Tell Me I’m Wonderful

Enjoy the performance as author Kelly Robson tells us a horror-laced lullaby for the future, straight from the Bradbury Building in LA. ~ Julian and Fran, May 11, 2025

From mermaids to spies and everything in between, May’s Sunday Morning Transport stories are ready to entice and ensnare you. Authors Suzan Palumbo, Kelly Robson, Christopher East, and Mary Anne Mohanraj will be your conductors this month! As always, the first story of the month is free to read.

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Tell Me I’m Wonderful

by Kelly Robson

Los Angeles used to be where the money was. When money started running from the fires, smart people followed. I didn’t, and neither did Eve and Beulah.

The twins weren’t dumb, just accommodated to constant disaster. They’d grown up in an apocalypse cult, so if the world was ending, big deal, they’d heard it all before. The cult leader had been promising the End of All Things for decades before someone finally took a piano wire to his throat and ran off to Switzerland with the encryption keys for the private vault. So by the time they were eighteen, Eve and Beulah were already collateral damage in a localized apocalypse.

They walked out of the Hollywood Hills with next to nothing, wearing tie-dyed T-shirts, shuffling through ash in flimsy plastic sandals, guitars strapped over their backpacks.

Look. You can see them in the last series of Street View images of Laurel Canyon Boulevard. Eve and Beulah stare at the camera rig as Google’s car passes by, their teased hair making dark halos around privacy-blurred faces, slender brown limbs tapered like mid-century modern furniture. They look like time travelers, don’t they? Peace and love, baby. Groovy.

They hit the ground busking, and it didn’t take long for them to catch eyeballs. A Senegalese disaster tourist stilted out from the Mondrian Hotel, listened to the twins play for thirty seconds, then brought them inside to thrash their guitars in their lobby. When the tourist moved on to the next American disaster region, the twins were fed, clothed, and hydrated. She even set them up with a secure exchequer vault to capture drips of busking income so they wouldn’t starve, but they needed a place to live. That’s where I came into their lives.

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I couldn’t have left LA, even if I wanted to. It was bolted into my executive direction: Atom Eno’s residence in perpetuity shall be 1129 Coldwater Canyon Drive, Beverly Hills. I’d delivered an extra-large pepperoni pizza to the door and had fallen for the bungalow at first sight. It was my first love—maybe my only love. Summer 1977. I was sixteen.

Yeah, I am that old.

Decades later, with two titanium hips, a cobalt-chromium knee, and an incipient case of radiation-induced encephalopathy, I had it all—except that dreamy little bungalow. I fired lawyers at the problem like bullets, and when I finally managed to pry the house from the bony grasp of an offshore holding company, it was crumbling like a sandcastle. I micromanaged renovation contractors while juggling chemotherapy appointments, restoring the bungalow’s mid-century glory and replacing every weather-facing surface with fireproof material. Plan A was to stay there forever. I had no plan B.

Luckily, one of my lawyers sneaked a clause into my executive direction. If my home’s destruction was imminent and unavoidable, I’d move to one of my properties downtown.

Honestly, I didn’t even notice when they transferred me to the Bradbury Building. I was too busy buying land. Four houses on Mt. Olympus. A dozen consecutive lots on Beechwood. When a fire flattened Beverly Hills, reducing my home to slag and boiling its underground cisterns, I wasn’t even buying lots anymore but entire neighborhoods. Koreatown. Little Bangladesh. Westlake. Century City. Sellers were throwing away land as if it were about to disappear into a hole. Short-term disaster thinking.

Okay, no, it didn’t look hopeful. The fires burned at temperatures so hot, they sterilized the soil and fragged the infrastructure—water, sewage, electrical, roads. When the rains came, soil liquidized and slid away, exposing the sandstone substrate and resculpting the landscape into new shapes.

Another item my executive direction provided for was a wife. Or not a wife, technically, but a caretaker and supply chain manager, which is the twentieth-century person’s definition of wife. And I am nothing if not a twentieth-century person.

Did I need a wife? The Bradbury Building had an uninterruptible satellite power link. Experts monitored my condition remotely. Maintenance techs air-dropped in every quarter to top up my glucose tank and run a soft rag over my carapace, and bots kept everything gleaming—inside, anyway. No fighting the atmospheric ash, which crusted the building’s exterior and shaded the windows to permanent dusk.

But shit happens, and when shit happens, someone has to clean it up. If the techs bailed, or my carapace sprang a sneaky leak, I needed someone around to notice.

Sounds like an easy job? Apparently not. My lawyers hired tradwives from South Carolina and Georgia, but none lasted more than a couple months. LA was too chaotic, life with me too lonely. When the women ran home, the lawyers had to pay huge bonuses to get an intern to fill the gaps between HR searches.

So when the lawyers found Eve and Beulah, they jumped right on them. Two sisters, resilient types who knew how to survive in LA. Perfect. A few days later the twins walked through my door.