kennedycatherine

[kennedycatherine]

Charlotte

I'd recently turned 21.

It was a Friday night at the condo—a three-story unit a handful of close friends had circulated through over the years. It was a cathedral of debauchery, where we took off and landed every Friday and Saturday night. It'd happen rarely, but on occasion, we'd end up cancelling cabs or not calling at all, just post up in the small yard or sprawled over couches. This was one of those nights.

Someone yelled from the kitchen that my phone was going off, thrown somewhere on the kitchen counter. My friend held it up from across the room, and I laughed. It was just Her, a queer dating app.

"It's fine. I'll look later."

"No, like, it's gone off a few times." He waggled his eyebrows at me, and I pushed myself off the couch.

Leaning over the counter, a few friends crowded behind me, not so covertly trying to see what awaited.

There were a few messages from a woman I couldn't remember liking the profile of. Most of her photos were taken from an angle where you couldn't really tell who she was or what she looked like, just a faceless body. But there, at the end of her profile, was a photo of a book I was currently reading—The Ethical Slut, a book a friend loaned me after I explained my mounting interest in the concept of non-monogamy.

The messages were benign, boring even. Standard compliments, questions about my upcoming weekend, an offering of her own plans. I shot back a few replies, put the phone down, and continued with my night. As always, it descended into a frenzy of shots and card games and bad music and worse dancing. The next morning, my throat scratchy, my head pounding, my dying phone lay next to me with a number of notifications.

Most of them were from her, the woman from the night before, and I was confused to find I had to scroll awhile to find the beginning of our conversation. The night before was riddled with dark spots she seemingly fell into. I felt bad. I wasn't interested in her profile at all. The strange anonymous photos, the profile clearly stating her non-monogamy, and the age listed as 42 were all a bit out of my depths. But we'd exchanged quite a few messages, and she'd told me, at length, about her recent divorce from her husband of a few years. The unanswered messages asked if she'd said too much or been too much.

I didn't want her to feel embarrassed. I told her no, it wasn't too much. I'd just fallen asleep. When she responded eagerly, quickly, I already felt guilty. Leaving her messages unanswered after she'd been vulnerable felt cruel, but continuing to engage when I had no interest felt similarly wrong. Over the new few days, I gave vague, non-committal answers before finally explaining that I just didn't think I was comfortable with the idea of meeting.

She sent me her address.

I was sat at work, staring down at a few numbers and a street name, perplexed. She followed up again, this time with real, genuine photos of her, her face clearly visible, along with a short reply. Just a few words to let me know she understood why it would feel strange or unsafe, but she was interested in getting to know me, so now I had her address—I could use it if and when I cared to. That felt even more strange, but I was intrigued. It was the type of boldness I assumed I would find in dating but had never experienced.

I was an out lesbian, but I was young in a community where the majority of people my age were still coming to terms with themselves. My experience with women had been crowded by shyness, confusion, sneaking. Anyone I'd been with, I'd pursued by providing massive amounts of reassurance, offering slowness and gentleness. I couldn't recall a woman explicitly stating, with any amount of confidence, that they were interested in me.

It was exciting.

But I didn't reply to those messages.

Days later, I was cooking dinner with a friend, relaying the details of my exchange with this woman. He couldn't believe it.

"She just… gave you her address?"

"Yeah."

"To show up anytime?"

"Presumably."

"Well, now you have to."

"I'm not doing that."

We argued about it playfully all evening. I was certain it was only fascinating to him because a woman would never so readily provide her address to a man. He insisted that he just needed to see what this was all about. We drank small glasses of whiskey and discussed the many possibilities. As the minutes dragged on, I was more and more interested. Suddenly it didn't feel just like meeting a woman from a dating app. It felt like investigative research, a plot I had to complete.

I texted her.

She was quick to reply that her evening was open and I could come by anytime.

I let the rest of the whiskey burn down my throat, "if you don't take me now, I'm not going."

As we approached the building, my stomach was aflame with more than just alcohol. Her "house" was actually a looming high-rise, and the idea of setting foot inside felt a lot like stepping into a maze you might not leave. My friend and I looked at each other for a long while. I could sense his nerves.

"You should have her meet you out here."

So, I texted her. Told her I wasn't sure how to access her suite and that I would be most comfortable if she met me outside.

She asked if I'd like to take her dogs for a walk instead of coming up. I agreed.

My friend parked across the street, and I stood outside on this warm evening, waiting.

I almost had to laugh when she opened the door. Charlotte was tiny. A few inches shorter than me, incredibly thin. It felt silly to assess the situation like it might come down to combat, but I felt confident that if somehow things went south in a bad way, I would be just fine.

She greeted me excitedly, rushing to throw an arm around me. Whether from time or from nerves, the rest is a blur. We crossed the street into a park, and I watched my friend's SUV disappear down the road.

She talked and talked, hands tangled with leashes but animated. She fluctuated between looking at me intently and staring forward for long stretches. I told her about my job, maybe a bit about my life, and she started in on a story about her brother. It was a long and winding tale halted by two girls asking to pet the dogs. When they finally looked up from where they were crouched, I realized they were about my age. They took us both in before nodding politely and pivoting passed us.

I wondered then who they thought we were to each other.

"I wonder who they thought we were," Charlotte said. The way excitement and intrigue laced through her words made my skin feel itchy. But what was there to say?

I'd thought the same thing.

When we rounded the corner and found ourselves in front of her building, she was in the midst of a story.

"Why don't you come up?" She asked, "I'd love to be able to tell you the rest of my story."

So, I did.

Her apartment was nice. I took in the decor around me and what she'd left lying out. It was clear she lived alone like she'd said, that she was a doctor like she'd said. It was simple but comfortable. I noticed the lit candles immediately.

We sat on the couch and talked for a long time. I kept glancing at the clock, noticing time wasting away, all too aware that I had to work early in the morning. But it felt nice just to talk to someone who wanted to know what I had to say, who asked questions and listened when I answered.

"I should get going." I finally said.

She stalled. Her eyes darted around for a moment until she stood from where she sat across from me and strode over resolutely. Her knees ended up on either side of my thighs, and she whispered something in my ear that I forget before settling her mouth over mine, hard and smothering.

It wasn't that I didn't want to kiss her. As we'd talked, I'd had my own moments of interest, and I certainly hadn't come expecting nothing. It was fine, if not a little forced and rough. Like a kiss meant for a different night, a different mood.

When it ended, she grabbed my hand and led me down the hall. We turned into a room with tens of small tealights lit—something she must've done while using the bathroom within the last hour. In the centre of the bed was a selection of sex toys, ranging in size and colour.

We hadn't spoken explicitly. I hadn't communicated any desires nor boundaries.

The items stared at me, some unfamiliar and sort of unpleasant looking.

"I can't," I said quickly, "I have a yeast infection." It was a lie.

"That's fine," she said and pushed me toward the bed anyway.

We lay there kissing for a long time. Every time we moved, I could feel hard plastics and silicones slipping in toward the centre of the bed, under my back, my hips, my hands.

It ended quickly, clothed and unsatisfying. She called me a cab, and I went home.

We didn't speak soon after, but I was 21 and curious and wanting. I wanted to be wanted.

A few weeks later, drunk in the middle of the night and at a bar down the street from her apartment, I texted her.

Around 3 am, she let me in, and I spent the night for the first time.

It went like that for a while. Every few weeks, she'd wait up for me on a Saturday night, and I'd wander over after a long night of dancing and drinking. She was always sober.

Two or three times, she invited me over just to hang out, watch a movie or eat dinner together. So, I did. She was an interesting person. Confusing and a little erratic, but mostly just nice and, from what I could tell, intensely lonely. Spending time with her was easy.

One evening she invited me over to watch a movie. I let myself in like she'd asked me to, and I heard her on the phone in another room—"She's here," she said.

My stomach dropped a small inch. Though the agreement was mostly silent, Charlotte and I didn't involve each other in our daily lives. We never saw each other before 8pm, and never once did we meet outside of her apartment. She was never going to tell family or many friends that she was interested in women, and I wasn't going to grow deep feelings for her. It just was what it was. A fine arrangement.

But the way she said "she" told me everything I needed to know. To someone, somewhere, I was the she. Someone worth mentioning.

"Who was that?" I asked when she emerged from her bedroom.

She said his name so casually like I'd heard it tens of times.

"Who?"

"David." She said again, nearly shrugging.

"Who's David?"

"My boyfriend."

"What?" My stomach hadn't just dropped. It was on the floor.

We'd been sleeping together for weeks. She never once mentioned a boyfriend, let alone ever seemed to see or speak to one. My mind started to spin, reminded suddenly of everything I'd ever read about informed consent in non-monogamy. How could she not tell me there was another person?

"You know I'm non-monogamous."

What ensued was a conversation that escalated into raised voices and a much too casual dismissiveness of my concerns.

David lived across the country. They hadn't seen each other in nearly a year and didn't have opportunities to talk much.

"So he knows who I am?"

"Yeah, of course."

"So he knows me, but I don't know him?"

"I was already with him when I met you."

"Has he seen photos of me?"

She looked nervous. "Yes."

I felt sick.

"You're not allowed to share my fucking photos with random men."

She seemed pissed, insulted even, that I thought of this random man as exactly what he was to me. A stranger.

I felt violated and humiliated, and she was so casual. She spun and twisted every conversation we'd ever had about non-monogamy until it was a great big mass of unidentifiable yarn. She made me believe I was wrong, that I'd misunderstood things she'd told me and conversations we'd had, that she'd been honest in the ways she was expected to be, and if I wasn't comfortable with that, then I was the one who'd been dishonest with her.

I didn't see her for weeks after that. But she reached out often over text, explaining in several different ways what their dynamic was, that they never saw each other, that I'd consumed more of her life than him recently, that it didn't matter.

When I did see her again, I was pissed. I had a backpack with a small joint inside.

"Can I step outside and smoke this?" I asked. Despite having been drunk around her, I'd never drank and never smoked in front of her, though she'd insisted it would be fine if I did.

She gave me the nod of approval without hesitation.

When I returned, her back was to me as she furiously wiped at a spot on the counter. She seemed to be buzzing with anger.

"What's wrong?"

She spun quickly, the cloth wiping and cracking loudly at her side.

She couldn't believe that I would do that, that I would smoke weed so casually in front of her, a sober person.

I was out of my depths. I was 21 and not that experienced, not someone who yet understood the tricky nuances of intimate relationships with other people, how commonly people can become passive agressive when they don't feel seen or respected, how sometimes when people lack the right words they might play mental games, they might lash out.

I didn't know any of this. I knew what I knew, which wasn't much, and I've spent every year and every relationship since that moment explaining to people, "I can only be exactly where I am now. I can only know what I know, and I can only have experienced what I've already experienced."  

I didn't have the language then. Lightly stoned, I just let her yell. I let her be angry, and it once again boiled down into a fight about David.

When she eventually spit out the truth, it made so much sense that I felt so foolish for not having played this scenario in my mind like the plot of a movie.

David wasn't her boyfriend. David was a man with a pregnant wife and two kids who lived on the other side of the country. Charlotte was a woman he slept with once a year if he could get away and only ever spoke to her on the phone long enough or often enough to keep her coming back.

The woman who had any influence over me suddenly melted away. Instead, a red-faced, childishly indignant stranger who suddenly looked and sounded so pathetic stood in front of me.

"You're not non-monogamous, Charlotte. You're having an affair."

"He's going to leave her after the new baby."

I wanted to laugh nearly as bad as I wanted to cry and vomit.

I was humiliated at how fucking little I'd seen. How little I knew the person I shared a bed with a handful of times. I was just the intimacy placeholder, an inconsequential person to spend time with in-between rendezvous. Not threatening to David like a man might be, not concerned or invested enough to have to explain anything to.

I left, and I never saw her again.

A few weeks later, she sent me a text message that nearly seemed like it was for the wrong person. It was intimate, personal, and affectionate in a way we rarely spoke to each other. It was as if she was jumping in, mid-conversation. I didn't reply.

Instead, I checked social media and found that she was there, in the same city as David. I could only imagine she was sitting next to him, maybe he was texting his wife, and she picked up the phone to text her "other person." The cute young blonde she got to share photos of and whisper about late at night when he found the time in a closet somewhere.

I deleted every trace of her.

There are dynamics in which age is incidental. And then there are dynamics where it is imperative. Her scheme relied on having a willing and malleable party who wasn't going to ask too many questions, someone who didn't know better.

For that, I wanted to blame her. But it didn't feel so simple. I've never doubted that she should have been better—I've doubted that human fallacy has an age limit. I've doubted that sad, broken people trying to get what they want in this world, trying to know exactly what it is to be loved, have the strength to look past a grey area that lies in the way of that.

I think about the people who say, without hesitation, "adults know better." And it's difficult because to refute that feels like you're absolving them. But I just don't think it's a fair assessment of something complex. We know we're not supposed to speed, illegally download movies, or litter. We take vows, and still, in a quarter of all marriages, someone will have an affair. The question is never whether or not something is right or wrong. It's never about if we "knew better." It's about how we can justify it regardless.

I helped the justification. I was a person who walked and talked like a grown adult, who had firm opinions, and who was seemingly emotionally competent. In a fight to be taken seriously, I took every opportunity to assert why my age was irrelevant. I'm sure I was convincing.

The most difficult realization was not that I'd been used but that I'd be remembered as an accessory to a story that was never about me. If you forced her into some semblance of accountability and asked her who she'd manipulated in that story, it wouldn't be me. It would be him. I wasn't important, not a full, dynamic, real person. I was a means to an end with him, her real person. If I happened to get hurt along the way, that was a casualty in her blindspot. Her eyes were firmly fixed elsewhere.

When she called me two years later, it became a cemented reality that she did not think of me as a person impacted by her. I was standing in a bathroom, visiting a friend miles and hours away, putting on lipstick. The name was so shocking on my screen I actually laughed.

"Hey!" She said enthusiastically.

"Hi?"

"I have a friend in town who really wants to go dancing. I never know what the cool places are anymore, so I thought I'd call one of the youngest, hippest people I know."

Flat and uncaring, I rattled off the names of a few places.

"Great, thank you!" There was a pause, "Hey, maybe we could get dinner sometime soon?"

"No, Charlotte."

I hung up.

[kennedycatherine]

11:41

Someone had joked once, called her a ghost. Her office sat at the end of the hall, the end with its own entrance. She never ventured much further.

Though there was no shortage of lunches, both catered and at the pub down the street, we never saw her. When her name appeared on the monthly birthday list, I was surprised they knew even that much about her. When the outing was organized, a small Thai place a few blocks over, she never RSVP’d.

“Should we get her something?”

Danielle laughed. Michael, in his own birthday crown, rolled his eyes.

Seemed like a nice thing to do, but then again, I was the new girl. Not yet worn down by rejections, cancellations, or ignored invitations.

When we arrived back at the office, they unpacked a box of too-sweet gourmet cupcakes. She never came for hers.

The clock hit 4:45, and I knocked against the wood of her door. The tip of the frosting on the vanilla bean cupcake beginning to discolour and harden in the open air.

“Come in!”

We’d seen each other in the bathroom, in the hall, been introduced once before. She’d been nice enough - she looked nice now, just confused.

“I uh-” I raised the cupcake, “I brought this for you.”

“Oh!”

“It’s yours,” I said as I set the cupcake down on the few inches of desk not strewn with papers, “the birthday month cupcake thing.”

She blinked at it.

“They sent out a message,” I offered up lamely, suddenly feeling silly.

“Oh, right. I-” she chuckled a small sound, “I may have turned those notifications off.”

She didn’t seem embarrassed by the truth of it, just that she’d said it at all.

I’d only gotten the job a few months ago but found myself quickly sunk in. With the team, the projects, the office, there was a sense of ease and comfort to it all. The dynamic was simple, to enjoy, to be entertained by. But even I found myself exhausted by the consistency of it - the round-the-clock exchange of jokes, the daily outings for post-work beers, the constant chatter. For me and my risky tendency toward quiet and isolation, it was as restorative as it was challenging.

I could imagine that for a different person it would only be a challenge.

“Understood,” I laughed.

Our eyes met for a moment, and she made no move toward the cupcake. She didn’t look as if she had anything to say, so I turned on my heel.

“Thank you,” she said a little too hastily like she was worried I may miss it.

And I didn’t completely turn back as I nodded.

When she caught me in the bathroom weeks later, my cheeks coloured darkly and quickly. The coffee stain on my shirt had needed immediate attention, and I hadn’t realized how much fabric had been pulled up and away from my belly until we were making eye contact in the mirror.

“Sorry,” I mumbled, “coffee.”

She nearly laughed as I tore myself away from the sink.

“Need another then?”

Barely a 7-minute walk down the block, the coffee shop was nice. So was she. Nice and ordinary and not at all deserving of the speculation or whispers.

“I’ve been here for two years, and I don’t think we’ve exchanged more than five sentences?” Danielle remarked into her beer, eyebrow raised.

Michael continued to stare over the rim of his glasses, and I had to laugh.

“I feel like you guys are disappointed or something, but what did you expect?”

“Well, it’s weird, right?” Came Danielle’s impatient reply, more to Michael than me.

