Dancing on the Skyline

I wasn’t always like this.

Head down, shadow on my face, trying to avoid eye contact with every person I pass by on the street. My knee length khaki-colored jacket is buttoned all the way up and shades are sliding down my thinning nose. I’m hungry but I can’t eat, lonely but I can’t be with people.

I am a person with one and a half years of needs unmet. I used to be free. A little too free. That’s how all this trouble started.

The night was like any other in my careless twenties. The thrum of a bar’s music. The backbeat of my body swaying drunkenly. Sloppy screams of the half-remembered lyrics to my friend. I went to the bathroom for a moment, and then when I reemerged my friend had found her night wrapped up in a well-built man. His friend; lankier, a little sweaty, was waiting to pair up with me. I had believed, in that moment, that this was my inebriated friend playing Cupid.

As I later found out, this was all planned. They had been following me for months, tracking the places that I frequented, knowing it was just a matter of time and assortment of circumstances before we would end up following them, willingly, back to “their place”. As soon as we walked into their apartment, I knew something was wrong. There was no furniture. Just a lab chair, a station of computers and a stack of guns on the countertop. All the windows were boarded up.

My friend’s giggling confusion was quickly silenced with the staccato-staccato of two gun shots. My screams were muffled with duct tape and hands that pulled me to the lab chair. Sharp poke, burning pain, and then I was out.

When I woke up, the place was completely empty. I was laying on a concrete floor chilled by the breath of late December wafting in from an opened window. I had made my way back to my place at the time, dazed. There was a package, waiting outside the door of my apartment. It was a stack of documents, the first page of which read “The End.”

It took me a week to read through the documents; a week after that for me to process and recover from the grief I was later told all people who have been tapped for conversion go through.

I didn’t really believe what I read at first. Instructions like “Don’t attempt to contact poltergeists. Notify your section leader if one visits you” were so bizarre that I would throw the documents to the side and drink. But when I woke up, hungover, I would keep reading.

Eventually the sum of the documents was this:

1.) I had been killed and brought back to half-living

2.) Half-living meant that I was an intermediary between the dead and living, who were currently in Universe War Five (abbrev. UWV)

3.) If either side won over the other, the Universe would be thrown into an imbalance that would destroy all existence

Like I said, it was all so bizarre I didn’t really believe it until one of my friends from college, Ricky, dropped into the city for work about a month after my conversion. He had already had dinner, so we watched TV and shared gossip about our mutual friends. Ricky looked great; he was working long hours at a hedgefund but he could’ve been fresh off of vacation. I was haggard and unkempt; he was glowing. I no longer had the desire, but if I was my old self, I would’ve pushed us into the bedroom to hook up like we used to. I assumed he didn’t initiate because he had lost his attraction for me after seeing my new look.

He went back to his hotel early in the morning and promised he would stop by before leaving the city tomorrow.

It was disappointing that he didn’t stay over, but it was just as well. I had a meeting to go to. They held one in each city for those of us that had been converted. There were five of us that showed up: a crumpled man with too-large glasses named Roger, a quiet foreign lady whose name was S- something, a kid who looked haunted by the youth ripped from his unwilling fingers, and a homeless man named Farrow who tried to turn everything someone said into a joke.

“My friend Ricky is visiting.”

“Friend?” Farrow raised his eyebrows and sneered.

“Nice,” the kid said. “Haven’t seen my friends in a while.”

“We went to college together. He looks great.”

“He was...the boyfriend?” S-something looked mildly interested for once.

“No,” I sighed. I had always hoped...but now it was all too late.

The group focused on Ricky for a while, excited to focus on something other than death and UWV for once. When I admitted that we used to hook up, everyone laughed and Farrow exclaimed, “I knew it!”

We were all getting up to leave, when Roger, who had been sitting quiet and motionless the entire meeting finally asked, “How did Ricky come into town?”

I shrugged. “Not sure. The train I’m guessing.”

“Luggage?”

“Dropped it off at a hotel.”

“You guys had dinner?”

“He had already eaten. What exactly are you getting at, Roger?”

Roger looked straight into my eyes, unblinking. “Don’t you think it’s weird that your friend who you haven’t seen in - ?”

“Three years.”

″-is now, out of the blue, coming to visit you?”

“We’re old friends. And he was in town.”

“Well say hello to Richard -”

“Yadley. Richard Yadley.”

“Yes. Say hello to him for me.”

We looked at each other for a long while. I finally broke away. Whatever he was implying, he was wrong.

When I got back to my apartment, Ricky was waiting on the porch, still wearing his suit from yesterday.

“Hey old girl, everything okay?”

“Of course,” I said. His eyes were bright green and still kind. He was vibrant.

When we walked into my apartment, he settled into the couch.

I busied myself with preparing us a snack of apples and peanut butter, checking back at him every so often. His smile was fading.

“Everything okay, Ricky?”

“We’re old friends.”

“Yes.”

“We knew each other long before the world came and ruined us.”

“I guess you could say that.”

“You know, it doesn’t have to be like this.”

“Like what?”

“The way you’re half-living...I mean just look at you.”

He got up, one arm now missing. A mischievous smile crept up to his lips as he drew closer.

“Ricky?”

“You’re so miserable,” a step closer now, his head splitting open, blood pouring out over his face.

I took a step back, knife in hand.

He chuckled. “You know you can’t hurt me with that, don’t you old girl?”

“Ricky, what happened to you?”

“Do you know how hard it was getting humiliated every day by those sadistic jerks? How hard I worked? And then one day I go in and they tell me I’m fired. I put all my money in the wrong stocks. Lost everything.”

I could see in that moment the sum of his life; his dog, his collection of Freddie Mercury albums and his illustrious high-rise apartment; falling away in front of his glassy eyes.

“We belong together. We never got the chance when I was alive. We have the chance now.”

He was behind me now, his sadness pressing down against me. It was true. I did not have much life left in me anyway. Maybe at least I could finally find peace.

The front door crashed down all of a sudden, and on the other side stood Roger and the others. S-something gasped, and I looked down to see that I was holding the knife at my wrist, already drawing blood.

Roger stepped forward, an urn in hand, muttering the incantations from our book. S-something, eyes closed, joined and walked in behind him. She held up a printout of a newstory with the screaming headline “Stock Broker jumps off of Company Building to Death” at the top.

Ricky laughed and whispered, “Come on, don’t lose your nerve now. Forget these losers.”

The kid and Farrow then walked in, shouting the incantations. Ricky started screaming, “Don’t be a coward, now. Don’t you love me? Don’t you miss me?”

The group walked in and surrounded me, chanting louder to compete with Ricky, who was growling, “Don’t listen to them!”

Slowly, I didn’t feel so alone. I dropped the knife and began to mutter the incantations with them. Ricky’s weight lifted away from me, and he began to spiral towards the open urn in Roger’s hands.

As the final tendrils were whisked inside, Roger sealed the urn quickly.

I am no longer the person I was before. I see the living and the dead. I am an unwilling soldier in a universal war. But starting that day, I started to feel a little less alone. Starting that day, I began to see why fighting the war was so important.