coyotekid

Welcome to my so-called...uh...room? Whatever.

My room isn't actually a room. It's a townhouse. I've a huge kitchen with track lighting, a spacious living room for my myriad game consoles (I'm a collector), and a tiny second-floor office overlooking the city street. On rainy nights I can look out at the window when I break from my stories and watch the mist, tinted orange from the glow of the streetlights, coalesce just above the asphalt. Until I wind up falling asleep in my chair anyway.

I'd sleep in the bedroom, but for the fact that Gabe and Eshana live there. To my mind, they are the world's greatest lovers. They make Antony and Cleopatra look like six-year-olds playing 'show me.' After Gabe's wife died, he went a little soft in the head, got some guardian angel complex, and figured Eshana was his charge. I couldn't imagine why he would've chose the caramel-skinned, green-eyed vixen to look after. You look at the way they hold each other, and the way they whisper to each other in the wee hours when they think no one else is around... They've become each other's world. Unfortunately, that world includes my bedroom. Enter at your own risk; I'd rather not. I can live without sleeping in my own bed.

What I have a hard time with is coming down to breakfast in the morning to find Sully the Clurichaun passed out at my kitchen table surrounded by empty bottles of what used to be my Harpoon Heferweizen. No Bud Light redneck water this, and the little bastard doesn't even have the decency to leave me the dregs. Every morning like clockwork he wakes up, red-nosed, and fire-eyed, his pointy ears near to drooping after drinking himself into a stupor because he can't handle that his wife took the kid and left him all those years ago. (What he won't tell anyone is that they left him because he's a drunk. He's supposed to be in recovery, but I haven't been able to oblige him on that yet.)

"Mornin' " he mumbles.

I take the milk out of the fridge, sniff it once before deciding it's safe. I take a pull from the carton before I put it back. "Shouldn't you be driving your cab?" I ask.

"Sure." He stares like a kicked puppy at the tabletop and I shrug and leave. Sully's done this to himself and he'll just have to wait until I can write him out of this situation.

I stop by the bathroom door for a minute, but Tom Bethlehem aka. O'Bedlam, has beat me to it. I can hear him singing Danny Boy in his thick Irish brogue. Tom's got a nice voice, but it's taken years. Centuries. Nay, lifetimes to bring it up to speed. I think he's sixty today; he shouldn't hit his eighties until the Autumn Equinox. You never know what to expect of Tom. He ages with seasons, lives and dies a full lifetime every year and at Samhain he's reincarnated. This creates problems between him and his lineage's banshee, Gwennol, who can't stop grieving until the last of his family line has passed. But Tom's not passing anytime soon, though. Gwennol hopes and hopes. One day, I figure, she'll find a way to off him for good, but until then, we're all stuck with the smug son of a bitch.

"Find that changeling kid you've been looking for yet?" I yell through the bathroom door.

"You know damned well I haven't, now feck off!" he yells back. "Can't a man bathe in peace?"

I mumble something about paying the rent and decide that maybe the girls are willing to give up the TV for a few before I can get into the shower.

As usual they're packed into the living room like rabbits in a burrow. There's the dryad and the pixie playing some sort of card game on the coffee table while the forlorn girl sitting on the couch stares blankly at the television. The powder-white shimmering ghost lady sits cross-legged on the floor in front of the idiot box. The she-wolf wearing fake lamb ears is texting up a storm on the far end of the couch, and the Rockabilly doll in the polka dot dress is smiling out the window as if James Dean will pull up in a Ford Fairlane at any moment. The strange thing is they all look the same: just like an exquisitely beautiful friend of mine from up the road a ways. They have the same penetrating blue eyes, ruby lips, and alabaster skin.

"Hi," the Sugar Plum Fairy says as she floats into the room looking lke the rest of them, and crams a Take 5 candy bar into my hand. "You had the sweetest of dreams, I take it?"

"Do I ever really wake up?" I ask her.

"Grumpy." She makes a tsk noise. "You wouldn't be so grumpy if you dreamed more."

"If you say so. Any chance on catching some cartoons?"

"We're watching Mad Men," the forlorn girl on the couch says. I sigh.

By this point I've come to the conclusion that my office really is the only safe place to hide in this entire house, so I march on up. Eventually, the day will begin in earnest and the house will clear out and I can get my thoughts together. My office is small, dark--nothing but a computer, a wall full of books, and a chair. Oh, and the couple NEXT to my office chair. They're sitting in chairs of their own, back to back, bound and gagged.

This would be Tosh and Massimo, the two crazy kids who are just now learning how hard love can be. Massimo's mother is a sea witch, and she's not too fond of Tosh, so when Massimo made it very clear that he was sticking with the apple of his eye, his mother left them both here to suffer. I suppose I could untie them, but his mum is the destructive force of menopause incarnate and I'm not about to get on her bad side. Tosh nods to me, her short, lavender hair glistening in the sunshine piercing through the slats in the blinds. Massimo makes a noise, thumps his chair against the floor (he's strong for such a skinny guy.) I give them an apologetic shrug.

"Sorry, thems the rules. I'll untie you when your mother says I can." I sit down in front of the computer, slip n my headphones to drown out the noise in the house. I can't sleep in my own bed because an 'angel,' wants to get lovey-dovey with his charge, can't eat breakfast without listening to the sob story of a drunken booze faery, can't take a shower because there's some undying maniac in my shower, and my living room is swamped with beautiful septuplets (not a problem in and of itself) so I can't watch tv.

I could get to writing if I can drown out the Tosh and Massimo's incessant noise. Just crank up the music glance at the monitor.

Too bad I can't think of a damned thing to write about.