I didn’t think it was weird. Coffee with Sawyer had only been proof of the obvious - she was kind of quiet, kind of shy, and frankly, a poor fit for the majority of the team. I hadn’t been surprised when she’d asked if I wanted to grab that coffee. I’d always been that person, the one who could flex and mold as needed. If they needed me to be loud and quick and obnoxious, I’d do it. If she needed me to be calm and mild, simply there, I’d do it - and so I did. We discussed the books we’d been reading over the weekend.

“I don’t know if it’s weird,” Michael finally shrugged, “Joss is a comfortable person.”

Danielle looked annoyed, like a person learning for the first time that they may not be adored by everyone.

“I’m just a better chameleon.”

I asked her for coffee next. It seemed like the polite thing to do.

A lazy writer might compare her to a bird and me to a cat, or something of the sort. I was aware that something in her was delicate and flighty, not a person to come at quickly or hard. But I was curious. Curious enough to break the ice.

“You never come out with us. Why’s that?”

She seemed to choke lightly on the bitter black coffee in her paper cup, then recovered, blinking as if it didn’t happen.

“I really do like the job, you know,” she said after thinking for a moment, “it’s just-”

“The people?”

“They’re all perfectly nice.”

“Doesn’t mean you have to like them,” I chuckled.

“Do you?”

“Like them?”

“Yes.”

“Sure,” I shrugged, “but it’s a lot sometimes.”

She seemed to relax after that.

It’d been late. The office had been quiet when suddenly the lights in the room had gone out. I let out a pathetic squeak of fear only to be met by a quick apology and a laugh.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you were still here,” Sawyer said as she came around the corner.

She looked pale and thin under the strange fluorescent lighting of the back hall, and I thought again of what they’d called her - a ghost.

I felt a near immediate regret, some small sense of dread, the moment I told her I was wrapping up, followed up by an invite to the bar across the street. I was certain she would say no. Then she didn’t.

There we were.

I was surprised when they settled the tequila shot in front of her.

I made a face, and she laughed.

“What?”

“Didn’t take you for the type.”

“I’m fun too.”

She always found ways to talk about something, to fill the silence with what was ultimately nothing. She didn’t wear a ring if she was married, but it didn’t mean she wasn’t. She was out late on a Thursday, so probably no kids, no dogs. As the Production Manager, I knew she must have a business degree. She was perhaps in her early forties.

These were all things I had to assume because she’d never told me.

Her eyes seemed heavy when we went our separate ways. When I caught her in the bathroom the next morning, they didn’t seem any lighter, like maybe she hadn’t slept.

“I had fun last night.” In the low lighting of the deep orange bathroom it felt almost seedy to say.

“Same,” she said with a small smile that was both weak and unconvincing.

I didn’t question it. She washed her hands and excused herself.

The following Monday, she was out sick.

Tuesday, her office door was closed and never opened.

Wednesday, we met in the supply closet.

She startled when she noticed me crouched looking through the coloured pens. I half expected her to turn and walk away, but she continued to the stack of printer paper.

“Feeling ok?”

“Better, yeah.”

“Fancy a coffee?”

“Mmm,” she nearly hummed, “I’ll let you know.”

She didn’t.

I didn’t see her until the following Monday, another late night. The light of her office glowed into the otherwise darkened hallway. We were the only two people there.

I thought of her and the people I’d known like her. The type of people who just don’t know exactly how to settle themselves into a room, into a group. People who don’t want to be alone but don’t really know how not to be.

I let myself into her office, lit only by an orange lamp in the corner. I could feel her looking at me but didn’t make eye contact until I’d settled myself into the plush chair across from her desk with a huff.

“Two ladies, one office, and another late night. You know what that means?”

“Is this a punchline I should know?” Her eyebrow raised.

“Well, we’ve done it once before. Tequila?”

I really looked at her then, those eyes that in a week’s time had yet to liven. But she sighed in near relief with a nod.

We looked up at the closed sign next to the hours on the door.

“Monday,” she sighed.

“Monday.”

Then, in a sweep of bravery, I swallowed. “I know a place.”

There was less in the tequila bottle in my cupboard than I’d expected, but it was enough.

“I could do something nicer with this, you know?”

“Doesn’t need to be nice,” she said as I filled two small shot glasses.

With a slightly nicer tequila and soda in hand, we settled into the overstuffed couch in the middle of my living room. I could hear my mother creeping into my throat, the lingering desire to apologize for the mess, though all I could see was this morning’s coffee cup and a takeout box on the dining table.

“Nice place.”

“Mmm, thanks.”

“Roommates?”

“Oh, no. Getting a little old for that.”

“Partner?”

“Just me.”

“Do you ever get lonely?”

It seemed an odd, intimate question. I thought about the many answers.

“I’m sure if I sat with it long enough, I’d say yes. But it’s easy to keep busy and pretend that you’re not. Or forget that you are.”

Her eyes stayed on me while she sipped as if she expected me to say more. All that was left to say was everything, things that would take hours to say or hear, so I said nothing at all.

Finally, I asked, “what about you? Do you ever get lonely?”

“I didn’t think I would, but I am.”

Her mouth missed mine, landing on the corner, cold against my cheek. But I turned into it, laid mine gently over hers. A few moments passed, and it no longer seemed she wanted me to be very gentle.

She was gone when my morning alarm sounded. I wasn’t surprised.

It’s so much easier to fall into habits and routines with another person than people seem to think. Looking at life as though it were a giant board game with milestones and markers makes it difficult to experience things. But if you don’t choose “first date” to get yourself from the green square to the blue, if you don’t roll the dice on a marriage card to get yourself halfway through the board, suddenly you’re not on it at all, and there are no questions to ask or cards to collect. You simply move.

Sawyer and I continued to move with no direction and no final square.

The night she fell asleep in my bed, she’d seemed so exhausted. The energy she’d held while she grasped and searched and felt her way through me on the couch was suddenly gone, replaced again with a hollowness that had seemed to grow over the weeks.

I left her there, covered her with the soft white blanket folded at the end of the bed. The clock read 11:27 when I turned the shower to a scalding warmth. It must’ve been 11:34 when I thought I heard the phone ring. The hum of the shower cut out to a near complete silence. My phone on the counter was blank, nothing incoming, nothing missed.

Through the closed door, there was a hiss - quiet and low. I pressed myself near the crack. A whisper, perhaps from Sawyer in the bed. Pushing myself away and toward the towel, I told myself it was none of my business.

We’d done this before - returned back to the office together in the morning after having taken my car back to mine. We were silently diligent about the whole thing, never talked about it, but never so much as spoke openly if others were still around and always returned early or late enough that the place had cleared out.

On that morning, there were vehicles in the lot, Sawyers and Michaels. It could’ve been avoidable, but we were just a moment behind him, still standing just inside the door, rifling through his bag.

He startled as the door banged closed behind us, his eyes widening, softening, and widening again as we all adjusted to the light.

“Morning,” he said flatly.

Sawyer only nodded before ducking her head and retreating to her office.

“Yeah, hi. Morning,” I mumbled as I brushed past him and toward the front of the office.

The large dark wooden table that accommodated our entire team was dark, the room silent. Michael flipped the light behind me. As I turned toward him, a slight smirk began to lift at the corner of my mouth. He had his own reputation for a short-lived fling with a former company president and some casual nights with discrete clients. But he wasn’t smiling.

He only looked at me for a moment before moving to his spot across from me. The silence as he unpacked his bag grew a knot into my stomach. Swallowing the discomfort, I pulled my things from my own bag.

“Did anyone really tell you about her?” He asked finally. When I looked up he was sat on his chair, eyes hard behind his glasses.

I tsk’d. “I know you guys don’t like her. But she’s been-”

“I meant about her daughter.”

“What?”

Sawyer didn’t have a daughter. Or a partner, or anyone.

Michael looked down at his hands, “just Google her some time.” Then he popped in his earbuds and left me alone.

It was right there, just above her LinkedIn.

“Local Man Suspected in Disappearance of Missing Child”

It seemed like something that should be everywhere, highly publicized, but it wasn’t. A smattering of articles, a few armchair detective Reddit threads, the latest update from two years earlier.

There was no real evidence. The little girl had gone missing along with her father about four years earlier. His apartment had been largely untouched. The only things missing were their passports, his wallet, and vehicle. His cellphone and wallet were later recovered about three hours outside of the city; the passports and vehicle were never found. There’d been no activity on his phone or in his bank accounts since the day they’d last been seen.

It was all too typical, one detective was quoted as saying. These things happened when divorced couples went through vicious custody battles. He’d been awarded only partial custody a month earlier.

All I could find were occasional Facebook posts from the local police department reminding the public that they were still considered missing persons.

I didn’t feel much of anything right away. A sort of sick feeling took root as I combed through what little detail I could find. I’d been sleeping with a woman who must be experiencing an immeasurable amount of agony. Some part of me continued to repeat the sentiment that I wished I’d known. That I would’ve been different with her, that I would’ve dug deeper or asked more questions. A bigger part of me knew that we’d only worked because I hadn’t.

I wasn’t going to say anything, not to her.

When Michael and I found ourselves alone late in the afternoon, I turned to him. “So you wanted me to find out that people don’t like her because her ex-husband fucked off with her kid?” I couldn’t help the ugliness that crept into my voice.

He only shook his head lightly.  

“It’s not like that, Joss.”

“What is it then?”

“She already worked here then, so did I,” he looked around, his eyes not fearful or nervous but sad, “something wasn’t right.”

“What do you mean?”

“She was just strange. No one even knew she had a kid, which, ok, wasn’t that weird because no one really knew anything about her. But she didn’t take more than like four days off,” he leaned in as he continued, “obviously the office was fucking rocked by the news. They were even looking into temps, but then she was just back.”

I shrugged, a hot defensiveness spreading throughout my limbs, “So? Some people need to throw themselves into work when things are going on, distract themselves.”

Michael nearly laughed, a bitter sound, “this wasn’t a fucking breakup, Joss, or like a parent getting sick. Her kid was probably dead.”

“Don’t say that,” I hissed.

“How many four-year-olds go missing with no suspected sightings in four years and suddenly turn up alive?”

We turned away from each other. That was the last time we spoke about it.

I didn’t see her again until nearly a week later. I couldn’t help the desire to stare at her longer, to listen a little more closely, to ask an extra question. I desired, all at once, to be much further and much closer to her.

We were up later than we usually were during our quick evenings. Music played softly in the background, her hair fell back over the edge of the couch. We chatted about the politics of a pandemic. Lapsing into silence for only a moment, a shrill ringing pierced the air. She startled, eyes widened. The phone was clearly still in her coat pocket, hanging off the back of an armchair in the corner.

“Do you want me to grab your coat?”

“Oh, no. It’s too late for someone to be calling.”

But someone was calling. I noted the time over the stove - 11:34.

The holidays were slipping away. None of us were ducking into the office to do the little work coming in, opting instead to stay off the frozen roads and inside with horrible made for TV Christmas movies. I didn’t see her at all.

Then a text came through on Wednesday evening - “Plans tomorrow night?”

Only plans I was willing to blow off, so I texted back - “None.”

She arrived at 9 pm, and nervousness crept in. Would we watch the countdown? Should we avoid it altogether? The midnight tradition of New Year’s Eve felt suddenly intimate, too romantic for co-workers just sort of sleeping together. I worried about how dull the apartment looked.

I was suddenly achy and raw as she stood in her thick black coat alone in my hallway. I wondered how she’d spent the holidays, if she was entirely alone. But she smiled, and I swallowed it down.

No questions were exchanged about the past week. Instead, I handed her a glass of champagne and told her stories of New Years’ past, unimpressive but laughable debauchery.

I couldn’t help but watch the time tick down, closer and closer to the dot at the top of the clock. When she excused herself to the bathroom, I refilled our glasses and checked myself in the hallway mirror. The door creaked open a moment later, and she returned to her glass, raising it to her lips. Liquid poured smoothly from the thin flute down into her throat until it was nearly gone. She hovered near where I settled on the couch but never came closer, her eyes on the screen of the television.

When she pushed her arms inside her coat a minute or two later, I wondered if I had the date wrong.

“Did you,” I started as she turned around to look at me, “did you not want to stay for the-”

“What?” The word was short, but she didn’t seem angry, not upset with me, just far away.

“Nothing.”

Her arms were limp when she pulled me into a hug, and her lips hit some part between my neck and my jaw.

At 11:41, I found myself alone.

Returning to work felt cold and lacking in the way that January does. Snow turned brown from the dirt of tires, sunlight lasting only long enough to accompany the working hours. I was tired.

Sawyer began leaving early, and I continued to stay late.

When the month was nearing its end, her office light was on past usual hours. It felt wise to hurry past, but I heard my name as I tried.

“Drink?” she called into the hallway.

We found ourselves on elbows over the bartop, chatting intensely about music we’d loved years ago. She kissed me there in the dark light.

My apartment felt somehow less empty with her in my bed. Chest rising and falling with shallow breaths, the lines of her face were soft. It was the most relaxed I’d seen her since maybe we’d met.

When the phone rang, it broke through both the darkness and the quiet of the room, volume just low enough not to wake her. On the nightstand closest to me, I reached to silence it before I realized it was not my own but hers. Still, I pulled it toward me and tried to thumb the button on the side. In my haste, something happened and suddenly, the line connected.

There was a hum around me as the voice broke through the silence, tiny and distant.

Heat rushed to my face.

“Mommy?”

I couldn’t speak. The room was still, the sound from the phone so small I couldn’t be sure I heard it. Raising it to my ear, I swallowed, terrified to make a sound.

There was silence for a long time and, finally, a voice.

“Babe?” I couldn’t be sure that was the word. It sounded muffled. “Sawyer?” It was a man, “why, honey?”

There was no feeling as the shiver worked through me, hand trembling as it lowered. The call was disconnected, the phone blank aside from the time, 11:34.

When I shifted on my hip she was there, eyes open and wide - “You can’t answer when they call.”

Prompt: Killer begins receiving calls from their victim.

#short horror story #short fiction #fiction prompt #LGBTQ writing

[kennedycatherine]

04.27.21

We were thirteen and I knew enough to know that was absurd.

We still inhabited a school yard with children learning their ABC’s. Girls our own age hadn’t yet graduated out of training bras.

Aren’t our brains like, too underdeveloped for this?

A few nights I just watched.

They came in fun colours, like the vitamins my mom still set out with my breakfast.

I found the whole thing anxious and boring. Anxious because it was drugs, and we were thirteen and what if we got caught or what if something happened. Boring because they bored me.

Nothing happened.

I made sure they had water and popsicles and candies to suck on.

“You’ll bite your tongue off,” Kallie had said one night.

A small trickle of blood came from her mouth awhile later and she looked pleased. I knew she’d done it. When I looked at her, I wanted to call her a liar.

“I know,” I wanted to say, “I’m sober. You just did that to yourself.”

I felt very young and very old all at once.

They asked for lotion. Lotioned themselves from head to toe.

One night one of the girls did a runner. Just opened the front door to suburbia and took off down the street in nothing but skimpy shorts and a tank top into the chilled night air.

I worried about her, but I didn’t go after her.

There were babies to look after, real babies. 6 years old and one year.

I don’t remember their names, but I remember loving them. I remember feeling sad for them.

Every weekend their mom would leave. She was pretty and young and had a thirteen-year-old she trusted to handle things.

“Where does she go?”

“To the bars in some small town. I think a guy lives there.”

They had family photos in the house. She had a husband. I remember wondering how things had fallen apart so quickly? They’d had a baby only a year ago and now they were getting a divorce?

Except they weren't. He just worked out of the city for months at a time and neither of them cared, I suppose.

I sat on a bed with the 6-year-old once, playing a game or reading a story and I heard laughter downstairs and I was so angry.

I was angry that no one cared that there were children upstairs. I was angry that I was going to put a child to bed who had a mother but seemingly didn’t. I was angry that I had to do it at all, that I was expected to. That it had come to mean relief when I walked in the door. If I was there, it was handled. I didn’t want to handle it.

I wanted to call my mom.

I wanted to tell her what was happening, tell her that someone needed to hold these babies or feed them right and love them. Because surely, I didn’t know how.

But I didn’t want to ruin the fun. I didn’t want Kallie’s mom to be in trouble. I didn’t want my mom, who also had a seventeen-year-old who just couldn’t seem to keep it together, to realize that a house she’d deemed safe by proximity in our good neighbourhood probably wasn’t.

“Give me one.”

No one teased or questioned it. They just handed over the small plastic bag.

I don’t remember what it felt like, only that I didn’t care for it. I didn’t understand it. I was bored by it.

I stopped going. Those girls decided they hated me. I worried about those babies and over 10 years later, I still do.

I started to see my childhood best friend, Maddy, a lot after that. She was pretty and athletic and loud and adventurous and young, my age but, young.

She lived a few blocks away, in the opposite direction from Kallie.

Her mom was in the midst of a divorce. She was older than most of the moms because Maddy had been a “surprise.” A blessing, she’d say, but a surprise. So, the rest of her kids were grown and gone. She’d done it all, seen it all.

We were in the eighth grade, just a few months away from high school when she offered to buy us booze.

She promised it would stay within the walls of the house, my parents wouldn’t have to know. She just wanted us to get a feel for it so we could test our limits, learn our boundaries.

When she presented us with those sickly-sweet orange coolers, I winced. Alcohol had never really interested me. I didn’t feel mystified by it or interested in it.

We drank them anyway.

We had one each. Then shoved two more under our thick sweaters and walked to the nearby park.

