In This Together

2500 words

In This Together

It had been one month since Kali had quit drinking, cold turkey—and she was about to crack.

            She and Joel walked side-by-side down a quiet street. The pavement radiated gentle warmth and traffic hummed softly in the distance. Buildings on either side of them faded into growing darkness. They were celebrating the one-month anniversary of her promise, and all Kali could think about was the single bottle her roommate had obligingly left for her.

            Joel’s voice came from beside her, distant. “Look, Kali, if you don’t want to be out—”

            “No.” She tossed him a smile over her shoulder. “I’m just tired. I’ll feel better soon.”

            Whatever she did, she couldn’t let him know how close she was to breaking her most important promise.

On their right, an empty stretch of parking lot lay in half-shadow. In the middle stood a collection of giant machines, their skyward-reaching arms black against the lingering orange in the sky. A Ferris wheel occupied the central space.

            “Look,” Kali said, pointing. “A carnival.”

            “Funny place for it,” Joel said.

            “Let’s go look.” Kali pivoted and strode across the asphalt.

She had reached the metal fence, hung with tattered flags, before she heard his footsteps behind her, then saw his white shirt beside her, luminous in the twilight. She scanned the carnival. Metal arms and pieces of rides lay everywhere.

            “Where are the people?” Kali asked. She leaned on the fence. Some of the lights were on—a spoke on a wheel here, an arch over a slide there—but most of the rides were dark. Long shadows entwined with each other.

            “Kali, are you mad at me?”

            “No,” she said lightly. She grabbed the barrier with both hands and hoisted herself up, swinging her legs over one at a time. “Come on. Let’s check it out.”

            “Wait, don’t you think it’s closed for a reason?”

            “Oh, come on. You could at least try to make this fun.”

            Joel hesitated, then followed.

            Kali grimaced at her attitude as she walked. In the empty aisles between the rides she could envision a throng of people, laughing and shouting. She stopped at the foot of the Ferris wheel.

The operator’s chair was empty, the gate unlocked.

“Someone could just...get on,” she said. “And start it. Look, the lights are even on.”

“Maybe the motor is busted,” Joel suggested.

“Maybe.” Kali looked up at the bright spikes of light outlining the wheel. She could almost smell the carnival food. Sickening.

Joel pulled out his phone and snapped a picture of the Ferris wheel against the orange sky. He spoke as he typed a caption for the picture.

“Remember when we ran into each other at that carnival? It was just like this one.”

It was hard to forget waking up from an alcohol-induced daze to someone you’d had a crush on for months. Later, she’d started to recover for him. Made promises to him.

Promises she could no longer keep.

“Yeah,” she said. She shoved her hands in her pockets and headed for a racing slide with four lanes. She felt sick—less with the thought of what she had planned than the thought of Joel’s reaction if he found out.

“Come on, Joel!”

She scaled the stairs leading to the top of the racing slide in seconds. She was going to enjoy herself right now. She owed it to him, to leave him with a good memory.

The sun had gone down, leaving the carnival lit by the few random lights that on the rides and the faint glow of faraway streetlights.

Joel stood at the bottom of the slide. “Kali, do you really think—”

“One slide, Joel, come on!” She grabbed a piece of carpet from a stack.

That’s when the lights clicked on.

Kali froze. “What did you do?”

            “I—did not do that.”

            Kali looked up at the rainbow of twinkling lights above her. They blinked rhythmically. “That’s weird, right?”

            “You should come down!”

            Kali dropped the carpet and kicked it into place. She tried to shake off the creeps as she settled onto it and bumped down the slide to the bottom, skidding into the padded plastic wall.

            “Look,” Joel said, pointing. Another spear of lights shot up into the now-dark sky—one spoke on the Ferris wheel that hadn’t been lit before.

            Kali shivered.

“Let’s go,” she said, tugging his sleeve.

            He didn’t resist. They struck off. But they’d only been walking for a minute before Joel hesitated.

            “Where’s the exit?”

            “We can go over the fence again.” Kali pulled him. The carnival was much larger than it had looked from across the parking lot, with many more machines. It shouldn’t be taking this long to get to the edge.

            Something clicked behind them. Kali jumped. Another scattered set of lights had flicked on—another spoke of the wheel, another ride.

            As if a switch had flipped in Kali’s body, her heart started racing. She needed out. Not until Joel gently pried her fingers loose did she realize how tightly she’d been holding his arm.

