Fiction

When I enter the restaurant, it’s empty. Electric lights buzz faintly, illuminating scaly leather seats. An unidentifiable pop song tinkles out from some deep recess, alluding to rooms undiscovered. A waitress stands guard at the door. I long for the familiarity of hotel room service, for truffle risotto and banana splits.

It is my last night in Paris. In theory, I am in the city to write my Great American Novel in cafés on the Seine. In reality, I eat alone in my hotel room for almost every meal, binge-read Joan Didion, and ride the ferris wheel in the Tuileries Garden three times a day. Every night after dinner, I call my father back in Richmond. I listen dutifully as he gives recommendations for the next day. I nod as he talks, pretending to take notes and saying things like “Of course, I’ve always preferred Rubens to Titian,” and “Today, I saw someone ordering coffee with milk. I almost called the police.” One night, to prove to him I was interacting with people besides hotel staff and ferris wheel attendants, I made up a story involving six Brazilians, a nightclub, and a private driver.

Tonight, I am at the restaurant Le Twickenham. My father frequented the place when he was a student in Paris in the 80s, pretending to be Ernest Hemingway or James Joyce or whoever for two years before returning to a corporate job which he never left. He recommended Le Twick (as he called it) for the wine, adding that he could not remember anything else.

The hawkish waitress intercepts me at the door immediately. “Une,” I say dumbly, hoping she will get my message.

She smiles in the way only waitresses can. Polite, at least on the surface. Even with the empty restaurant, she gives me the table next to the door and ​maître d. Cold wind slithers through the door frame. I keep my jacket on.

Off the crinkly plastic menu, I order six oysters from Brittany and a bottle of the restaurant’s cheapest wine. I feel like a stereotype. I feel like my father.

The wine is terrible, but strong. The oysters are rusty. I peer at myself reflected in their smooth, white emptiness. I imagine myself inside a pearly void, floating in eggy mucus, some anonymous person pulling me into being.

During the meal, I resist the urge to pick up my copy of ​Blue Nights, ​which I am reading for the third time. The first time I finished it, I tried buying a new book at Shakespeare & Co. but the place was too crowded with preppy Hemingway wannabes for me to even think of literature. Tonight, instead of reading, I decide to think of my father.

It is difficult because I didn’t have a particularly traumatic childhood. My father did all the things fathers are supposed to do, like take me on insufferable fishing trips with hidden moral lessons when we came back empty-handed, and pretend I was a great ballerina even when I was in the back row during every recital. Everything was normal. Since I began college, even our usual fights had been quickly smoothed over by regular cash deposits. I am here in Paris thanks to one such deposit. I’m sure there is some moral lesson about spending your parents’ money bumming around Europe but I haven’t learned it yet, nor do I have any desire to.

My oysters are finished. I signal for the waitress. She blinks at me from her perch at the corner of the bar. The colored liquors behind her appear like stained glass, her glare almost saintly. “More?” She asks, walking over and crisply fanning menus out in front of me.

“Do you have dessert?”

She pushes forward a peeling red pamphlet with photos of miscellaneous, equally terrible looking microwavable desserts. I choose strawberry cheesecake because my dad loves it. Had he ever ordered the same thing?

It arrives, predictably gelatinous, congealed strawberries leaking syrup across the plate. As I eat, I can’t stop thinking about my dad. I think of our house in Richmond with the wraparound porch. I think of our cat, Sammy. I think of the ski trip to Grenoble I took last week at his suggestion. I think of the obnoxiously healthy foods he insists on stocking in our fridge. I think of the sugars and fats and preservatives I am eating. I feel the strawberries clotting my blood into syrup. I imagine my heart rotting, sugar pouring out the valves. I imagined little maggots, small like risotto, squirming through the ventricles.

Bile rises in my throat. I am done with the cheesecake. Something rumbles through my stomach, like a beast awakening. I stand up, wine-drunkenness rolling across my vision. “Oú trouvent les toilettes?” I hear myself ask the waitress. She points left and I see myself walking, the music growing louder with every step. Past the empty tables is a serpentine staircase with a red SALLE DE BAIN placard on the top step. Letters twist across the sign​, ​pirouetting into each other.