There were always kids there, in that strange age range where you have some sense of freedom without actually having any and you crave it, always. You know how to sneak alcohol, ask people outside the convenience store to buy you cigarettes.

Uncool teens, acting very cool leaning against slides and monkey bars we earnestly used only a few years earlier.

By then I’d decided I liked Logan. He was in high school already, two years older than us, seemed nice enough and attractive enough to like, so I guessed I did. I showed him the stashed coolers under my sweater and shivered when the air hit me. He offered me his jacket.

I was only wearing it maybe a minute, not even long enough to brag, when the sirens hit and the park was lit up with red and blue. Everyone scattered in different directions. We hopped a fence and then another and another until we collapsed on her lawn, one cooler lost to our epic and brave journey.

The patrol car circled the block.

“It’s almost 2am,” they told us. We nodded.

They asked how old we were and I told them we were 16.

Maybe they believed us because it was dark but maybe they didn’t because we weren't.

“Do you live here?”

“Yes.”

“Go inside.” We did.

I didn’t drink much after that. All we could get our hands on were drinks that seemed to be a half pound of sugar and something that tasted like mouth wash. The group favourite was Troika which smelt like hand sanitizer and cost about $25 for more than a litre. Everything was vodka.

Every time I drank any of it, I was immediately and violently ill.

My entire body would flush, an ache in my collar bones that radiated and buzzed down my arms and go on and on and on until I’d have to peel my clothes off and stick myself to the coldest surface, let my body wretch and wretch until I’d vomited everything.

I’d find out a few years later that I’m alcohol intolerant with a vodka allergy.

But I’d given up trying long before then. Found my way to pot.

I loved it immediately. It calmed me down, it made me laugh. It made me hungry.

I suffered far fewer embarrassing stories and hallway whispers than most.

I had a starring role in only one story that would go down in infamy.

There’d been a birthday party, someone had made an ice cream cake that was immediately forgotten in favour of solo cups and bongs. I smoked my own joint and remembered that cake. In a haze I found myself alone in a tiny storage room, in front of a deepfreeze. Opening the lid, there it was, creamy and beautiful.

“Fuck yes.”

Then the door opened.

I turned and there he was. The hottest guy in our grade and he’d been calling me a dirty hippie for two years. I closed the lid.

“What are you doing?” He asked

“Waiting.”

“For?”

“You.”

He looked confused. He should've. I had no reason to be waiting for him, I hadn’t even spoken to him. I was 16 and stoned and I wanted to eat an ice cream cake at this dumb birthday party by my fucking self. I pushed myself on top of the freezer.

“Come here.”

He did. We made out on top of the freezer until I felt he was sufficiently distracted, and my job was done and then I pushed him out of the room.

Then I ate some of that cake alone as I’d intended.

Upstairs my best friend sobbed in a bathroom. Even now that we’ve long outgrown teenage angst and hormones she can be prickly, angry, deeply unaffectionate. Then, she was slightly volatile. She wanted to be alone, but I stayed – shoved myself into a corner of the bathtub as she refused to look at me or tell me what she was so upset about it. I waited her out. Mostly because I was stoned and relieved to be in a room away from a throng of sweaty, horny 16-year-olds.

Suddenly, she confessed something to me quietly. She’d made out with that same guy - the hot one I’d been with on top of a freezer - at a party the weekend before. I hadn’t known and she hadn’t stopped thinking about him, and he hadn’t looked at her since.

“I just want him,” she whined.

“I just made out with him on top of a freezer.”

She turned her startling green eyes on me. “You what?”

“I don’t know,” I felt deeply guilty, “there was a cake inside.”

She choked and then she laughed and then I laughed. We left and we laughed the whole walk back to wherever we slept that night.

I went to a performing arts college that had less than twenty students which became lesser and lesser as we viciously vied for the same thing. There were no parties or binge drinking or even any outings. We worked quietly and quickly, most kept to ourselves.

If school really was a competition, I won.

My instructor called me into his office, “I want you to go to this interview. You’re ready.”

I wasn’t supposed to be graduating for at least 3, maybe 4 months. I wasn’t ready. But I went. I got the job and I left, the school and the city.

I was alone and I was terrified, and I was working most hours of everyday and waking up every morning feeling like I’d made a massive mistake. I hadn’t. I was just 19 with no idea what I was doing, only that people seemed to believe I could, and I didn’t know why.

My sister and my grandfather became sicker and sicker with addiction.

I stopped smoking pot almost completely. I’d found alcohol that didn’t upset my entire system, but I never drank by myself. I was afraid that if I did, I wouldn’t stop. I’d fill the hole and then just like them, I’d never learn how to be whole on my own. I went for runs and I journaled and worked and tried to make friends.

I drove home for graduation and realized a few things. These people had three more months together. They were closer, most of them resented me for being given an opportunity that most days I wasn’t even sure I wanted.

There was a party afterward and I felt 13, lonely and bored. I wanted to leave.

My sister was really sick by then.

The best friend I’d made in school, Elliot, he cornered me in the empty kitchen. Most people had settled into the living room for conversations or the basement for beer pong and I hovered in the kitchen, feeling entirely silly in my cheap white dress. Elliot smelled like whiskey while he hugged me, and I wanted to cry. I'd missed him.

We’d had plans to get jobs together. We were going to become a morning show duo in some city we’d never been to, rent a house together. Spend our afternoons drinking beer, planning our show content and break into big markets before we were 25.

I cried when I took the job that meant those things wouldn’t happen and he’d hugged me then too. He was happy for me.

He pulled out of the hug in that kitchen and looked at me for a long time, with big open eyes. A nearly childish, wide stare. He took a deep breathe.

Then he told me he was in love with me.

I startled backward away from him and hit my hip hard against the stove. I was angry immediately. Because I was gay. Because people had been telling me he was in love with me. Because I chose not to believe them. I felt my trust had been broken. Because why? What can I do with that? I loved him. I couldn’t be in love with him. If I could, I would’ve wanted to be. He was so good.

And I was so mad because he was drunk.

I was sick of whispered late-night confessions and people telling me things that weren’t true. I was tired of people making promises to me and telling me they loved me and none of it mattering. I was just so fucking sick of everyone being wasted on something all the time.

It wasn’t his fault. I’d always felt loved by him, I appreciated him, I loved him. I wanted to be gentle with him. I should’ve been. It was just… there were so many things.

“What am I supposed to do with that?” I asked him.

“I just needed you to know.”

I left. He called me so many times, he left voicemails I deleted, and I never answered. I went back to my small town and my small job the next day. I re-read his texts, “I’m sorry, I was drunk” over and over and felt no relief in his excuses.

I didn’t drink for a long time.

A man I thought I knew told me he was in love with me.

I found my sister cold and blue on a floor, medically dead, though she miraculously survived.

My grandfather vomited on himself in the back of a van as we took him to the dry out centre where he'd eventually become sober for a brief time.

I was so tired.

When I moved back to the city, I found comfort in things again. I could drink and be fine. The world didn’t end. I didn’t crave it in the morning or when things got hard. I started smoking pot again. It calmed me down, it made me laugh. It made me hungry.

I took mushrooms a handful of times with my friends. I cried the first time because I felt like me. Present and responsible and in control and so deeply, disappointingly myself. I’d wanted drugs to be a void, even if I never took them. I wanted to believe that somewhere there was a way to just not be myself for a while.  

I was bored of myself.

I wanted to escape, and it wasn’t happening.

But the second or third time I learned to enjoy them for what they were and felt all too proud for simply having a nice time.

I begged my roommate to come to this EDM show with me. It was my co-worker’s birthday and she’d always been excessively, exceedingly lovely to me. When she sheepishly asked if I would be interested in going to this live show to celebrate her 37th, I swallowed down the price of tickets and said yes. Emphatically.

Matt, good natured and so easy, said yes. He liked live music and whiskey and leaving the house.

We got there and she was alone.

I asked about her husband. He stayed home with the baby. And her friends?

Coming, she said.

There were three of them. I thought back to days she’d cried to me in the bathroom and the coffees we’d shared in her office. I’d always thought of her as a sort of leaky faucet, spilling out without control. I hadn’t realized I was actually just in her circle. One of five.

She got adorably drunk. “Mom’s night out!” They all chanted and Matt and I stood off to the side a bit while I apologized to him on a loop for painting this night as an in and out affair.

“We can just leave whenever, I'm sure she won’t notice.” I’d said.

Eventually she asked me if I wanted to “score” in the alley. I laughed because it sounded so seedy and suspicious coming from the mouth of this quintessential suburban mom who I only knew as a woman sitting in a blazer, in an office, next to her family portraits.

I asked Matt if he wanted any. No, he’d brought his vape pen.

We went outside, me, her and her curvy friend with the insane curly hair. Some guy was already there, and the exchange was quick. She turned back and announced, “to the bathroom.”

The bathroom? Fuck.

It’d seemed seedy and suspicious because it kind of was. “Dumb stoner,” I thought to myself as we marched back inside with the bag of cocaine I’d thought would be a Ziplock of weak weed.

I don’t like coke. It makes me angry.

She lined it up, wide eyed, on the hard back of her red wallet. She yammered and mumbled and stumbled over her words quickly and excitedly. It’d been years, I couldn’t tell anyone at work, her husband could never find out, was I sure?

Once again, I felt bored. “I’m sure.”

The friend took her bump and turned back to me, “what’s your sign?”

“Cancer.”

Her eyes were frenzied, like I’d said something important.

“I knew it, I’m a Scorpio.” She wound her fingers into the hair at the back of my neck and whispered to me, “we’re like sisters.” Then she kissed me, hard and square. Her breath was sour, her lips were chapped and she pulled away with a toothy grin before offering the wallet up to my nose.

I looked at them, their excitement, I felt the overwhelming emptiness in my chest. I felt sad for someone, them or me, and how dull I found the whole thing to be.

I sniffed it through a receipt from a kids play centre and wondered, idly, if there are people who think mothers don’t behave this way.

I wiped and sniffled and felt the light burn in my twice broken nose, now irritated by thin white powder.

“Well, that took for-fucking-ever,” Matt yelled over his whiskey.

“It wasn’t pot.”

“Did you do it?”

“Yeah.”

He laughed, slung his arm around my shoulders and we moved into the crowd of dancing bodies. Mostly I felt sober and a little annoyed about the money I’d spent.

I found the group, buttoned one of their torn open shirts and hugged them goodbye.

Matt checked his watch in the cab, “we have to be up in like, less than 5 hours” he groaned and then called the wing place to make sure we could have some delivered.

He’s a sneaky drunk. You never know until it’s too late. As he poured himself a whiskey at our bar cart, I knew it was too late.

We settled into the couch, waiting for our food. He kept dozing off and I kept saving the glass tumbler he refused to relinquish, from falling to the floor and sloshing all over our new carpet.

When the food arrived, I ran to get it. I had the energy.

I decided to take the stairs and took a turn too sharply, smashed myself against a railing and yelped in pain. A bruise blossomed on my arm before I got back to our apartment.

I tried to sleep and kept waking with my knees knocking and my thighs wobbling. Matt came to my door, bleary eyed and dull. It was 6:30am. I hadn’t slept for more than seven minutes at a time.

“We gotta go, G.”

I looked at my packed bags on the floor. We were driving to his moms, 2.5 hours away.

“Yeah, I’m ready.”

He turned away and called over his shoulder, “Happy Easter.”

Jesus, I laughed, it is fucking Easter.

And while I sipped my third mid-afternoon coffee over a card game with his mom and sister, I thought - I guess if there’s a day to decide I probably n​ever have to sniff anything through my nose ever again, Easters as good as any.

[kennedycatherine]

07.06.19

Mostly, it’s the conversations you never thought you’d have.

You give up on believing you can ever be shocked.

Tell me a story, whisper your greatest failures, your deepest horrors.

I’ve become Switzerland, neutral.

Sometimes I wear it like a badge of honour even though I never really wanted it.

My mother and I barrel down a terribly paved highway toward the treatment centre and I shield my eyes from the sun. I try not to laugh at the irony of being desperately hungover the first time I visit my sister in rehab because I know it’s not a joke to be shared. I’m not sure I think it’s all that funny either but most things have lost their humour.

Piano floats in from the speakers, Elton John, while my mother blows cigarette smoke out the window. She’s been playing “Funeral for a Friend” repeatedly and I don’t ask her to stop. She throws the cigarette, clears her throat. I hear her, this woman I’ve known all my life to be self-assured, a constant source of comfort who gives everything and asks for little in return, ask me for reassurance of her own.

“How was your childhood? Was there something we should have done differently? Something we can do differently? Were we good enough?”

Not without its complications but no, no, and yes.

But I don’t think she hears me. Dark hair whips into her mouth while her window closes, a tear rolls down her cheek and she doesn’t try all that hard to hide it. She’s already decided the thousands of ways she’s a terrible mother, she’s made up her mind about how this is her fault and I’ve yet to find a word in the English language to bring any comfort to that.

I don’t really know how to orbit her as her child anymore.

When they first hand me the pamphlet, she seems so calm. My mother’s always been a doer, a problem solver. And here she is, a woman with a problem and a solution. Why should we possibly worry? But I do, consistently, constantly.

And she must’ve too. It’s why she seems eerily reticent when she delivers the news that my sister will be home early. She’s been kicked out for using while in treatment. A feat that’s nearly impressive given the strict monitoring they’re under.

We’re stuck, again, in a loop of conversation with words we never thought we’d speak. I want to tell you how that felt, I wish more than anything that I could. But often, it felt like nothing.

I’m 21, maybe 22, when I have to call my parents to tell them I found their daughter and I can’t get her to breathe. An hour later, I’m stood in the emergency room. My parents are on the highway, a few hours away after having left for the weekend.

She’s in a bed, unconscious, tubes in places that I don't want to see. So I leave the room. The sliding doors give way to a chilly January evening and her boyfriend rushes in, an anxious, towering mass in black. Before I can even say a word, he throws his hands up. How? When? Why? But I can see in his face that he already knows.

I take a call outside and he follows closely behind. When I hang up he tells me everything. It falls out like tens of secrets he never wanted to keep. He fills in the blanks of the day, the week, and I hear things about my sister that I never wanted to know.

When he’s done I tell him he needs to leave her.

He looks at me, this nearly forty-year-old man, with hard, set eyes and refuses.

“You can’t fix her,” I tell him. “She’s not a real person right now. She’s barely a person at all.”

He wipes at his eyes and asks me questions, leans on me while I pretend I’m not twenty fucking one - or however old I was that time around - wondering how the fuck we ended up here, shivering outside hospital doors, “You need to leave her.”

After 4 years together, he does.

And I feel that I’ve betrayed my sister. I also feel that I don’t have a sister.

When my parents come in, worry, anger, confusion and so much exhaustion, I leave without glancing at her a second time. None of this looks like my family. These are two shattered people that I don’t know, not really. That woman in the hospital bed is not a person I recognize because really, the last time I knew her, she was just a girl. So was I.

That night I sit in the living room of my best friend’s house saying terrible things about a person I love.

“I just want her to die.”

It bounces off the cream white walls of this polished house. They look at me, horrified, “you don’t mean that.”

And I feel bad, I do. Not for me or my sister, not because I thought it or meant it, but for them. A small pang of guilt, looking into their eyes. Like admitting to a young cousin, “no, Santa is not real.” It’s not the world I want them to live in, a world where people say those things about someone they love.

Why should they know that horror?

Why should they know how to talk about it? Why should they have to have these conversations? They shouldn’t.

And they don’t.

Everyone apologizes, always.

I’m on a date. She asks, as most people do, if I have siblings. I tell her I have a sister, which often feels like a strange, foreign word in my mouth. She pries. Not because she’s genuinely curious, not because my family tree will change whether or not the lines and curves of my face appeal to her. But because this is a date and that is what you do.

It’s polite.

It doesn’t feel polite when I tell the truth.

Her beer settles loudly back onto the table, threatening to slosh over the edges as she mutters apologies. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

I look up into the sympathetic curve of her lips, the worried set of her eyebrow and I want to ask her why? Why shouldn’t she have asked?

Because she doesn’t want to know?

Because she doesn’t think I want to talk about it?

I want to scream about it.

We talk about her brother and his new baby instead.

The only people I can talk to about it, in a way that makes any sense to me, are the only people I don’t want to talk to about it. I wish for parents who will give me a hard time about if and when I’ll get married or have babies.

I quit the job I went to college for because I can’t focus and I feel like a failure.

I stop sleeping and I stop feeling most things until one day, I feel everything. And it doesn’t stop and it snowballs and becomes an avalanche until I can’t function at all. I break down in my doctor’s office - “I think I’m fucking losing it?” - and I feel so horrified and so ashamed when he asks me if I’m sure I’m not a risk to myself. I walk out with the same prescription that’s been sitting on my mother's vanity since she had children.

I start a relationship that seems so beautiful but kind of isn’t. We fall apart. We decide moving several hours away together will solve it. Eventually, she does. I don’t.

I tell my parents, my family, about almost none of it. Not the depression diagnosis, not the breakup, or the move that suddenly isn’t one. It’s not because I don’t want to but because I’m not sure I can take another sentence cut short by thoughts of her.

“I feel so sorry for you sometimes,” my mother says one morning, facing the window, coffee clutched to her chest. “She just took up so much space, you know? Always this wheel that was falling off or getting bent and we were always chasing after her or trying to have her fixed and you – you’ve always had to just keep going. The little engine that could.”

