The Life of the Party

Picture Credits: adi-goldstein

The life of the party died at the party, which was the end of the party, or actually, it wasn’t,
because everyone stayed at the party, because the police wouldn’t let us leave, and though we
were no longer in the mood to party, the music continued to play, because no one had thought to
turn it off, no one had wanted to touch anything, well that’s not quite true, we’d wanted to touch
each other, that’s why we’d come to the party, to find someone we wanted to touch who wanted
to touch us just as much, to the point where the touching, in our minds, became synonymous
with the idea of “partying” itself, but not now, perhaps, not after the dead guy, who would later
be described as having been “so full of life”, as though “life” were a dose of helium a person
could be injected with, which is not to imply that the dead guy had looked like a balloon, in fact
he’d been kind of slinky, not in terms of being coiled up like the kid’s toy, but more in the way
he’d moved, and also he had a magnetic personality, in the sense that he could attract people as if
by invisible pull, and later, the police would find he’d kept magnetic poetry on his fridge, and the
investigators hoped to uncover clues about his death by examining the verse, though there was
little to go on interpretation-wise, and one of the investigators quipped to his superior officer,
“What am I, a literary critic, chief?”, which, in fact, led the chief investigator to hire a well-
known literary critic to analyze the deceased’s fridge magnets, but there were only four words on
the fridge: “DREAM” “LAST” “CHANCE” and “LOVE”, and there were only so many ways to
rearrange them, and the critic couldn’t make heads or tails of it, though she was used to working with challenging texts, but after just a few weeks she threw up her hands and walked out of the
station a defeated woman, and the man’s death remained a mystery, and after an appropriate
period of time had passed (or maybe not so appropriate, if we’re being honest) we decided we
needed to party again, to honor his memory, to celebrate our friend, if he was our friend, though
maybe it was as much to celebrate ourselves, the fact that he was gone and we were still here
must have meant something, we thought, and it’s not like we forgot about him, but we decided
we didn’t need him to have fun anymore, had we really been so dull and clueless that so much of
our identity had focused on this one person, but when we showed up to the new party, there he
was, by the bar, living it up, or was it his ghost, well maybe it was, because when he drank his
drink it poured right through him and down onto the floor, or maybe it wasn’t him at all, maybe
we had invented him whole cloth, maybe he had never existed, and instead of fantasizing about
him we had to reckon with being alone again, as we’d always been, or at least as alone as we’d
been since the beginning of the party, when we’d wanted to find someone—anyone—to talk to,
to touch, to reflect us like a mirror, if only to confirm that we ourselves were full of life, so full
to bursting, so full we could explode, leaving the police to clean up the mess of us, the police
who, truth be told, would probably rather be partying themselves, experiencing the life we all
wanted to be living, until the moment we weren’t living it anymore.

About Matt Leibel

Matt Leibel is a fiction writer and copywriter from San Francisco. His stories have appeared in Passages North, Electric Literature, Portland Review, Wigleaf, Socrates on the Beach, and Best Small Fictions 2020. He can be found on Twitter at @matt_leibel.

Matt Leibel is a fiction writer and copywriter from San Francisco. His stories have appeared in Passages North, Electric Literature, Portland Review, Wigleaf, Socrates on the Beach, and Best Small Fictions 2020. He can be found on Twitter at @matt_leibel.

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