El Capitan

Facing directly
the high forehead 
of Capitan,
there is a stream no one goes to
because the trail is faint
and there is no marker
Go there. 
Walk
until the banks crouch down next to the water
and she will glide over you cooly
with her weight 
and her will.
This is how you get to touch
the mountain, 
for she has just come from there.
Lay under the protective
slant
of his
towering face
afterward and let the sun dry you.
No one will come.
No one will come
because they don’t know
and they are afraid 
to go where signs aren’t.

Bare Heart

Ivy climbs, 
growing in thin spears
toward the pinhole that is sky
and waking wonder

Loose in my veins is 
a plant like this, 
a climber

My own will brings me
to lay heart upon chopping block, 
to squelch out its green juices
in a way that makes others shudder,
saying,
Wait!
We weren’t prepared to see that!

We women who pray before stones lay our hearts bare.

I am 
the resin that falls 
from the tree, oozing its immaculate complexity 
toward cragged cracks that may catch it 
but usually

don’t

and I find myself trailing white and dry
down asphalt 
to drains.

Leah Baker is an English teacher at a public high school, and works regularly with her students to develop, refine, and submit their own writing for publishing. As for herself, she has had her work featured most recently in Panoplyzine, Soliloquies Anthology, The Raw Art Review, and Sheepshead Review.

Beginning of the End of Summer

These September highs are lower 
than the lows of August.

She’ll be back, Summer, 
before the weather finally cools, 
but the object lesson that the heat 
can abate fills me with hope.

filled by the first rains of fall, 
the creek sings after summer silence,

The bank’s lanky thighs, 
bared by heat and drought, 
robbed of all modesty, 
are now demurely covered 
by the rising water.

Mighty clumps of bushy bluestem wave
heavy strawberry blond heads.

Pink love grass, gently caressed by the wind,
kisses the cheeks of the prairie,

Copper canyon daisies, Mexican mint marigold
burst open their blazing yellow blooms, 
joyful explosions on autumn’s apron.

I desperately need to cut my fingernails.

Perplexity of Memory

The arid Texas sun 
is merciless. 
The air conditioner 
has stuttered and died. 
Water from the cold tap 
runs warm.
By four pm I have shed my clothes 
in favor of a cotton mumu. I sit 
both under a ceiling fan 
and in front of a box fan. 
By six pm 
my scalp is drenched,
the cotton cloth sticks to me.

My brother reminds me 
that the house we grew up in 
had no air conditioning. 
We remember playing outside 
all day – 
freeze tag, 
hide ‘n seek, 
capture the flag.

We remember 
putting chewing gum on asphalt to see it melt.
We remember 
walking downtown on hot summer afternoons
to the library or for an ice cream cone.
We remember 
riding our bikes all over town.
We remember 
prancing barefoot across the black top street 
to play with our neighbors.

But we don’t remember
ever being hot.

“Keep straight,” the robotic voice commanded.

Tom checked his phone for what must have been the hundredth time as he drove through the forest. Shouldn’t take more than thirty minutes now. A weak wind swirled golden leaves over the road, spinning them around in a graceful ballet while waving stripes of blue gleamed through the trees when the car passed a sapphire lake. And all of it was coated in the brazen mantle of dusk. At least it’s beautiful out here. 

When the trees disappeared Tom rolled down his window and glanced around at never ending fields, inhaling autumn while some guy sang folk songs on the radio. He drove by some cattle, a barn, a farmhouse here and there, and then a sign.

‘WELCOME TO BELLEVUE

Where it always feels like home’

The road became a street; the fields dotted with large habitations, then, after a minute, two continuous rows of buildings – little shops, little houses – before which people strolled around with little plastic bags in hand, grey jackets on their backs. The street merged into a great place bristling with life where many meandered through the alleys of an outdoor market. Grey jackets everywhere. Tom slowed down as three avenues made their way out of the place and into every side of town. He checked his phone again and took a left and leaned over to look up as he drove under an electric decoration displaying a blue lightning strike flashing on and off. He drove by a drugstore, a deli, and a bar. Blue lighting strikes pinned on the doors, on shop windows, stitched on the matching jackets most of the townspeople wore. Tom lost his smile.

“Fucking Mercer,” he thought out loud.

He knew exactly what that looked like. A town fair, some harvest festival of some kind, the celebration of an historical event. Nothing of interest for Tom.

“He’s gonna hear about this,” Tom said to himself as he checked the streets.

That was his own fault, he knew it. But blaming Mercer felt good, even though he just had to say ‘no’ and that would have been the end of it.  Mercer had made a hobby of leading Tom into unsettling situations. The adventures often started the same way. Mercer called, said a few puzzling words ordering Tom to meet him, or left a cryptic message on his phone or in an email. Most of it ended up disappointing –yet entertaining, some were straight-up outrageous but, once in a while there was a gem in there. This time, the few words that started it were only ‘You’ve got to see this’ accompanied with GPS coordinates and a RDV in the little town of Bellevue, Nowhere.

Tom stopped the car as another group of festival goers walked across the street. From there he could clearly see their grey jackets, the blue lightning strike circled on their chest, the marine blue trousers. And they seemed to clearly see him too, several faces staring at him as they passed by, checking his car, his license plate even. They don’t get many foreigners here. He kept driving up the avenue -high-end shops, restaurants- until the view cleared on his right to leave space for one the busiest and gigantic parking lots Tom had ever seen. He slowed down unconsciously and looked at the number of cars – probably twice the population of a town like that. Then he saw the lightning strike again, a titanic piece of metal up in the air, nestled at the top of a Disneyesque castle that popped out of nowhere. As he drove by he saw the matching outfits, hundreds of them, turning their heads and staring at his car. Then he saw the flashes and almost slammed on the brakes. He quickly turned his head to see a group of them, phones in their hands. They’re just taking pictures.

A few streets away, he spotted the ‘No Vacancies’ sign, parked and checked around, but he couldn’t seem to find Mercer’s car. Damn it. Tom took his bag out of the trunk and walked to the entrance as a policeman stepped out and eyed him down. Inside, the lobby was bustling with luggage, footsteps and noises erupting from a nearby room.

“Hello, Sir,” the clerk welcomed him.

“Hi, I have a reservation for two nights.”

“Very well, Sir. What is your name please?”

“Dermott. Tom Dermott.”

The clerk typed a few things on his computer and checked the screen for a moment.

“Are you here for the ceremony?” he tried with a professional smile.

“The ceremony?”

“Oh, the local…,” the clerk snapped out of his computer and examined Tom. “Nevermind. It’s just, most of the folks in town are here for the seminar. It’s the biggest of the year. People are coming in from all over the world.”

“All right. I’ll be sure to check that out. What kind of ceremony is this? A town festival?”

The clerk raised an eyebrow for a split second he immediately seemed to regret.

“Mh. No, Sir. The blue strikes are holding their annual ceremony for new supporters.”

Tom felt as if he had just been impolite but couldn’t imagine a possible reason for it.

“Anyway. Mr. Dermott, you are in room 22 on the second floor. Here,” he turned back to a counter and took out a magnetic card. “Is your room key. And, do you have any luggage you’d like us to bring up for you?”

Tom took the card out of the clerk’s hands. “No, I’m fine, thank you.” He took a step back and stopped midway.

“Just one thing. Do you know if Daniel Mercer already checked in? We are supposed to meet today.”

“Let me see,” the clerk said and did. “Sorry, Sir. Mr. Mercer has not yet checked into the hotel.”

“Thank you.”

“Have a good one.”

Tom entered his room a few minutes later and was pleasantly surprised. The hotel was much more agreeable than expected from such a little town. The elegant silk bedding was promising, just like the oak furniture would welcome his papers and pens in style. Not bad. Except for the flowery paper on the walls. He got to the window and checked the street. The grey jackets milled about everywhere you looked, swarming the sidewalks in small and larger bands. That seminar began to arouse Tom’s interest, moreso than any town festival whatsoever might had. He looked at his phone and figured he could go for a little walk. I got nothing better to do until dinner anyway.

Tom began his tour on the main avenue. He passed by a few little shops with their lightning strikes well in sight, a little group of grey jackets curiously eyeing him out, then a larger one, smoking outside a business office with a great lightning strike carved above the entrance. He saw two policemen hanging out outside their cars next to a park, discussing something loudly. Then Tom stopped, seeing something he didn’t quite like: the small lightning strikes stitched right above their badges. This is not some town tradition. This is something else. And right there he heard the clash of the lens, the click of the photograph. The culprit was on his right, a frail elderly woman in her grey jacket that had stopped in the middle of the crosswalk, her camera in her hands. Tom frowned; annoyed by the idea of a stranger taking his picture, then he became puzzled when the woman just stared into his eyes, in a stance of challenge. She nodded and reached back to her group of other grey jacketed individuals. Great, Mercer got me into a town of loonies. Tom went around town like that for about half an hour, but no other oddities were encountered, except for what was probably the largest supply of matching jackets he had ever seen. He went back to the hotel a little bit confused about the whole thing, but still unable to get what Mercer was seeing in the place.

“Mr. Dermott!” the clerk hailed him as soon as he stepped inside.

“Yes?”

“Mr. Mercer arrived. He’s waiting for you at the bar.”

“That should be about right. Thank you”

Good news, finally. Well… News, anyway. Tom found Mercer being his usual self, drinking at the bar alone looking shady among early diners that glanced at him from time to time.

“Hey! My old friend!”

“You’re late,” Tom said taking the stool next to Mercer.

“Am I?” He asked innocently looking at his watch.

 “Ass,” Tom chuckled and ordered a scotch. “So, what the hell are we doing here? And please tell me this is not like that time with the native tribe.”

Mercer pretended to be offended, hand on his heart. “How could have I known it was just a bunch of kids tripping on ecstasy in the woods. It clearly looked different.”

Tom laughed thinking about it. “So?”

Mercer smirked, twisted it into a smile with squinting eyes, clearly very fond of himself. “That is different. Here lies a great story for you, my friend. But don’t be so impatient! Enjoy your drink first.”

Tom did and they chitchatted for a while about the drive, the charm of the little town, then a waiter came to them.

“Your table’s ready, Sir.”

Mercer smiled, nodded to him and stood up, offering Tom to follow him with his hand. They sat, ordered, and when the waiter was gone Mercer grew dimmer.

“Have you noticed anything strange since you came into town?”

Tom snickered. “Well, maybe a little odd, like those god awful jackets but apart from that I have to say it looked like some kind of town festival, nothing more.”

“It does look like that,” Mercer agreed, glanced around and lowered his voice. “Except from the fact that 85% of the town’s population moved out without any apparent reason in the past two years. Or for the hundreds of millions of dollars generated yearly by one local business. Or for the twenty-two suicides,” he said, gesturing quotation marks at the word, “that have been reported over the same period.”

Tom leaned over, elbows on the table. “How do you know about all this?”

Mercer chuckled. “I knew you’d like this one!”

“All right, you got me. I’m all ears, now spit it.”

“Two years ago the writings of a man from this town became popular and began spreading like wildfire around the state, then pretty much everywhere through the internet. I caught up the trend at the beginning and sold them online to foreigners. Though that didn’t last a month because the books were so popular they were translated in dozens of languages and sold everywhere in the world, published by the very same publishing house that is the local business I was telling you about.”

Tom frowned and leaned back, looking outside the reception room at the many many cars. “What kind of writing are we talking about? A life coach that has all the answers to success?”

Mercer bit his lips. “I would have preferred that. A self-proclaimed diva who tells you wearing her 500 bucks handbag is the best way to get under the spotlight is not that dangerous.”

“Fuck. A spiritual guru, then. You’re talking about a cult, aren’t you? What does he do? He pretends he can heal your pain away?”

Mercer looked down, seemingly uneasy. “Well, that’s the problem. It’s more complicated than that. I’ve read all the books, Tom, it’s just a bunch of spiritual sayings and mottos to live a better life. There’s nothing in there to explain how it became such a movement. Two hundred million sales worldwide, hundreds of thousands of disciples coming to this town every month. Everything points to this place. It’s like a goddamn pilgrimage for these people, but I have no idea what makes them do it.”