To ground myself as I begin the descent, I hold the iron railing. It undulates under my grip. The music is growing louder. The thing is rising in my throat.

At the end of the staircase, there is a small black door. The music seems to be coming from inside. I grip the doorknob. I have never felt anything so cold in my life. I want to rub my cheek against the metal, moving it back and forth until split skin reveals pulpy flesh. I want to pull myself open, cleanse myself of the thing inside me.

Stumbling inside the bathroom, I grope for the light switch, illuminating a small bulb in the center of the room. A toilet sits demurely in one corner, a sink with a grimy mirror reflecting its image in another. The music booms, jostling against my thoughts. The rumble is getting louder, swelling into rhythmic hissing.

I feel the vomit rise in my throat. My head is going to explode. I hunch over the sink, mouth agape. I can’t breathe. The thing is at the top of my throat. My jaw is detaching from my skull. I am dying. I am going to die. One day they will find me in the bathroom of Le Twick, a pile of shiny white bones.

I look at myself in the mirror. From behind my teeth, I see a set of slitted eyes. I gag and suddenly the thing is out past my teeth, its tail flicking against my lips. Through lidded eyes, a snake looks up at me from the sink. Its mouth is open, music pouring from the gap. I try to listen to it, but it is nothing I have ever heard before.

The ground shifts. I am floating, drawn towards the pearly toilet bowl. I want to curl myself up inside the emptiness until I am nothing more than a speck of brightness. My father will discover a new daughter, a chain-smoking Parisian writer, and I will be content circling through Paris, rising above the city, wrapping my fingers around the hot, white lights until I am just ash, drifting peacefully into the Seine.

Something scratches against my eardrum. Water swirls down the drain. My void tilts. I blink.

“Would you like the check?” The waitress stands in front of me, grimacing and tapping her check pad impatiently. I am sitting in my chair by the door, staring at the line of waiting people curling outside. The restaurant is full, music replaced by lilting voices. An empty plate of cheesecake looked up at me.

