There exists a kind of beauty here, too – all around, little flowers and birds cut from tin and wound with copper wire. Some of them are bedazzled with bits of colored glass while others are smeared with luminescent fungus. Other little tidbits of curious décor hang about: a rusted bird cage with an owl skeleton slumped inside, an old-school big blue mailbox spackled over with chewing gum; a series of hitching posts topped with human skulls that are each decorated in a unique way (glittery glass, teeth replaced with hematite, flowers painted on bleached bone, an American flag motif, ivy growing out of an open jaw).

In the distance, Mookie hears a subway train: gung gung gung GUNG GUNG GUNG gung gung gung. The ground shakes, the vibration crawling up his feet and legs. When it passes, a dog barks in the distance. Windchimes tinkle.

“So, who you need?” Mother asks. As she walks, her skin sounds like two rough roofing tiles scraping together.

“Man named Steve Lister.”

She barks a laugh. “You know better than that. We don’t go by our old names here.”

“But you know him.”

“I know him. Burnsy. That’s what he goes by.”

Burnsy. That figures.

As they walk, they hit the center of Daisypusher – a circle where the dead commune around a bubbler fountain made of misshapen gobbo skulls heaped in a clumsy pyramid. At its peak sits the cracked geode head of a Trogbody, dark and dirty water pouring out of the thing’s open mouth, cascading down.

Dozens of dead folk eye Mookie and Skelly as they pass. The dead each bear the marks of their deaths. An armless girl in a pink dress smiles. A man in a rusty wheelchair – the spokes coiled with dead dry snakes – sits like a pile of moist garbage, flies buzzing all around him. A moldering hausfrau stands around in a pink bathrobe. A big no-eyed trucker type with a Peterbilt hat crosses his arms. A teen boy in a snazzy orange vest turns his head – the noose still hanging from his swollen, empurpled neck swings.

Mookie nods as they come closer. A few nod back. Others just stare.

The circle is ringed with trees – not real trees, but trees made of bundles of chain and fence and piled-high trashcans, the branches formed from twisting pipes, mannequin arms, and braided wire. Fake trees that cast long shadows.

Sitting in the makeshift tree branches are cats. Dozens of cats.

Each in various states of… unlife. Ribs showing through an old calico’s side. A tomcat with half his face mashed in. Another cat that’s just skeleton and skin hanging off the bones like old, wet curtains. Cat-bones click and shift in the branches. Mrowling and cooing and hissing.

Skelly stares up. Jaw slack.