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  * * *

  TO ALL THE UNCIVIL WOMEN WHO DON’T TAKE SHIT FROM SHITTY MEN

  * * *

  PART ONE

  * * *

  THE STARFUCKER

  ONE

  THE MISSING PIECE

  NOW.

  This is what it feels like, six months into losing Louis:

  It feels like someone has pushed a corkscrew through her middle. It is a comically large tool, this corkscrew, like a cartoon prop, but it feels cold and sharp as it pushes its way through her body every morning, every afternoon, every evening, every hour and minute and second of every fucking day and every fucking night, coiling deeper in her before it reaches her margins and then rips its way back out in one brutal yank, uncorking her insides, spilling her guts, hollowing her out from belly button to backbone. The vacancy is palpable, a ragged hole like a cannonball blast through a tall ship’s sail, setting the craft adrift. It feels like her organs are exposed: her stomach, ripped out, unable to contain food; her heart ruptured and pouring blood; her lungs perforated, air whistling a mournful dirge through the ragged flaps of tissue with every miserable breath she pulls through them. Louis felt a part of her, once, and now he is gone. And she is reminded of that pain moment to moment—

  Because she is carrying his child.

  And that is the quite the ironic sensation, is it not? Louis is gone, and her middle feels ripped out—even as she experiences the opposite sensation of walking around with a squirming fullness around her belly. It’s as if the baby is not a baby but rather a black hole setting up shop inside her.

  As she walks up to the Dead Mermaid Hideaway here in Hesperia, California, she feels the baby in there. Roiling around like a lone potato in a pot of boiling water. Little fucker won’t stop moving. Like the baby wants to kung-fu-kick its way out of the womb. The doc they found for her in Beverly Hills, Dr. Shahini—with her enviable golden skin and those bold black eyelashes like the wings of a swallowtail butterfly—said that Miriam’s body should release chemicals that make her welcome the presence of the child. The chemicals, she said, would help Miriam feel “at home” with the baby inside her, but Miriam told her, “Doc, my body doesn’t make those chemicals.” Because to this day, the baby feels like a parasite, an intruder—

  (A trespasser)

  —and mostly she just wants it gone. Gone because it reminds her of him. Gone because even in its fullness and agitation, it makes her feel hollow, empty, and painfully alone. And already she can hear Gabby chastising her inside her mind: It is not an it, Miriam; she is a her.

  She’s your daughter, not an end table.

  “Feels like a fucking end table to me,” Miriam grouses under her breath. “God, what a great mom I’m going to be.” Like that matters. Right now, until she figures out a way forward, this child will barely be born before it dies—robbed from the world at the moment of birth. From darkness to a brief flash of light, and then taken away again. Returned to the formless chaos from whence all things come. Life gone too quickly to where it usually goes slow: unmade into death.

  All part of fate’s plan.

  But Miriam is Fate’s Foe. She is the Riverbreaker.

  Fate will not write the end of this story. She will.

  Miriam swears to herself now, then, always: she will figure out how and why this kid—this parasite, this end table—is going to die, and she will save its life. Even if that means ending her own in the process. She owes that much to Louis. He is dead because she fucked up.

  This baby will not suffer the same fate.

  This baby will live.

  Deep breath, Miriam. In. Out. The baby squirms inside her.

  She takes out her cell and she texts Gabby: I’m here, Dead Mermaid Hideaway.

  Gabby reponds: You’re there early

  Miriam: No traffic.

  Gabby: Early is good

  Gabby: See Taylor yet?

  Taylor Bowman, the preening lackwit, and also the reason she’s here. The doe-eyed pretty-boy is about to get himself murdered in the next—she checks her watch—37 minutes.

  Miriam: I haven’t gone in yet.

  Gabby: I wish I was there with you

  Miriam: I’ll be fine. You’ve got a more important job. Any luck?

  Gabby: None yet, will let you know

  Gabby: What’s the place look like?

  Miriam looks up and describes what she sees: Awning has a fake mermaid skeleton draped across it. It’s no lie. Someone has made a replica of a mermaid skeleton. It’s a pretty good replica, too—still has some fish scale on its bony tail, some fake webbing between the fingerbones. The red wig is maybe a bridge too far, but the clamshell bra seems a nice touch. She doesn’t bother describing the other signs plastered awkwardly around the doorway in: LADIES DRINKS = 50 CENTS OFF and LOOTERS GET DEAD and FAMOUS FOR OUR GHOST PEPPER MARGARITA, whatever the fuck that is.

  Miriam adds: Shifty desert dive bar, except she doesn’t mean shifty, because autocorrect corrected shitty, so then she has to fix it in all caps: SHITTY desert dive bar duck you autocorrect, which just pisses her off more and leads her to type in thumb-punching rage, ducking motherducker fuck shift shit duck it.

  Gabby: I told you, you should just put the profanity in your phone’s dictionary.

  Miriam: It’s not my phone and that sounds like work. I’m going in. Will text you updates.

  She slides the phone into her back pocket and heads inside the bar.

