Kitty Wittgenstein and the Sinister Society of Southpaws (4.1)

CHAPTER FOUR

In which Kitty hangs on tight, clowns begin to make sense and ill is spoken of the dead

4.1 Rodeo Ga Ga

(note: to go to the beginning of the story, go here, to see all Chapter Four posts, go here and to see all Sinister Society of Southpaws posts, go here)


I had to say, the afterlife wasn’t what I thought it would be.

Not that I’d thought there was an afterlife. But if my entire atheistic worldview had been proven wrong, I could take some consolation from the fact that all the world’s religions had got it wrong, too.

Well, perhaps not all the world’s religions. Maybe there was some obscure religion somewhere that was founded on the notion of an afterlife in the form of a rodeo. But if so, I hadn’t heard of it.

And yet, here I was, atop a bucking bronco, hanging on for dear, uh, life (?) with the arm that I’d only just had blown off.

Maybe this was hell? That would certainly explain the smell.

The horse beneath me spun around in a frenzy. I clung to him.

There was some kind of clock counting the seconds I’d been on. It was now up to twelve.

The horse bucked some more. This time I only just managed to hang onto the reins. But I was dangling perilously. Another decent buck would finish me off. I just had to hope the horse didn’t realise that.

I tried to straighten up.

But just as I’d almost regained equilibrium, the horse bucked the other way. Almost flung me off. I had my arms wrapped around its neck. But it was now only a matter of time.

The horse seemed to know that. For, one almighty spin later, I was thrown clear.

I landed hard in the dust. Not as hard as I’d landed a few minutes ago when the bomb had blown me across the hall. But hard enough.

I seemed to have lost a battle of wits with a horse.

Bound to happen some day, I suppose.

From nowhere, rodeo clowns came running in to distract the horse.

Clowns.

I’d been seeing clowns back when I was alive, too. Back there they hadn’t made sense. Here, they didn’t make a lot more sense. But at least they seemed to have a role.

What was odd was the fact that the clowns seemed to be the cast of Party of Five. There was Scott Wolf, clad in giant shoes, running around like a loon. And there was Lacey Chabert, beneath a frizzy orange wig, wielding a lasso. All the others were there too, doing their clown bit to calm the horse down.

Still, the clowns were here. And they made sense.

Despite the oddness of who was beneath the clown costumes, things were starting to fall into place. Or, at least, I thought they did.

I knew where I was. What was going on.

I didn’t understand what had gone on with the bomb explosion. Or Bruce’s betrayal. Or, for that matter, how my body seemed to be perfectly reconstructed. I felt for my neck. No vampire scar there either.

So none of that made sense to me yet.

But I knew why I was in the rodeo. I knew it wasn’t the afterlife.

And I knew why Luke Perry was striding across the dust to interview me.

(to be continued)