Gemma grabbed a handful of her hair, squeezed, and stopped just short of pulling. Her frustrations had returned. She never asked the Strangers if she was alive, dead, or dangling somewhere in between like a death row inmate swinging from a noose, waiting for either her neck or the rope to break. And a hundred years may pass before she saw the Strangers again.

“Don’t matter.” She wiped her rag against the dusty bottles of booze lining the shelves of her dive bar. Each shelf had a string of Christmas lights draped off its edge. She worked her rag around the bottles and enjoyed their glow under the dim lights fixed in the ceiling. “Been something like three or four hundred years. Why dwell on it now?”

She thought that, perhaps, she had never known whether she was alive or not. Not even centuries ago, before her skull was crushed, morsels of her brain riding a stream of blood like pieces of cork floating in red wine. People simply decided that alive was what they were, like all one needed was to inhale, exhale, and be above ground. But, in that case, a tire pump in use was alive, too.