“Yes. I’ll pay in cash,” I said weakly.

~~~

That night, I call my father. He is sitting in his study, grading student papers. I hear Sammy purring across his lap. “Tell me about your last day in Paris.”

“I saw more Impressionists and worked on my novel,” I say​, “​ And went to dinner at the Twick, like you recommended.”

“How was the wine?” I decide to be honest. “Spiritual,” I begin.

 

Ava Ratcliff is a senior at Phillips Academy Andover. A graduate of the Iowa Young Writers Studio, her work has appeared in Chronogram Magazine and New Moon Girls Magazine, among others. She enjoys travel, reading, and visiting museums. Find her on Twitter at bookreviewsava.

 

 

Umberto’s cooks the juiciest veal cutlet in the entire city. You know this because you’ve eaten veal cutlet at every Italian restaurant in the entire city. You’ve given second chances; with the sand-haired boy two weeks ago you revisited Butera’s and then Pomodorino with the freckled boy last week, but at both places the dish still tasted like copper. As you sipped your third glass of Merlot and feasted on cold garlic bread, you realized this is why you stick with what you know won’t disappoint.

At 7:50 you peer over your steering wheel as your date shuffles toward the restaurant. He had offered to pick you up, but you told him you live far so you’d meet him instead. It’s safer this way. Your date fiddles with his bomber jacket collar. His posture rivals the Hunchback and although you’re parked yards away, you can tell he’s not six feet tall like his profile claims. Maybe five ten, at most. Strike one.

What else is he lying about?

You unlock your phone, pausing to recall which dating app you two matched on. Ah, yes. Now you remember. You open his profile. You conduct your research in the days prior, but it’s useful to brush up that evening. Looking for a smart girl to make dumb decisions with. Not your first encounter with that tagline, but you prefer a cliched bio over an exhaustive info dump and the photos are what determine your swipe’s direction, anyway. In the first, he wears khakis and a Serengeti National Park shirt. Two monkeys perch atop his shoulders. After a quick Google search, you learned that last summer he worked as a safari guide in Tanzania. You hope he isn’t a vegan; you dated one of those once. The whole dinner the guy eyed your plate with a look one reserves for clogged toilets.

In his second photo he dons a tuxedo; he links arms with a girl in a wedding dress who’s a female version of him. According to his social media, he and his twin sister studied at the same university, and her husband was his fraternity brother. You stalked the sister’s page, too. She’s an equestrian and graduated from the top veterinary program in the country. She reminds you of the girls your foster mother urged you to emulate, but those girls pelted you with brown paper bags in the cafeteria.

Your phone buzzes. Just arrived. Let me know when you’re here 🙂 He can wait a couple minutes. You switch back to his profile. The third photo is a selfie. He’s handsome in an obvious way, chiseled jaw and eyes like a verdant countryside. He looks like a hybrid of seven other guys you dated, but what earned him your right swipe was his hair. You only date blonds.

You had a great love once. That man was your sun. The air you breathed. The blood in your veins. You still gaze at the photos under your mattress. He was perfect. You still sleep in his old football t-shirts and replay his voicemails like a lullaby; you imagine his velvet voice transcending your recordings and asking for you back. You conjure him so vividly — from his shaggy blond hair to the birthmark on his left cheek — it feels like he‘s there. As if he never left. Some mornings you think it was all a bad dream. But then you remember you’re forbidden to contact him and have no information how.

The moon hovers in your rear-view mirror. Crescent tonight. Awesome, be there in 5 you text back. Punctuation smiley faces aren’t your thing. Not that it matters what your thing is, because your thing can be whatever you want. You can be whatever you want, and men can’t perform the ubiquitous pre-date social media autopsy because you don’t exist on social media. You haven’t since The Breakup. The only truth your dates have is your first name, and that’s all you ever give.

Who will you be tonight?

Certainly not an orphan. Or a stalker. A threat. Sociopath. Whatever else the restraining order pegs you as. You usually curate your life based around that of your date’s, so perhaps tonight you will be a twin. You’ve always wanted an identical sister. You two could’ve pranked all the kids in your foster home. Maybe tonight you’ll have a pet snake. Last week you had two pet squirrels and a hedgehog.

You adjust the ruby heart dangling from your neck, the last Valentine’s Day gift from your love. Sometimes you incorporate it into your fictitious life. You’ve said you inherited the necklace from your baroness great grandmother; your father is a jeweler and he created it for your sixteenth birthday; it was a souvenir from vacation in Aruba; you found it in a Manhattan taxicab at 3AM. Tonight you’ll say you bought matching necklaces while you and your twin studied abroad in Greece.

