i am not your friend

i, the narrator of this little tale, am not your friend. i'm hardly even your ally.

or, who knows, maybe we are friends. are you my friend? you seem pleasant. let's get drinks. let's be pals.

but no. let's get serious. we're not friends. meetings at the mountebank club (for that is what the night shop is, before it gets dark) are not friendly. we are drunken, cynical little shits, and those of us who can't process alcohol manage to fake the mean drunk act well enough.

we compliment one another, sure, but if i were to read one of my many pseudo-philosophical ramblings about illusion and reality, they would praise me for my poem about the woods. if i were to read a short story about a man whose girlfriend is killed by a man with birds inside him, they would praise me for my exploration of survivor's guilt. (hmmm. i feel like i got that one from somewhere.)

my point is, you are not my friend, and i am not yours.

after hours

we had an interesting customer today. he said his name was triptolemus, and that he needed a gun. he also said to tell him if i saw any puppets of the human variety. i said we at the night shop make sure our customers stay in one piece. (for as long as they're our customers, anyways. wink, wink.)

the guy was clearly an angel. he had this look in his eyes that felt... driven. also, the chthonic nickname and the tattoo of two triangles overlapping were pretty much dead giveaways. but hey. eyes. those are cool too, i guess.

dude was real tall, by the way. real thin, too. i gave him some extra food, along with the gun.

oh, yeah, the gun. that's probably the main thing, huh? well, anyways, that happened. he asked me for a gun, along with the declined request, and i gave it to him. we at the night shop like to ask for unusual things sometimes. (no, we're not some sort of weird reverse prostitutes who make people have sex with us in exchange for equipment and information. get your head out of the gutter.) i figured money would do this time, though.

well, more like i gave him a reduced price. i didn't ask for his firstborn, or whatever. just his name.

apparently his real name is—

secret.

that's what it is.

i wouldn't rat on a customer.

(you can't see, but i'm winking right as i write this. it is a wink of utmost mischief and schadenfreude.)

introductions

my name is asher lyall. i am not the only asher lyall, and i am not always asher lyall, but i am asher lyall. i am a member of the night shop. we are not the only night shop, and we are not always the night shop, but we are the night shop.

or perhaps none of that is true. perhaps the mask of asher lyall or the facade of the night shop is more important than the fact that i am sometimes alan roach, and alan roach is sometimes asher lyall, and that the night shop is sometimes the mountebank club, and the mountebank club is sometimes the third facade, the secret facade.

perhaps keeping up appearances is the important thing. who could say for certain? certainly not i.