Forever After

2



On streets rife with despair, where the pavements were murky with ash from a million smokers and the gutters clogged with the wares of the downtrodden -- condoms, cigarette ends, needles -- Michael walked with his head down and his hands stuffed deep into his pockets.

In life he lived in mediocrity, never achieving success or comfort, but was content with his under-accomplishment. He had been happy with what he had: his one bedroom flat, his frozen meals-for-one, his weekends down the pub. In death he found himself in a metaphorical hell, on the lowest rung of society; mixing with the worst of the worst.

A shoulder moist with body odour and thin to the bone with malnourishment, brushed past him on the street. The man didn’t apologise to Michael, didn’t even acknowledge him.

Michael sighed and shook his head.

Ahead the street was alive with skimpily clad women offering their bodies for the price of a fix. Their flesh tight to their bones, bruised and blackened; their eyes sunken deep in their skulls; their lips a mixture of cracked, dried, blue and diseased, all covered over with lashings of lipstick which shone a defiant shade of black and red against their pale skin.

“Want me to show you a good time?”

“Hey cutie.”

“What, you not even going to look at me?”

Michael brushed past without raising his head. It was better not to acknowledge them; better to avoid their Medusa stares. Not because they exuded a powerful seduction over him, but because they depressed him, they reminded him just how low he had sunk. These were the women he knew now; these were the women he worked with. He had reaped the souls of their friends and soon he would reap them as well. His old life had been a conveyer belt of beautiful women, he had been popular with the ladies, they loved him and he loved as many of them as he could. Now they sickened him.

He slalomed through an assortment of beggars, prostitutes and clusters of those who could have been both but were too inebriated to be either.

Michael dreamed of the day when he could work in a place like the Heights. Where the streets were paved with gold and not splattered with vomit. He wanted to collect the souls of the successful and educated. To mingle amongst the intelligent, the well-bred, the well-off and the over-privileged.

In a back alley, a darker slice of this dark town, Michael paused. A motionless man lay slumped up against the wall like a broken puppet. The sleeve of his right arm had been rolled up, his pale flesh exposed to the cold. A needle hung loosely from a vein at the top of his forearm. A small trickle of blood ran down from a pinprick opening, stretched wider under the pull of gravity.

Michael removed a small electronic device from his pocket and glared at it with a twinge of curiosity on his face. The figure stirred slightly, cackling a vomitus groan. Michael nodded, stuffed the electronic timer -- his database of the dead and soon to be -- into his pocket and continued down the alley, stepping over the intoxicated man.

These were his streets; these were his people, and every one of them disgusted him.

He entered a grotty flat through a stained, flaked and graffitied door. There were crushed beer cans and the tell-tale stains of piss, expectorant and vomit outside of the door. It stank of sickly putrefaction, and that smell didn’t much improve when he opened the door and entered the two bedroom flat.

He had lived in the flat since his death. This was his heaven, his hell; the place he had been confined to. A definitive example of a bachelor's flat, it was dark, gloomy and it stank of stale body odour and melancholic masturbation, most of the smells provided by Michael’s flatmate in eternity: Chip.

Chip was slouched on the sofa when Michael entered, a stumpy hairy man who appeared to be of hobbit and Neanderthal parentage. His face was small and compact, his features squeezed together by a vice. A flat head, flat chin, protruding forehead, bulbous nose. The colour of his skin was hard to decipher, in reality it was probably a ghostly pale, but with the layers of dirt and masses of hair -- which didn’t seem to grow from anywhere specific, but rather just seemed to stick all over his sweaty skin like loose hair on soap -- he looked apish.

A joint was held loosely between his protruding lips. The billowing smoke rose into apathetic, redlined eyes that watched Michael as he sauntered over to take a seat opposite.

“Are you not working tonight?” Michael wondered, half glancing at the television where a talent show played on low volume. A pompous judge was displaying his distaste for a devastated singer.

With a thick trowel-like hand, Chip removed a small bag from his pocket, thrusting his hip upwards to jam the hand into the material. He pulled the top of the drawstring bag and emptied the contents onto a nearby coffee table, where they were acquainted with a half-eaten slice of pepperoni pizza, an outdated TV guide and a mobile phone which had run out of battery three weeks ago.

Michael watched the assortment of teeth cascade from the bag. They bounced against the solid top like sleet before settling in ragged piles on the dusty surface.

“Finished,” Chip declared, managing a proud smile as he gestured to the teeth with a wave of the empty bag.

Michael stared absently at the piles.

He had been dead and confused for thirty years, but even as little as seven years ago this would have surprised him. Back then he hadn’t known Chip, hadn’t known that tooth fairies even existed, and if he had he certainly wouldn’t have expected them to look like Chip, otherwise he might have entertained the idea of an eternity spent living with one.

Chip spent his nights patrolling the same area as Michael, but where Michael took souls and left empty corpses; Chip took teeth and left money. It was his job to take every spent tooth from every child throughout their adolescence, but it was only the first tooth that mattered, the rest were just complimentary. The teeth were taken back to the Collector Headquarters where they were ground, analysed, and destroyed, but not before the organisation had collected and filled the child’s DNA to maintain a database that the government would kill for, but one they didn’t even know existed.

“I told you to stop bringing those back here,” Michael said. “It’s f*cking disgusting; can’t you drop them off at the office?”

Chip didn’t seem to be in the mood for trudging the two miles to his workplace, he barely looked capable of making it to the toilet without tripping over his own stupidity. “I’ll do it tomorrow,” he said indefinitely. He took a long toke from the joint as if to emphasis his lack of mobility and then he offered the burning stick to his friend.

Michael watched the ember spill smoke into the dim room. The simpleton face of his grinning flatmate appeared expectantly through the hazy, ragged lines. He shrugged, conceded, and took the joint, settling back to watch television as an entire country cheered the antics of a dancing dog, knowing that he was just a few tokes away from understanding their enjoyment.

“How was your pick up?” Chip said half-heartedly, his smiling eyes on the television, enjoying the performance as much as the squealing audience.

“Demented.”

“Drugs?” Chip wondered, the scent of degeneracy piquing his interest.

Michael turned distastefully away from the television; there wasn’t enough dope in the world. “Adultery,” he explained. “He tried to kill his wife for having an affair, ended up killing himself.”

Chip laughed, a little too enthusiastically. He slammed his fists into the side of the couch. “Classic,” he said, his voice strained with hysterics. “You have a great f*cking life mate.”

Michael twisted his face and leant back, sinking into the chair as he tried to let the dope take over him before the memories and the regrets of when he really did have a great life swarmed over him.