You hop out of your car and saunter to the restaurant. Your date is probably waiting for your arrival at the bar, debating whether he should go for a handshake or a hug. People are predictable. The host will escort you two to the table and he’ll start with small talk, either a comment about the weather or he’ll inquire about your day. That’ll be the segue into asking if you worked and if so what do you do, to if you went to school and if so where and what did you study, to your long-term goals to your hobbies to if you’re watching any shows on Netflix.

When he speaks, you will listen. You will ask questions. He will feel seen. He will feel heard. Your charm will mesmerize him like a child at Fourth of July fireworks. He’ll be so enamored he won’t even have thought about sleeping with you, and when he walks you to your car, he’ll say it’s been a while since he felt this excited after a first date. You’ll blush, and when he asks to see you again, you’ll tell him you’d like that.

But that’s the last he will hear from you again.

Just walked in you text as you enter, spotting his blond hair at the dim bar. You chirp his name and he turns. His eyes light up like a fresh lamp bulb. He walks in your direction, smiling shyly when he approaches.

“Hi,” you say, beaming. “I’m thrilled to meet you.”

 

 

Melissa Kerman is a writer living in New York. You can follow her on Instagram @melissakerman

 

1.

Charlie’s the new kid in the class and boy, does he stand out. It’s not that he’s funky lookin’ with a crooked smile or poofy hair. Nah. He looks pretty normal. It’s just that he’s new, and we never had a new kid before. I live in a small town, ya see, one that you can’t even find on the maps. Try, I dare you! Look up “Daisyville, Tennessee” and nothin’ will pop up. So when you go through middle school knowing who ya cheat off of, who ya avoid, and who ya befriend, and then some new kid shows up with only a month of 8th grade left, what are ya supposed to think of him? And he don’t talk like us either. He talks all fancy cuz he’s from Connecticut. He just sits in the back of the classroom reading all these books with real small print so we don’t talk to him and he don’t try to talk to us. But today was different. Cuz while Mr. Smith was writing some dumb Shakespeare lines on the chalkboard and blabbin’ his mouth about comparing a chick to a summa’s day, Charlie stood up and threw the sharpest paper airplane at his head. Hit him right smack dead on his bald spot. And I’ll tell ya, Charlie wasn’t the new kid anymore. He was a god.

 

My Grandpa Eugene was the greatest paper airplane maker in the world. He traveled to London, China, and even Australia showing people how to master the art of paper airplanes. He was going to teach me how to make a folded piece of freedom this Tuesday. Grandpa Eugene was going to fly down to our new house from Japan, but not all planes are as sturdy as his paper airplanes. The principal called me down; the sound of “ooooos” from my classmates followed me as the secretary brought me into his office. I should’ve known something was wrong when he called me “son” and offered me a piece of caramel. The principal said I could go home early if I wanted to, but what would I do back at the house? I would just end up sitting in front of the glass cabinet that held some of Grandpa’s greatest work, and think about how we would never need to expand the showcase; that those are all the paper airplanes Grandpa Eugene would ever make. I walked back into English class and Mr. Smith was teaching us Sonnet 18, but I learned that last year. So instead of listening, I folded last night’s homework, mimicking Grandpa’s motions. There is a certain feeling that takes over your body when you are finally able to fly the perfect paper airplane. I don’t know if I could even explain it in words; Grandpa Eugene probably could. You feel it in your fingertips and surprisingly also in your left big toe. I released it and wow. I was aiming for the trash but hey, I’ll have time to work on my craft during detention.

 

Nobody thought a tree could fly, but look at me go. I’m soaring.

 

 

Livvy Krakower is a high school senior from New Jersey. She has been previously published in Jewish Women of Words, The Writers Circle Journal, and others.

The front door swung open as if blown by a strong wind, and Grandma barged in, lugging a steel cage the size of her torso. Inside, a yellow cockatiel with orange-spotted cheeks and gray plumage stood on a wooden rod. Setting the cage on the kitchen table, Grandma cooed at it.

She had been acting strangely for months. Just last week, I was surprised by a stray dog sniffing at the refrigerator. For some inexplicable reason, Grandma had let it in, and I was the one who had to coax it out the front door.

Grandma called out in Chinese, “Look at the present I got you.”

Unable to feign disinterest, I walked over to examine the bird.

“What’s it for?”