Tom thought about it for a second, rubbing his hands. “If it’s the guru’s birthplace the meaning of this town is understandable.”

“I’m not arguing that,” Mercer said. “But you’ve seen the little blue strikes on the shops and houses, right?”

“Yeah. You mean the whole town’s converted or something?”

“No, no, no, my friend. They kicked them out!” Mercer whispered loudly, instantly inspecting the room afterwards.

“What do you mean?”

“I told you 85% of the residents moved. Those guys bought everything. They own every shop in town, most of the houses, and this very hotel, by the way. And that’s what I don’t get. People come here after reading a book and decide to stay just like that,” he said snapping his fingers. “Makes no sense.”

“What about those suicides?” Tom asked.

Mercer sighed. “I honestly don’t have any evidence, but when I found out it just seemed way too much for such a little town.”

“The police officers,” Tom said for himself.

“What?”

“I’ve stumbled upon a few today. They have those strikes stitched on their uniforms.”

Mercer’s eyes grew wide. “That is not good news.”

The waiter stepped before them and put their plate down. “Enjoy your meal,” to which they both nodded without a word and the man left.

“All right,” Tom said after a minute of silence.

“What?” Mercer asked.

“You got me, I’m hooked. I want to know everything there is to know.”

Mercer chuckled and got to his plate. They ate and managed to silence the topic for a while as the room got more and more crowded, then when the bill was paid Mercer stood up and reached Tom.

“Let’s take a walk.”

Tom frowned, rubbing his belly. “Right now? I was thinking of crashing early actually.”

“You want to see this,” he simply said and stepped away. Tom followed.

They slowly strolled down the street in silence and crossed path with several groups that stared at them on their way. In the next street they were alone.

“So, what is it?” Tom asked.

“Almost every night something happens around 9 or 10 p.m. I want you to see it, to make up your mind about what it means. I think it’s important, maybe a key aspect of the whole thing.”

“Ok. What is it?”

“There are a few places where it can happen, just follow me until then.”

Tom did, and although he was growing curious by the minute, he felt uneasy as they crossed one street after the other. Roughly twenty minutes in their digestive walk, they both stopped at the loud voices in the residential street.  A group of grey jackets stood on the porch of a small house, talking lively to the resident who clearly wanted no business with them.

“Let’s get closer,” Mercer said and swiftly reached the house next door.

“I assure you, Sir, we mean you no harm,” the greyjacket at the head of the group calmly said. “One of our members is living in this house. We simply came to help.”

“What are they doing?” Tom whispered to Mercer.

“Wait and see,” he answered.

“No one here is part of that!” The elderly man shouted. “I’ve told you that last week, I’ve told you that last month. Stop knocking on my door.”

“This is not ours to say,” the other said. “We help each and every of our members, Sir.”

“There is NO ONE here who wants anything to do with your bullshit. Do you understand me?” The man said as he approached his face next to the group’s leader then spat on the ground.

In a flash, two of the group stepped forward and pushed the man aside to get into the house. Tom stood up ready to intervene but Mercer pulled him by the arm hard and locked him tight.

“Don’t.”

The elderly man fell on his ass as the two members were almost inside, when an elderly woman came out of the house holding a hunting rifle in her hands.

“LEAVE OUR PROPERTY RIGHT AWAY OR I’LL SHOOT.”

The group stood still, unmoved, staring at the woman without expression, until the leader turned to the elderly man.

“We will come back,” he said, oblivious to the threat.

“We know what you’re doing! It won’t work!” the man shouted in the night before walking back inside with his wife.

The group turned their heels, walked out the man’s alley, and as they were about to cross the street they saw Mercer and Tom. They stopped and looked at them as both didn’t budge an inch. Then the leader took his phone out of his pocket and the group did the same. They aimed the viewfinder up and down, left and right, and clicked. And left.

Tom was speechless, his heart throbbing, his palms sweaty, not sure as to why he felt like he had been assaulted himself.

“What the fuck was that?” he said out loud.

“That is why 85% of the town belongs to these people,” Mercer answered after taking a long deep breath. “They harassed every former resident until they couldn’t take it anymore and moved away. They are replacing the entire population of this town with their people. You know what I can’t comprehend at all?” he asked shaking his head.

“What?”

“These people were doctors, teachers, office workers. Many are foreigners. They come from incredibly various backgrounds. How in hell do you get these kinds of people to behave like that? Threatening an old man in his own house.”

“Yeah. Most cults take advantage of people’s weaknesses. They pretend like they have the sheltering answers, provide a sense of security. But these people. It’s way beyond brainwashing. This is not the work of a spiritual guru. It’s religious. They think they are accomplishing some kind of purpose.”

Mercer tried a smile that felt wrong. “Yes, I agree. And I think we need to find out what that is.”

Tom nodded. “And what’s up with the pictures anyway? Are they documenting every person that is not one of them?”

“That’s also what I thought. I don’t know why, but I didn’t see any of them take a picture of something else. They also took pictures of every house that is not yet one of theirs.”

Tom looked up and down the street, scratched his face, rubbed his hands, took a step left and right, then when everything in his power was done to cool down he looked at Mercer.

“You sure aced it this time. I think I’m gonna get some sleep.”

“Yeah. Good idea,” Mercer said.

The reception clerk was nowhere to be seen when they walked in, and the restaurant was empty, too, though it was barely ten minutes over ten. They both glared at each other but didn’t state the obvious discomfort they were feeling, and got to their room in silence.

Tom stayed eyes wide opened for a while, aware of every single sound, any hiccup in the roaring silence of the little town. He turned on his side and looked at the night lamp. He pulled the latch, pulled it again, then checked inside the bulb. He got up, stood at the window and examined the street left and right. Not a single soul in sight. He paced round the room, looked into the drawers, the closets, under the bed. He tucked himself again and closed his eyes. I’m being paranoid. He tried to picture anything slightly reassuring, but he couldn’t get it out of his system, he couldn’t stop thinking he was being watched, being recorded, or something worse, until he fell into a dreamless sleep.

Breakfast was apathetic, without an appetite to dive into the plate of pastries. Coffee it is. Though they were likely the only gloomy ones in the room. An ecstatic eagerness was taking over the place, wide grins on every face, lively words pitched from one table to another. Mercer took one last sip.

“Let’s take off,” he said. “We’ve got work to do.”

“Day’s already planned?”

Mercer simply nodded and got up.

They once again walked up the street, busy as hell now, grey jackets everywhere going in the same direction, faces turning on their way. They still stare at us. Tom was uneasy, but for some reason Mercer had a gentle smile on his face for the passersby. They followed along the trail of the disciples until they reached the gigantic edifice and its matching parking lot. The white castle looked childish in a way, cartoonesque towers rising on the four corners of the building, an impressive welcoming party of grey jackets before the great wooden doors. Two long lines of hundreds of people stood before the entrance waiting for something.

“Headquarters?” Tom guessed.

“Something like that,” Mercer said. “From what I managed to learn new members live there for the first few months of their ‘training’. Afterwards most of them buy property around here. Most often than not it’s the company that buys it on their name and stations them.”

“So, they basically lose control over their finances? Another red flag,” Tom said, staring at the hundreds of people grinning wide, walking around hugging each other, laughing out loud. They look like they found their true calling.

“It’s starting,” Mercer said.

And he was right. The excitement exploded in an uproar of cheers and hollers and whistles like the band just entered the stage, but it was only a silhouette walking out of the building. Thirty seconds later the lines began to move forward and were swallowed by the castle one person at a time as security officers checked them before letting them in.

“They’re wearing badges,” Tom noted.

“You know what’s on there,” Mercer gravely said.

Tom looked at all the faces, almost grateful to simply be let inside a building. Indebted, most likely.

“That’s where the suicides happened,” Tom said for himself.

“I kinda think so too. But with those security officers and the force in cahoots I’m guessing you can’t believe those police reports.”

Tom noticed Mercer was still smiling, though he could see it was forced.

“What are we doing here, Mercer?”

Mercer stared into Tom’s eyes and sighed. “I need your help. I’m going in today.”

“What? Are you insane? Let alone the suicides, which is pretty alarming, those people will do anything to protect their secrecy.”

“We need to know what happens in there, Tom. That’s the whole point, right? Why would you document all those things if you want to back off when we find the real deal?”

“That’s not what I’m saying. I know we have to investigate what’s happening here, but this is dangerous. There are other ways.”

“There are none,” Mercer said, a light shining in his eyes, more serious than Tom had ever seen him. “And I need you.”

Tom thought about it for a second, but the only thing that popped into his mind was the flash of the photograph.

“I need someone outside, Tom. Someone who knows where I am and what I’m doing, and who can do something about it. Someone I trust,” Mercer said, emphatic on the ‘trust’.

“Damnit, Mercer. We’ve done some pretty fucked up shit but that deserves the medal.”

“Is that a yes?”

“You’re gonna do it anyway if I say no, right?”

“Yes,” Mercer said.

“Keep your fucking phone handy at all times. I’m calling you in the evening and tonight, got it?”

“I’ll do the best I can. If I’m not there tomorrow you know what to do.”

Tom nodded and took Mercer’s hand in his own. “Don’t do anything stupid,” he said in his ear before Mercer stepped away, waved at him, and reached the end of the waiting line.

Tom ambled alone on his way back, enjoying morning, putting some order in his mind, eager to get to it. I need another coffee. He looked around to see if he could find a shop where he could kill some hours in, but there was nothing to see left or right. The shops were closed on the avenue, iron curtains down, luminescent blue strikes flashing on and off above the doors. The street was empty, too, and the whole town seemed void of any sign of life. No cars on the roads, no faraway honks, no boots knocking on the ground. No sounds at all. Even the birds had fallen silent. Tom felt strange, an uninvited guest whose unwilling host carefully examined his every move. Tom quickened his pace, his heart throbbing, breathing loudly; unable to tell if his biggest wish was to stumble upon another human face or to never see anything from this place ever again. Hell of a town.

Tom took a long deep breath when he saw an employee smoking outside the hotel. He rushed inside as casually as he could manage, asked the clerk for a whole pot of coffee to be brought up and got to his room where he locked himself in. He booted his laptop and ecstatically got to it. He found little about the suicides, not much more about the corporation – except for oddly complacent articles about their contribution to the area – and a few pages about the town’s history; who apparently had none of interest before the Blue Strikes’ implantation. Nonetheless, at noon he was about ten pages in. Then he began to document everything he had seen, everything that happened. The outfits, the shops, the photographs, the castle. That damn castle looks like an attraction. No wonder it makes me feel so sick.

When the sun began to set, Tom decided he had pushed the deed as far back as he could. He took out his phone and dialed.

“You’ve reached Mercer. Leave a message.”

He stared at the screen for a while. He took a few steps around the room, stretched his legs, looked out the window at the day dying over the ghastly street. Maybe they took everyone’s phone for the time of the ceremony. He tried everything he could to be rational, but he had to accept it. For the first time in years he was worried about Mercer.

Mercer had been the oddest, the fearless character he had ever met, and he had been his friend for many years. The duo worked well. Mercer did the groundwork. He used his connections, took the path least travelled, or simply bummed around to find the most unorthodox stories, the wildest experiences, and Tom wrote about it and sold the stories. He’s the one that guided me through the catacombs that day. He’s the one that gave me the urge. An insider’s account of a cult was a great opportunity. But was it worth it?  

Tom went down to the lobby to clear his mind. And have some dinner, too. That would be good. When he found himself standing alone in the restaurant area, he concluded that eating in his room would be less disturbing after all. Fifteen minutes after, the clerk mechanically entered the room with the tray, a cardboard smile drawn on his face. Tom wasn’t feeling much of an appetite anymore, but dug into it anyway. The empty plate lying away, he examined his notes once again, trying to get a pattern, a connection, some new idea that might pop up at the sight of a word, a name, a place. Nothing. And it’s giving me a freaking headache.