I want to ask her what else I was supposed to do.

Who else am I supposed to be?

I haven’t been their daughter, not someone's child, in years. We’ve just become these three people standing shoulder to shoulder, no one any more certain than the other.

Emotions are anything but constant.

I’ve loved my sister and hated her.

I’ve hated her while I’ve loved her.

Blamed her. Absolved her.

The easiest conversations I have are with her. Because she’s the only one willing to admit that she doesn’t know what the fuck to say or how to say it. So, we almost never talk about it. When we do, it’s vague.

She calls me once from an unknown number. I haven’t seen her in weeks, maybe months. The silence she leaves after I answer is so long, anyone else would’ve hung up.

“Are you mad at me?” she sounds so small.

“I’m not mad,” my chest tightens, “I’m confused.”

“It just happened.”

“I know.”

I don’t know.

After the hospital, one time or another, I silently refuse to see her. Everything is awful and hopeless and unfair and broken. I’m often a person I don’t care to be. I’m graceless and angry and sometimes entirely absent.

When I do see her, I don’t plan to cry. Selfishly, I plan to be angry. I want to hit her like I did the day she turned blue on that living room floor.

I’m hurt and splintered and I need someone to blame for being in pain. For being in a life that doesn’t feel like mine.

But there she is.

She's so thin. Her eyes are a little vacant. Drugs to help with the withdrawals - ironic.

She moves in a way I’ve never seen, so quickly, and she hugs me. To some it’s nothing, but our relationship to each other’s always felt a little like magnetic repulsion. We never get too close.

“It wasn’t supposed to happen that way,” she whispers, “It wasn’t supposed to be you. You shouldn’t have come. I’m sorry. I do love you.”

It wasn’t supposed to happen that way. She is sorry. She does love me, all of us.

And it could happen again and again. It already has. She’d still be sorry, she’d still love us.

It doesn’t make any of us exempt.

Is that unsatisfying? I’m sorry. I’m still learning how to talk about it.

[kennedycatherine]

things may be shitty but sometimes I'm shittier

I’m overheard retelling half a joke my friends have heard 30 times over. One of the greats in my rotating stock of five. 

“Wait, what’s this about?” Asks someones boyfriend and I lean on an elbow, angle myself toward him with a grin.

“It’s actually a really funny story.”

His girlfriend rolls her eyes, “it’s not funny.”

My eyebrows go up, in, “I think it’s funny?”

“Kennedy,” she begins and looks at me with even eyes, “it makes people uncomfortable.”

She says it like a mother warning her toddler not to pull his pants off in front of the dinner guests, not again. And I feel a lot like he might;

Defiant - it is a funny story, I’ve done the math on which details can stay in, which have to go out, I know where to pause for a laugh or a sigh. He’d probably like it. 

Ashamed - it probably isn’t funny to everyone, perhaps my math was just enough to keep people engaged, the pauses great for a sympathy laugh. He probably wouldn’t like it.

“Another time,” he whispers with a soft, consoling smile and I silently curse his girlfriend. 

Fuck you, Kierstan, you don’t know the first thing about comedic timing.

The story in question is about the time I found my sister cold and unconscious. I thought she was dead. The punchline about my being in a pink velour costume when the EMT’s arrived and the bit about the stolen laffy taffy, oh and her not being dead - fully worth the undeniable emotional lows. 

Believe me when I say that in some circles, it’s a funny story. There are branches of comedy, Netflix specials, peoples entire careers and livelihoods that are rooted in dark comedy - there is a vast market for illuminating and lightening the horrifying. Also trust me when I say I know how deeply unfunny it is to watch someone you love overdose. 

The story is funny now. A few years ago it wasn’t. It was a nearly unspeakable thing. An experience that happened and it wasn’t funny. 

But life goes on. 

You have no choice. 

Around the time of the pink velour tracksuit and the laffy taffy, I found myself laughing uncontrollably at my desk. I’d just left the job I’d gone to college for and found myself in the pit of broken dreams - an 8 to 5 desk job. The absolute thrill of it all - somedays you might file, somedays you might answer a few more calls than usual. Somedays your boss might ask you to bend over and pick up his pencil while you wear the skirt it was gently (but firmly) implied was mandatory. Mandatory only in the sense that no one could tell you that you couldn’t wear pants but they sure were more forgiving of car naps running 15 minutes over if they could glimpse a knee. 

And boy, did I need the car naps. 

It’s funny because I thought I was doing great. Really, for awhile I thought I was the best I’d ever been. I was laughing pretty much all the time, at everything. I’d never found the world more funny. By all accounts, I was having a great time.

So imagine my surprise when one day I found my eyes full, my face damp and my car hurdling down the highway past the exit to my work. When I did arrive, this time with pants, therefor low forgiveness - I was asked to my boss’ office for a closed door meeting.

Why was I late?

Somehow telling my boss that I wasn’t exactly sure the reason but my brain was telling me I should just keep driving, maybe to the next town, maybe for hours, maybe until the border, didn’t really seem like an option. “I think I have the flu.”

Despite all the things I didn’t know, I did know I didn’t have the flu. I found myself laid out in my doctors office anyway.

When he finally threw the door open, all white coated and anxious, just like I like em’ - I sat up. We made a sort of frenzied eye contact and he asked me what was wrong. 

“I think I might be, like, totally fucking losing it.” 

I left with a plan and antidepressants.

It all sounds kind of simple and quaint.

But it wasn’t.

Stopping to consider if you’re a danger to yourself or anyone else so your doctor can qualify if you need counselling, pills, maybe a psychiatric hold isn’t charming. Those first few weeks of pills, even though you’ve been told and you know you’ll feel worse for awhile, they’re simply awful. This isn’t some beautiful woman on HBO popping a white pill with her chardonnay, suddenly noticing a pink bloom on her neglected cactus. This is ugly and painful before it’s anything else.

And slowly it did become “anything else” … most of the time. 

Depression isn’t a joke. But it is a static way of being that loses it’s edge. 

It softens. Like a shitty haircut, you come to expect the blunt, harsh edges. Your body adjusts to the sight of it. It’s still kind of scary to look at but you know what to expect.

Life goes on.

It’s just not precious anymore. 

I could barely say I’d been diagnosed. I only told the people who were close enough to see the new medication was wearing me out. Now it’s an introductory fact, “Hi, Kennedy Catherine, daughter, lover, lesbian, writer, major depressive disorder.” 

I felt for a long time like it was all behind me. The worst was over! Family, outside of some trick hearts, healthy. Depression, diagnosed, plans made, helpful medications on standby. Experiencing another dark episode seemed dull,  ya know? Just a tad fucking redundant. Been there, done it, bored by it. 

Then: March 2020. 

There was a period of limbo. I still had a job, I just couldn’t be there or do it until things got better - hardy har. I packed up my truck and settled into my families cabin for five or six weeks. It was fine, I was fine, I thought. One day I went out for a walk and awhile later watched my sister rumble through a long stretch of prairie toward me on an ATV. My phone was dead and I’d be gone, oh, three hours longer than expected?

“What happened?”

I just kind of… lost track of time? Lost my sense of direction? I don’t know, I thought. I was here but I sort of went away from myself for a second. When I sunk into the bath later with achy muscles and a blister, I felt nervous.

Now, I haven’t scared myself in years. My depression isn’t so severe that I feel unsafe with myself. Anything I did or have done to effectively terrify myself, I shed by the time I was 20. Because that can happen, you can do that. You can change coping mechanisms and learn real, healthy ways to parent yourself. The mood instability that came later, the dark times, I still felt mostly fortified. I felt like I could figure it out, like I still had access to myself to do the figuring out. 

But I could feel myself slipping away this time. 

I was talking fast about something or another when I finally said to my mom, “I think I might need help.” I wasn’t sure exactly what I meant because I didn’t really know how to help myself and I wasn’t really sure what was wrong. 

And that in and of itself is a problem. I didn’t know what was wrong? 

I was out of the job that got me out of bed Monday to Friday for three and a half years, I left the house that had become my comfort cathedral, I hadn’t seen any of my closest friends in months, I was living with my sister and my mother who I hadn’t spent longer than a handful of days with in like five years. There was global fear and uncertainty and the risk of contracting a virus that could or could not kill you but I didn’t know… what was wrong? Well that’s just deeply moronic. 

Sometimes when you need help, or when I need help, that does come in the form of professional counselling or medications or an anonymous support group. Sometimes, it’s just circumstantial and circumstances can change.

I went home.

And in a few weeks, when I’d more or less returned to myself, I could clearly see the hills and valleys my mind had just wandered. I felt strength again, a sense of renewal and excitement about my imminent return to work and society.

Then I actually lost my job.

I know, redundant. I’m tired of myself too. But bullshit is cyclical, that’s just a fact. 

And if there is one thing I’ll give myself credit for, it’s my ability to immediately concoct a backup plan in the face of a threat. Moments after I was officially terminated, texts and emails went out. The idea of not knowing where my next paycheque would come from and how much it would be, having lost the place I strolled into everyday with a sense of purpose and not knowing when and where I’d have that again was simply not an option.

My head went down, I narrowed focus and the efforts resulted in… enough. I’m living. Which wasn’t and isn’t the hope for life. Unstable stagnancy is deeply uncomfortable.

So, generally speaking, things are not great. 

I lost my humbly secure job. A place I comfortably could’ve lived and died if I’d prioritized everything other than work and my sort of crippling ambition. This effectively led me down the path of questioning every decision I’ve made past the age of 16. First and foremost, choosing radio. An industry that was at it’s peak in the 1930’s and on the decline ever since was perhaps not the most lucrative or secure of career choices. 

My romantic life developed far enough to remind me that often times I am a crusty, avoidant crustacean human and suddenly all those popular tweets about my deep emotional inabilities and intimacy issues seemed, well, not that funny.

I decided I probably shouldn’t drink. I don’t have a drinking problem but I do have a problem with drinking. Namely, waking with no memory, my legs shaking and my stomach clenched so tightly I could sense my body wanted to flee - itself, mostly. And let’s not forget the part where I get fighty and mean.  

When shit hit the fan and then shot off the blades into the face of life in my early twenties, it wasn’t my fault. To be clear, mental health is a no fault area. I was always predisposed to depression, mental illness is genetic. I had no control over that. But there were plenty of variables, extenuating circumstances if you will, that I also had no control over but sure as fuck could and did blame other people for.

This is not the same thing. 

This is a moment where it is necessary to discern illness from circumstance and living from coping. 

Like I said, bullshit is cyclical. And it this point, it’s pretty much just my own bullshit on repeat, forever and ever amen. At twenty or twenty three, when the circumstances weren’t my fault, it also felt like my reactions weren’t my fault. I was floundering, I didn’t know better. I learned some hard lessons about how I cope and handle things. I learned that I didn’t really like the person I was when I was figuring out how to survive myself and life. 

I was unkind, a lot. 

I hated the way that felt, I hated the way it affected my relationships and decided to learn from it.

Except, I didn’t learn. I said, great, noted. Dashed a nice little ~fini!~ at the end of that chapter, closed er’ on up and bypassed the bookshelf for the dusty box in the corner labelled, “garage sale.” Because surely no one would need to read that again! 

And then a few weeks ago when I had a breakthrough in counselling, I dug that chapter back up and allowed myself a few days of surprise. Bitch, you been done knew the WHOLE time. This isn’t news, this isn’t shocking. This is the part of you that developed somewhere along the way and it didn’t work and you didn’t like it but! But. It was comfortable. So you gave it a few years and then when things fell out of control again, let it settle back in all warm and snuggly.

You know what they say. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, I guess I need to financially prioritize a CBT therapist. 

So here I am, again. 

Only this time feels deeply, deeply different. Because it’s not the first. 

I sat down with a friend to tell her how I was feeling. How much I felt like I needed and wanted to change my default settings. 

I need a factory restore. 

“I think you’re being hard on yourself.”

No, no, I have grace for myself! I actually have a lot of understanding. I’m parenting myself through this which includes showing myself love while I also discipline.

“I just feel like maybe you were doing the best you knew how.”

Well, I mean, sure? Sometimes? But there were moments where I knew I was saying or doing the wrong thing, where I was even challenged by someone else but I wasn’t challenging myself, you know?

“Well maybe that’s just who you are?”

Right… but this is also who I am? And we do actually have a say in that, you know? Like how I evolved from throwing toddler tantrums on the grocery store floor? I could actually just keep doing that, no one is stopping me, but I don’t.

“I think you’re being self deprecating and that is not healthy.” 

Since when is self identifying a problem self deprecation? 

“Oh, don’t be so hard on yourself.”

… but change is hard? 

I appreciate that people want to protect me from myself or from bad feeling or whatever they perceive that all to be. More often than not, I think they, we, you, I, we’re all just trying to protect ourselves. But it’s not helpful. Pretending that everything is fine and that we’re fine and adopting an overarching, “I am perfect as I am, namas-fucking-te” mantra isn’t actually helpful.

What’s the harm in me saying I have been shitty? That I have acted poorly? That I have neglected to be better when there was clearly a different option? That I wasn’t honestly showing myself to people when I could’ve or allowing them space in me?

That it’s… not nice? That just like the joke about my sister not being dead, it’s not comfortable to listen to? It’s true and it is compassionate to view yourself as a whole, to know yourself and think I actually do like myself and this life enough to want to be better.

Just like what is coined the unfortunate evening of Velour and Ambulances or the depression diagnosis or life being turned on it’s head by a plague sent from hell, once it was deeply painful and then it wasn’t. None of this is precious. Being a shitty person sometimes isn’t a rare affliction. You’ve been shitty before, you’ll do it again, I’ll do it again, hey, you might even be shitty right now! Isn’t that something? 

Things are not great right now. They’ve been not great tens of times before. Only this time it isn’t taking me 2 to 4 years to talk and laugh about it. Because this is a muscle, the shit muscle and it’s exercised. It’s buff. 

And you know what? Things could be worse. They could even get worse now! I’m hoping they don’t but they certainly could, and in the thick of it, we’ll always have that glimmering possibility to hold onto. 

[kennedycatherine]

A pink romper and borrowed lipstick in a sudden downpour. That’s how we met. 

She was bone dry in a sundress at a table full of people warmed by cheap wine. The only open seat was two away from her which I was glad for, feeling damp and limp.   

The room was entirely dimmed by the time she asked someone to swap seats with her. Our knees knocked together and in the flicker of artificial candlelight, I liked her. She walked me to my car, tapped my number into her phone.

That was it.

At the time, life was decidedly erratic. The ups were tempered by the completely unexpected horror of the downs. Nothing made sense. Yes’s and no’s came mechanically with no real thought. I just did, with no real why.

Months passed in a fog before I blinked myself into a life that had somehow gotten away from me.

I’d say the sun was streaming in through that dirtied window but I can’t really recall.

I’m not entirely sure what month it was. Maybe early spring or late fall. Things outside were either still dead or beginning to die. 

Her head rested over that small pouch, low on my belly. Fresh braids stuck out from funny angles under her head. 

We did that almost every time I was there. I’d perch on the couch, a hard wooden edge supporting my weight under the worn cushions, she’d kneel between my knees and hand me the comb, two elastics. 

It was one of the few times I felt useful inside her rushing and doing. A pang of dread hitting low and hard every time she admitted to practicing. I knew she was hopeless at working those strands into place herself. What if suddenly she wasn’t?

I wasn’t sure why it mattered. I didn’t know I really wanted the job.

I used to run my fingers through the strands slowly. Over time it became hurried. Just something we needed to do and she'd look to them with a sigh. Fine, good enough.

I was tired of “good enough.”

I looked at her knees, bent under a dress. The tip of her thin, pointed nose. A deep line between her brows, knitted in concentration on a book she’d probably told me about.

She sighed and burrowed further into me, a little too hard. I was sore there and hissed a small sound but said nothing.

The words were there, filling my mouth - large and expansive. But once they were said, the bricks would tumble. And so would commence the series of doings and undoings.

I suddenly remembered listening to a shitty comedy special with my sister in a tiny twin bed on a snowmobile trip -

“Just take your shit and and go.”

“I can’t just go, Kim, it’s not that simple. My CD’s are in his truck.”

I had many metaphorical CD’s in her truck.

A laugh, a sigh. 

The indignity of breakup logistics. “Uhm, I know we bought that vibrator together but it actually always worked better for me, so-”

I thought of what could possibly be said, “I really need to detach myself from the person you are but first, can I go through your makeup bag because I’m pretty sure you have my good mascara.” 

No, I reasoned. That seemed cruel. Either collect your shit and then do the dirty work or vomit up the words now and accept the loss of the person and the things. No need to pour salt into the wound.

Then I found myself wondering who the fuck I thought I was that I’d even leave a wound?

“Hey.”

I’d seen the messages on her phone the night before. It’d been settled right next to my hand, full brightness. A one night shattering performance, audience of one, cast of two - not including me.  

My mouth is often wider than my mind. It spills over recklessly, constantly. But there are things other people don’t have to know. Let me tell you, you’re allowed to collect stories and details and memories and pain and happiness and say nothing at all. You can look your date in the eyes and know they’re an asshole and leave without telling them they’re an asshole and that you’re leaving. 

You get to do that.

Take what is owed and give as much, leave the rest in the room and close the door on your way out. 

I said nothing. I’ve never said anything. Years out, not a word to her or him or anyone.