“I thought you needed a pet. You look so bored.”

The bird squeaked, and I bent down to look at it through the bars. It was the size of a lemon and twitched at me with confused eyes.

From her shopping bag, Grandma pulled out a bag of birdseed and tossed it to me. I fumbled with it as if receiving an unwanted prize from a claw machine.

“Feed this to him every day and put fresh newspapers on the bottom of his cage so he doesn’t die.”

I would have rather had a new phone. Or a new bicycle. Or a bar of soap. But as I watched Grandma clap the dust off her shoes, I envisioned her journey from the conglomerate pet shop that smelled like sawdust to the bus stop with the dropping-covered bench. I imagined her awkward descent down the steep bus-steps and her trek through crowded intersections and past the barking bulldog in Mr. Miller’s yard on the way back to the neighborhood. Could I refuse such dedication?

Carrying the cage to my room, I passed by an oil painting of Mount Lu entrenched in white clouds, a towering reminder of Grandma’s childhood. It was one of the few things she brought over from her old Nanjing apartment, where the paint flaked off the walls. I set the cage on my desk, which overlooked the generic suburban neighborhood. I could fit the bird onto my bookshelf, but my science fiction books and treasured volleyball trophies would have to be removed.

I gave him toys: colorful wiffle balls and some Lego pieces. I gingerly offered him the birdseed. He plunged his beak into the hill of nourishment and nibbled. I named him Yu for euphoria because he squawked all evening.

A few weeks later, I came home from school and found Yu out of his cage, roosting on Grandma’s lap. Some balled-up tissues lay on the sofa, and a documentary on China displayed on the flatscreen. An open container of Haw Flakes lay on the coffee table along with an unfinished Sudoku puzzle. Our TV was twice as wide as Grandma’s old-style television in her tiny apartment back in Nanjing. The camera panned over the mystifying Shilin Stone Forest. I was about to make a remark when I heard raspy breathing. Grandma’s cheeks were watery and her eyes red.

“Are you sick? Is everything okay?” That sounded like what an adult was supposed to ask.

Grandma replied, “Ni ke yi ba niao fang zhou ma?” Can you put the bird away?

She placed Yu onto my fingers, and I carried him into my room. Seeing her cry was bizarre, as if I were watching her soul slipping down her face. I placed Yu inside the cage and listened until the crying had stopped.

That evening, Yu squawked continually in my room. Somewhere in my neighborhood, a kid was taking up the flute, and their unearthly screeches combined with Yu’s shrieking to create an ear-aching symphony. I tried to focus on my calculus homework, but the screaming noise was an auditory wound.

I stopped my pen. It was one of the queer things I didn’t normally notice: the sounds in my house. Before Grandma came, I’d blast my classical music on the Bluetooth speaker or watch old TV shows. But now I gave Grandma full reign of the television and wore headphones so she could nap undisturbed. During those days, noise came from my computer and Grandma’s television. Aside from the barest of communication for necessities, there was little organic sound besides that coming from Yu.

Unable to concentrate on homework, I carried Yu on my fingers to the backyard. The clouds had dissipated, and the dying orange sunset reflected off the windows. Standing in the shady spot next to the magnolia tree, I listened as Yu chirped incessantly just as he did on the first night. His food was provided for him, his shelter was given to him, his protection from predators was assured, and his only job was to sing.

Grandma’s window was open, but the flowery curtains were drawn. A phone rang, and Grandma’s voice sounded. I barely listened: “Alex loves the bird …. It chirps all day,” but she soon digressed into her aching joints, the lack of stinky tofu in San Jose, and the cost of noodles at Ranch 99.

“It’s too calm and quiet here. Back home, I could hear the cars, the motorcycles, and the noisy people. If I walk to the park and sit, I maybe see one, two cars, and one person walking a dog. It’s like being on an island waiting to die. Every day, I get up, watch TV, eat, and sleep.”

I knew she was a different person in Nanjing. She liked the country and fishing barefoot for freshwater eels. Now, she was a foreigner dropped into my living room. I almost felt guilty for her life like a prison inmate.

Just then, Yu leapt off my hand and flew through the two palm trees and into the sky. “Yu!” I called, while my mind scrambled to figure out how I had forgotten that birds’ wings grow back. He soared the updrafts and disappeared over the suburban houses. I dashed out the gate and out of my cul-de-sac until I reached the road, where the rush hour traffic flowed like the impassable Yellow River. My last sight of Yu was the setting sun glinting off his gray tail feathers as he flew over the six-lane road. It was the time of the year when it was still winter but close to spring. He could wither in the cold, unable to find food or shelter. Or he’d be eaten by some cat, I was sure.