After a while he didn’t see the point in forcing it anymore and crashed on the bed. A damp hand caressed his forehead for a moment, rested on his chest then on the side of his body. Then the lamps started blinking, the room grew smaller, until all that was left of this town was the floral wallpaper, the buds elegantly sprouting into crimson eyes overseeing the world, scrutinizing Tom’s restless sleep.

The eyes bulged out of the wall, quivered, then quaked in splendid tremor. A thunder of feet broke the ground. Hands hammered down doors. The low growl of a pack moved around, eyeing out its prey. 

What are they trampling on?  Who?

The rumble moved closer, and Tom realized he wasn’t dreaming anymore. He turned on the lamp, jumped out of bed and staggered to the window, rubbing his eyes with one hand, holding the sheets over his shoulders with the other. The street was dark, but light grew in the distance, as if a world of ice was blazing miles away. And it moved. It moved along with the rumble, and it was going this way. His way.

A blue arrow of light struck a window and bounced back, then another one. The houses up the street gradually lit up, a halo of many whites and blues mirrored in the windows, the facades, slowly polluting the night. Then the faces began to pop under the lights. One, ten, a hundred. The grey-jacketed procession walked down the street in ominous silence, apart from the martial rhythm of their feet on the ground. Tom stood still at the window as the funeral march approached until he realized he was probably the only guest left in the hotel that night. He rushed to the wall and turned off the switch, then crouched back to the window, his head peeking up the wall. The drums of the feet made his heart pound in a tempo twice as fast, but still in rhythm, he noticed. When he saw the face turn to the hotel and stop, Tom felt a single drop of water running down his back. But when he saw a dozen more do the same, he almost crashed to the ground lowering himself as much as he could, staring at the floor, shivering from all his body. He turned his back against the wall and stared at the buds on the floral paper. What do they want? What are they doing?

Then a white blue flash reflected on the wall and answered him. The mad beat of a thousand strikes of pale blue light lit up the room for a full minute, the invasive snaps of the lenses ringing in Tom’s head as if they had been a feet away. Tom pinched his arm as hard as he could to cool himself down, but it didn’t do the trick. They captured it whole. He felt the hotel – and Tom – within the viewfinder, snatching the entire world away from his hands, from his control. The flashes became less frequent, until it became a sporadic occurrence, all the while Tom did his best not to get up to look at the street. When it felt like it was finally over, a loud bang crushed Tom’s hopes. The knock went on three times in a row, and Tom didn’t budge an inch and held his breath. The stranger knocked once more on the door thirty seconds later, and Tom looked around the room at everything, at the lamps, at the desk and the pens, at his luggage. I need something sharp, or something heavy. But thirty seconds more were enough to lift him off the dreadful thought when he heard the footsteps walking away in the hall.

Tom stayed there tucked around himself under the window, looking at the wall. For some reason no other place felt as secure as here, and nothing he could think of could help him think rationally. Except one thing. He took out his phone once more, took three shots before dialing the correct number then called.

“You’ve reached Mercer. Leave a message.”

“God fucking damnit,” Tom whispered to himself.

When his phone’s screen turned off, he realized the town had gone to sleep again. He crouched up halfway, took a peek at the street then stood up. The street was as silent as it could. Just a lovely small town street with its beautifully decorated houses, the local little shops, the spotless sidewalks. The perfect town to raise a family. Of course it is. Tom paced around the room, looked out the window, paced around the room, looked out the window, sat on the side of the bed, paced some more and before long a delightful lilac mitigated the darkest blues as daybreak began to shine above the little town. Tom stared out the window, rubbing his eyes as a few early risers strolled down the street carrying breakfast. He checked his phone and couldn’t believe morning was finally there, yet the thought quickly disappeared when another thought shove it away. Where is he?

Tom took a much deserved shower before reluctantly leaving the room to go into the lobby. The room was already vibrant with activity, guests coming and going, the smell of many wonderful things filling the air.

“Hello, Mr. Dermott,” the clerk said when he saw him standing aloof in the middle of the room. “How was your night?”

“Great, thanks,” Tom answered in a flash.

Haggard and confused, he stepped into the restaurant area and reached the buffet.

“Hey, Tom! Good morning!”

Tom turned around at the voice, and stared straight into Mercer’s eyes sitting at a nearby table, a delighted smile on his face. Tom hurried to him and took a seat, nervously eyeing the other guests on his way. No one is staring.

“What the fuck happened last night?” Tom whispered, leaning over the table. “I was goddamn terrified. What happened to you? I couldn’t reach you.”

“Oh, oh, slow down! Everything’s fine,” Mercer said without a glimpse of anxiety.

“No, nothing’s fine. What the hell was that march through town? I didn’t sleep a minute, Mercer.”

“Settle down,” he said, calmly putting his hand on Tom’s. “It’s okay, alright? Yes, it was one of the strangest nights of my life, but we’re good, Tom. We’ve got everything we wanted.”

“Good, because we’re leaving today. I’m not staying a minute more in this freaking lair for crazy fanatics.”

“Yeah, okay, don’t worry. It’s probably for the best anyway,” Mercer said before taking a bite. “By the way, how’s the work going? Got a good lead?”

“Well, I’ve got a few things,” Tom said watching as Mercer wiped some egg yolk from his chin. “How are you so calm?”

“It was weird, but not that terrifying, you know. You didn’t use to get so overwhelmed by a little adventure,” Mercer said smirking.

“Yeah, if you want,” Tom said, uneasy. “Anyway, let’s get out of here.”

Mercer snorted vocally, displeased to give up his breakfast like that but didn’t say a word. Both went to the lobby and Tom paid as quickly as possible while Mercer spared a few niceties with the clerk. Tom walked out of there first, hurrying to his car with his luggage in hand and the keys in the other one. He reached for the handle and looked back. Mercer was a few steps back, ambling along the walkway before the hotel until he lifted up his head, stared into Tom’s eyes and stopped.

“What are you doing?” Tom shouted.

“Just. Just one thing,” Mercer said lifting his index up.

He took his phone out of his pocket, fumbled on it for some time and aimed the viewfinder at Tom. Tom felt something creeping up his spine. Unable to move, he stood there for an eternity as Mercer took all the time in the world to reach the button. Click. Tom and Mercer stayed motionless, a half-smile eating up Mercer’s face, no words exchanged. Tom opened the door, threw his bag inside the car and sat. He looked at Mercer through the glass, at his unaffected face, his stillness carved into the quiet little town. As Tom was about to give up, Mercer nodded and walked back. Tom turned on the contact and drove out of Bellevue, Nowhere.

I had to do it. There was no other way.

And as he drove away on the small country road, all Tom could think about was the snap of the lens, the click of the photograph.

Noé Varin is a French copywriter and creative writer living in Normandy. He has published short stories in Vine Leaves Literary Journal, Galaxie Rouge and Hellbent Magazine.

The college girls said they would take care of everything: her two cats, her expansive vegetable garden, and her mail, even if it was just throwing out the supermarket circulars.  They’d even care for her bees.  They had bought Chef Vicki a year-end gift: a ticket to San Francisco and weekend stay in a hotel by the wharf, the fat tourist grotto she never neared when she lived there.  

            What they didn’t give her was a makeover, a new wardrobe and a different trajectory in life.  And she couldn’t just spend the weekend hidden away in her cottage; they already possessed her extra key.  So Vicki drove to the airport in Chicago, less than two hours away from the small town in Wisconsin where she cooked for a sorority—the girls loved her curry tofu pops and pizza muffins.  She would go to San Francisco.  She would hide away in the hotel and watch movies.  She would eat junk food for a whole weekend and not feel guilty about it.  She would go to a bar and pretend to be someone she wasn’t, a fashion designer, maybe.  She would try and not think about the girls in her house, judging her life.   

*

The girls looked around her cottage.  Strings of skull lights dangled over her front door.   Chef Vicki stacked her hats on mannequins’ heads in the entryway.   A snow globe collection adorned the windowsill. 

Each room was a different crayon color:  Chef Vicki always referred to the red room or green room rather than the dining room or the bedroom.  “Chef Vicki is a mystery,” the Sorority President said as she wandered from one room to the next. 

“Wrapped in a riddle,” another laughed. 

The Sorority President liked that when girls uttered a banality, Chef Vicki called out “cliché” and toasted them.  She had never been called out on one and saw it as a personal victory. 

“I don’t like that she calls us exile; that’s an insult,” the Pledgemaster said. 

“She calls Wisconsin exile, not us,” the Sorority President corrected.  She was going to attend law school in the fall. 

“She loves us,” a girl said.  This girl was shy.  She liked that Chef Vicki made her feel like she was the most special sorority girl in the room. 

“Oh, please, it’s her job,” the Sorority Treasurer said, “she’s paid to act like she loves us.”  She didn’t know what she wanted to be, but she tired of everyone talking about getting out of Wisconsin after graduation as if it were a prison.  Each winter, she craved the stillness of canoeing on the one of the nearby lakes; each summer, she craved the big expanse of sky that reflected on the snowy hills and reminded her she was part of a larger universe.  She wasn’t altogether sure any other place offered that. 

“Let’s see what TV she watches,” said another, “I bet she likes the same TV we do.”

*

When Vicki lived in San Francisco, she had been a house sitter for one of her personal chef clients—they were a tech couple before tech was called tech.  She took in mail, watered plants, and played with the two cats.   She’d get high and check out their cabinet for the fatty foods they promised her they were no longer eating.  She would look through their photo albums.  She didn’t stop to ponder the family portraits.  She examined the older photographs, the ones before the wedding and the school portraits.  The wife had bragged that she had been in pageants, that she had been thin in a different life.  Vicki had not believed her.  But there was the proof in a photo album yellowed and crackly from dried glue.  Indeed, her client had been rail thin in that trendy way of the seventies, her ribs protruding.  Her smile was all teeth.  Clad in a red Farrah Fawcett bathing suit and high heeled pumps, she stood slightly pigeon toed with one hand placed on her hip.  She looked delicate and submissive.  Now her client was formidable and dressed in tunics to hide her bulge.  Each time Vicki visited the house, she opened the photo album and looked at her client’s first life wondering if it had been a sudden change or so gradual her client hadn’t noticed.  From the photo albums (which Vicki scoured), the change seemed sudden. Before pictures of beauty pageants and road trips with long legged skinny girls to after pictures where her husband and kids smiled into the camera—for her client no longer appeared in the pictures, she was just recording the life before her.

Vicki rarely invited the sorority girls to her house. She liked coming home from the chaos of the sorority to her little cottage and garden, a refuge from teenaged tittering.  She sewed avant-garde quilts with her Stitch and Bitch group and sold them online—she had a three star rating for she often didn’t send things on time.  She slept with the bartender who lived in Milwaukee—he still had all his hair at least.  And she watched her shows, oh, there were so many shows these days.  It was a fine exile, she thought.  The girls were wrong to think she’d want to go back to San Francisco and slip on her old life.  She’d stay in the hotel, imagine a weekend, and come back with stories to entertain them.

Vicki had always been prone to hyperbole, but somewhere along the way she had wholly reinvented herself.  After San Francisco ejected her with its high rents and her friends abandoned her to marriages and careers, she moved to Chicago and landed two hours north cooking at a Wisconsin college.  Her private chef resume had impressed them.  The girls thought she’d keep them healthy and thin—isn’t that why celebrities hired her? 

It’s not that the resume was a complete lie.  She had indeed cooked for people in San Francisco who acted like celebrities.  But she had never finished college, never graduated from a culinary school unless one counted the adult school class she took in Oakland, and she had never cooked for a Hollywood celebrity.   Yet it didn’t matter to the sorority girls.  They were an   audience to Vicki, new girls filtering through year after year.  And with each passing class, Vicki polished her history to an archetypal sheen: Gen X woman mastered her universe and retired to country comfort. 