When she lifted her head, she smiled and I knew I didn’t like her. Not the person she was, maybe not the person she’d been. I looked back at the months that stretched behind us and couldn’t recall, once, thinking that I could love her.

I don’t have to guess to know she felt the same.

“Yeah?”

I thought about the messages, the argument over breakfast about how little I’d eaten on a stomach she didn’t know was upside down with shame and humiliation. 

“We need to break up.”

There was nothing in her face. She didn’t move, said nothing for a moment before pushing herself up to sit on the bed.

Somehow we both ended up resting on our sides, faces inches apart.

“Can we discuss it?” she asked.

“I don’t think we should.”

I couldn’t recall any other time she’d wanted to discuss anything about us. 

Her nose screwed up, lips quirked to the side, the same face she made pouring over work e-mails. Finally, resolutely, “there are good reasons to stay together.”

I didn’t ask what they were and sometimes when I think of her, I wish I had. 

“There’s not.”

She stayed silent for a long time, “right.” Then lamely, “we could make a list.”

“If we have to make a lis-”

“Yeah, no. You’re right.”

I don’t remember what happened next. I think we had sex, I think I collected my things that were within my line of view and considered the rest an occupational hazard.

Shifting into drive I only made it the length of another house before I stopped. Should I take a photo? Some strange time marker? A reminder for years later. “Oh yes! That house, I got trashed on lemon gin there many times with a pretty woman.” 

The front of the house was so familiar. The gate with it’s trick lock. I didn’t take a photo.

Turning off of the street, I wondered when I would feel sad. 

I thought of her in her empty, white house. I remembered that hollowing feeling of silence after being left alone by someone who hadn’t felt temporary but suddenly was.

Did she feel that? Crushingly lonely? 

Then I thought of the messages and what I knew that meant for me. And what it meant for her. That even inside the grief, if there was any, she’d be relieved. She’d be celebratory. She’d text him, maybe call him. He’d celebrate. He’d be relieved.

I leaned into it, decided I’d celebrate too. 

[kennedycatherine]

Snap your fingers

Me, I forget things. Most things, many things, little things.

I’m surprised by every story told around a table I find myself starring in. “I wasn’t there for that?” Everyone nods all at once, a symphony of, “yes you were.”

My sister explains a bicycle ramp poorly built by neighbourhood kids. She’d taken the first jump, then a few of the boys and finally me, kid sister. It’d all fallen apart, and I’d gone crashing to the ground, opened the skin of my knee, ended up with a lengthy, jagged, silver scar. For years I’d been saying it’d come from tripping over a crack in the sidewalk.

The memory, it’s not for lack of trying, or any reason at all really. I just can’t remember days, weeks, months, entire years that have passed. I pull and I pull, fingers through cotton thoughts to break through the top and often there’s nothing.

But I recall a dimple, a freckle in the base of the spine, glints of light across skin and shades that change behind the eye. I remember touches and tones, complete sentences, and the owners of them all.

It’s what we’re made up of—little things, seemingly meaningless. Within everyone, something you’ll continue to search for in other people, something not to be found again.

It was in her fingers. The way they wrapped around a wine glass, worked through hair, grazed a keyboard, reached for me. They took up corners of my mind better used for dates or facts, a history lesson perhaps.

But she was a history all her own.

She looks older now. She is older now. Her hair longer, maybe lighter. But it’s hard to know if this is just where I fantasize, in the small sort of empty things. She clutches a jacket in front of her, eyes unfocused. I remember then how uncomfortable she was with crowds and seem to remember scrawling “socially awkward” somewhere on a list of pros and cons all those years ago.

Then again, maybe I just thought it. Journaling seems to be one of those things I romanticize about myself—a forgotten hobby that never really was much of one at all.

There’s a quick, warm flash of gratitude as I realize she doesn’t notice me. I’m afforded this small luxury, to get to be the one who stops, prepares, watches, steels herself.

The bride and groom have already been whisked off someplace, probably photos and champagne and obligations. There’s extravagant talk of the beauty of it all, quiet whispers about “where did we park” and low grumbles from those who forgot to eat, regret their shoes. People mill and congregate, clap shoulders and share hugs. I stand alone.

“Diana?”

I’d forgotten to steel.

She’s striding toward me, awkward in the long limbs unaccustomed to heels and dresses.

“Zoe,” I lift a hand to wave from where I hold my clutch in front of me and quickly return it to the soft leather, “hi.”

She probably would’ve reached for me if I’d been anyone else, but I’ve never been much like that. Acutely aware, all too much, of space. Maybe she remembers because she stands so far away people pass right through our conversation in a near constant flow.

“How are you?” The natural crinkles of her eyes, always jovial, are a bit deeper now.

“Good, good, yeah. Beautiful day right, I mean, Sophie. Gorgeous.”

“Stunning, as always.”

“As is her way, right?” I say as if I really know Sophie at all anymore.

More people pass through.

I take three steps closer.

She looks above my head and starts a sentence that doesn’t become anything.

“And you,” I start, “how are you?”

“Good! Yeah, great.”

I wonder if it would be rude to sigh too loudly, maybe rub my eyes, chip away at the manicure I’d given myself seven minutes before I left the house. 

Can’t we just exchange a passing hello at the bar and go about our days?

She clears her throat and I feel an intense affection for her suddenly, the way she never seemed to mind leaning into her discomfort— “so, alone?”

I almost laugh, decide against it, decide to do it anyway and she laughs a bit with me, “yes, alone. Engagement didn’t exactly pan out.”

“Right. I’d heard that actually. Tonya.”

“Oh? I didn’t think she’d know.”

“Yeah, through Michael.”

“Oh,” I shrug, “didn’t know he’d know either.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Just,” she stumbles, gestures, “never kept in touch?”

“No, no. They uhm-”

“Were mine?”

“Yours.”

“I never minded, you know? If people wanted to keep in touch, I wanted them to.”

“Oh, well. They always do, for a while,” those fingers, they clutch harder, and I try to smile, offer a laugh, comfort, “I don’t blame them. I wouldn’t have either.”

“Well, I don’t think that’s very fair.”

What is this thing we do, with the niceties and the grace and kindnesses to people whose worlds we once set on fire?

I nod and she looks to the street.

“I’ll see you at the reception?” I ask.

“Course!” It comes out a little too chipper and I’m suddenly reminded of that too, slight over reactions to almost everything.

It’d been so endearing once.

We’re seated at banquet tables so opposite each other it feels intentional. I imagine they’d debated if they’d have to send invites to us both. Upon deciding yes, our names would be scribbled down for seating arrangements—"nowhere near each other.”

She sits in a group, but I know she’s alone.

I also know she’s married. Three years, at least.

Dinner wraps up with speeches that are not too long or too sincere and seamlessly there’s a DJ, the lighting low.

“Red, please.” Red or white, those are the wine options at the bar.

“Really?”

I turn and Zoe is just a few feet behind, earnest and confused.

“Yes? Can I—” I sweep a hand in front of me, “can I get you something?”

She joins me at my side, slightly flushed, “gin and tonic, please.”

I stare at the hands of the bartender, and I think Zoe looks at me.

“But the headaches?” she says suddenly. I must look confused because her face flushes more, down into her chest where I know a cluster of beauty marks lie over her right breast. She doesn’t meet my eye, “you never used to drink red. Because of the headaches.”

Right.

But those stopped, 4 years ago. Seemingly no reason at all.

“Cured.”

“Incredible.”

We take the glasses; I slip the bartender a few dollars. Lingering next to the dance floor seems safer, a less committal option than choosing one or the others table.

Three glasses of wine, warmed and bold, I offer up an out that’s also an acknowledgment.

“We don’t have to do this. Catch up. If you didn’t want to, I’d understand.”

She breathes into that place high in her long torso. “I think I do. Don’t you?”

I sip, “honestly? I don’t know.”

But we do.

It’s friendly and mundane. Back and forth with highlights and accomplishments that are all sort of boring but somehow startling to have missed. The sort of thing that made me stop e-mailing when she’d reached out 4 years earlier.

When she touches my arm, I wonder if anyone in this room recognizes us as a couple. Just two people from a distant social circle they’d seen once or twice, years back. Eyes may be flickering over us, “oh yes, there’s so and so and so and so. Those women, they look nice.”

We swap empty glasses for full ones until everything is swimmy and blurred and I remember all the mornings I thought she looked so beautiful it didn’t matter that she’d miss my calls and slipped into bed long after I'd already fallen asleep.

“Do you have any cigarettes?”

I startle. Had I been a smoker then? I can’t remember.

“No?”

“Shame.”

“Indeed.” It isn’t a shame. I don’t know when I quit, maybe not as long ago as I thought but now it turns my stomach.

Eventually we do sit at the table with her name card.

“I’m sorry about the engagement.”

“Oh, don’t be.”

“Really, Di, you deser-”

There’s an exhale I don’t plan to release, “don’t.”

“No, come on. Yo-”

“Don’t.”

“I wish-”

“Really. Please.”

Seven years ago, she’d sobbed while I shoved t-shirts into a bag, “you never let me explain,” she cried over and over.

“How did you feel when you heard I’d got married?”

“Happy.”

“Really?”

“Yes, that’s all you wanted.”

She makes a sound that sounds something like a surprised, “hmph.”

“Are you happy?”

“Of course.”

But she doesn’t look it. I don’t know when I’d last seen her happy. It hadn’t been with me, not later, maybe not in the beginning. “Chronically dissatisfied” a friend once said.

“Good.”

“I thought of you a lot then,” it feels like many moments pass before she finishes, “about us.”

Us.

It’s so strange. A thing that feels only like an idea but is real, was real. A thing as real as her and her wife, in a different world and a different time. With a life that still lives in pictures and memories. In the cluster of beauty marks and the fingers in corners of my mind.

I click my tongue, rub my palms against my bare knees where her hands have landed more than once in the hour past.

“I need another drink.”

There’s a moment of near shock that bleeds into resignation. 

When the minutes pass and the night grows dark, I’m sure the hint of shock fades away when I don’t return.

[kennedycatherine]

Stumblin In’

“Little bit-a lucks all you need,” she’d say around the cigarette dangling from the corner of her overly glossed mouth.

Every Sunday, she used the same penny, rusted and thinned from her thumb and pointer finger, left resting in the ash tray on it’s off days. Small strips of foiled silver would begin to flake, left carefully to settle.

“You’re my good luck charm, baby” she’d drawl before lifting the card, slowly, just below his chin, “now blow.”

It was an eager feeling, a little sickening. Like the way he’d decide to breathe could change the outcome. If he wanted it badly enough, the numbers could rearrange themselves.

So, he’d close his eyes and he’d blow.

Then he’d blink himself back to reality. She’d stare, just for a moment, at the suddenly cheap looking scratch ticket in her hand and then back to him with a small smile.

The outcome never changed, only wasted money.

His mom was the same person she always feared she might be, a loser. And he was the same thing he’d suspected all along—unlucky.

Twenty years later and she’s died with nothing and he’s still trying to prove his worth with a penny and a scratch ticket against the steering wheel.

The dash blinks a pale green “10:14 PM.”

He picks this gas station for the calm. It sits 5 miles out of town, with the same leather faced attendant whose taken up residence on the creaking stool behind the register for 40 some years.

Headlights occasionally pass behind, always into town, never out. Otherwise, it’s just the buzzing of the outdoor ice cooler and the occasional tune drifting from, presumably, leather faced man’s trailer out behind the station.

On this night there’s one other vehicle taking up space in the parking lot. It’s not all that odd, doesn’t make him feel any particular sort of way. It’s a small red truck with a woman in it. She lights up a cigarette as he stashes the disappointment of a scratched card into the endless pile in the console. It reminds him of the cigarette pack in his glove compartment.

So, he picks one out, lights it and breathes out through the open window.

He’s not sure how many weeks it’s been, how many times he’s been there, when he finds the red truck back in that spot. The last spot on the right.

A book is settled against the steering wheel, a cigarette rests between the fingers of the hand she uses to turn the pages. She doesn’t spare him a glance as he shoves his hand in his pocket and scrunches himself back into the low car. The ticket is halfway scratched when he notices a melody settling around him.

Eyes closed, she murmurs along to a song he can almost clearly hear through their open windows.

“Our love is a flame, burning within

Now and then firelight will catch us

Stumblin' in

You were so young, ah, and I was so free

I may have been young, but, baby, that's not what I wanted to be

Well, you were-”

She cuts it short, stashes the book in the backseat, shifts into gear and pulls away.

He notes the time, 9:57pm, Thursday.

It’s 9:42 when he’s plucking a water bottle from the coolers the following Thursday. According to a book in the dustiest corner of the library, the last time they saw a heat wave like this was June 23rd, 1968. The entire town sticks and groans with it.

He lets the coolness rest against his palm before pressing it against his forehead.

“If you’re going to stand there all night, and I wouldn’t blame ya if you did, at least pass me one.”

His shoe squeaks against the cracked tile floor. Outside, the empty red truck idles, inside a brunette challenges him with crossed arms and a raised eyebrow over lightly wrinkled green eyes. He passes her the bottle that’s collected most of the sweat from his skin, but she doesn’t seem to mind. Just flashes a grin, genuine and white, and starts toward the counter.

“Howard,” she throws out casually as she slides the bottle to leather face. Then the door is chiming, and he’s left counting change against the counter, just enough for water and a scratch.

Two Thursdays from that one, they’ve both got their windows rolled. It’s not the same stifling heat but it’s warm nonetheless, even with the sun mostly set.

This time, she’s only parked one space away. He thinks she’s listening to the same song from before, or something that sounds similar. The silver foil falls away and presents nothing. He lights up a cigarette to match the one she has hanging from her window.

“Hiding?”

It’s not startling exactly but the way she’s looking at him, pointed, interested, open, it’s something different.

“Hmm?”

She uses her cigarette to point to his, “filthy habit,” she laughs.

It’s hearty, rich. A voice below sea level.

“Yeah, I guess. You?”

“Hiding?”

“Sure.”

She shrugs, “maybe.”

Her eyes go back to her book and silence falls between them again for a time that could be minutes but may have been an hour.

She shifts into gear, “same time next week?” She calls and he nods only because he’s not sure what else to do.

It goes like that for weeks. They leave the designated space between them, sometimes they talk and sometimes they don’t.

He can’t decide on anything that passes through his mind about her. She dresses like a rancher, all buttoned up shirts tucked into jeans, but she’s always clean. She wears earrings and rings and bracelets and makeup, he’s sure. She’s not too young, maybe 50, maybe 60 but her hair, dark and fairly wild in its unkempt curl, makes her hard to place.

She looks like she could be anyone’s mom but none of the moms he’s known. Maybe not a mom at all, or a wife.

He doesn’t know. He’s not sure he cares.

He’s less sure he doesn’t care.

“What’s your name?” He asks one day while he exhales through the window. She laughs so sincerely, so freely, her entire throat exposed to the night, that he can’t help but laugh right along with her.

She shrugs as she often seems to, “Isabelle,” exhale, “from Toledo.”

“You’re lying.”

“Course I’m fucking lying!” her eyes smile with every passing word, “what’s your name?”

“Brian.”

“You’re not a Brian.”

“No, I’m not.”

A beat passes, “best just to keep it this way,” she says nowhere toward him.

At some point they take up smoking against the outdoor cooler. The temperatures have eased and her books have lost her interest these days.

“When’s the last time you didn’t have to be just exactly who you are?” When he looks at her there, under the lights, he puts her over 60 and waits for her to continue, she always does. “You know? Whatever you are, whoever you are. You could be an accountant or a janitor, or a dad or just, I don’t know, some fucking asshole and none of it matters to me. When’s the last time you felt that way?”

He notices that when she curses, it doesn’t sound much like a curse at all.

“The last time someone suggested I look like a fucking accountant.”

“Oh, shut up.”

He shoulders her lightly and considers they may have never touched before.

Her lips twitch once, twice, before she starts again, “I’m being serious.”

“I don’t think I think too much about who I am or who I’m not. Or pretending to be either one.”

She hums a small sound that makes him feel small.

“Lucky you don’t have to.”

Lucky.

“What do you mean?”

“There’s time,” she takes a drag, “I don’t have that anymore. I have to just keep being the person I’ve made myself to be. I have to keep doing exactly what I’m doing. This is it,” she gestures largely, at herself, at nothing, “There’s no other place to go. It’s all that it is, I’m all that I’ll be.”

“Well that’s not true. You can go, you ca-”

She looks at him then, fully, completely, “I can’t.”

For two months she doesn’t show up.

“Your hairs getting too long,” it’s a disapproving grimace, staring him down between the vitamin waters and the energy drinks.

“My wife wanted me to grow it out.”

“You have a wife?”

“No.”

She sighs, “sometimes this game is fun and sometimes it’s not.”

The weather turns in the next few weeks, so they go in on a carton together, sometimes he brings two beer, no more, and they begin smoking in her truck.

He works the extinguished butt between his fingers, “how old are you?”

A smile and a laboured sigh, “not part of the rules.”

“Oh, come on. What difference does it make if I know how old you are?”

She thinks, “62.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” she laughs mirthlessly, “really.”

“I’m 32.”

“My son is 32.”

He thinks for a second because it doesn’t feel like much of a lie, “you fucking with me?”

“Not about that.”

“What’s he like?”

She shakes her head and turns on the radio.

He starts to suspect he’ll see her someplace. Begins placing her as the woman turning out of the aisle at the grocery store or the one he’s just passed in line at the bank. Every second glance confirms what he already knows to be true, it’s not her.