  TWO

  MERMAID CHUM

  Inside, it looks like someone took a Gulf Coast dive bar out of Florida with a giant crane and carted it over to California, plonking it down here in the heat-fucked Mojave. Dollar bills are stapled to the ceiling. Various bits are covered in boat netting. The booths are old wood, and some of the tables are glass over ship’s wheels. Then of course, you have all the assorted mermaid tchotchkes: sexy mermaid art, sexy mermaid lamps, and above the dead-ass jukebox in the back hangs a mermaid figurehead, like the kind that would point the way at the bow of an old pirate ship. Everything is dusty and dim. A little bit cracked. A little bit rotten. Like me, Miriam thinks, grimly cheerful. Or cheerfully grim.

  The bar is pretty empty. It is, after all, noon on a Tuesday, and this bar is in the approximate epicenter of Satan’s dusty asshole. She figures it probably lights up late in the day with bikers and truckers.

  Right now, some old sunburned shriv sits in the back across from a trailer-trash blonde, asses hanging off their stools. The old dude is in some kind of man muumuu, and the lady wears a tie-dye halter-top and cut-off jeans so cut-off, they look like they want to crawl up the woman’s butt like a teenage boy’s jizz tissue hidden clumsily between two couch pillows. Other than
that, the only person in here is the bartender: a gruff, butch woman whose pockmarked face looks time-scoured and worn, the gravity of a hundred thousand scowls having long dragged it down toward her buff-yet-paradoxically-bony shoulders. Her hair is short-cropped, dyed a pink that is less like the pink of a pretty heart or a My Little Pony and more the pink you’d get if you blended up a pack of hot dogs and poured the resultant slurry into a frosted glass.

  Miriam sits.

  The woman regards her the way one regards gum under one’s shoe.

  “ ’Sup?” the woman asks.

  “Hello,” Miriam says, drumming her fingers on the wooden bar top. “Lovely nautical theme you have going here.”

  “Thanks,” the bartender says, but she doesn’t sound thankful. She plants her arms out like a couple of kickstands, and Miriam regards how each is swaddled with ink—tattoos galore, all various animals, cats and wolves and birds and snakes. “Whaddya want?”

  “That question, right there . . .” She clucks her tongue. “That is a tricky bitch, that question. What I want, what I want, whoo. Yeah. I want what every woman wants. Respect. Peace on Earth. Equality and justice. I want for nobody to give a shit that I don’t shave my armpits. For good men to carry me around on a palanquin made of the bones of bad men. Mostly, I just wanna be left alone. To find somewhere at the ends of the Earth where I can go sit, be it a beach or a mountain, and stare out upon the horizon, where no one will bother me. Though, if we’re being honest, really honest, teen-girl-diary honest, what I want is a fucking drink and a smoke.”

  The bartender sniffs. “You found the bona fide end of the Earth here, sweetheart. And I don’t know what a . . . pelenguin is, so I can’t help you there.”

  “Palanquin. It’s like a—I dunno, like a bed or a cart you use to carry people. Don’t you read trashy fantasy novels?”

  “No.”

  “Not even with the mermaid shit going on here?”

  “Still no.” The bartender shrugs. “Can’t help you there. But I can help you with the drink part. No smoking in here, though.”

  “You can’t—what? You can’t serve me alcohol.”

  “Why not?”

  Miriam points theatrically to her middle.

  “Maybe you’re just fat.”

  “Uh, rude. Though—” She thinks about it. “Maybe that’s not rude, you not making an assumption about me. Okay, I take it back. Not rude. Still, I’m telling you that I am currently with baby on board, so you can’t serve me booze. Pregnant bitches can’t drink. Even if what I want is a glass of your lowest-shelf tequila, tequila that has no lime in it but has perhaps once looked upon a lime.”

  “I can make you a ghost pepper margarita.”

  “I don’t want that. I don’t know what that even is.”

  “A margarita?”

  “A ghost pepper. Is it a pepper that died?”

  The bartender has reached the end of her rope in terms of patience, and she crosses her arms and gruffly asks, “Lady, you want a drink or not?”

  And now it’s Miriam’s turn to reach the end of her patience, because she will not be out-impatiented by this gruff lump of pink-haired bison jerky. “You’re missing my point, ma’am. It doesn’t matter what I want. I don’t get what I want. Nobody gets what they want. If I got what I wanted, I’d be on that beach with a hollow coconut full of blackstrap rum and no baby in my belly and no psychic gift in my head and no Trespasser fucking with my skull at every turn and did I mention that my head is broken and did I mention that the man I loved is dead now and did I goddamn jolly well mention that—” She hears herself talking faster and faster, louder and louder, and so she quickly swallows whatever nonsense was about to come out of her mouth, clamping her teeth so that no more words can easily escape. “Sorry. Point is, I can’t drink. I mean, I can. But I shouldn’t. I’m responsible now. So, no drink for me. What I need is information.”

  “I’m not your Google.”

  “I don’t want to know the capital of Djibouti; I want to know if you’ve seen someone in here recently.”

  The woman arches an eyebrow to a near-perfect point. “I don’t roll over on my customers.”

  Miriam slides a twenty-dollar bill across the wood. “And now?”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Her name? Why her?”