*

The Sorority Girls crammed into her living room and watched movies on her flat screen television.  Chef Vicki stored DVDs in old wooden bookshelves.  Both seemed old fashioned to them.  The Girls chose the romantic comedies and planned a day watching movies and petting Chef Vicki’s two cats.   The couch was oversized and worn in the center, as if a person had nested there.  The girls assumed the couch was another one of Chef Vicki’s finds.  No one imagined that the couch was new and that Chef Vicki was the origin of the indent on the couch.  No way would she spend all that time just sitting in one place, the Shy Girl thought.

One girl who was particularly enamored of Chef Vicki sat in an armchair swathed in green velvet.  

“Someone famous probably sat on it,” the Sorority President said. 

“Didn’t Chef Vicki say she dated the former mayor of San Francisco?  I’m going to be a mayor someday,” the Enamored Girl said.  

The Shy Girl thought of Chef Vicki with her platinum shag and her chiseled face.  She wanted to dye her hair too.  She’d wait though, to make it less obvious she was copying Chef Vicki.  Once, Chef Vicki had told her she had found a diamond ring at a flea market. It had been overlooked, Chef Vicki said, forgotten.  She had bought it for a dollar.  Now, the Shy Girl looked through all the miscellaneous boxes at the garage sales in her neighborhood, hoping.

*

Vicki cleaned the cottage before she left for the airport.  She purposefully left out the old portfolio of photos her friend had taken of her—back when he was going to be a famous photographer and she was a professional muse.  (Last she heard he worked in the social media department of a big university).  She took care to put her high school and college journals under her bed.  They could be found.  Everyone snoops, she thought. 

Her recent diaries were different.  She hid them deep in the recesses of her closet, locked in a trunk, hidden behind her overcoats, behind the mothballed bridesmaid dresses she kept for Halloween costumes.  The girls would need clothespins on their noses to find them.

She long ago stopped keeping a journal that was a diary of her life—she found it too angst ridden and navel gazing.  Entries ranged from lists of resolutions to improve herself—resolutions always unmet—to rants about the passive aggressive slights by her friends to complaints about herself.  How often could she write, I felt fat today?   Now her diaries were a log of the stories she told —too many close calls at homecoming dinners when a sorority alum would recall a funny story of Vicki’s and a current girl would say, “that isn’t what Chef Vicki told us.”  

So she kept track:  She went to college in New York before transferring to SF State.  In actuality, she had been to SF State, but she had only lived in New York for two months, couch surfing with friends who went to NYU.  And even now, she couldn’t actually remember how long she attended SF State.  Had it been one year?  She remembered telling someone she only had only semester left to graduate, but she could no longer remember if it were true.  During a brief stint in Los Angeles, she wrote that she worked on a film with a famous actor, so famous she couldn’t talk about him.  But she would tell them he constantly farted on set.  This was a total lie; she was friends with someone who was friends with someone who did that.  Often, she thought this might be an urban myth, because she once overheard someone in a bar tell the same exact tale.  Were these kinds of stories just cliché?  She toasted herself for the thought.

She wrote down that she dated the former mayor before he was mayor—back when he was just a club owner.  This lie she always remembered, but she wrote it down anyway, just to be complete.  She had wanted to date him, she wandered into his club weekend after weekend.  Once, they danced.  This was true. 

The Lie List grew each year when a new batch of pledges were forced to help in her kitchen and one of the them asked, “you really lived in San Francisco?”

She remembered the cold salty air of the bay greeting her every morning.  She’d go to sleep listening for the foghorns.  She remembered admiring the roguish women with piercings and tattoos even before body manipulation was trendy.  She remembered the shops along the streets of each neighborhood selling Live My Dream.  A girl from Virginia residing in San Francisco.  What would happen next, she used to imagine.  She tried waiting tables, executive assisting, teaching cooking, and selling marijuana.  She was going to live her dream too.  What she didn’t remember was the stress of making rent each month, of how she could never afford anything sold in those Live My Dream shops, of how the wind whipped down Geary with such force it would burn her face.  When had it stopped being a city of promise?  She didn’t remember.

*

“Look what she has in the freezer,” one of the sorority girls said. 

The Treasurer pulled out a vodka bottle and said, “vodka tonics, anyone?” 

“What else does she have in there,” another girl asked.  “Can you imagine if she eats all processed food?” 

They laughed. 

“Chef Vicki would never do that,” the Shy Girl said.  “Just look at her garden.”

The girl looking in the freezer squealed, “Look!  A bag full of Snickers.”

“What would Chef Vicki say?” the Enamored Girl says.

“Crap heaven,” they yelled and clinked their vodka tonics together.  

*

At the airport, Vicki bought coffee and a doughnut, plugged in her laptop near the gate, and people-watched.  It was like visiting a city.   She could identify the business travelers with their sleek roller cases and the millenials who traveled in their yoga pants and carried full-sized pillows.

The man sitting next to her sipped his coffee and texted at the same time.  He carried a small, inflatable pillow wrapped around his roller case suggesting he was a frequent traveler.  His face was tanned; his shirt a crisp linen.  He looked like he came from money.  Then she noticed a tattoo of a clock on the inside of his arm.  She had read somewhere that meant he had served time in prison.  Back when she lived in San Francisco, she might have fucked him for that very reason.

            “Going home?” she asked.

            “Just visiting friends in Frisco.” 

            “No one calls is that, you know,” she said. “San Fran, maybe, but never Frisco.”

            “You’re the Frisco police?” He turned and looked up at her.  It was not a friendly gaze.   

“No, I just lived there for years, and I’m telling you no one calls is that.  People there hate it.  Call it The City and they’ll love you.  They like to pretend it’s New York.”  Vicki laughed and smiled her smile, the one she knew made her eyes crinkle in an attractive way, a way that used to win people over.   It was the smile that once got her invited up on stage at the Fillmore.

“San Franciscans actually have a consensus on hating a nickname?”  The man shook his head and glanced again at his phone.  He didn’t look up.  She didn’t remember when she had become invisible to men.  He likely dated younger women even though he was in his forties like her, she thought.  His hair was too mussed on purpose, his jeans weren’t ragged, just designed to look that way. 

 “That’s a great tattoo, you know.  I read somewhere that,” Vicki said.

            “It’s the time my mother died.”

            Vicki was relieved to be interrupted before asking about prison time.  She hadn’t noticed the hands at all but she didn’t ask for clarification.   She saw now that the time was clearly marked 3:10.  “I’m sorry,” she said.

            “You didn’t kill her.”

            Vicki raised her hand to toast him, cliché.  He didn’t notice.  “It’s a beautiful memorial to her,” she said instead.

            The man turned his other arm toward her and there was the exact same tattoo. 

“Another member of your family?  Oh, I’m so sorry,” Vicki said.

“No.   It’s the minute after.”

She didn’t understand.   She leaned toward him and looked closely at his tattoo and saw that the long arm was indeed marked to be later than 3:10:  3:11.   “It must be painful to lose a parent,” she said. 

She half expected him to yell at her.  His energy was caged and this made him both attractive and dangerous. 

“It’s just fucked up to feel devastated and freed at the same time,” he said.  He shrugged. 

She didn’t know how to continue the conversation.  Both of her parents were in Virginia watching television and sending her dinner money once a month so she could “go out and enjoy herself.”  So she nodded and they sat in silence until the flight to San Francisco began boarding and a line of people anxious to get on the plane formed around them.  She looked down at her laptop for a few moments, but didn’t know what to check.  “I always wanted a tattoo.”

            “Everyone says that.”

            “But how do you know what you want on you forever?”

            “You don’t,” he said.

“It’s because eventually you don’t notice them?  Like a scar?” 

“It fixes time.”

            The man stood up to board.  He didn’t say good-bye.  No nod, no look of a shared moment.  The small roller case and the short-sleeved shirt.  He was not prepared for gusty cold San Francisco.  He was wearing clothes as if he were going to southern California.  She comforted herself knowing he’d look ridiculous in his I-left-my-heart-in-SF sweatshirt.

*

The girls tried on her hats.  One of the girls wanted to look at her dresses.  “Chef Vicki always talks about those black and white parties down by some pier,” she said, “and what about all those clubs?   Didn’t she say she partied in a castle?”

They opened her closets.  “Chef Vicki must keep everything she’s ever found,” the Treasurer said.  Other girls hung back, they wanted to see her closet too, but they thought it rude.  They didn’t try to stop the others though.  They were 20, who were they to stop a rude person?

Before long, the cats were ignored and the girls were wearing dresses—mod dresses from the 60s, a poodle skirt with an actual poodle on it, a colonial dominatrix gown of some kind that only the Fearless Girl who first looked in the closet would wear. 

They didn’t smell any mothballs. 

The President held up a French maid outfit, “Chef Vicki must have been a slut.  Didn’t she sleep with the mayor or something?” 

The Enamored Girl dreamt, one day I will go to parties and wear outrageous outfits.

*

Vicki wasn’t lying when she said she had always wanted a tattoo.  She had even gone so far as to sit in the chair at Body Manipulations with an illustration of the tree of life and the goddess Venus emerging from its branches.  She had a famous tattoo artist in San Francisco draw it for her.  It cost 300 dollars for the drawing.  She climbed onto the table and exposed her lower back and some of her butt.  The needle touched her skin and she counted to ten, waiting for the pain to subside.  She flinched; she hopped off the table and said she’d return.

Now, at the base of her back where a tramp stamp might be, she had a black inked arc that looked like a letter L written by a first grade left-hander.  It was going to be a part of the root system, the tattoo artist told her.   

She told her friends that the tattoo was just too damn expensive. 

She told the girls she couldn’t show them her tattoo and let them think the salacious thoughts she knew they had. 

She didn’t feel like she was lying.  She had one after all, that lopsided L wasn’t just a birthmark.  

On the plane, she looked for the dismissive man with his truth tattooed on his arms.  She didn’t see him.  Maybe he had disliked talking to her so much that he was curling himself into the rows, hiding.  Vicki was no longer certain what her truth had been, and what, if anything, she could ever tattoo on her body.   For a moment, she wondered if she really conversed with the man at all.   Maybe San Fran could be Frisco.  She boarded.

*

The girls lazed around in Chef Vicki’s cottage dressed in her clothes.  They were drunk.  They pet her two cats.  They never looked under her bed.  They emptied her closet instead.  The Pledgemaster pulled out a trunk.  “Maybe she’s a serial killer and she keeps her trophies in here,” she said.  The Enamored Girl pointed out it was locked, but her voice was lost in the vocal fray.  They figured out the combination, her birthday. 

“It was like Chef Vicki wanted us to open it,” the President slurred.   They each took a journal, one pictured Monet’s lilies, another had Klimt’s virgin, others merely leatherbound.  All had Vicki’s bubbly cursive slanting downward with each progressing line. 

The Fearless One still dressed like the dominatrix picked up a journal—a black one with a sticker of an alien on it—and mimicked Vicki’s voice, throaty and low like she once smoked too much.

“I can’t believe Gillian left me at the castle.  How was I supposed to get home? Yellow Cab laughed at me, laughed at me, when I asked them to come to Hunters’ Point. Fuck her.  I need new friends.”  

Even the Shy Girl picked up a journal—one covered in denim—and read, “I went by the club again tonight.  GP was working behind the bar training some newbie.  I wish he would just ask me out.  He acts like I’m a guy.  Could he be gay?” The girls laughed and related and wondered who GP was—“Greg!”  “Gilbert!”  “Gerry!”  “Godfrey!”  “Geeky Poo!”  They giggled. 

The Enamored Girl didn’t read.  She sat in the velvet chair and felt bad for Chef Vicki and wondered if she ever found better friends than Gillian and if she herself would ever find better friends than her sorority sisters.

