Excerpt:

The Pearly Gates Senior Living Facility for Ladies was New Jersey’s premier destination for the “terminally young at heart”, at least according to the brochure in the lobby, It was at The Pearly Gates, on the first floor, in the suite at the end of the hall, that the three remaining members of Penny & The Dimes gathered around the TV to watch themselves once more bring Time Square to its knees.

Penny always got a little drunk before a New Year’s Eve performance. This year was no exception. She satiated herself with another generous pour from the secret stash of boxed wine under the kitchenette sink, and then stumbled towards the sitting area along a trail of Merlot colored polka-dots; a trail beaten out over so many nights of this routine.

The suite at the end of the hall was an uninspired space. The banana leaf wallpaper was faded and sun-dried, the furniture generic, indistinct, and yet somehow, mismatched, and with no razzle-dazzle whatsoever. The windows were half obscured by heavy floral drapes that stank of ancient farts, and offered only a narrow view of a dusty courtyard and a crusty, dried-up lake bed. It hadn’t rained in decades. The Tri-State Area was a desert.

Penny eased into her old oak rocker slowly (on account of her bad knee) and ignored its creaks of protest as the legs bowed beneath her. She brought her lips, etched with cigarette lines and stress-tested by countless lovers, to the cup’s perimeter, and looked to her two former bandmates, now her roommates. Of course, they were familiar with this choreography, and slowly assumed their positions:

Brandi was slumped in her wheelchair by the window, barefoot, in a terry-cloth robe, looped at the waist to reveal ancient leopard-print lingerie. Her g-string cut through her torso like a Dutch ham on Easter Sunday. Her silver-streaked hair was shellacked in rows of foam curlers that reminded Penny of sausages spinning at a gas station, but she’d never had the balls to tell her that. Brandi shifted in her wheelchair, grunted a few times to clear the phlegm from her throat, and managed a wobbly K-turn in the wheelchair to face the TV.

(Everyone knew Brandi’s wheelchair was really just an accessory for the most part. Sure, in theory, she could walk, but that hack podiatrist had said: “No more platform boots.”

“Are you saying I need to wear FLATS?!!!” Brandi cried out in his office the day she got the diagnosis.

They could hear her all the way up in oncology when she shrieked, “I’d rather never walk again! I’d rather DIE!”

“Ma’am, would you please keep your voice down,” that hack podiatrist had said, unmoved, thumbing through some x-rays on his clipboard. “I warned you ages ago, the kind of shoes you’ve been wearing all these years can result in a shortening of the calf muscles and tendons, ankle instability, increased pressure at the ball of the foot, not to mention, a shift in your center of gravity causing resultant knee, hip and back pain. I’d say you’re pretty lucky all things considered, but let’s keep an eye on those bunions.”

He’d then had the nerve to ask for an autograph, but when she reached into her tote bag for the stack of yellowing headshots she always kept on hand, that hack podiatrist told her that actually, he just wanted a signed x-ray of her feet.

“Oh, the agony of da feet,” she muttered under her breath. She gritted her teeth as she signed:

Yours 4Ever, Brandi

Brandi flicked the knob on the side of her wheelchair that made the footrest pop up and back recline. Then she flicked another knob, the one that turned on her hearing aid. She kept it turned off most of the time.

“You are literally so rude,” Penny would always say. “What, you’re too good to hear what anyone else has to say?”

And Brandi would always say, “Huh? Sorry, can’t hear you.”

Behind Brandi sat Daisy, on the loveseat, alone. The way the passage of time had affected Brandi’s metabolism, it’d had an equal but opposite effect on Daisy’s. Her figure had always been narrow and delicate, aside from her infamous set of plump, buoyant breasts, which were confounding and surreal in proportion to the rest of her. But she’d become increasingly slight with age, increasingly bird-like. The way she perched on the faded paisley cushions as they barely slumped beneath her gave the distinct impression her bones may—in fact—be hollow as a bird’s. This may have been due to geriatric osteoporosis, according to a hack orthopedist she’d seen once. Daisy had never been the type to schedule a follow-up visit. She hated bad news.

Daisy had taken a vow of silence decades earlier, and hadn’t uttered a word since. These days, she just click-clacked her knitting needles, occasionally using them to rattle out a spontaneous drumroll on her bony kneecaps when the mood struck. Daisy had to swivel her entire body to face the TV, on account of her chronic whiplash, an inevitable consequence of all those nights of unchecked head banging. She wore a neck brace, its foam stiff and crusted with year’s worth of excess buildup from skin creams and moisturizers. Their labels all promised to ‘restore youthfulness’ and ‘fight aging’ as if entropy were some corporeal enemy that could be defeated by an ointment.

Next to her on the loveseat, Daisy saved a spot for Destiny, may she rest in peace. It went without saying.

Daisy didn’t speak and Brandi didn’t listen, and so Penny often felt as though she lived alone in silence most of the time, save for the relentless ticking of the clock over the doorway. Time had always been such rude company. The silence made her recall the early days on the tour bus, that first Dimes 4Ever World Tour. She would have given anything for a moment of quiet back then, but looking back on it now from the Pearly Gates, none of it seemed real.

With the three of them finally in formation, Penny took a hearty sip of Merlot, picked up the remote with the oversize buttons for the elderly and hard-of-sight, and took aim before pressing the big red button. The screen sputtered and spat a few times before it stabilized, and then her favorite sound filled the room:

“DIMES FOR-EV-ER!” chanted the crowd of thousands, but it sounded like millions even through the thin acoustics of the old television speakers.

“DIMES FOR-EV-ER!”

Like rain in the desert, like music to their ears. The screen beamed footage broadcasting from a drone flying over Times Square. The people in the crowd below took on an amorphous form, so densely packed together that individuals became a collective, undulating mass. But Penny knew that when the camera inevitably switched in a few seconds to zoom, she would see men, women, and children dressed up in the signature outfits of their favorite Dime:

Pigtails, a scant bikini top for the Daisies, the Brandis in a short, tight dress and thigh high platform boots. The Destinys in leather pants and spiked collars. But of course, most of them would be dressed up as Penny.

One good thing about the increasing global temperature and decades-long drought, she thought, was that her trademark uniform of a crop-top and mini skirt now seemed perfectly sensible for what would have once been a winter day in New York City.

Abruptly, the stage lights dimmed, and the crowd became electrified. They knew what time it was.

A voice boomed from somewhere, “Without any further ado –” No one heard what the voice said next. It didn’t even matter. The audience erupted, and for a moment Penny thought she heard them all the way from the Pearly Gates.

Penny & The Dimes took to the stage.

More specifically, four holograms appeared. Each of the Dimes’ likenesses had been captured by a full body scan some decades earlier and tweaked to perfection with proprietary Holo-Body technology. They flickered into view, one by one.