Free Monster by A. Lee Martinez Page A

sales assistant. “Trolls ate my apartment.”
    The look in his eyes and the way he backed away from the counter told her he probably thought she was crazy.
    Chuckling, she paid for her items. He stuffed them into a plastic sack and pushed them across the counter toward her. When she reached for them, he jumped back.
    “You don’t know,” she said, “because you can’t see or remember. But I can.” She held up the notebook and laughed. She turned toward the door and realized everyone in the store was staring at her like she was a madwoman. But she liked being left alone anyway, so it seemed like a perk.
    She opened a pack of cigarettes, took one out, and lit it in the middle of the store. No one complained. Probably thinking she’d sink her teeth into their throats if they did. Judy held up her arm for everyone to see. She pointed at each word, reading it aloud in a calm, even voice.
    “Magic. Is. Real.” She tapped her temple. “And I don’t care if there is something wrong with my brain—this time, I’m going to remember.”
    A mother pulled her children closer as Judy left the store. Everybody might think she was crazy, but they were the crazy ones. They were the ones without a clue.
    She drove back to her apartment. When she got there, she was surprised to see it was in ruins, a big hole in her wall marked off with police tape, and a horrible odor coming from it.
MAGIC IS REAL,
the writing on her arm reminded her, and now she recalled that something supernatural had eaten her apartment.
    She went to Paulie’s apartment and knocked on his door. Loud music played, so she knew he was home. She pounded her fist as hard as she could. It took a couple of minutes for him to finally answer. He was naked. No surprise there. He was naked a lot. Thick smoke wafted out of the doorway. It smelled of pot and incense.
    “Hi,” she said.
    He offered her a nod before turning and walking inside, leaving the door wide open. His narrow butt, flat and pale, didn’t match his wide, tanned shoulders. She stepped inside the apartment and closed the door.
    “Paulie, is it all right if I stay here tonight?”
    “
Mi casa es su casa,
” he said. “But you’ll have to sleep on the couch. I already got two ladies here, and I ain’t a machine. Want a beer?”
    It was a rhetorical question. He brought her one. “So, like, bummer about your apartment, y’know,” he said as he twisted the cap off the bottle and handed it to her.
    “Yeah, I know.”
    She took a drink, and he just kept nodding to himself.
    A naked woman stepped out of the bedroom, and Judy was beginning to feel overdressed. The woman was tall and lean, a little on the bony side. She had wings sprouting from her back.
    “This is Judy,” said Paulie. “She’s going to stay the night.” The angel nodded to Judy, who nodded back. “Okay, so I’ll be in the bedroom if you need anything, Jude,” he said as the angel took his hand and pulled him toward the bedroom.
    Judy sat down, and the couch cushions expelled a cloud of trapped, sweet-smelling smoke around her. She opened her notebook.
    ANGELS ARE REAL
, she wrote.
    She heard a faint giggle and a moan beneath the loud music.
    AND THEY’RE EASY
.

7
     
    Lotus was old. Older than the universe. And older than the universe that had come before that. And the one before that. She’d lost count of how many universes she’d seen come and go. They all tended to bleed together, follow the same basic trajectory from birth to collapse. The details might differ, but the end result was always the same. Chaos, then order, then chaos again. The chaos parts were safe and quiet, something she always looked forward to. It was those stretches of order that could sometimes make her endless life difficult. But even those instances were brief. She usually ignored them, finding ways to kill the time.
    Since the dawn of this universe, she’d seen everything there was to see and been nearly everything there was to be. She’d