*

            Two vodka cranberries and a nap later, Vicki was shuttling to her hotel in the wharf. There was only one friend left in San Francisco.  Everyone else had left for the suburbs, for their hometowns, for affordable housing.   Only Gillian remained, her wild-haired party friend who was lucky enough to work at a tech firm before it went big, lucky enough to marry her college sweetheart in a Napa Valley wedding before everyone had Napa Valley weddings, and lucky enough to afford raising a child in a city where there were more dogs than children.

            Vicki sat on her bed in the hotel room.  It was stiff and unyielding.  A no smoking sign was bolted to the door, but she could smell the deodorizer covering stale ash.  The movies on the flatscreen were $15.99 a pop.  Her shows buffered with the internet service the hotel provided for free.  The sorority girls had gifted her a place to sleep not a place to hide.  She called her friend.

Gillian shrieked.  She chastised Vicki for not calling sooner.  She chastised Vicki for never visiting.  (Gillian had never visited her.)  She wanted her to come see the house—“it’s a Victorian flat just like we always wanted.  Get this, on Russian Hill!”  But Vicki declined with a lie about meetings.  Meetings for what, she didn’t know.  And she knew Gillian would never ask.  She had followed Gillian’s life on Facebook so she had already seen the flat and the view.  That’s what they were to one another now—Miss you!  Happy Birthday!  Great picture!  She didn’t want to tread the hardwood floors of her own dream.  They agreed to brunch the next morning.

Vicki walked.  At the wharf, she jumped when the guy hiding behind a garbage can in a Snoopy mask jumped out at her, laughed and asked for a dollar.  It used to be a guy hiding behind a fake branch.   In North Beach, she didn’t stop to notice the comedy club she used to frequent had closed or that all the same old men hung out at Caffe Trieste, even the guy missing his foot.  She walked the city blocks in the outfit she wore to the airport, looking down to see the street names etched in the cement—it had taken her years to start looking up toward the street lights in Wisconsin.  She walked to the Haight and sat on her favorite bench in Buena Vista Park.   Surrounded by a sweeping oak groves she remembered she thought this to be a place magic survived.  She couldn’t remember where the Grateful Dead had lived, although she told her girls she partied in that very house.   She had told them she shook Jerry Garcia’s hand and felt the stub of his finger. 

They didn’t know who Jerry Garcia was.  And then maybe again Vicki didn’t either.  Had she ever liked The Grateful Dead?  There was this one boy she liked and he liked them.  She tie-dyed tee shirts for them.  He played and replayed Sugar Magnolia and called her his Sugar Victoria.  She wanted to be the girl with bells on her toes. 

             She arrived first at Squat and Gobble, the one at the edge of the Castro between their old neighborhoods, a crepe place where they would meet weekly and talk about all things that they had experienced apart even though they walked the world like twins back then.   She wore the jeans that lifted her butt and her favorite bulky sweater that hid her belly that was no longer flat.  In the hotel room, she looked at her image in the mirror.  An older version of her favorite self stared back.

The crepery hadn’t changed at all, mismatched wooden tables and chairs, a blackboard menu.  It was one of those places where orders were placed at the counter and the cashier gave you a number.  Vicki ordered her old favorite, a mushroom and egg crepe.  She took the seat against the wall so she could look for Gillian and still act like she wasn’t nervous with anticipation.

Gillian walked in, waved and stood in line.  She looked as she did in all those Facebook pictures; her page obviously not as curated as Vicki’s page, which contained more from her past than her present.   Gillian worked her phone screen as she stood in line, seemingly comfortable with the reunion that hadn’t happened yet.  Vicki studied her.  Her jeans were loose and she wore ballerina flats instead of the boots she’d had once elevated to fetishism.  She wore a blazer that looked expensive.  She wasn’t as thin as she had been, but her skin still reflected the light.  She still glowed.  Vicki touched her face, which felt dull in comparison.

Once Gillian ordered and with her number in hand, she walked over and hugged Vicki.  She murmured how much the same she looked and Vicki wondered if it were true.  “I’m sorry Jack couldn’t come even just to say hello,” Gillian said.   “He took Amaretto to the Dolores Park.   She had a minor meltdown this morning.  Can you believe I have a daughter?”  Vicki didn’t hear Gillian breathe between sentences.  Who named a child a liqueur?  She remembered Gillian once crushed on a guy named Jameson—maybe there was a trend she didn’t know about. 

They waited for their food and talked about the edges of their lives.  Vicki told Gillian about the bartender and Gillian lamented married sex.  They gossiped about mutual friends long gone.  Gillian told Vicki about her husband bringing coffee to her each morning and Vicki echoed, “Jack’s a good man.”  They nodded through one another’s presentations of their lives. 

“You know,” Gillian said and leaned forward.  “I still have it.”

“Herpes?”

Gillian laughed.   “You know, that art project we found?”

Gillian looked in her purse and pulled out a blue marble etched to like earth and glued into an oyster shell.  The found cliché.  Vicki could see Gillian kept it pristine, at least as pristine as something they found in a cardboard box on a corner in the Haight.   “I still have those Italian leather shoes you found too.”  Gillian leaned forward, “I haven’t been treasure hunting in a long time, we should go after we finish here.”

They had furnished their apartments that way, Vicki remembered.  They had wandered the streets of the wealthier or artier neighborhoods and picked through what people abandoned to the sidewalk.  Expensive shoes, novels, beautiful artwork and furniture that could be refurbished or repurposed.  At least that’s how she remembered it.  “Do you still have the dresser?  The one with the art deco tiles?”

“It was old.  All the tiles were cracked.  Jack and I put it on the street and it was gone within the hour.   It’s in some Millennial’s apartment, I’m sure.”

Vicki leaned forward.   “Do you remember Kezar Pub? Is it still there?”

“God, I haven’t been there in ages.  They called you Norm.”

“I thought they called me mayor.”

“Honey, I think it was just our group that called you the mayor.  Just like what’s his face.  Do you remember how you loved him?”

“He wasn’t mayor then.”

“No, he owned that shitty club you would make us hang out at all the time.  And you would smile your smile and wait for him to tell you he loved you.”

            “He never did.”

“Did you ever have sex with him?”

Vicki hesitated.  She hadn’t.  But the urge to shape her story was strong.  She shook her head free of the urge.  Had she lied to Gillian back then?  She couldn’t remember.  “What do you remember about us back then?  I mean, it’s not like I blacked out, but-”

            “We were delinquents.”

“Come on, for real. Do you remember that Thanksgiving?”

“When we went to Safeway at three in the morning and I put the turkey under my shirt and pretended I was pregnant?  How did we get away with that?”

“I thought I did that,” Vicki said.  She remembered waddling and laughing as her friends followed agape with laughter and disbelief.  She remembered the ice-cold drumsticks against her belly.  She remembered the chill turning into a searing pain. 

Gillian shook her head.  “I think it was me.”  She shrugged.  “When I tell the story it’s me. You tell the story, it’s you.  Who cares?”

“Did I really get up on stage at The Fillmore?”

Gillian shook her head.  “No, of course not.  How could you get up there?  It’s s a real stage.  You did get up at Deluxe—that was more like a platform.  Don’t you remember you fell and twisted your ankle?”

Vicki shook her head, it didn’t even sound familiar.

“We went to the emergency room, remember?”

Vicki would have sworn her fifteen years in San Francisco were emergency room free.  She would have sworn she had never been to a hospital in San Francisco.  She couldn’t even remember where any hospitals were.

They sipped their iced teas.  Conversation ebbed.  Vicki spotted a tattoo: Amaretto in cursive on the inside of her wrist.   She complimented the tattoo. 

“That little girl changed everything,” Gillian said.

Vicki supposed her move to Wisconsin changed everything.  But she wouldn’t tattoo the state on her wrist.  “I just can’t remember anything from those days.”

“Because you danced on a stage at Deluxe rather than a big venue like the Fillmore.  Again,” Gillian leaned forward, “who cares?”

            Vicki did.  

*

They were wearing the hats now.  Bundled up on the couch in Chef Vicki’s costumes, watching her television, petting her cats.  “Poor Vicki,” they said.  They congratulated themselves on their gift to her.  “She needed it,” they said.  The Enamored Girl was angry.  There was no mayor.  There was no movie.  There was a Lonely Girl who wrote in her diary about how much she loved a man who didn’t know more than her name.  Nothing was glamorous at all.   Chef Vicki’s life seemed not altogether different from the Enamored Girl’s life right now, a wishing one.

*

Gillian laughed when Vicki told her she was a Chef and Culinary Arts professor at her small liberal arts college.   “Everyone,” Gillian said, her bangles clanking, “everyone, remakes their history for public consumption, but really?”

“I do work for a college,” Vicki said again.

“Whatever, Vics, I love you.” 

“And you never exaggerate?  Your life is an open book?”

“Cliché,” Gillian squealed.

They clinked their drinks together from old habit. 

            “But honey,” Gillian said, using the word honey like a slur.   “Remember when we first met?  When you just moved from Los Angeles?  You told me you worked for people in Hollywood and you told me Hollywood was by the beach.  Did you think I didn’t know where Hollywood was in relation to the shoreline?  It was a great story, Hollywood by the beach and you working for producers you couldn’t name.  The story is why I liked you.

“So now, you don’t think I actually believe you, Miss Party Girl, are actually a professor, do you?  But who cares?  We’ve been friends for years and I’ve got your back. Tell me the stories.”   Gillian mashed up what was left of her crepe and poured pepper all over it.  “Carbs,” she said by way of explanation.   “Who cares what life it is.  I have a beautiful Victorian, but my parents pay the property taxes and gifted us the downpayment.  I work at a tech company, but I’m the HR person.  I drive an Audi, but it’s preowned and leased.  It’s real enough though, right?  Am I lying?  No, no, I’m not.”  Vicki noticed Gillian’s bangles were on her dominant hand and covered her tattoo much of the time.   She wondered if that were on purpose. 

Vicki wanted to be back in her garden. The girls couldn’t be trusted to tell a weed from the sprout of a baby carrot. Her cats hated strangers and would probably hide.  She wanted to make a new quilt, perhaps with some of the costumes she hid away in the closet. She wanted to put on her bee suit and look at her honey.  Gillian kept talking, her bangles clanking as she continued listing her polished life versus her tinny one.

*

The girls lost interest and packed the clothes away.  The sugar high of the alcohol had worn off.  They were tired and dried out.  They straightened the house and watered the plants and pet the cats one last time.  The Shy Girl shook the globes so they were all snowing at the same time. The Treasurer yelled at her to fill the vodka bottle with water and returned it to the freezer.  The Pledgemaster pocketed a small Hello Kitty figurine she found at the bottom of a box.  She announced it was a souvenir of Chef Liar.  That’s what they called her now.  The President made sure it all looked the same as before—she was smart and had taken pictures with her phone.  

They stood outside the door and the Enamored Girl told them she would stay behind.  She made up a reason and said she’d find her own way home.  No one cared.  Alone, she put on Chef Vicki’s hip huggers and a fringy top she found in the closet.  The pants were too long and were covered in cat hair.  She felt like a hippy from the seventies.  She took a snow globe with the Statue of Liberty, a place she’d always wanted to go and laid on Chef Vicki’s bed.  She shook it and wondered whether the real Statue of Liberty would be as uncrowded and serene.  She had never been to New York City.  It would be disappointing, she concluded—it wouldn’t look autumnal and glossy like the moves she’d seen.

The Enamored Girl stared at the ceiling and considered Chef Vicki and her life; she then wondered about her own: the boy she loved who didn’t love her; the times she cut her thigh to remind herself that she felt pain; the exams she studied for but never quite hard enough to be disappointed if she didn’t get an A; her grades—grades that didn’t include As; and her future—her likely one and her dreamed up one.  And she wondered finally if the girls would let her stay in the sorority if they knew the truth about her.  

*

Body Manipulations looked the same as Vicki remembered it, steampunk red and intimidating.  It smelled of dust.  Her request was plain, and the man at the counter, his lip pierced, looked bored at her request.  She’d heard tattooing on bone was most painful.  She didn’t leave this time.  She asked him the time and he told her, 4:30.  That would do.  She told him what she wanted and hopped on the table and lifted her shirt.  She refused to flinch.  She concentrated on the ceiling and absorbed the burning like a penance.  Antique wrought iron looking hands of a clock with no face inked on a left rib.  4:35.  It wasn’t all a lie. 

