Free Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite, Deirdre C. Amthor

would be their last trip!”). I left the store feeling obscurely pleased, turned at Lisle Street, and walked through Chinatown, marvelling at the strange stew of smells, the exotic spell of the fairy lights draping the storefronts, the vivid Asian faces of the boys. Then I crossed wide, chaotic Shaftesbury Avenue and was in the part of Soho I remembered best.
    Gay London has a strenuously sanitary feel to it, a kind of hygienic glitter. Even the sex shops and video stores are staffed by clean-cut young men who answer every inquiry with cheerful courtesy, whether it is about the best coffeeshop nearby or the proper way to insert an anal plug. I went into a gloomy little pub I hadn’t frequented much before. Its expanses of dark wood and fixtures of tarnished brass gave it that famous British-pub atmosphere, so of course it was always full of American tourists.
    I laid a five-pound note on the bar, got back half the change I’d expected and a pint glass filled with one of my earliest andtruest loves: cold lager. I never went in for the English tradition of warm, murky beer that tastes like something more properly used to feed livestock.
    I carried my pint to a corner table and sat just looking at it for a moment: the creamy head of foam, the tiny bubbles ascending through clear gold, the droplets condensing on the sides of the glass, then running down to form a wet circle on the beer mat. Reputations are ruined, marriages destroyed, life’s works forsaken for the beauty of such a sight. There are seven thousand pubs in London.
    At last I picked up the glass and, very slowly, drank off half my pint without stopping. My throat felt like a cactus in a drenching desert rain. My tongue had its own sort of orgasm. The taste was liquid silk, slow-brewed joy.
    Capital punishment was never any deterrent to murder. The worst of us would welcome death. But to tell a man he can never again taste cold lager! I vowed I would die, and remain dead, before I would return to captivity.
    Tonight I must pace myself. There would soon be plenty of opportunities to drink until the room spun, when I had finished slipping between Her Majesty’s iron fingers. Now I had to keep an eye on the tourists who were starting to pour in. The next part of my plan depended upon them, or upon one of them at any rate. Still, after five years one cannot help getting a bit light-headed. I had just started on my third pint and was marvelling at the pleasantly watery feeling in my limbs when Sam came into the pub.
    Of course, I didn’t know he was called Sam then. I only knew he was a male of my approximate height, build, age, and colouring, and that he was looking at the men in the place much more keenly than the scattering of women. Our facial resemblance was sketchy, but it would do. If he was a local chap or a European tourist, I could forget him without ever learning his name. But if he was American, I intended to make him my companion for the evening.
    I let him order his first round (a Guinness, which told me nothing except where our similarities diverged), saw him pay for it from a brown leather wallet he kept inside his coat, and watched as he stood drinking alone at the bar. He kept scanning the room, and our eyes met more than once, but I broke the gaze each time.
    When only a swallow of vile black brew remained in his glass, I carried my lager to the bar. He polished off the Guinness, flagged the bartender with an expansive gesture no Brit would own, and said in a perfectly atrocious twang that could have originated nowhere but the American South, “Gimmee another stout, please.”
    Inwardly I rejoiced. But to him I only said, “You can stand a match on end in that head, you know.”
    His dark eyes lit with pleasure when he realized I was talking to him. I wondered whether anyone had been friendly to him on his holiday, or if he had encountered a lot of prats who immediately wrote him off as a stupid Yank. Of course, he