Natasha Metropolis, the former Silent Film Icon, was done.
Now reanimated, she was still twenty-five and had found work as a biotech specialist in the field of futurist dystopias in a mid-size Western USA state. She had gone further than most and investigated all words that suspiciously began with dys-.:
dysfunction
dyslexia
dysfunctional
dystrophy
dysplasia
dyslexic…
It was a family thing.
She had been asleep frozen in the Siberian Steppes after Fritz Lang’s film, Metropolis, had been shelved. During that time images of a mysterious sign floated through her hibernating mind. Past, present, future – quantum entanglement – the stillness of the present.
Now returned to life, Natasha wanted to be a Harlequin Romance Heroine.
She was dressed in a linen costume of colourful patches and a hare-tail on her cap to indicate cowardice that hid her courage. One never knew when deception would be useful. When disguising herself as a Harlequin she also wore a black leather half-mask, a moustache and a pointed beard.
But her life had come to a standstill.
She’d done her bit, been a loving pet owner for one week. Brought up four turtles, whom she had loved dearly and worried about.
But they had died, so she’d fled.
Escaped to the local booze can, down the street for what she hoped would be the vacating of her mind. Because who could be sad when there was so much beauty in the world? Beauty? She was forcing herself to enjoy it as she sat blotto late at night, knocking back rotgut whiskey, tearing pieces off a dirty napkin—and the filth into her mouth to stifle the gasping moans of grief that would otherwise barrel-out of her mouth.
Delicacy was not her strong suit.
Her senses were muted, dulled by the turtle’s passing. Colours, flavours, sounds. The highs and lows of life. For one week, he’d been gone, and she was still stuck in this weird state of limbo, trying to find her way again.
Then she had a different kind of animal, one she thought would make her come alive, a hamster. But she had soon discovered something, so wrong that she had been driven literally to drink.
The hamster was a vampire. Yes, she was the terrified owner of a vampire hamster. Nothing in her reading of the Holy Scriptures of Harlequin romance had prepared her for this! Maybe buying a hamster hadn’t been the best idea, but her last turtle, who had looked a lot like Orson Wells dying and raising Kane, had whispered, “Hamster.”
The hamster was lying motionless during the day, its paws up, wearing its adorable black cape and Transylvanian dinner jacket only slightly soiled by a few unsightly blood stains and running furiously on its treadmill throughout the night when not trying to turn into a bat.
Undead hamster goes bats. You read it here. Animal crackers. Buying another turtle would have been a better use of her money. Money wasn’t the important thing, though.