Alexandra D’Italia completed her graduate work in creative writing at University of Southern California. She’s published in Gold Man Review, Meat for Tea, South Loop Review, Arcadia, Red Rock Review, and Art Times, among others. Alexandra also won USC’s Edward W. Moses Prize for Fiction. Her short plays have been staged in New York City and Valdez, Alaska. Online Sundries ran a monthly online column of her serialized monologues about a dysfunctional writers group: When the Roundtable is a Rhombus.

“Oh, my god,” says Kumar. I turn my head, and he puts his phone screen to my face. It’s a video of a corgi doing a mini obstacle course.

“Oh, my god,” I agree, gasping and laughing. We smile together for a few seconds as the video ends, and then we go back to our phones.

We’ve been lying on his bed, like this, for about an hour now. A 2019, Gen Z stereotype, yes, but Kumar understands that I don’t always have the energy for more. He’s the only friend who’s stuck with me through all of high school, and because of that I’ve called him whenever I’ve done something self-destructive–even the time I crashed my car and lost my license. Aside from my therapist, he’s been my sturdiest emotional support.

It makes me want to fuck him so badly.

I’ve always been into the shy, nice guy type; Kumar is unfortunately so nice, though, that he’s never once hit on me. He’s never even lightly rubbed at the idea of hooking up–not even while drunk. Still, he’s a straight, teenage boy, and so while I’ve never had much self-esteem, I know that I could probably make something happen. The real problem is that deep down, I know I don’t truly want him; I just want to ruin the only friendship I have left.

I’m a self-destructive mess.

There’s also the fact, though, that he and I are leaving for separate cities in a few weeks… and so things might not ever be the same between us, anyway. Maybe if I initiate something, now, he might even come home for Thanksgiving.

No, Adrianna, I think. Control yourself. These thoughts are just a flashing sign toward another damaging path, but you’ve been on such a good one lately. Don’t let yourself swerve.

“It’s after three,” Kumar notices, interrupting my inner slut shaming.

I look at the time on my phone. He’s right.

“Should I ask if we can do it another day?” I grumble. Yesterday, I’d piled together what I want to store at home while I’m gone, and today, my mom and I are bringing that stuff up to the attic. We’re also shopping for new school supplies for me, even though it’s still early to be doing so. I guess coddling’s what you get when you’re an only child (with a tendency to do things like crash cars).

Kumar shrugs, sitting up. “I need to take my sister to the store soon,” he tells me.

I try to gather my energy. I’m jealous because his sister is awesome (seriously: the coddling’s getting to me). “Okay,” I say. I switch my phone to my left hand and then reach out for his arm, using it to pull myself up. He laughs. While he doesn’t have that much muscle, he has just enough that I appreciate the moment that I’m touching him. I also like his dark arm hair and the tattoo on his tricep: a downturned triangle with small lines and hexagons passing through it. I was there with him, when we were sixteen and he saw it in the parlour window; he thought it looked cool, and he just got it on the spot. Ever since then, the shapes on his left arm have been like a flower bush to me, only revealing themselves in the spring and summer–as if they know that they look good.

I realize, then, that that’s going to be Kumar, in general, now that we’re going to separate colleges. I’ll be at Hagerstown Community; he’ll be chasing opportunity right out of Maryland, altogether. The thought of that is really weird to me. While we only really became friends through ninth grade debate club, we’ve always gone to school together. The world’s already started to feel unstable.

As I leave his room, I shout goodbye to his parents and sister (who still think that I’m dating him), and I let myself out. The heat closes in on me as soon as I exit, and the sidewalk blinds me for a second. It smells like burnt tire out here.

The heat over-relaxes my muscles as I walk, and gravity feels even stronger than usual. Kumar and I both live in the suburbs, and my place is only about a ten-minute walk away, usually–fifteen when it’s hot. When I finally open my front door, the air conditioning greets me like a Harlequin lover.

I hear stomping. I go up the stairs and my mom is leaving my room, a cardboard box between her hands. Her frizzy brown hair is in a disorganised bun.

“Hi. I just started,” she tells me. “Did you add to the list?”

I pull the folded paper out of the back of my shorts. Opening it up, I chuckle again at what she’d written. Adrianna College Needs, it says, in smothered ink. The first item: a daily planner. The second: pepper spray. She wants to get me the first thing because I have bad depression, and the second ‘cause I’m a girl. Y’know, equally crippling flaws.

Once Mom is finished looking over my additions to the list, she places it on my desk and grabs the box again. I go into my room, take another, and follow her up the creaky stairs to the attic. It’s dark up here, but even more humid. The dust annoys my nose. There’s furniture, coat hangers, and a couple of old bikes leaning against the bare-wooden walls; in the right corner, a pile of brown boxes has already germinated.

Mom goes to the boxes. She places the newest one down and then picks up another.

“What are you doing?” I ask, following the path that she’s cleared through the dust.

She wipes some sweat off of her forehead with her tiny wrist. “This is a total mess,” she says. “I thought I’d also organize it all so we can actually find stuff later.”

“Oh,” I say, putting my own box down in front of the pile.

“So, I’m gonna bring some of these down to the storage room. But I’ll take care of that; it’s really dirty in there. You just bring everything up from your room.”

I nod. As Mom heads back down the stairs, I decide to look around a little. I never go into the storage room, or up here, and I wonder how old everything is. Some of the boxes at the top of the pile have a lid, and some don’t–like memories shut away and memories not. I read some of the labels. Thesis books. Must be some of Mom’s old stuff. Wedding gifts. I laugh when I see that one. Adrianna Kindergarten. I was five years old just about… seventeen years after my parents’ wedding. Mom was right; there is really no order here.

I use my tiptoes to peek inside of the kindergarten box–because I’m self-absorbed, I guess (Gen Z, remember?). I see a few small, ribbon hair bows: pink, white, and yellow. I smile at how cute they are, and because I faintly remember them. Underneath is a stack of papers, with a little drawing of red flowers at the top. I think I remember that, too–making it in class. My smile grows.

I hear Mom re-emerging up the stairs behind me. “What are you doing?” she asks.

“Just a second,” I say. I plop back down as she returns to her side of the pile. Something else has my attention. The box to the right of Adrianna Kindergarten–marked 3rd Grade–has a lid, but it’s lopsided. It’s like something inside is too big for the box. I lift up the lid, and what I see poking out is even stranger. A golden soccer ball. I squint.

“What is this?” I call to Mom.

“Huh?” she responds. I hear her approach.

“This trophy,” I say. “I never played soccer.”

“Yeah, when you were little,” she says. “You don’t remember?” She grabs the box from in front of me and goes back to the stairs.

I feel a boom in my stomach as my mood falls on its ass. “Right,” I lie. “I remember now.”

And once I’m back down in my room, I text Kumar that it happened again. On Saturday, we lie back down on his bed.

“Did you ask her more about it?” he suggests, once I finish telling him the details. We’re both on our backs, staring at the ceiling. I wonder if the white bumps are moving and distorting for him, too.

“I didn’t want her to think that my brain’s not all there,” I tell him.

“But it’s not,” he says. He reaches over and puts his palm on my face.

“Stop,” I laugh, and he pulls away. He sits up, grinning down at me. He’s got a wide, dimply grin that complements his triangular jaw. “You know what I mean,” I say, and the moment starts to pull itself back together.

“Yeah,” he mumbles.

“Every time I come home from hanging out with you, or come down for dinner,” I continue, “I’m already scared she’s gonna say, like, I’ve changed my mind, you’re not okay enough to go.” My joints take on familiar stiffness as I say it out loud.

“I get it,” he says. He looks down at his bed. I stare as he rubs at the side of his neck. “I was just thinking, maybe if you asked for more details, you could remember something.”

“Except it said third grade,” I tell him. “It’s not like I was too young to remember being on a freaking soccer team. And long enough to get a trophy. I should remember that.” I realize how loud I’ve gotten. I’m sounding desperate, pathetic, like I think that yelling I should remember will magically make it happen.

“Everyone forgets childhood memories,” he says.

“Not this many important things,” I say. “There’s been so many.” Despite trying to calm, I’m still weirdly loud.

Then he looks back at me, sympathy exploding in his eyes. And the moment that we make eye contact, I finally go quiet. I gasp, and it’s tiny in my mouth, but it rumbles down through my insides.

Brown eyes are God tier. Especially his.

But I sit up, and then I look away from him. I draw my eyes over his Gorillaz poster–the cartoony surrealism of it–as I force myself to re-rail my train of thought. “Like, even if you think the soccer thing’s debatable,” I finally say, squeezing at my calves, “What about that hole I made in the wall? Like, that… was so major, and still…”

“Your mom said that just was a dumb accident, though, right?”

I squeeze harder at myself. “Yeah,” I say. But it’s a lie, one of the only lies I’ve ever told him.

Because of the subject matter, I’m still trying my best to look like I’m holding myself together: to look good, or at least presentable, to him. My core’s completely tied up and tight, though; I’m just like a pretty little bow. Meanwhile, I can feel the truth trying to crawl up my throat, and it’s threatening to make me throw up all over the bed.

I sense him take a big breath, lean back on his hands. “You told Lisa about all this, right?” he asks, referring to my therapist, and I nod. “What’d she say?”

“That my parents should understand that depression can sometimes cause memory loss,” I tell him, almost reciting. “And that that doesn’t make me less strong or capable of going to college.”

“There you go,” he says.

“But what if they find out that it could also be my meds? If they stop paying for those, I’m fucked.” I’m already feeling rickety about having to find a new therapist; I’ve had Lisa since I was fourteen. A place called Hagerstown doesn’t sound like the epitome of mental health, either (no offense, Hagerstown).

“So, what are you gonna do?” Kumar asks.

I put my hands in my lap. “I was thinking of asking for her help. To help me remember,” I tell him.

“What? Like hypnosis or something?”

“Yeah. Exactly.”

“That stuff doesn’t work, though.”

“What do you mean?”

“I read about it.”

“What?” I repeat, shaking my head. I pick up my phone and type memory recovery hypnosis into Google.

He’s right. According to the first source, that kind of treatment is usually a scam, and no good psychologist will do it. The ones who do sometimes wrongly convince their patients that they were sexually abused. Uh, no thank you.

I can feel Kumar leaning towards me. I look back up at him and sigh. “So? Believe me now?” he asks, with a proud smile.

“No,” I pout, and I go back to my phone. I go back to the search results and keep scrolling, hoping for an opposing source. Eventually, a video icon catches my attention. It’s an old, wide-eyed, balding man standing just a little too close to the camera. RECOVER YOUR MEMORY WITH CERTIFIED HYNOTHERAPIST HERMAN PAUL, is the title.

“What is this?” Kumar chuckles, leaning in even closer to me.

It takes me a second longer than before to press the link.

“Do you feel like something’s been missing from your life?” the man asks, once the video starts. “Like there’s something you’ve forgotten, and you won’t be happy or successful until you get it back?” The overall quality is poor, and an ugly rainbow effect floats behind him. This must be a commercial from the nineties or something. So, yeah, this man’s methods are probably out-dated; I wasn’t even alive in the nineties. I wonder if he’s dead. “Good news: the answers are all still inside of your brain,” he continues. He still hasn’t blinked. “They’re just hidden behind a door, and you need a licensed hypnotherapist to help you unlock it.”

“Seems legit,” Kumar mumbles.

“Don’t wait another minute,” Herman practically yells. “Call now and I’ll help you unlock your memory and open the door!” A phone number starts to flash on the screen.

“Another minute?” Kumar mocks. “Holy shit, Addie, hurry!”

We lose ourselves to laughter. He puts a hand on my shoulder, like he’s trying to hold onto his sanity. I start to feel like I’m losing mine, as well, but for slightly different reasons.