When I told Grandma that Yu flew off, she scolded me, “Birds have wings! Did you think it would just sit there on your hand?! It protected you from bad luck, and now your luck has flown away.”

I stood there, not knowing whether to accuse her of wonky superstition or to apologize.

She handed me three twenty-dollar bills and said, “Buy a new bird on your own. But wait until you’re older, more responsible. It’ll bring your luck back.”

“Okay,” I said. I didn’t tell her that I didn’t want another bird, but I accepted the money, knowing I’d probably spend it on a used basketball hoop.

That night, Grandma caused a huge uproar with my parents.

“Who’s going to take care of you in China? Did we spend months getting you a Green Card just so you could tour America and go back home?” my mom bellowed.

They had had the same argument many times before. And on each occasion, I would pretend to continue my homework at my desk, or peruse a novel on the couch, staring at the black letters, but not reading.

I interjected suddenly, without the wave of boldness that I had been hoping for, “You get home every night, and you only see her sleeping, but don’t you know how bored she is? Could you watch TV on a couch every single day until you die?”

With grudging support from my parents, Grandma left the following month. She was received at the airport by relatives and returned to her old life in China.

A few years later, Grandma passed away in my aunt’s apartment in Nanjing. I often thought about her after she left, imagining she had settled back into her pleasant past life, talking to local market owners, going eel fishing with her neighbor, and falling asleep in a familiar bed in a familiar country.

The evening after we burned spirit money for Grandma, I was playing basketball in my driveway when I thought I saw Yu sitting in a tree across the street. It probably wasn’t him. The bird was plumper with shiny black eyes and smooth plumage. But the same orange spots dotted his cheeks. I cautiously approached him, but by the time I got to the tree, he had flown away. His chirping stayed with me as I went inside.

That night, I left my window open and thought about Grandma. I wondered if she received our money and what she would do with it.

 

 

Alex Zhang is a sixteen-year-old who lives in San Jose and attends Lynbrook High School. He loves reading novels, manga, poetry, and just about any piece of writing. Someday he hopes to write a novel about an alcoholic man trapped in a post-apocalyptic world struggling to find meaning in his life (it’s a work in progress).

So, this is what happened. People started, I don’t know, disappearing, I guess is what you’d call it. You can’t say dissolving, because that’d be slower. You can’t say melting, because there’s nothing left after they go. You can’t say dying, because there’s no body. My brother Warren called it deleting. The universe was deleting people; it was a computer, we were files. No saving, no backup, no recovery.

No one knows who the first to go was. There were rumors on the internet. Small threads on smaller forums. Comments on conspiracy sites. We all remember though when that news anchor, the pretty one—the chick with the, uh, the blonde hair and the botoxed lips? —got deleted live. One second there, the next, gone. Her clothes stayed in the air for a frame and then dropped, like that coyote that runs off a cliff and hangs in the air for second before he falls. Like that.

At first, we all thought it was a big joke. The slowest news week with the anchors trying to up their ratings with absolutely anything. Movie magic. The best CGI effects. But it wasn’t. Later, they tried to slow down the frames to analyze the deletion. They couldn’t get the cameras to go slow enough, or maybe it was just that fast.

Then more people were deleted. And more. Then it was a blame game for a while—Russia, China, North Korea, ISIS was using some new high-tech warfare. Then it was some sort of plague: a biological thing, a chemical thing, a physics thing. Then, as everything got crazier, as people got desperate, it was the aliens, ghosts, God.

For a while, it didn’t affect me, you know? Some anchor in some big city disappeared? Some ambassador overseas? A bunch of kids across the world? Just a bunch of randoms. It didn’t come in waves. Cities didn’t disappear at once. There weren’t symptoms. It’s just random.

Then in my physics class at Galfrey High, my friend Freddie, a pretty girl with all these beads in her braids got deleted in front of me. For a fraction of a second, her beads hovered in the air, and then came loudly crashing down on my desk, and then rolled, clattering on the floor. Everyone started screaming, except me. Any scream of mine was stuck in my throat like a sock, choking me.

Warren, my parents—no one knew who to talk to me about it. Warren had asked me afterwards what it had been like, in the tone he got when he called me a pearl-clutching bitch and pretended to dump my Ativan in the toilet. When he saw the next deletion at his basketball practice, he came home and apologized. Novel.