The diner bulletin board always has a new paper here, a flyer there, people looking for ranch hands, labourers.

Jim & Annetta Clark - J&A Holdings Anthony & Sarah Bouvier - White Swan Farms Clark & Brigitte Williams - Cedar River Ranch Kirk & Diane Simmons - Bracken Hill

He tries to place her in all of them, but they slip over his idea of her like an ill-fitting shirt. Possible but not quite right.

“You know this is weird, right?”

She’s just finished explaining the way she feels about a song that used to play in a bar she liked to dance in, and he relishes in a moment of knowing her before realizing he doesn't.

She shakes her head, narrows her eyes, “what is?”

“This. You and me.”

“Why? We’re not doing anything wrong.”

“I didn’t say we were. I’m saying it’s weird. We’re two people who show up at a gas station every week to see each other and I don’t know your name.”

She sighs with the annoyance of someone who doesn’t want to have this conversation and he resents her for it. Because he’s never asked her to have this conversation despite how totally fucking reasonable it all is.

“I don’t think it’s that weird.”

“You’re just saying that.”

“I’m not. I don’t.”

“You don’t leave here and wonde-”

“No.”

“You don’t know what I was going to say.”

“No, I don’t leave here and wonder about you.”

She isn’t there next Thursday.

Or the next.

Or the next.

Leather faced Howard hands him his scratch ticket and he turns back toward the emptied parking lot.

He’s not really sure he wants to do this for the fourth week in a row—take the scratch ticket back to his car, take a spare quarter to it, light a cigarette, pretend he’s not glancing sidelong at the space she should be.

“Howard?” The man looks up through worn, tired eyes and seems completely unphased by his name being uttered by a man who should be a stranger, “have you seen her?”

“Who?”

“The woman I meet here sometimes. Red truck.”

“Oh, Maggie,” he swallows so hard he almost doesn’t hear the next sentence, “no. Holt’s been keeping her busy.”

“Mmm,” he nods, “something happen?” He shrugs, pretends its town chatter, just two people discussing their neighbours down the way.

“Heart attack. She’ll be taking on most of the work with their boy gone.”

“Right.” He nods because he doesn’t think he can say any more but there it is anyway, “how long’s it been now?”

“What I remember.. oh, well, accident must’ve been two years ago now. Funeral was late, had it last spring."

He nods again. Howard settles himself back onto the stool.

The door chimes as he lets himself out, back into the emptiness of the parking lot.

He settles himself against the cooler, places the ticket against the top. Silver flakes up against the ridges of his coin and reveals a 13 underneath.

Unlucky.

He folds himself back into his car and thinks of a man named Holt who lost his son and then nearly his own life. He thinks of a woman named Maggie whose son is dead and whose husband almost was, who closes her eyes during the ballads of love songs written and sung in the 70’s and smiles to a stranger who doesn’t know just how unlucky it feels to be her.

He shifts the car into gear and pulls out from the parking lot and onto the highway, back toward his empty apartment 5 miles away.

[kennedycatherine]

Evil Grows in the Dark

It pulls me from the tempting grips of sleep, so unexpected I’m not certain it was real. But it comes again, the rapid slapping of knuckles against thick wood. Smooth hardwood rubs the tops of my dragging toes, stumbling out the bedroom door, an insistent throbbing at my temples made worse by the light pouring through open curtains. 

It must be morning. 

Throwing the door open to the darkened, windowless hallway of the fourth floor, I’m not sure who is more surprised. 

“Sorry to wake you ma’am. I’m Officer Marin.”

“What time is it?"

“Oh. Must be nearing 10am.”

“Mmm,” leaves my throat feeling coarse, tempting me to close my eyes against the dull fluorescents, “can I help you?”

He presents a small photo, the wallet size that parents order in bulk to pass around to relatives who leave them at the bottom of the mail pile—“have you seen this girl?”

“Molly? Yeah?” I pass the photo of the blonde, straight haired child with the sharp nose and round eyes back to the officer.  

“You have? When?” He produces a note pad. 

“I don’t know. She lives across the hall, I see her lots. Why?” 

 “Can you recall the last time?”

My own soured breath reaches my nose as I blow air from my mouth, trying to reach through the fog to conjure a picture.

“It’s Sunday, yeah?” 

“Yes ma'am.” 

I want to tell him to stop calling me that.

“I guess, Friday then. Why?”

“What time?”

The voice, the light, the questions, it’s all so irritating I want to curse. Instead, I shrug and tell him, “5:45ish, likely. They’re pretty routine, her and her mom. Come and go at the same time every day.”

“And that’s the last time?”

“Yeah.” 

“Is there anyone else in your apartment ma’am? A roommate or boyfriend?”

I wince and shake my head, “no, I live alone. What’s going on?”

“She’s been reported missing.”

“What the fuck?” It rushes out of my lips, tempting me to apologize but he doesn’t seem to notice or care.

“And you haven’t noticed anything or anyone suspicious around the building?”

“I don’t think so? I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone else go into their apartment. Even if something weird happened, man, I don’t know if I’d be the one to notice.” 

That’s when I hear voices down the hall. I poke my head out the doorway and notice the man down the hall whose name, in 5 years, I’ve never learned. He looks concerned, shaking his head, running a hand across his brows. 

“What happened?”

“Can’t say, ma’am. But can I get your name and number if we need further information?”

“Of course.” 

When the door closes with a soft thud behind me, a feeling takes up low in my belly that feels something like dread. Slipping into the bath it seeps from my stomach and throughout my limbs, gradually twisting and rotting with a feeling of pointless guilt. 

What I had seen didn’t matter. 

Just one moment in and among years of inconsequential comings and goings. Nothing worth noting. 

I’d only known them in the way you know a cashier at your favourite grocery store or a co-worker outside of your department. Whole people limited to singular traits. Like the cashier is “pink lipstick lady” and the co-worker is just an “anxious, pastry lover,” they were “the quiet mother and daughter.” Everyday constants who meant almost nothing at all. But that painfully simple view was often clouded by small, curious nuances. 

In no way did she feel a maternal figure. She was built of thin, harsh lines with a body it seemed impossible could’ve been home to a child, but their stunningly similar features were undeniable. She was a mother, just one to whom mothering seemed an inconvenience. 

On occasion I’d see them in the hallways, sometimes in the street outside of our building, long, thin fingers clutching smaller, chubbier ones. Even when I spoke a hushed hello or good morning, her replies came clipped, from a mouth set in a straight line. Whenever I caught her daughters brightly curious eyes I wondered where they’d come from. It seemed possible her mother never had them. 

As I told Officer Marin, they came and went on a fixed schedule. Out the door at 7:35 am, one armed with a thick briefcase, one with a pale pink lunch bag. They returned home every day by 5:45pm, armed with the same bags, faces worn, blonde hair askew. Their door would close and only on the rare occasion did it open before the next morning.  

Perhaps they were a peculiar pair but I was solitary, single, much too distracted to care.

I’d been more than a little tipsy that night. Veins pumping with a mixture of alcohol and the adrenaline of a comically bad date that left my head spinning. The toe of my boot met the top of the stairs with a dense thud as I tried to make my way, noiselessly, to my apartment. 

Fumbling with the keys in my pocket, a small creak came from over my shoulder. My hands halted but after a moment, I continued to try to fit the key in the lock. When it finally clicked, another sound, a small throat clearing came from behind me. I turned, met by the nervous stare of those round, brown eyes. 

She was no older than 7, maybe smaller, wearing a shade of white pyjama that would be ludicrous for any child. We stared for a moment, taking each other in before I managed a word.

“Hi?”

“Hi,” her voice came small and quiet.

“What are you doing?” She only shrugged. “It’s really late. Does your mom know you’re awake?”

She shook her head, eyes trained on the floor. I took a step toward her and steadied myself with a hand on the soiled hallway carpet, dirt shooting under my fingernails. Then she looked to me, lips mashed together. It was nearing 1am on a Thursday and through the crack in the door I could see their apartment was brightly lit, a television playing a little too loudly. But I couldn’t see or hear anyone, just the brightly lit hallway. 

“Is your mommy home?”

“Yes.” The ‘s’ hissed around her missing front tooth before she let out a small breath, slowly and quietly adding, “but she won’t wake up.”

The alcohol seemed to evaporate, the adrenaline anything but giggly. 

“What do you mean?”

“She fell asleep on the couch. I tried to wake her up but she wouldn't. It’s been a long time,” the words tumbled out of her mouth, quick and quiet, as her eyes filled. 

Blood rushed, pounding in my ears. I tried, desperately, to swallow my panic for the child in front of me, loose blonde curls and nervous rounded eyes begging for calm. 

“It’s alright because I’m going to make sure she’s okay, but first, why don’t you come with me?”

Brown eyes widened as she glanced down the hallway in either direction. When she didn’t move I reached a hand across to her. Hesitantly, she took it and slowly crossed the hall toward me. We stepped through my open door together, her hand so small and dry in my own, eyes shifting around my cluttered apartment to the overstuffed couch in the living room. Telling her to take a seat, I made my way into the kitchen where a lone bruised apple sat on the cupboard. 

“I’m sure you’re hungry,” I handed it to the tiny girl, sat clutching my pillow, “I’ll be right back.”

I expected a protest but she only nodded with tired eyes and accepted the apple from my hand.

The hallway suddenly seemed incredibly narrow as I stared from my doorway into the open door of 403. The lights were still on, bright and white, the TV spewing loudly. Somewhere in the back of my mind it occurred to me that I should dial 911 but the thought that this woman, a hard working single mother, may have just fallen asleep after a long day, nagged at me.

I crossed the hall.

Their apartment somehow felt more modern, more open and updated, than mine. The smell alarmingly pleasant, like a tropical candle or the lingering scent of a woman’s body spray. The layout was similar to mine and I found the couch, a white and beige mass in a sterile looking room. 

Breath caught in my throat at the sight of her, pale arm dangling over the edge of the couch near the coffee table adorning a plastic orange pill bottle. It was all so cliche, something you’d almost have to laugh at. Only with a glance it was easy to see the bottle was nearly full. Whatever it was, if she’d taken too many, it couldn’t have been much more than one.

Suddenly the feeling that I was trespassing washed over me. I thought of myself, a woman in a strange apartment, watching an exhausted single mother sleep. My eyes swept over her, baggy black pants and a white tank top. It was clear she was breathing, her chest rising and falling predictably; face smudged with traces of makeup, blonde hair pulled back, a few pieces falling into her face. 

It was the first time I’d really seen her. I was reminded, suddenly, of the men I’d seen trying to talk to her in the stairwell and on the street.

Brown eyes flickered. It was all too quick, confusion, shock, anger.

She immediately sat up, mouth open as she prepared to yell, but I threw my hands up. 

 “I’m sorry! I’m your neighbour,” it became a weak chant, “I’m sorry!”

“What!” She yelled before hearing my words and lowering her voice, “are you doing?” she demanded. 

"Your daughter-“

“Molly,” it came quietly and then, “Molly?” She yelled as if expecting the child to pop her head around a corner.

“She’s in my apartment!” I yelled, trying to gain her attention, “She- she, was in the hallway when I got home. She was scared because she said you wouldn’t wake up.” Confusion and anger twisted through each other in the lines of her face.

"What!” The blonde demanded again, “Why?”

I wanted to yell back, tell her I was only trying to help. But the alcohol both made my blood boil more quickly and stunted my ability to conjure words. I was still trying to find them when she pushed herself from the couch, rushing past me and out the door.

As she stepped into my apartment I felt a fraction of what she must’ve felt—violated. She didn’t look like someone who belong in this cramped, untidied space. Muttering over her sharp shoulder, she eyed her daughter who lit up at the sight of her, the first true affections I’d seen them afford each other. The blonde scooped up her daughter and I watched in amazement as her thin arms clutched the small child to her chest. She turned back to me, eyes wide and frenzied.

Suddenly, I felt like an intruder in my own home.

“Now,” she said sternly over Molly’s shoulder, “this was all just a misunderstanding and we’re going to forget about it, right?”

“Umm, yes? Sure,” I stuttered out as I noticed Molly’s sock dangling from her toe, “but—” I pointed to the sock, but her sharp tone came over mine. 

“Right?” She demanded again. 

The sock fell to the floor, forgotten and unnoticed, as I repeated the word back to her.

The next morning, they were out the door at 7:35 am. I passed them once in the hallway and only Molly glanced in my direction. It was as if nothing had happened, as if I’d dreamt the entire affair and all was as it had been for the past 5 years. 

Until Officer Marin presented me with her photo. 

Pulling myself from the bathtub, cold and wet, I can hear something just outside the window. Pushing the curtains back, blinking into the brightness, I can see there are three police vehicles and an unmarked van, a man with a camera stood next to it. It creeps through my stomach, clutching and pulsing, this great unease.

Something is undoubtedly wrong.

The buzz of activity below fills the air with a hum of electricity. My body thrums with the desire to do. Something, anything. But there’s nothing, I don’t even know what’s happening. So I turn toward the bar, fill a crystal glass and settle into the warmth of the overstuffed couch. 

The next morning, I see it. The photo of her on the apartment’s bulletin, obtuse, rounded letters spell out a word I already know—“MISSING”

It’s everywhere for days, inescapable and menacing. 

The news reports she’d gone missing from their apartment one evening when her mother, who I’d come to learn was named Clair, went across the street to grab milk from the convenience store. Security footage of her going through the store as she grabbed the jug of milk and surveyed the children’s candy before plucking a small cup of gummy candies from a shelf, was played on a loop through the news stories. 

She wasn’t even a suspect, they said. Her only crime, the only point of public scrutiny was leaving the door to her apartment unlocked. Her career as a doctor of psychiatry, used often in the court system, had left her wide open to be victimized by the type of people willing to perform unthinkable acts against children.

I shutter when I come across the news, or her photo shared thousands of times across social media. First, at the thought that someone had been able to get into the apartment just across from mine. Secondly, at the feeling that something is very off. I’d been home that evening. I’d been sat at my desk, trying and failing to write. If a man had tried to take a child that was afraid to cross the hall to her neighbour whom she’d seen countless times, I would’ve heard. 

Someone would’ve seen.

But a shooting happens across the city, another child goes missing, his body found in a ditch on the outskirts of the city one week later. 

I think of home, the place I come from. Just a dusty town in the middle of nowhere where tragedy grips like a disease, spreading wildly from cell to cell until the body is ravaged—useless in its grief. It's nothing like that here. The stories are shuffled, stacked, constantly moving. The terrible is buried under the heinous.

Life moves on as Molly remains missing and people forget. Her case is still open, but all that can be done is done and no amount of photo sharing or public outcry will bring her home. 

I notice that Clair is leaving her apartment again. Gone a little later, home a little earlier. 

I’m on my way out, rifling through my wallet, when she rounds the corner and into our building. In a knee length black coat, limp blonde hair with exhausted eyes and a broken stare, she is heartbreaking and captivating. I hold myself in the shadows of the perpetually darkened hallways as she stands in the entrance.

I want to watch her. I want less to speak to her or for our eyes to meet.

Molly’s faded photo, with its curled edges, rustles lightly under the air of the vent. I wonder how many times Clair has looked at it, if she avoids it or falls asleep with it, but her body turns rigid. It looks for a moment as if she’ll pull a pin away from the edge, but suddenly 4 of her fingers are under the paper, tearing it away, an angry sound bubbling from her throat. 

My hand is on her arm before I realize I’ve even left the shadows. 

“Stop, leave it!” But the shreds are on the ground, only small corners under the pins of the board. 

“Why?” At her breathy word, I look up from where my eyes are trained on the floor. Deep brown eyes, tireless and blazing, make me feel like I could crumble.  

“People need to see her. To remember who they’re looking for.” 

A sound leaves her throat, halfway between a sob and a bitter laugh. There’s blood on her hand, a long paper cut in the middle of her palm. 

“You’re bleeding.”

She looks down, surprised for a moment before swallowing. Our eyes meet as she shoulders past me to stalk slowly up the stairs. 

There is dread in my bones, coiled into my body. 

It’s three nights later when a knock pulls me back from the silence of thought. It comes again, quiet and hesitant. A glance at the clock notes the time, 11:13pm, and I pull myself away from the desk. I’m not expecting anyone, haven’t been for months, but I twist the knob anyway, feeling a rush of cool air as the thick wood opens to the hallway. Blonde, pale and thinner than before, Clair is there.

“Can I come in?” 

Stepping aside in silence, she takes a small step and pulls her sleeves into her palm. 

“I’m sorry,” she says suddenly like she might be turning to leave and I realize I’ve said nothing at all.

“No, no. Please.”

By instinct I find myself at the bar. “Can I get you something?”

“Whatever’s strongest.”

I hesitate over whiskey and wine before settling on the short, chubby bottle with amber liquid. Two are poured, one handed to her where she stands uncomfortably between me and the coffee table. 

Her lower lip worries between her teeth before she raises the glass to her mouth as we sit on the couch, taking up opposite ends. 

“I’m not from here,” she says finally and quietly, “I don’t have many friends.” 

“Me either,” my smile comes small and with the intent to reassure.  

“I can’t stand to be in there anymore,” when she says it, the words mostly fill her glass but I know she wants me to know, “without her.”

