Page 3 of Meet Me After Life

The phone call in my lap rings out.

‘Hey, it’s T, you know what to do!’

I clear my throat after the tone. ‘Hey, Tils. Umm… long time no speak. I saw you in the new Womb Raider reboot. You were great – really. You make a very convincing mercenary fetus. Look, I wanted to call because… well, I mean I’d love to see you. And I, uh… it’s looking like I’m going to have to⁠—’

Beep. The phone hangs up automatically. I stare down at the girls on the screensaver. I study Tilly’s gap-toothed grin staring straight ahead. I’m there next to her, gaze trained on her like she’s the Stars. There’s a light in my eyes I don’t know how to get back. I was too young to know any better back then. And now I know better but I have no self-control. It doesn’t matter how long I stare longingly at the screen, she won’t answer. She never does. I place the phone facedown on the table.

I pull back the sheer curtains obscuring my view of the city and pin them back. The city lights of Keninburgh pulse like wavelines on a heart monitor. The magic here is so strong it can be physically seen.

I’ve lived here since I turned eighteen. Making it out alive of Judy Orcwell’s Orphanage was no easy feat. I left that starsforsaken town in the dust and never looked back. And now, here I am living the high life in a fast-paced city as a journalist for one of Keninburgh’s bottom-grade printed papers, surrounded by creatures and species who’d never look back at me.

Sure it’s lonely, but most mortal existences are. Humans can’t ever actually expect to make a long-term place for themselves. We die too quickly to accumulate any sort of favour or wealth. It’s meant to be this way. We’re just too temporary.

I gather the leftover takeout scattered across my table from two days prior and bag it before exiting the apartment, sliding my arse down the banister because I’m a big kid that never grew up. That is until I reach the last set of stairs. I internally groan. A dark figure lurks on the bottom step staring up at me. Bottomless eyes follow my slowing steps as she wails.

‘Hello, Lucille.’ I offer a tight-lipped smile to the banshee.

She shrieks.

‘Lovely to see you too.’ I shimmy past her with my bag of rubbish. Breaching the apartment-block entrance, the hustle and bustle of immortal life continues.

‘A hundy for a suck?’ Val the alley-vamp is near camouflaged against the side of the building in their brown leather pantsuit. They always hit me with the same offer. My answer has always been a hard no – but recently, with the mortal tax increase… No, Miller, I chastise myself. There’s a reason the price is so high. Sometimes they don’t stop, and you just become another drained body for the city council to robo-vacuum up.

‘No thanks, Val.’ I smile politely and continue down the end of the alley towards the bins.

Val huffs and goes back to sharpening their nails.

I’m sure they’ll move further uptown after the power shift ensues. Vamps have been equating more of the governing body recently, which is both a blessing and a curse for mortals since they prefer to feed from us. But I doubt it’ll stop the inner-city tax for humans.

The bins have recently been inhabited by a lovely family of rancid racoon zombies. They thank me for the contribution to their dinner before quickly turning on me after realising the food isn’t brains.

I sprint back down the alley and make it back out onto the street, turning to see the racoon raising his tiny fist at me and shaking it. He has terrible migraines – he won’t follow me to the footpath where it’s too bright.

The night is as long as the horizon but the city is lit. Magical signatures dot the sea of glass-pane windows like stars in a depthless sky.

Speaking of…

A wave of light from above is almost blinding for a moment, before it dims some. The light precedes two stars. The effect is like covers being turned down on a bed of silken navy. The North Star. The Star of the afterlife drags itself through the atmosphere and pulses with incandescent charm.

Being human, it isn’t all that uncommon to feel inconsequential. We are, after all, at the bottom of the food chain. But for fourteen minutes every day and night, I watch those stars cross the sky, and I don’t know, I just feel seen.

The North Star is followed by its trailing younger sibling the Black Star. They circle the world twice a cycle and only stay in this line of sight for a total of fourteen minutes. What a time those fourteen minutes are to be alive.

To the naked eye, the Stars are objectively beautiful, one shining with an iridescent glow that casts the sky in varying degrees of pearlescence. A rainbow caught in the whites of a milky iris. Something magnificent and charmed in otherworldly wonder. A stunning sight, but as it happens twice daily, not many bother to look up and soak in the splendour of its beauty. The other, the Black Star trails after like smoke from a backfired engine – not immediately obvious in its beauty, but the way the darkness dances is like watching the ballet. Black ribbons pirouette in every direction, casting tiny dancers in the sky.

If I could diminish its beauty to a thought, I would say that the sky is humming. I would say that it looks the way that nature sounds. No chord structure, no man-made progressions. It is the flight of the bumble’s wings. It is the dance of swaying poppies in undisturbed fields. It is the shift the water takes when the wind puts her lips to its surface and exhales. It’s nowhere as clear, as here, in the city. And for fourteen minutes of my day, their chorus is nothing short of heavenly. No one knows exactly what the North Star’s function is, but there’s been plenty of speculation. From celestial corporate death body, to gateway to the universe; everyone’s ideas are quite broad. You’d think there’d be a little more info available on where mortals will spend all of eternity, but as it turns out, we’re just as low on the food chain after death as we are before it.

I stare a minute longer and a memory strikes like a heat seeking missile from the back of my mind, loosed from a box of things better left untouched. A vision of two young girls, staring longingly out of another cracked pane glass, gazing at the famous stars, being too far to truly witness their splendour.

‘One day,’ Tilly had said, staring wistfully from our shared bed.

‘One day,’ I’d reply, gripping her fist in mine. Her answering grin bared a gap between her teeth big enough to land a Pegasus between.

I shake my head, trying to expel the wayward thought with the motion. Some things are too sore to remember. Some things – some people – do more harm than good. Even if you love them. Especially if you love them.

An ogre walks into me, physically knocking me from my thoughts.

‘Watch it,’ he growls.