Dad tried to keep our spirits up, trying to talk up studying, career fairs, college apps. Mom shouted, “Just shut up! Shut up! There’s nothing left here! There’s nothing left!”

Warren reached a hand under the table to grab my wrist, fumbling along at my pulse until he grabbed my hand and squeezed hard like he was trying to shatter it.

People in town seemed to stop showing up—trying to run somewhere, anywhere, even though everywhere seemed to have this inexplicable plague. Or they just got deleted. Mom stopped driving and Dad started staying home. Warren said it was because Dad didn’t want Mom to be alone.

The world got quiet. Cars stopped rumbling because people stopped driving. Planes stopped flying for fear of deleted pilots. Radios replaced their music with a running requiem and a list of the newly deleted and a series of experts talking about everything we don’t know.

Mom stopped getting out of bed and Dad and Warren tried to compensate. Funny how the apocalypse ended up making Warren nicer.

Warren made a list once of all the people he knew in town. His best friend Ricky, his favorite teachers, all the kids on the sports teams, a bunch of old people around. More than half the names were crossed out. My name was at the top: Jamie, in his chicken scratch, He caught me sitting on the floor of our room, just clutching the list in my hand like a misshapen pearl. He just gently pried it out and refolded it along its creases slipping it into his back pocket.

I stole his bike and then came back alone. Added thirty names and crossed out twenty-seven. One of them was my psychiatrist’s.

I overheard Dad tell Warren one night: “You have to be strong.”

“Of course.”

“No,” Dad said, voice ragged, “You gotta be strong, War, because your mom—”

“Is she—?”

“No, but I need you to be ready for anything, okay? For Jamie.”

“What about Jamie?”

“Your mom and I, at any time, we could—”

“No. No, we’re not talking about this.”

I didn’t say anything and hadn’t in a while.

 

Warren was driving us home from the de facto last school day in March, listening to a biophysicist theorize the atoms making up people were just flying apart, saying, “The velocity of the force pulling apart—,” when she got deleted on air. Warren swallowed, turned off the radio, and put in a CD to sing along to.

We came home to our father’s apron on the kitchen floor, a boiled over pot on the stove, and a shattered mug in the living room.

Warren stopped in the foyer.

He sniffed hard, just once, and said as brightly as he could, “I’ll make dinner then.”

I knew how it must’ve happened. I’d seen more deletions by then than I have fingers and toes. I couldn’t say anything, not even for Warren. I haven’t talked much since Freddie, Todd, Richie, everyone really. There’s not much else to say. Not much to feel, either, except a little sick.

I just kept editing Warren’s list, imagined him saying, “This isn’t Schadenfreude, this is just masochism.”

I heard Warren cry at night, in his bed across the room. I’d never heard him cry before. I wondered if I should call him a pearl-clutching broken bird or offer him an Ativan. There wasn’t really an etiquette for this. He cried the next day, too, and the next, and begged me to say something, anything. All my words had been scooped out. My vocal chords had been extracted and became the crossed out names on creased and faded notebook paper.

Warren grabbed my hand and made me look at him in the dark. “Everything’ll be okay.”

 

Two days later, I woke up and Warren wasn’t in his bed. I collapsed on the floor, shrieking so long and so loud, I think I might have spittled blood from vocal hemorrhage.

“Jamie! Jamie, are you alright?!”

“You were gone.” The first thing I’ve said in weeks. “You were gone and I was alone.”

“I had to get food,” he said, and he’s crying again. That night Warren slept with me, back to back. I looked over every now and again to make sure he’s still there. I slept even less.

Eventually we went outside and walked along the empty streets of our little town. There’s a car crashed into a house, and another burned down. The wind howled in the quiet, screeching and pulling at us, the world wondering where all her people went. I don’t know, I wanted to tell her. No one knows. The shelves of the half-looted stores were half-empty and the air smelt rotten like the dead.

Warren couldn’t stand the silence. The world became too quiet for him. He sang all the songs he remembered and read aloud all the books he found even when he’s upstairs, cleaning for no one. Maybe it’s to remind me he’s still there. Maybe it’s to remind himself.

Months passed, days blurring together.

We watched a meteor shower in August and Warren tried to goad me into wishing on a star. He broke into a deleted neighbor’s house and stole his wine. We’re too young to drink, but we’re drunk. “We can’t die because we’re young,” Warren sang. He whispered in my ear as the meteoroids fly, “I don’t want the world to delete us.”