“Fine. You win,” I say, as we finally start to sizzle down.

“Thank you,” he smiles.

And when he lets go of me, it kind of feels like having a knife pulled out of my body. The feeling his touch gave me was very bad for me, yes, but losing it feels worse–and now I’m bleeding all over his duvet. Somehow, that’s not much better than throwing up.

I lie back down, placing my hands on my stomach and staring at the ceiling again (because what else can I do, at this point?)

“I mean… does it really matter that much, really?” Kumar mutters. I can tell by his voice that he’s treading water, trying to not get too deep. “If you don’t remember?”

At that, my mouth folds in a little. I pause.

 “It’s not, like, the actual memories that I care about,” I admit, the words shaking in my throat. “More like… the feeling that my brain is literally falling apart.”

“Right.”

“It’s like I have no control,” I tell him. “My memories are literally part of who I am. And what if there’s way more that I already lost but I don’t know about? What if I lose more?” I realize that my voice sounds punctured, and it’s filling with dread. So, I don’t really care how deep we get; I already feel like I’m drowning.

“You won’t,” Kumar says.

“I might.”

“You can still remember without any hypnosis.”

“I don’t know,” I say. I clench my teeth.

“Really. You can still try and trigger stuff. I read about it. Seeing or hearing things related to the memory can help.” I feel him shift, stare down at me.

“But the trophy didn’t work,” I argue.

“It’s gradual,” he tells me, his voice softening, dropping down onto me like a blanket. He knows how to do that. “And if you try to remember some things, it can train your brain to remember other stuff. Like, trying to remember the soccer thing could help you remember the hole in the wall thing, or reading those books on your shelf.”

“What?” I turn my head to face him.

“And that’s also a really gradual process but at least it’s legit, unlike-”

“Why did you read all this?” I ask, squinting up at him. His face withdraws a bit, and then I know the answer. “Because of me,” I say.

“Well, yeah,” he mumbles. It occurs to me that Kumar could have a tiny crush on me. Or maybe he’s just that great of a person. Either way, he’d be an amazing boyfriend–but since my idiot brain is trying to destroy our relationship, of course I only want to fuck him.

“I can’t ask my parents about anything,” I tell him. I look up back to the ceiling, and it’s like my words fall back down on me and hit my face. I really hate that I can’t talk to them about this. “They can’t know.”

“Who needs them when you have me?” Kumar responds. I can hear him smiling a bit; he’s using his comfort-Addie voice.

It works. And it also turns me on.

I retreat from the feeling. I’m so freaking backwards. It’s really like I’m some insatiable slut, which doesn’t make sense with the rest of my life. They say that it’s the girls with no self-esteem who go after sex, but I’ve never had either. Something about Kumar just gets to me, just pushes my ‘button’, and it’s not normal.

“Wanna go to the soccer field?” he asks, forcing me to regain focus.

I haven’t been to my elementary school, Phillip Ridge, since the night in tenth grade when my group of friends had loitered in the playground. Kumar had left a cigarette butt on the field, and we’d laughed, saying that the kids would be scandalized the next day. I hadn’t remembered anything about soccer, then–but I also hadn’t known that there was anything to remember. I’m hoping that Kumar is right and if I try to remember stuff, now, it’ll help open up my memory to things (help to open the door, if you will).

Kumar and I decide to check the school out, again, since the breeze today makes it bearable outside. He drives us there, and then we walk through the soccer posts in the field, behind the school. Being summertime, the field’s as desolate as my memories of it. I definitely recognize this area–the chipped white paint on the goalposts, the saggy nets, the fake but convincing grass–but I don’t remember ever actually playing out here. That’s except for one time, for gym class: I remember Mr. Gibson explaining that we were being tested. Dylan got pissed at me for not passing the ball. There end my memories of soccer. 

“Do you remember me being on the team?” I ask Kumar.

“Sorry. I didn’t pay any attention to that. Or you, back then,” he says. I look at him, and he has a teasing glint in his eye. “Maybe…” He pauses. “Maybe we could try to find someone who was on the team with you, and see if they’d help.”

“Even if that worked,” I say, “I’d rather try other memories first before I tell anyone else I’m a lunatic.”

He laughs.

We reach the playground beside the field and I slump onto one of the swings. As expected, it burns at my unprotected thighs.

Kumar sits on the swing next to me.

“I have memories here,” I tell him. Images of playing jump rope with my girlfriends, of pretending that the slide was a teleporter, of twisting my ankle in a bucket of chalk are all funnelling into my mind. Meanwhile, I’m still staring at the field, trying to focus on it, instead–but it’s rejecting me.

“Uh,” Kumar says. I hear his sneakers twist on the concrete. “Do you remember what the jerseys looked like?”

I bite my lip, thinking. To my surprise, I see a blurry image of a neon jersey on a clothing line. Could this be a flashback?

“Yellow?” I ask.

“Oh,” he says. “I don’t actually know.”

“You’re useful,” I tease, looking over at him. His dark hair is flipping a little in the breeze. I force myself to look away again and harder at the memory.

“Wouldn’t they probably have been the school colors, though?” he mumbles.

I nod. And I realize that the jersey I’m seeing is actually way too big for a nine-year old.

Except… I don’t remember that either of my parents were ever into sports …

I turn my hands hard around the swing chains as my stomach turns. I really am getting worse.

“Hey. You’re trying, and that’s probably still gonna help,” Kumar says, and I realize he’s behind me, now. “For the long term.” I feel his hands on my shoulders, and they give me a different kind of flash–in my stomach and in my loins.

We spend the next half hour or so messing around on the swings and on the playground. We laugh and take pictures. More so than before, I forget about the soccer. From the moment that Kumar pushes me on that swing until the moment I’m asleep, he’s the only thing left on my mind.

As good as it feels, though, I know that my brain is only trying to trick me. These thoughts are no different to the ones that tell me to go outside without sunscreen or to drink with my meds. If I want to keep getting better, I have to resist them.

Thankfully, when I get up the next morning I’m only thinking about breakfast. I find my dad at the table, on his tablet, once I reach the kitchen.

“Hey, bug,” he says.

“Hey,” I say, opening the fridge. “Where’s Mom?”

“At the flea market. Apparently they’re having special deals today.”

I stop in place. Mom doesn’t work anymore, and she’s almost always here. Is this a sign, then? Is it my chance? Dad worries a lot less about me, and so without Mom here, I might be able to sneak a few questions about the past. After yesterday’s failure, I especially need to know that I can remember.

I’m not going to ask about the soccer, though; I have some more biting questions.

“You gonna… get something?” Dad asks, behind me. I realize that my face is cold. I grab the bread and throw the fridge door closed, then take out a piece and drop it into the toaster. I decide to ask everything while I’m eating, just to seem as casual as possible.

“Remember when I made that hole in the wall?” I ask, finally, with all of the breath that I can gather.

It’s been bothering me for two years. The day that I found evidence of the hole was the day I truly realized I had a hole in my brain. Looking for my phone, I’d moved the living room couch and found a square of a different white than the rest of the wall; Mom had explained that I’d gotten frustrated at a game of chess, once, and hurled the wooden board across the room. I went limp when she said it. She seemed confused that I didn’t remember, and so I didn’t ask any more questions.

While Kumar did say it can take time for triggers to bring memories back, it’s been long enough, since that day; I need more information.

“What about it?” Dad replies, after a pause.

I swallow, still thinking up my strategy. I turn to face him. “Did you see it happen?” I ask.

“Uh… yeah,” he says, winding his squarish jaw. He places his tablet on the table. “You had… thrown the board, and…”

“How old was I?” I ask. That fact, I need to know the most, because I’ve had a worry boiling at the back of my brain–something too upsetting to admit, even to Kumar. And now, the questions pop and fizzle extra hard in my mind: had I just been a young child throwing a dumb fit? Or had I been older than that? If I’d been in my teens, that would make the throw more concerning; I could, without realizing it, have become more than self-destructive.

“Uh…” Dad repeats. He’s raking his nails across his cheek, his graying beard. “Sorry. I’m just trying to remember.”

Me too, I think, with an internal sigh. It sort of feels like he doesn’t want me to remember, which makes more suspicious that I’d been on the older side.

I do have a different theory, though, about what’s really packed into his pauses.

Something I do remember well is that teachers (and adults, in general) have always given me uncomfortable, pitiful looks. For the longest time, I didn’t know why; they did it even before my parents figured out that I had mental health problems. Nowadays, I truly believe that they could all sense my issues before those issues ever sprouted. Somehow, they could already see that I was hopeless. And I think that that’s what’s going on here, too. Whether my questions are inconspicuous or not, Dad can still sense that they’re linked to my depression. So, I need to stop, or he’ll figure out what I’m trying to do.

Before I can decide on my next move, though, my toast pops. My heart flinches, and I groan.

But it’s as I go to get a plate that I hear another sound. A crash. The crash into the wall. It’s a stiff, crackling sound.

It’s barely distinguishable, too. I try to play it again and again, in my head, trying to hold onto it, trying to make it louder. Still, it sounds so distant, like a far away memory… like a memory pushed away. And no matter how hard I concentrate, it doesn’t change. It’s not enough.

Frustration starts to take me over–not because I’m remembering my anger in the moment, but precisely because I’m not.

“You must have been… about fourteen,” Dad finally says, and I feel frothing in my stomach. Not only does that age make the act very questionable, it also means that I definitely should remember it.

At this point, I can sense that every new step toward my lost memories will need a ton of work; it’s like my inner self has a ball and chain. But I’m already so, so exhausted, and I’m starting to think that I might need to be locked up, for real. The fact that I’d thrown the board hard enough to make a hole… what if I’d hurt someone? What if I’ve hurt other people, too? Maybe I have; maybe that’s why most of my friends have abandoned me, at this point. In the most literal way possible, I have no idea what I’m capable of.

“What’s made you think of this?” Dad asks as I sit down and start dragging peanut butter across my toast.

I clench my teeth and try to pull an excuse out of the ground. “’Tryna prove to Kumar that he was a worse kid,” I say, with a forced laugh. The lie is, of course, dirt–but Dad nods. I take the excuse to grab my phone, stare downward. Then I create a broody fog around myself, trying to figure out what to do. It takes me a few seconds to notice Kumar has actually texted me.

Fam just left for the market. Wanna play Mario Kart on the big TV?

His words climb from the phone up to my fingertips, making them numb. When Kumar says let’s play Mario Kart, he actually intends to play Mario Kart with me–and if I weren’t sexually frustrated, it’s something that I would love about him. By the time that I swallow down my last piece of toast, however, I’ve decided that I want something different, today.

I go back to my room to get dressed. I douse myself in setting spray, so that my makeup won’t melt in the heat outside (or the heat inside…). Then, I powerwalk to Kumar’s house. My heart is going so hard, at this point, it might pre-emptively burst the buttons in my shirt.

I’d tried to retreat from this outcome. I really had. But, like a tsunami, that’s only made me plunge back onto it, even harder. If I’m going to be out of control, then I might as well own it. I’m done with feeling like I’m drowning; I want to be my own flood.

“Hey,” Kumar says, after opening the door for me. He steps aside, and I enter. “Feeling better?”

“Not really,” I admit, kicking my sandals off and against his wall. “I tried talking to my dad,” I say.

“About what?”

“The wall thing. Didn’t work.”

“Oh,” Kumar says. He has no idea how much his eyes are pulling me into him.

“So, I give up,” I say. I place my arms by my sides and keep them there, firm. “This is too frustrating.”

“But it could still be doing something,” he tries, pinching his face in a little. “And you just-”

“Except I realized that I shouldn’t care,” I say. My knees feel tight, now. My arms are tingling.

“Why not?”

“Because if I don’t have my old memories, I shouldn’t be trying to get them back. I should be making new ones,” I say. I step in an inch closer to him. “Like, I didn’t remember anything yesterday, but I came out with even better memories. With you. I want more of that.” My lips start to feel heavy with the growing weight of my words.