It happens six more times in the span of fourteen days. Every time she settles herself into the couch I think of the small beige sock in my t-shirt drawer. I’ve had it since that night. Unsure what to do with a lone child's sock, I keep it in the drawer. 

When Clair comes we don’t exchange many words. We drink and sit near each other and she says almost nothing at all, never cries, never sniffles. I’m afraid of what could come if I so much as hand her the sock, these emotions of a woman I don’t know. A woman who seeks comfort in the walls of my apartment. 

So I never mention it.  

When she pushes my back against the wall it all feels entirely too calm. Her hands are against my hips, eyes unable to meet mine as she whispers against the skin of my neck, “just… please. I need a moment to forget.” 

Her breath ghosts against my lips, whiskey and mint. I think maybe I knew this was coming. My breath comes ragged as I feel her lose herself in someone else. In something that isn’t grief or pain or loss. And when she comes against my hand with a sob, tense and wet, fully clothed in the darkness of my living room, my breath shakes as heavily as hers. She keeps her face pressed against the skin of my neck.

Then she’s gone.  

I don’t see her for a week. Then she’s back and it all becomes too much, too often. She comes to the door and we exchange only the necessary niceties, sometimes we share a drink before she wanders through the dark and into my bed.

She leaves before the sun rises, rolling away as soon as we’re finished, pulling her shirt back over her head at the end of my bed. I don’t ask why she’s doing this, what we’re doing or how she feels. I pretend not to care the morning we wake up after having fallen asleep together. 

Because—

Because she’s a woman with a daughter who is probably dead. 

And I’m just the girl across the hall. 

It empties me as I feed her distance, her coldness, her arousal with this devastating openness. I’ve never known how to sew myself shut. On the nights she doesn’t come, I feel I’ve lost. I wonder why, when it takes only a few steps to cross the hall, she would stay there. In the miserable walls of her stark white apartment. 

I crave her and giving to her, this thing she’s taking.   

I haven’t seen her in nearly six days and I feel I’m being driven to a point of madness from which I can’t return. Irritation and anger boil under my skin. 

She did this. 

I pull my door open and step into the silence of the hallway.

She deserves this, for me to go back on our silent arrangement.

So I breathe and I knock, but there is nothing. I bring my hand up again and there’s no sound on the other side. I know it’s wrong to grasp the knob, to feel the metal beneath my fingers but as I turn it, weak with desperation, I feel as if it’s been expecting me, opening with ease. 

The scent is still overwhelming, the silence deafening. I can hear my blood in my ears. A single light down the hall illuminates the first few feet of the living room and the key hook is empty. She isn’t home. I can’t help the thoughts that roll in, bitter and jaded.

Has she not learned what happens to those who leave doors unlocked?

I wander through the hall, like I had once before, compelled by curiosity. The cleanliness is jarring. In the absolute chaos and hysteria of life, everything is still in its place. Aside from the sleek white table in the corner where paper is strewn across the cold, hard surface. 

It’s like a dream, like I’m not the one in control of my body as I cross the room and find myself standing over the table. There’s a notebook open to a half written entry. Pictures and bills. I finger the edge of one, a carpet cleaning service and then another, a rental car. I don’t recognize the names of the people they’re addressed to but there’s three prepaid credit cards sat next to them, waiting to pay. 

I can feel the skin of my brows crinkling, the prickling of sweat near my palms. I notice the date on the journal entry—September 26th. Two days before Molly went missing. The page is slick beneath my thumb as my eyes trace the words. 

It all begins in confusion. 

The words of a mother who makes mistakes, who is lonely, who sometimes makes misguided choices in the depths of her depression. 

It tells a story of great detail. 

How Clair had never meant for it to happen. But she’d been so alluring, this other woman, in a time when she really needed someone. When she was tired, when she was alone, navigating life as a single parent, this woman was her only solace, the only person who made her feel wanted. 

She tells the pages about this woman, a young writer who has moments of emotional instability that can be frightening. Clair realized she was in over her head when the woman became resentful of the time and attention she needed to give her daughter. There was so much tension between them as this woman spoke to her endlessly of her fantasy that they run, run away from the responsibility of their lives. It was too much. She didn’t want it. But she was afraid of what this woman might do if she tried to end things. She was in too deep. She was afraid for her child and what this woman could be capable of within her jealousy.  

I read the other woman's name, over and over. The letters looping in a familiar pattern that sickens me. 

Because it’s mine.

The words swirl in my head, bile rising in my throat as I notice the photos, face down, next to the journal. Turning it over, staring back at me is the skin of my own backside, an image of my body tangled in sheets, asleep. My stomach drops and jolts. I shuffle the photos, see one more of me and Clair lying next to each other. I come to the last. Where a small child's sock, beige and slightly dirtied, lies against the fabric of my college t-shirt. 

It’s all so neat. It’s all so clear. A story I’d almost believe if it was written against the pages of a riveting novel. Only this is the evidence of a story that never happened, of a relationship I never had, a child I never really knew. 

I think of Clairs eyes, cold and stilted. I think of the tears she never cried and the things she never said. 

I think of her, this woman who took and took, though it seemed she never really wanted me.

I think of Molly and the mother it seemed never really wanted her. 

Down the hall a door opens.  

[kennedycatherine]

it was mine.

I remember the first time I spent a weekend with my new best friend in the third grade. 

She had these really kind of sweet, quiet parents. They were a little dull, very settled, very content, very routine. Every aspect of the weekend was scheduled and marked by these little “traditions” where everyone knew their role and exactly what was going to happen.

It was all so simple and kind of muted. Noiseless.

On Sunday my mom picked me up in the late morning and asked me how it was. 

“Different.”

My childhood was not noiseless. It was boisterous and full and sometimes a little chaotic. There were always friends coming and going, chatting loudly with my mom at the kitchen table, smoking in the garage with my dad. My sister and I’d adapted to falling asleep on many a family friends couch after being told for the 7th time “just 30 more minutes, babies.” By the age of 8, I could hold a better conversation with most adults than I could kids. 

It was charmed, entirely encased with love and because of that, I grew up with a lot of “pseudo parents.” People who were always there, undoubtedly, with a listening ear or open arms. They were my parents friends but they became my people too, in our own unique ways with our individual connections. 

It’s how I found myself, on a Friday night, pulling up outside a family friends home for a dinner party. I was 16 years old and going through what felt like a never ending “love isn’t real” phase. My sexuality was a mystery to a lot of people, myself included. All I knew for certain was that the idea of marriage made me deeply uncomfortable and this idea of romance I’d been sold by the novels I tried to read and the movies my friends liked to watch made me nothing but anxious. 

I wanted none of it.  

I let myself through the door and said hello to my parents, the biological ones, then hugged the other set, Dennis and Andrea. Plopping myself onto the bench at their kitchen table, I mumbled on about 11th grade finals and summer plans and listened intently to whatever other conversation was going on between rum and cokes and drags of cigarettes. 

Then Jane walked in.

I wish it didn’t sound cliche. Trust me, I wish it wasn’t fucking cliche. That’s the horror of my memories, it was all deeply, deeply cliche. And painfully obvious. 

I’d heard of her but we’d never met because her kids were mostly grown so she and her husband spent most of their time travelling when they weren’t working. I don’t remember being introduced to her or if we exchanged many words at all. What I remember most is that she couldn’t have been less interested in me. She was there to discuss a recent trip to Egypt with the friends she’d missed and I was just some obnoxious teenager she’d never met.

But it was well and truly over for me that night. 

The understanding that this was attraction was not clear to me, not immediately. She was just someone I thought was interesting, with a sort of reserved demeanour but wild stories and an incredibly successful career. I wanted to know more, I wanted her to tell me specifically, to look me in the eyes while she talked about whatever thing she’d be doing next. 

But she did not see me at all. And it was making me insane. 

I talked more loudly, I tried to make jokes, ask pointed questions. None of it mattered. I was annoyed. Being entertaining? Kind of my shtick! I was funny and charming and people noticed. She, however, did not give a shit. 

I left that night, drove away in my beat up Jeep Grand Cherokee, very likely listening to some variation of Bonnie Tyler or Bob Marley, wondering who the fuck she thought she was? 

Three days later, when I was still thinking about her, I decided it was because she’d injected a newness into a room that had become otherwise stale. And while that’s what I always craved, I was jealous. She was charming and engaging in a way that 16 year old me couldn’t be because I lacked the experiences she had. The ones I wanted. I just kind of wanted to be her. 

Right? 

Almost a year later, I was headed into my senior year of high school. I had no idea what life was going to look like for me but I had plans and dreams. I was thrilled. After my first week back at school, my dad planned a fishing trip for me, him and Dennis. One final hurrah before the end of summer  weather and the real beginning of school and homework and part time jobs. 

He was set to pick me up after my last class at 3:25 on Friday so I left that old Jeep, affectionally called Cher, back home for the day. But class ended and he was nowhere. I stood in the entrance of school, kicking rocks, calling and calling to no answer. My mom wasn’t picking up either. So I began what felt like the unreasonably long 45 minute walk home wondering what the fuck had happened to my dad and this supposed fishing trip we’d been talking about for days. 

The anger hit me square in the chest when I rounded the street and there, about 10 houses down, was my dads truck parked in our driveway. 

When I finally reached the house, I allowed the door to slam behind me and dropped my bag in the entrance, pissed off, huffy and a bit more than a little sweaty. But stepping into the kitchen I saw my dad, a man I’d never seen cry, not even at his own fathers funeral, was trying to compose himself and his tear stained face.

“Dad?”

“He’s dead.”

“What?”

“Dennis. This morning, he died.”

I laughed. “No, he didn’t. He didn’t?”

“He did, babe. He went over to our cabin to get stuff ready and he just - they found him. He collapsed. Heart attack.”

What happened after that is a blur of days, really. Dark and empty and sort of scary. I’d known people who’d died before but this was the first loss that felt like mine too. The first time I hadn’t felt like a bystander to the significant grief of someone else. Because I felt it. 

I remember walking into their house, still dressed in my sticky school clothes, so shocked by the people there. He’d been dead all of eight hours and there was already just - people? Milling, fussing, sitting, crying. It was sunny outside and none if it seemed to make any sort of fucking sense.

My dad was immediately gone from my side, busying himself with the inconvenient organization of death. My mom was out of sight, in the bedroom with the widow who’d been given so many pills she was nearly sedated. I didn’t know where to look or sit or how to contain my grief or how not to. Then I saw Jane, a familiar face.

She looked angry. 

I felt angry.

So, I sat next to her.

We didn’t say hello because it wasn’t really the kind of occasion for pleasantries. The silence only lasted a few moments before someones sob pierced through the stillness and my own shock began to wear off. Then the tears came. For a moment, I forgot where I was, trying to find a way out of this waking nightmare when a hand grabbed mine.

“He loved you so much, you know?”

I looked to Jane. “What?”

“He always talked about you like one of his own girls. You write, right? He was really proud of you.”

Then I cried harder. She did too. 

His death was shattering in ways I never expected. Probably because I never thought to expect it at all. Everyone kept on moving in this sort of fog, raw and changed. Andrea was often a person I didn’t recognize. My dad, a man who only knew strength and strong wit, was suddenly joyless and sort of aimless without his childhood best friend and lifelong companion. My mom was a bit frantic and a lot run down trying to keep the seams together for those who couldn’t really do it for themselves. 

Then.

My dad had a heart attack too. Just four months later. He survived and the fog was lifted in favour of fear and we all clung. To each other, to life. 

Those next few years, in some ways, became about renewal, reestablishing. We’d always felt like a bit of a rag tag, mish mosh “family” but it became even stronger, more defined. Sunday morning brunch at Andreas was no longer an option. It didn’t matter if I was hungover in a sweat suit, or my dad and the other guys wanted to be out hunting, we all crowded that table and passed our grief around with bacon and fruit salads. Friday nights were always spent on our deck, beers and joints and tequila bottles and stories. God, the stories. Sometimes I wonder if they all lied just to keep us entertained but if I’m being honest, I didn’t really care. We cried a lot in those years too. 

As we all navigated this newfound territory of feeling far more bound and at times, obligated to one another, Jane was around more. Death does that. We commune. 

At first, there was just too much. Too much pain, too much mandatory functioning that felt unnatural, a heavy burden when you just want to lie down and tell everyone to fuck off with the pleasantries. And for me, too much confusion. The reality that I was interested in and attracted to women was something I often overlooked in favour of believing that love was something that just wasn’t for me. Surely, I was just a lone wolf destined to be the family spinster. That felt much simpler. 

But it was becoming hard to deny. 

There was a birthday party. I can’t even remember who it was for. I was debating with my mom whether or not I had to go when she started rattling off the names of everyone she knew who’d be there. When I heard Janes name, the answer became clear to me. 

I looked forward to that party for weeks. When the night came, I rolled in not so reasonably late as the careless college student I was.

Jane wasn’t there. 

Minutes passed, then hours, the night was winding down and she wasn’t there. My heart was in my stomach. The disappointment seeped through every limb. I wanted so badly to ask someone where she was but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I didn’t know what I was feeling only that it wasn’t quite right and I was terrified that if I spoke her name, it would vibrate through my voice and someone would know. 

That night, incredibly drunk and a little bit stoned, I cried into my pillow. Because I was disappointed I hadn’t seen her, because I didn’t know when I would again but most of all, because I had no idea what any of it meant. 

Months later, by complete accident, we all ended up at the same place. The “family” was all there but I’d come without them, with my best friend. Late in the evening, I found myself at the bar at the same moment as Jane. The words that tumbled from my mouth all felt wrong and I grew more and more uneasy as the conversation went. But in no way did I want to walk away and I certainly didn’t want her to walk away. 

When the moment did end and I brought the drinks back to my table, my friend asked who I’d been talking to. I gave a brief explanation, opting to bypass the part about the intense emotional turmoil over whether or not I was in deep, deep lesbian love or lust with this woman. 

“Oh, she’s super pretty.”

“She is, right?” I asked, a little too forcefully, a bit too excitedly. 

And later that night when we all ended up at a table together, talking for hours, she said it again.

“She’s super pretty and she’s like, super successful and cool? Can I be her when we grow up?”

I was so fucking relieved. Having someone else, someone who was straight and in a loving and committed relationship with a man, reaffirm that Jane was a person worth admiring suddenly absolved me of any anxiety. 16 year old me had been right, I just wanted to be her.

But 16 year old me hadn’t cried in a pillow over not seeing her either, had she?

It was very likely only months from that moment when the grand Coming Out happened. It was a long time coming and despite the emotional turmoil, was rather simple and calming. I was just one of those people who really had to say it out loud before I could fully deal with it. And I did. 

At this point, the “Jane Cycle” had been turning for a few years. I’d convince myself it wasn’t love or something like it, I’d see her and I’d crumble. I mean, inconsolably upset for days and sometimes without even realizing why. I’d just be irritable and moody, upset with the world. But it was all because I’d had my hit of norepinephrine and dopamine just to have to walk away from it with no sense of when I’d get it again. It was painful. 

In coming out, I allowed the mask to be pulled off these “ambiguous feelings” I had for Jane. It wasn’t confusing. It was just a fact. I loved her. Not entirely, not implicitly, but in my own sort of tragic, puppy dog way, I did. 

The first time I saw her after the gay flag had been waved, I almost had to laugh. She was not nearly the terrifying, untouchable thing I’d been holding onto for years. She was just a person I was attracted to. Though a part of me was tempted to tell her, just as a “wink, wink, nudge, nudge silly kid, hey?” moment, I opted not to. Instead, I got drunk off jello shooters and tequila and flirted shamelessly with her. 

Until her husband laughed and affectionately called me a tease, lightly putting me in my place. Hold your judgements, okay? I adored her husband, he adored me. They’d been married longer than I’d been alive and ultimately, he was just thrilled to finally get to tell Jane, “I fucking told you so!” Because as it turns out, teenaged me was definitely not pulling off my sapphic yearning as subtly as I thought I was. 

Sometimes I become a bit sad for a younger me. The one who struggled through years of feeling very confused and kind of defective. Who wondered why she was incapable of feelings like everyone else. I hear stories and watch movies of teenagers going through these kind of shameless, embarrassing first fumbles in love with prom nights and adolescent movie dates. Then there’s the mandatory coming of age heart break with teenage girls eating ice cream and watching rom coms and trash talking the ex boyfriend of 2 weeks in the girls bathroom. It causes a momentary heartache for the girl who didn’t have that because for her, things felt more heavy and certainly a hell of a lot more complicated. 

Then I remind myself, in someways, I did get that. I got the embarrassing first fumbles and the painful, dramatic, crying into the pillow first heartbreak. Just, for me, it looked a little different. It wasn’t Tyler from Trigonometry class, it was Jane from the dinner party. 

And it was mine. 

[kennedycatherine]

One.

She exhales into it, long and hard, bright and pink. When it becomes a strange, blurred mass beneath her nose, she can’t help but laugh. Funny, in all that cheap old porn, the kind in a shoe box under their bed or stacked in the drawers of his unsightly office desk, its the other woman that blows bubbles. 

It's the other woman that blows her husband too. 

Least they'd got that part right.

Chilled night air sends a shiver up her bare arms, red halter top stretched over her stomach. The fabrics as thick as her skin, the red as warm as her drug store lipstick - Shade 107, Cherries in the Snow.

Darkness takes up in the corners of the street and peering back through the window, she reads the clock. 7:55. Spitting her gum off to the side, she reaches to the step below for the blue pack of cigarettes. The lighter sparks, sending a small flame to singe the end of the white stick. 

