon.

“He ate weird.”

“That sounds like a bullshit excuse.” She tosses her braided blond hair over her shoulder. “Jenna said he was rich.”

“Yeah, well, he had things to say about my appearance.”

She spins around to face me. “He wasn’t into goth baddies? Jenna said?—”