“Well, we’ll keep hanging out this summer,” he says. His smile sneaks up like it’s still unsure of what’s happening.

“Yeah,” I say. My breaths rise and drop like tidal waves. “But if I want true control of my memories, then I need to make the ones I specifically want.”

He’s not dumb. At this point, he understands. He shifts backwards, a little, under the crash of my words.

“You mean…” his voice starts to dwindle.

“Yes.” I say it, and my lips, my body feel lighter again. I’ve done it. I’ve stood in front of him and shed the weight I’ve been carrying for months.

Now, there’s nothing left between us but clothes.

Still, he hesitates. “Addie,” he says, looking my face up and down.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” He looks away, and his eyes float all over the wall. “I just… never thought that this would happen.”

“But have you thought about it?”

He pauses, again. Then, a pulse travels down my body as he nods.

In that moment, though, I do consider turning back. If he’s thought about it, and I’ve thought about it, then it’s practically a shared memory. That’s more than I can say for some of my real past. It’s a shared memory, which means that it’s basically already happened.

Tell that to your vagina, is my next thought.

I take another step forward. I can feel Kumar’s breath on my face, now. It’s warm, cushiony. There’s an underlayer of spice to it, too–but in the sense that cinnamon’s a spice. It’s so him.

“I get it,” I tell him. “Why would you ever think it would happen? All I’ve been is depressing. Our relationship has always just been you comforting me,” I say. I then take his hand, and I place it on the inside of my thigh. “That’s why I have to repay you.” The words are like a sacrilege to say, and it’s exhilarating.

Kumar, on his end, still looks scandalized. His face is spread out, wide, like a person holding out their hands to show their innocence. Here’s the thing about his actual hand, though: it hasn’t moved. I let go of it, and, still, he keeps it on my thigh.

Sure enough, his face starts to melt, to relax under my heat. God, I just want to eat those chocolate brown eyes of his. But they start to eat me up, first. When he finally does move his hand, it’s in a grabbing motion.

He puts his other hand on my cheek, and we start to kiss. It’s a little sloppy, but I’ve wanted him for so long that I actually love the nastiness of it. I wouldn’t have even minded if he still smoked.

He starts to rub at me through my shorts, and I feel my heat there rising. He pulls his mouth away and puts it at my ear.

“Look at you,” he mumbles. “I texted you and you were here, like, right away. And you put my hand on your thigh.” His comfort-Addie voice may have turned me on, but his degrade-Addie voice makes me take off. “What kind of eager little…”

“I know,” I rasp, near silent.

He lets me go. I feel like I’ve been dropped, even though I was standing.

“I’m gonna text my family, make sure they’re gone for a while,” he says. “Go to my room and wait for me.” His words are soaked with lust–almost as much as I am. He turns and goes into the living room, and I hurry down the hall.

Once in his room, I carefully place myself on his bed instead of plopping down, like I usually do. I can’t believe this moment is real, and it’s like I have to be careful with it, or I’ll shatter it. I lie on my back, propping myself up by my elbows on the duvet. I push out my chest. I wait.

I’ve seen this room so many times, from this same vantage point, but my senses are heightened, now, and I see the details again. There’s a band of light shining on the off-white wall, from the window behind me; Kumar told me he installed his blinds a little too low and never bothered to fix them. His small desk, nailed to the wall, is busy with papers. There’s also a tub of protein powder, a box of cat food, his still-unsolved Rubik’s cube. Above it, his posters: Gorillaz, Artic Monkeys, The Beatles.

Then I hear him in the hallway, and my eyes go back to the door. My heart starts, again, to rabidly fuck my chest. It’s a bit intense, actually. It feels like it’s going to explode. I know that I’ve been dying for this, but I didn’t expect to have a real heart attack over it. I realize, too, how fast I’m breathing, but that all the breaths are somehow failing to bring me any air.

When he enters, with intent in his eyes, I feel the bed tip sideways. I clutch the sheets, trying to stay on. I’m seasick. My mind goes black.

“Wait. Are you okay?” I hear, faintly, but I can’t respond.

My mind isn’t black in the passing-out sense. And, for once, it’s not in the empty sense, either. I’ve been trying so hard, lately, to remember, and now, I do. Now, all I see is the memory. I was in my bed and I was in the dark.

“Oh, my god. What’s wrong?” Kumar asks. “Was I too much? Fuck, I’m sorry. I just thought-”

“No,” I groan, once I get some power back. It comes from my core. “It’s okay.” I’m shaking like a terrified cat.

“No. You’re freaking me out,” he says. I feel him sit next to me and put his hand on my shoulder. I start feeling a little more grounded, more pulled together. My brain materializes. Reality starts to fill me up, and my eyes start to get hot. “What happened?” he begs.

But I can’t think about what happened. The memory is too awful. It’s so bright in its horror that I can’t look at it directly. Looking at it would sting.

Living it made me go blind.

“Did you… remember something?” Kumar asks. I realize that I’m crying. I force my head up and down and try to force some air in through my swamped nose. It rattles my lungs, makes my next breaths frantic and unstable. “I’m sorry,” he whimpers, coming in closer to me. “Fuck. It’s my fault. It’s all my fault.”

I turn and hug him, trying to tell him that it’s not.

I realize how blind I’ve been to this memory, until now. And, having been used to that blindness, my small peek at it was so painful that it made my eyes, my mind flood. I can’t look back at it. With another creaky breath, I make the decision that I just can’t.

Instead, I decide to look at the doors. I try to understand the event by looking at the moments in which it entered and exited my life. I remember being happy to see Connor opening my bedroom door, that night. I remember being sad to see him being taken out of our front door, the night after that.

“You know that I admire you a lot,” Kumar says. I stick my face into his chest, getting his shirt wet. “Do you want to talk about it?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” I struggle. My words fight my nausea, also creeping up into my mouth. “It could make me remember.”

I remember more than enough, already. I want to shred this new information back out of my mind, to bring it back to its split, unintelligible state. But what’s done can’t be undone; it won’t go away, no matter how much I beg.

That’s when another question starts to pull at me. What happened on the second night, then? What made Connor get caught? I take just one more peek at my bedroom door, and then it comes back to me. The door. I’d heard the creak, across the hall, and I’d been tough.

“Come on. Open the door,” Connor had urged me. “It’s okay, Addie. Open the door for me.”

“No,” I’d whispered back, into the darkness. “No.” No more.

I’m keeping it locked.

I beg my brain enough, please, as I run back to the present. I lie with Kumar, trying to stop thinking. While I still don’t see the memory, though, I still can’t ignore the angry banging on the other side.

And I realize that for all of these years, this event had been hidden deep in my brain, like food forgotten at the back of a fridge. It had been rotting my mind, slowly, from the inside, without my knowledge. It had taken that smart little girl and made her hate herself. It had made her want to sleep with the boy who’d acted like a brother to her.

A stifling horror latches onto me, in that next moment, because I also realize that I haven’t been pushing Kumar away, at all. I’ve been trying to make him stay.

I let out another muffled cry, and he pets my hair. I try, again, to focus just on him: on his hands in my hair, on the movement of his breathing. After a little while, I start to feel more evened out. I think of the positive; at least I think I know, now, what’s been so wrong with my memory. Repressing this trauma has probably corrupted my ability to remember things, in general. That’s probably what’s been going on with me.

Another horrible thought slices through me, though, a moment later. I let go of Kumar and I sit. I feel groggy.

“Addie?” he says. He puts his hand on my back.

“I have to go,” I pant. I realize that my whole body is sweaty.

“Let me drive you.”

I agree, and we leave right away. When we get to the front of my house, I see my mom approaching from down the sidewalk. I groan. It’s deep and internal.

“I’ll text you, ‘kay?” I tell Kumar.

“Okay,” he says, putting a hand on mine. “I love you.”

“I love you,” I tell him. I do love him–a lot. I’ve been unsure of a lot of things, lately, but not that.

As I step onto the sidewalk, though, I become only focused on my task. I march to my front door like the killer in a horror movie.

“Addie?” my mother calls, from my left. “Are you okay?”

I ignore her. Like the memory, I can’t possibly look at her right now. I climb the porch stairs. Once I’m through the front door, I head to the main stairway.

“Hello? Which one of you is it?” my father calls, from the living room. “Hi?” But I leave his voice behind, too. My chest is burning with dread and lack of air, but I climb as fast as I can. I reach the hallway and go for the storage room across from my bedroom. I open that door. The entire room is a pile of boxes, but I can see parts of the gray walls. My mouth breaks open, trying to let me heave through the thin, piercing air.

I can’t delay for long. I grind my teeth and rake my eyes over the pile, searching for the marking 3rd grade. I knock boxes down, looking. Books and papers and kitchen supplies splash onto the floor, onto my feet, but I don’t feel anything. Soon enough, I see the lopsided lid.

I push it off, and I grab the neck of the golden soccer ball. I pull the trophy up out of the box, then hold it up in front of my face, panting. There are two pairs of stomping behind me, in the hallway, as I read the inscription on the base. I start to cry, again, because it’s exactly as I thought.

Most Player Potential
Phillip Ridge Junior League
1998

Pascale Potvin is an emerging writer from Toronto, Canada. She has fiction 
featured New Reader Magazine and The Writing Disorder, plus a film in 
distribution by the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre. She has just 
received her BAH from Queen’s University, and she is working on a budding 
book trilogy. Some of her blog pieces about writing can be found at 
onelitplace.com, where she works as Assistant, English-French Translator, 
and more. 

Sunflower

The biggest I’ve seen— 
size of a steering wheel
in some friend’s grandma’s garden—drove
the world into me,

dragging the sun with it,
reached like a voice from a cave
where it’s always night, knocked
me down without touching me, then turned

away. That night Mom had to lie
with me until I fell asleep, 
tell me I’d be alright
and the next morning

I watched some cartoon I loved
and ate a sugared cereal, 
a stem of sunlight resting
on the edge of my bowl.

Meditation

After Baudelaire

So a new sky, the town surrounded.
If there’s no breeze, the locals will make one. 
Not one hair will flicker. No dandelion will nod
sarcastically until December. The interim

still warm and nighted I’ll spend with you,
gray sadness. Someone shot the sun down already
so I could write a shadow to your face
that hides from me the color of your eyes.

You’ve read me under the covers 
with a flashlight long enough. 
The turquoise edges of our antipodes lie
serrated as Indian Ocean shores.

But at night you soften like white morning glories. 
There’s a morning in me 
the branches haven’t learned. Please
walk with me until we see hills again.

I Was Seven

Mom cut her hair short. 
I asked if someone had died, 
and I meant her.
She held me while I cried.
She said, I’m still me,
and her arms felt like her arms. 
She said, Hair is just your head
when air happens to it. 
And I wondered if the air minded. 
I prayed for rain, to show her
the air agreed with me
while she breezed her fingers
through my hair 
and let me happen to her 
as long as I needed.

We Must Go

I’m usually happy when my kids are happy.
My daughter chases a bubble across the yard. 
My son digs a hole in the sand with a stick.

Leaves click their tongues like fire as a breeze ribbons
from the west and lands cold in the grass. 
They don’t mind. They’re having fun, aren’t they.

But I know soon I’ll tell them it’s getting dark
and we need to go, and life
will have turned against them.

And I, on behalf of life, will say I’m sorry
as I buckle seatbelts
against their will, against their cries for mercy.

I’ll lie. Maybe tomorrow, I’ll say. 
I’ll do this to move them forward
because tomorrow won’t be like today. There will be

appointments, errands, a drifting from place to place.
In the morning, my wife and I will gather them
from their beds and bring them with us

where we must go. But for now
let her try to catch that bubble
before it bursts. Let him see how far down

the hole goes. Why not? 
It’s not dark yet, 
and there’s nowhere we have to be.

Marcus Whalbring’s poems have appeared in The Cortland Review, Spry, and elsewhere. His first book of poems was released in 2013.