It’s not a secret, I didn’t say. But no one says it even though it’s true. That was true about a lot of things, before. Before.

“I’m sorry, Jamie,” he says in the heat, voice cracked and hoarse. I don’t know what he’s sorry for and I can’t ask. My words, like all the people, have been deleted. Backspaced. Undone.

Warren’s even clingier than usual as we crawled into bed, grabbing at my hands, my back, my chest and pressing himself as close as he can against me. I felt his heart pounding and his heavy breathing against my neck. He smelt like wine and Dad’s cologne. He nuzzled my neck and didn’t say, “Goodnight.”

When I woke up, I already knew.

 

 

B.L. Dansereau is a recent graduate from Johns Hopkins University with a bachelors in archaeology and a minor in classics, which makes her highly qualified to make fun of Indiana Jones, give impassioned speeches about the British Museum needing to repatriate all of its stolen artifacts, and watch vinegar dissolve mud off of quartz. She is a queer, disabled young woman with a fluffy fat cat named Echo, who is named for the nymph but joyously tries to repeat everything she says in meows. She writes to engage wholeheartedly with what it means to be human, which is also the same reason she entered archaeology at all – the Neanderthal who lost her bracelet on a mountainside in Portugal 30,000 years ago had a life and a wild story to tell that she desperately wanted to hear. B.L. has had one poem published in Lagan Poetry Press, and was, a lifetime ago, recognized by Scholastic Art & Writing.

 

Want to hear a story, baby girl? M’kay, I’ll tell you a story.

I’ve had my first love. It’s odd to think, because it was never something I looked for, never something I saw, never anything I’ll have again. Only something I knew in hindsight. He had wrinkles around his eyes when he smiled, and freckles in the summer. He was always steady, clear, shallow-water blue. I met him when we were eight and loved him until we were sixteen. I met him when his mama was pregnant with his youngest sister; you’re in the fourth grade now. Nine-years-old. I hope you know how excited he was to trace your little baby hands. To love your little baby lashes.

I never told him. He never told me. We didn’t have to, because we just knew, baby. We never kissed in the school yard, or held hands under desks, or touched at all. Just talked, talk, talking. You learn the smallest things with (for) your first love. You go out of your way to find out the middle names of everyone in their family. Connor. Patricia. You want to know what they’re thinking, all the time, what wishes and thoughts and sorrows are spooling ‘round their thrumming little heart. You think, they’re the most beautiful thing you ever saw. And they are, baby, they really are. Until the next beautiful thing.

The summer sun sets behind a powdered sky, and you see the same moon. You talk well into the night, when he’s in dust-red Utah and you’re here, and you’re both exhausted, but you’ll stay up for always if it means you get to keep talking. You won’t realize how fast always runs out. Don’t let it run out, baby girl. Don’t let it take your shine.

And something else happens, too.

Loves don’t begin or end in a moment. Loves are timelines without dates. Everything is ebb. Everything is flow.

You won’t ever really fall out of love with him, or her, or them, just learn to love someone else in a different way. You’ll feel guilty about that, but it’s okay. You never love the same way; it – the loving, the unloving – morphs each time, into its own lovely, pained shape. And you won’t be able to look each other in the eye anymore, because if you do, you might see that lovely, pained shape tucked away in the greener side, pooling beneath a mirrored pupil.  And you’ve worked so hard and long not to see that shape. An aching long time, baby.

And trust me, you’ll both wanna talk afterwards, when it’s ended, but you’re not sure what that means. Ended. Ended. How can something end when it never really began? You want to ask him. Her. Them.

But fear’ll hold your tongue tight and whisper untrue truths, and so a not quite something fizzles out into a not quite nothing. That will be with you forever. Beautiful, and sad, and it all really depends on what forever means to you.

He’s taller than me, now, baby girl. He’s stronger, and smarter, and he’s loved more and hurt more; you can see it in the way he holds his shoulders. Taut. Tense. Collar bones and cotton. You see? How his writing’s a little narrower, his beautiful mind, a little broader, and the world’s a little scarier. The wrinkles around his eyes (steady, clear, blue) are deeper, now.

I smooth them with my thumbs, just like this, baby girl; they melt into the miles of his skin. You feel it? Let it (me[us]) go, I whisper. Go to sleep. I hum (him, you, me, us) a lullaby; he wraps us in stardust. And in the nighttime, we fly away to where the remembered things go.

It’s quiet there.

 

 

Maya is a past tap dance princess, present book monster, and future movie maker. She believes radical empathy and pumpkin bread can heal the world.