A man coughs down the road. 

A dog barks, a baby cries. 

Its been five minutes. 

And her husband is fucking somebody else.

She should probably be bitter, she thinks. And in some part of her sunken, murky mind, maybe she is. But for now, she laughs. 

A manicured nail taps against the concrete step as she thinks of the boy at the grocery store. 

Every Wednesday, like clock work, she shows up. Overdone, overdressed. Too much makeup, sunglasses rounded and tipping over her nose, shorts much too short. And every Wednesday he packs her groceries, carries them out to the car that everyone knows she can't afford. 

He's young. Well, probably around her age. But people her own age started to feel young around the day she'd said, “I do.”

One day, that bag boy leant against her car, brown eyes starting at her ankles, dragging slowly to the top of her bottle blonde head. She shivered, feeling sick, warm and seen. It wouldn't have taken much more than three words, a quick invitation. There was a motel just up the street. It would be so easy, men always are. But she'd popped a cigarette in her mouth, flipped him a few dollars and closed herself into the car. 

She'd made a vow. 

And how could she hold him to his if she shit all over hers?

Head lights shine on wet pavement. His car ticks slowly past neighbours, flashy, gaudy. Awful, really. He'll step out reeking of booze or cigars, she knows that. 

And God, she’s so fucking sick of everyone being wasted on something all the time. Alcohol pumping through veins, powder dusted in fine coats along their noses. At his pace? Probably both - at 8:15 on a Tuesday. He's wearing his suit jacket, tie slung around his neck. Before he even makes it to the walkway he notices her. Shock and disappointment, second, a feigned happiness. The husband home after a hard day at work to his beautiful wife. 

But the dried sweat on his skin hadn’t come from the office and her beauty is like the “MISSING” photo on the milk carton. Old news. 

She flicks her cigarette as the tip of his boot meets the first step, “long day?” she exhales.

“You could say that.”

It’s a moment before his hand comes up to brush over the back of his neck, sighing into the night, “can I sit?”

“Your house, doll.”

He sits next to her and the air flows around him. The scent hits her, another woman, strong and expensive. Her own perfume sits on their nightstand in a bottle shaped like a cartoonish cherry, smelling like sickly sweet chemicals, her dead mother and home. She absently wonders if he's given that woman the bottle he tried to gift her for Christmas. 

She'd refused it with a laugh and a kiss. 

It'd smelt old.

He sighs again, like he’s trying hard to say something, anything. Her neck cranes and he finally meets her eyes. His lips are swollen. There's a pale pink smudge on his collar. 

He isn't trying. 

Doesn't want to. 

His eyes practically beg her.

She takes another drag, “don’t forget,” exhale, “we were in love once.”

“What?”

“Madly.”

He groans loudly, “you’ve gotta stop doing this. Don't be so dramatic.”

“I'm not.” She waves her hands coolly. She’s not. She’s quiet, she’s calm. 

“So what are you on about then, huh? What are you talking about?”

Their eyes challenge each others.

“I didn’t say anything, did I?”

“You said plenty.”

She laughs, palms up in mock surrender, “a wife can't remind her husband how much they loved each other?”

“That's not what you were doing.” It’s nearly a hiss.

“Then what was I doing?” 

Each word hits deliberate and hard, like a jab in the chest. A moment passes, anger and sadness springs up in her like a creeping, coiling vine, hot tears work behind her eyes, “say it.”

He keeps his mouth shut, unwilling to go any further. Wishing she would step up, to say for him what they both already know to be true. 

The air floats unequally around them, the way it would with an unwelcome guest. Yet there’s only the two of them, their minds equally as unbalanced as the cool, stale air.

“This isn't what either of us wanted.”

She laughs, airy and bitter. There it is. 

“That’s what you're going to say?”

“Baby, I-”

“Stop.”

“You know I’m right.”

“Why would I think tha-”

“We’re miser-”

“This is exactly what we wanted! This is all we talked about. Leave your wife, be with me. A marriage, a real marriage! A house, a home, a fucking baby.”

“You were high! I was just trying to help you-you, you know what you were like! Unreasonable. We didn't know what we we- I didn’t know.”

“Don't you dare! Don't you dare blame this on that!” She's standing in front of him now, a nail in his face, “you didn't have to marry me because I was a lost little girl. You don't get to take credit for saving me so that you don't have to save us.” 

She thinks the entire block can probably hear her.

“Okay, okay,” he grabs at her hands, “shh, just shh, okay? Calm the hell down.” 

She tears away from him, “you don't even have the balls to say her fucking name. You'll doom this whole relationship, try to force me out, but you'll never actually end it.”

He breathes hard and spit trails from his tooth to his lip. 

“Neither will you.”

She stops. 

Their breath the only thing between them.

She can turn away, to her car. Her keys are in her pocket, cold and hard against her backside. But he hasn't said it. She hasn't said it. No one has admitted defeat. 

It didn't have to be this way. But here it is. 

It would be cold. 

She would make it miserable. 

He would suffer through every moment with her. 

Because he would look at her and he would hope but he'd never do it. Not really.

She steps past him, toward the door but before it clammers shut, she spits over her shoulder. 

“You're a fucking coward.”

[kennedycatherine]

Other People

A tree looms large, casting taller shadows than most across the space coined “no man’s land.” A thin line borders the school yard, an attempt to have children understand boundaries. But it seems that in planning, the obvious fact that children love nothing more than doing the exact opposite of what they’re told was completely neglected. So that tree, seemingly massive and enticing, becomes a sort of sacred space for students looking to exercise rebellion, paint themselves as bold and fearless. Before a teacher, tired and unamused, blows their whistle to call the child out for a scolding. “You know better.”

 Robin is eleven when her best friend receives a vague invitation to meet behind that tree after classes at 3:35pm. It comes in the form of a carelessly folded piece of scrap paper, words slashed across the paper in a childish scroll, signed “Ryan.” A boy from their class that had just moved there. Jane, her best friend, asks her what she thinks it’s about but she can only shake her head. She thinks she’s knows but it’s not something she really wants to think about. So Jane asks the other girls in the class, together they smile and they whisper. She sits and re-reads the pages of her book, 1 time, then 2 and 3.

 Robin wonders what it will mean if they’re right.

 It’s 3:42pm and she’s stood next to the red bricked wall of the school she’s been going to for 6 years. The chilled fall air bites at her cheeks and she clutches the thick notebooks and her math textbook closer to her chest.

Deep in the forbidden line, under the shadow of “the tree” she can see bits of Jane’s winter coat and one of Ryan’s hands resting casually against the rough tree trunk. A group of his friends, 3 boys of mismatched heights, all stand at the bike racks looking on intently. Robin feels a tug somewhere in her stomach that tells her she shouldn’t be watching.

 When she looks up from where eyes have been trained on two dogs running through the soccer field, Jane is nearly skipping toward her. Teeth gleaming under the sun, her mouth an open grin, the tip of her nose and cheeks a deep pink. She almost squeals as they come face to face. Robin wants to ask exactly what happened, were those other girls right? Before she can, Jane is whispering in her ear, one finger barely pointing toward where Ryan and his friends stand at the bike rack.

 “Hunter likes you.” The words come from Jane’s chapped lips quick and hushed.

 “What?”

 “Hunter,” she says with an excited nod, as if Robin really hadn’t heard her. “Ryan said that if you want, he’d go behind the tree with you.”

 That gnawing feeling that had lingered in her stomach tumbles and grows. Robin has never been a person who leans towards indecision. She’s been feisty, loud and assured beyond her experiences since she was small. But in this moment, she is at a loss. She knows what she’s supposed to do. She’s watched Jane bounce her knees, wring her hands, grinning in excitement and nervousness all afternoon. She’s watched the other girls whisper, overcome by the 6th grade drama and intrigue of an ambiguous and promising note. She thinks about what they’d all do, what they’d think if they had this chance.

 With a dry throat she musters a nod and watches at Jane sends her own nod across to Ryan.

 Robin’s eyes flicker towards Hunter but he isn’t looking at her. He’s swiping his palm away from a sly high five as he stalks toward the tree. Jane’s smile is so large, so satisfied that she can barely look at her. She moves past and begins the walk.

 When she rounds the tree, into the shadows, Hunter is there blowing breath into his palm. She sighs, unable to decide how she feels because on one hand, they’re young. She thought she’d have time before this happened. On the other, watching this boy whose mother probably chose his sweater and his shoes check his breath and wipe the sweat from his palms, feels so juvenile. Fraught and unnecessary.

But he’s shoving his hands in his pockets, eyes darting from side to side and he looks so damn nervous that Robin can’t help but think of him that day in the 2nd grade, burrowing his face into his sleeve in embarrassment after accidentally calling the teacher, “mom.” Suddenly she feels so bad that she backs herself up against the tree without a word and closes her eyes.

She doesn’t think there’s all that much to say.

When it happens, it’s quick and unpracticed. His lips are rough and chapped and he hits his nose against hers too hard, smashing hers to the left. She wonders, idly, as she opens her eyes if it’s going to leave a bruise.

He’s wide eyed in front of her as if he’s surprised with himself. Maybe impressed.

She musters a question. “Good?”

He nods slowly and pushes his hands back into his pockets. She turns to walk away but her name comes from his mouth in a small yelp. When she turns, he’s biting his lower lip, “I think you’re the prettiest girl in our class.”

She closes her eyes against the words and tries desperately to find a way to take this compliment and turn it into something that makes her feel that way. Pretty and happy and special. When she opens them he’s still looking at her and she feels nothing at all. A thank you tumbles from her lips and she wishes that Jane wasn’t standing there waiting.

She doesn’t want to talk about it.

Robin is thirteen when a group of 10 or more of them are piled into a cemented, unfinished basement. They drink flavored sodas and every one shares a sip from a single vodka cooler stolen from a parents fridge. When enough time has passed that they’re certain they should be feeling something, a girl in the crowd suggests Seven Minutes in Heaven. Robin looks to everyone around her but doesn’t meet anyone’s eye. This is how things go now. Every birthday party, every school dance and evening or weekend hangout seems to be an ill-concealed reason to experiment. To try new things within the safety of a group where everyone is curious.

She still doesn’t feel that way, hasn’t tried like the rest of the girls to garner the attention of boys. Hasn’t even found one whose attention she’d want. When the other girls ask, she lies. Says the name of a boy a year older who offered up his sweater at the park one cold evening. It’s just easier that way.

When her turn comes she spins the empty cooler bottle, an ugly red and orange label twisting and blurring into one until it lands on him. And of course it does, the popular boy. The one whose name every girl is chanting in her head as the bottle spins for them. They all meet her eyes then.

And they don’t look happy anymore. 

The closet is nothing more than a small storage room under the stairs that the two of them barely fit into it. It’s so dark they can’t see each other but his sour breath fills her nose and she tries to turn her head into her shoulder.

“Are you ready?”

“We don’t have to do anything.”

“I want to?” His words come in that sort of childish, indignant way, “don’t you?”

It doesn’t seem right to lie. So she says nothing at all and he presses his lips, dry and tight against hers. The moments tick by painfully slowly as his lips become wet and she thinks about her role in the school play. He pulls back long before their time is up but they stay silent until someone bangs a fist insistently against the dry wall.

“Wait!” He suddenly says as she moves for the door. When she turns back, he tousles her hair with both hands and does the same to his own. They’re met with cheers and whistles as they sit cross legged with the group again.

For weeks she’s told how lucky she is.

But she doesn’t understand why.

She’s sixteen when it all becomes real. Her friends go on dates, some of them just sleep with guys when they feel like it. They all go to parties and drink and smoke but it’s only a pretense for what’s to come. Making out in spare bedrooms and hooking up in dark bathrooms. Sometimes when they ask, she kisses boys too. Sometimes she does it even when they don’t. It doesn’t really feel like anything anymore, it’s not the worst part of it all.

That’s not when she feels that something is undoubtedly wrong. Something in her is broken.

Her best friend has feelings for her and tells her so whenever he gets the chance. Sometimes over the phone, a few nights in his bedroom when he throws parties, a handful of times at school and once in a long letter. She never tells him no. He is handsome and smart and nice and promising. He has a future ahead of him that looks bright and a number of girls that know it too.

Sometimes when she’s alone, she convinces herself that she feels that way. That this is some slow burning romantic comedy in the making and she’s going to get there. She is. She’s going to feel it. But then he touches her thigh or breathes a drunken kiss against her cheek and her stomach clenches with guilt and fear and sadness. Because no, it’s not going to happen. And no, it’s not him. It’s her.

“I don’t understand why this is so hard for you. I care about you so much, what more do you want?”

“I don’t know,” she says and looks to her shoes, tries not to lose her three beer and one Jell-O shot over the hard, black tops.

She’s still sixteen when she decides that love might not be for her. It just doesn’t seem she’s capable. And it’s strange, she thinks, she’s not a cold person? Or unkind or uncaring. There’s just something that’s wrong with her. The few times that she confides in someone how she feels or really, doesn’t feel, they tell her just to wait. She’s young and she’ll meet some guy eventually. It’ll come. He’ll sweep her off her feet. But she feels in her bones how untrue it is. Because she’s been lucky enough to know nice guys, great guys, attractive guys and felt an absolute emptiness where an overwhelming something should be. 

Gay is a word used to describe things that are lame and ugly. It’s a topic of debate in her Christian Ethics class. It’s a word that boys toss around when they want to cut each other down. The only people she knows who are gay leave her school when she is 15 because of the nasty rumors and terrible things that come flying from the mouths of people who don’t seem to care. The closest she gets to a real life example is girls who make out with each other at parties to the cheers of boys in their classes.

She chooses not to think too hard about what else that word could mean to her. So far it’s been a slur, an insult, a reason to hate, a reason to have to leave. When it’s not that, it’s just not an option. Not something to consider in and amongst the romance novels that her friends read, the movies they watch on Friday nights, the boys she rejects and doesn’t tell her parents about. It’s not something she’s been made to feel it’s okay to be.

Besides, she’s so busy focusing on what she isn’t feeling, she has a hard time wading through the murky waters of what she does.

When she graduates high school, the word occupies more of her mind. The people she meets at work, at college, they’re different. To some of them, the concept seems simple. They are who they are. So she tries harder to seek out people, resources and content that will help her to figure out what place this has in her life.

She thinks she nearly has it figured it out when suddenly, her father asks about her best friend. They haven’t seen him around in a while, this person who was once a fixture in their home. She tells him the truth - they’re not friends anymore. But she leaves out the part that he broke off the friendship because she was being unfair to him. In the process of figuring out who she was and what was going on with her, she was dishonest, misleading and selfish. She said things she didn’t mean and never said what she should’ve. She doesn’t know how to tell her father that. But he says it anyways.

“You do know it’s okay if you’re gay, right?”

She says nothing but that night, she cries and she never forgets that.

She’s 18 when that year is up and she gathers her family in one room and says it. And even as she does, she’s not all that sure if it’s true. It seems to be? It makes sense to her. But it’s not been a reality in her life, something she can see and feel and touch and that makes it feel, at times, like a concept for other people.

There are hiccups and tears, occasional flashes of hot anger or watery, inky sadness, mostly from her. But it’s okay in a way that she didn’t know it could be. Her family is still there, unchanged, unwavering. Her friends are the same. Something uncoils low in her belly and relief seeps through her veins into every limb. She cries and she cries because the absolute emptiness is replaced by an overwhelming something.

Months later, she meets a girl in the dimly lit room of a pub. She’s a friend of a friend and they walk to the bar together to order their drinks. Leaning there, they talk and they smile and the other girl looks at her just a bit longer than she thinks another would.

They rejoin their group, seats apart, but they meet each other’s eyes as the evening goes on. When Robin goes to leave, trying to slip out quietly and artfully without a full crowd of goodbyes, the girl follows. She grabs her wrist lightly and presents her phone. “Can I get your number?”

Her first instinct is to say no. She’s been practicing this craft of easy rejections for some time now. But this is different. This is a first.

She accepts the phone being slid into her hand and types the familiar letters of her own name and the known pattern of her number.

The feeling that takes root in her stomach when the unknown number appears on her screen nearly an hour later is one she’s only felt a fraction of at different times. She tries to temper her smile as she taps out a reply. And when the invitation for a date the following week comes, she tries to swallow the nerves. But they stay, fluttering and buzzing for days.

Excitement, nerves, doubt, doubt, doubt. She types out tens of messages she never sends.

“I’ve never done this.” “I’m not ready.” “I’m sorry, I think I might be confused.” “I’m scared.”

Instead, she sends what she knows her friends send to their first dates. “I can’t wait!”

She smooths out her dress and wonders if it’s too much. She wipes off her lipstick no less than 5 times before her sister hands her one she just bought, “Jesus, relax.” The clock reads that it’s 10 minutes early when she pulls into the nearest parking spot. So, she waits, bounces her knees, wrings her hands, grinning in excitement and nervousness.

She knows she has to start walking toward the restaurant now and if she’s being honest, she kind of wants to vomit. But, in a good way? She’s nearly at the doors when a cab pulls up and the girl gets out. Nearly a stranger, standing under a streetlight in a light mist of rain. She smooths down her own dress and then she looks up, meets Robins eye. When she smiles a smile that she knows is just for her, her throat goes dry and something blooms in her chest as she thinks she’s probably never seen something so beautiful.

It feels right.