  The bartender grimaces. “Because it’s a dyke bar.”

  “Is it?” She turns around and gestures toward the old dude. “What about him?”

  “That’s Sandra.”

  At hearing the name, the old man—woman?—turns and gives a little finger-waggling toodle-oo wave. “Oh,” Miriam says.

  “You want proof gender is a spectrum,” the bartender says, “look no further than the very young and the very old.”

  Miriam shrugs. “Cool. Fine. Regardless, I’m curious if you’ve seen a certain dude in here. You might know him—a celebrity, Taylor Bowman. Kind of a young, hunky surfer-stud type, but with a guarded, vulnerable emo-hotness to him? Coiffed hair, soft lips, firm jaw. Dumb as a fence, this guy, a real ding-dong, he’s like a . . . a human Applebee’s. Mediocrity given form, like a monster made of dismembered boy band parts.”

  “I know him; he’s on that rom-com cop show. But I ain’t seen him in here. Biggest celebrity type we get is the cat lady, the one who had all the surgery, now she looks like a cat? She comes in once or twice a year trolling for, well—you know. Pussy.”

  “That’s weird.”

  “Hunting for pussy?”

  “No, turning yourself into a pussy.”

  “Ennh. People do what people do.”

  “Yeah.” Miriam bites her fingernail in frustration. “So, no Taylor Bowman. Shit.” She doesn’t mention that she’s pretty sure he’s going to be here in about, ohhhh, twenty-two minutes, and when that happens, he’s going to get dead. Thing is, what if she’s wrong? The rules are the rules: when she touches someone, she sees how that poor fucker will die and when, but the where of it is left for her to figure out. In this case, she thought she had it figured out: the vision of death showed her a wood-paneled office, an old metal desk, and invoices from different vendors scattered around it, all addressed to The Dead Mermaid Hideaway in Hesperia, CA. But now she’s questioning that. What if the room and desk she saw were somewhere else? An owner’s room in a house somewhere. Maybe here in town, maybe miles away. Maybe in a whole other state. Panic cuts through her like an icicle stabbed in her chest.

  “If you’re not gonna drink anything—”

  “You have a back room? An office?”

  The bartender nods slowly. “Yeah. Why?”

  “Can I see it?”

  Miriam pushes another twenty across the bar top.

  Tongue in the pocket of her cheek, the bartender shrugs. “Sure. C’mon.” And then she gets up and heads to the back.

  Miriam kicks the stool out from under her, then follows after.

  THREE

  PISS AND VINEGAR

  The bartender pushes open a swinging door and walks to the back. Miriam follows, and as she does, the baby inside her flips and flops, punching her bladder before starting up another round of hiccups. Which trips Miriam out because, to reiterate, there is a human being inside of her and when this little jerk has hiccups, she can totally feel it. The hiccups arrive like the popping of champagne bubbles, an effervescence that both tickles her and makes her feel queasy all in one go.

  The baby, she fears, is drunk. Even if Miriam can’t be.

  Worse, now she’s gotta pee.

  And now, the heartburn is kicking in again. The heartburn that comes with this kid is a hard vinegar burn that gushes up through her windpipe, forcing her throat to feel tight and summoning a taste to her tongue like she’s licking nickels.

  Pregnancy is a gift, they all say. Blah blah blah, miracle of life, what a special time, cherish these moments, you’re creating life.

  Well, creating life is a stupid shitshow, she decides. It is less a harmonic convergence of angels singing
and more a tired, insane Dr. Frankenstein furiously cobbling ill-fitting body parts together in a fireworks show of lightning and hiccups and heartburn.

  They pass a door. Gender-free bathroom that identifies itself as a bathroom by the icon of a toilet crudely carved into a wooden placard.

  “I gotta piss,” Miriam says.

  “Jesus, fine,” the bartender says.

  Miriam elbows open the door and shimmies her way inside, finding a cramped toilet-closet that smells of dry rot and urine ghosts. She maneuvers her burgeoning belly past the sink, grunting as she hikes down her jeans and panties before sitting. Ironically, it takes a few moments to conjure the urine to her, and she mumbles, “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon.” The piss arrives suddenly, without much warning, a porcelain-polishing firehose blast that is deeply, irrationally satisfying. That is one thing, at least, that pregnancy has improved: peeing is now a sublime, even divine release.

  From behind the door, the bartender asks, “You from LA?”

  “Sure,” Miriam calls back. “Well. Not from-from there, but I came from there today.”

  “What about that Starfucker thing, huh?”

  That Starfucker thing.

  She decides to go for it.

  “That’s why I’m here, actually,” Miriam calls back, still pissing, still polishing porcelain, pssshhhh. She literally has to speak over the sound of her own vigorous peestream.

  “You serious?”

  “Serious as an In-n-Out Burger, double-double, animal-style.” God, she loves In-n-Out Burger now. California can fuck itself right into the ocean (which would at least put out the wildfires), but it needs to leave behind that fast-food joint. Since being pregnant, she craves their burgers the way a clown craves the terror of children.

  Finally, the waterfall of scalding urine ceases.

  Wait, no—

  Still a couple more blasts.