Free Midnight Special by Phoef Sutton

years before you run out of variations.
    “But this Wednesday I was feeling a little tired of the whole thing, so I just thought I’d take a bath. Maybe I’d been mixing too much Ambien with too much vodka, I don’t know. Somehow I just drifted off and under and nobody was with me, because they were all too busy downstairs fucking.
    “They tell me Eva was the one who found me. It makes sense. She was probably trying to avoid the party. She had turned into kind of a wallflower in the past few months. Used to be, she was up for anything, and anybody. But you know how young girls are. Very changeable. The least little thing can set them off.
    “Anyways, she found me, and despite what she says now, she didn’t want me to be dead. She performed CPR on me and called the paramedics. That broke up the party downstairs pretty good. When you die, that’s when you know who your real friends are. Most of the people just split. They didn’t want to be caught up in the TMZ of it all.
    “Well, the paramedics showed up and tried that defibrillator thing on me—zap!—but it was a no go. They pronounced me dead and zipped me up in one of those cool body bags and proceeded to carry me downstairs.
    “Now what was I doing all this time? Was I heading down a long corridor toward a heavenly light? Was I in a field of fire getting prodded up the ass by red-tailed demons with pitchforks? No. I was just…nowhere. So if you ask me if there’s an afterlife, I have to say, not so far as I can tell.
    “To quote Bill Shakespeare, ‘Hell is empty and all the devils are here.’
    “Anyway, they took me downstairs, and Eva stopped them when they tried to take me out the front door. All the paparazzi were there hoping to snap pictures of my naked, dead carcass, and she wanted the paramedics to go out the back door to avoid them. She was like you. She thought all that publicity wasn’t respectful. Me? I’d have loved the attention. Ask anybody—they’ll tell you what a headline whore I am.
    “Anyway, it was while they were arguing about which door to take me out of that I woke up.
    “Those zippers on those ziplock body bags, they don’t work from the inside, so I just sat up and fumbled around in there, not knowing what the hell was happening, but thinking I must be involved in some kind of kinky sex play that I couldn’t remember. Then I fell off the fucking gurney.
    “Everybody rushed around me and I remember that Eva was crying and the paramedics were covering their asses, trying to make sure they didn’t get sued.
    “I just went up to bed and left them arguing with my lawyer, who had been heading out the side door with two Asian chicks when he thought I was dead but, now that I was alive again, was making sure that I saw that he was my loyal representative.
    “Fuck them. I just crawled under the covers and tried to sleep off the memory of death. Eva came in and said she was glad I hadn’t died. I thanked her for her honesty. That’s why I stay with her. Because she’s honest. I don’t know why she stays with me.
    “It was when my lawyer came up to tell me about the good chances I had for a lawsuit against the city that I realized things had changed.
    “He was stinking. And rotten. You know the drill.
    “His left ear, where he wore his Bluetooth, was decaying so much the little earpiece was dripping with gore. I didn’t want to say anything. I didn’t want to be rude. I just kept gesturing to my ear, brushing something away, hoping he’d get the hint. Nothing. When Eva came in, I pulled her aside and asked her about Isaac’s ear, and all I got was a blank stare. Nobody saw it but me.
    “So I figured, OK, I’ve suffered some kind of strange brain damage. What do I expect after being dead for a while? There are bound to be some hiccups.
    “When he arranged for a secret meeting with the paramedics at an office I have off Santa Monica Boulevard, I didn’t think too much of it. When he told them not to bring anybody