            “Glad we’re on the same page,” he muttered. He lengthened his strides. “It takes freaky abandoned carnivals to get you to hold my hand?”

            “Just keep going.”

            “They’re here!” someone shouted.

            Kali could have sworn the voice came from behind them. “Did you hear that?”

            Joel looked over his shoulder, squinting. “Probably someone across the parking lot.” He headed toward the admissions tent. It blocked the sporadic lights, so they walked through a shadow.

            “Wait, that’s the slide,” Kali said as they rounded the tent. She stopped. “We must have gotten—”

            They both jumped and stopped.

            At the top of the slide, silhouetted against the lights, stood a man. The lights made the wisps of greasy-looking hair around his head stand out like a halo. He was wearing baggy shorts and held one of the pieces of carpet in his hand.

            “It must have been him playing with the lights,” Joel said.

            The man spotted them at the same time. He tossed a carpet onto the slide and shot down. At the bottom, he stumbled off and staggered toward Kali and Joel.

            “He’s drunk,” Joel said under his breath. His tone was full of disgust.

            Kali’s hand loosened on his arm. Joel’s words cut straight to her heart. If he’d known what she had planned...

            The man stopped about fifty feet from them. “Hello,” he said. His voice was slurred and thick, but absurdly cheerful. “Welcome to the carnival.”

            Kali forced a smile as Joel responded slowly.

            “Uh, thanks. We’re actually on our way out.”

            “Oh no, don’t go. I love having guests.”

            “Are you the owner?” Joel asked. He pulled Kali to the side.

            “These rides are like a whole complex,” the man said. He smiled crookedly and staggered toward them. “Come and see.” He waved a bottle that Kali hadn’t seen before in a motion probably meant to be inviting.

            “We have to go,” Joel said. He pulled Kali aside and started walking.

            It’ll be a good story, Kali kept telling herself. A really, really weird story. Remember that time we ran into that random drunk guy in the empty carnival.

            Joel tensed beside her. She saw the man a split second later, sitting on a beam for the spinning car ride, leering at them.

            “Come on!” he called as they turned away. “Don’t run away again!”

            They got moving this time. Any hope of keeping a directional heading disappeared as they dodged a pile of crossbeams. Kali stumbled and dislodged one.

            Joel cursed as they turned the corner and saw him again, sitting cross-legged in the middle of the street. “Where is the exit?”

            They did an about-face again and ran for the Ferris wheel. Joel’s grip on her arm slackened until they were loosely holding hands, then running separately. Kali tried to keep an eye on Joel but he flickered in and out through random, pulsing streaks of light.

            Lights started to click out. Joel cursed again in front of her—the most profanity she’d heard from him since she’d met him.

            Then she lost him in darkness.

            “Joel!” she shouted. She couldn’t see him anywhere. She kept running, but in the dark she stubbed her toe on something and staggered. She hit something soft, like the canvas side of a tent, and fell through it.

            “You’re here!”

            Kali rolled to her feet, rubbing her sore shoulders. There was a soft click, and a flashlight propped on its end burst to life. Kali stood inside a small tent filled with trestle tables and boxes. Behind the flashlight, his face illuminated from below, stood the drunk man. He had a bottle in his hand and he was grinning.

“I never have visitors!” the man said. He left the flashlight and came toward Kali, grinning. He held out his hand for a handshake.

Close up, he didn’t look as threatening, Kali thought. He was probably friendly when he wasn’t drunk. She carefully shook his hand.

Had Joel heard her call for him?

The man was so close she could smell the bottle in his hand—a warm, familiar smell that she constantly fought thinking of. And she didn’t know where the door was. Had there even been a door? Or had she just fallen through the canvas?

The man carefully poured a small glass out of the bottle and held it out to her in a shaking hand. “Have some? We can talk.”

“I’m good, thanks,” she said cautiously. Her shoulders were so rigid her neck hurt. She wanted it. But she’d promised. She’d promised Joel.

The grin faded from the man’s face.

“Have some,” he said, shoving it toward her. Some slopped over.

“I’m...on a diet,” she lied. Even she didn’t believe it. He wouldn’t.

The smile slowly transformed into a frown.

She wanted to take it. Her fingers twitched. She was planning to have some later anyway.

She couldn’t locate the door without turning. She kept her face full toward the man, unsure how he would react. She hoped her voice wasn’t trembling too much.

“Kali!”

She didn’t dare call for Joel. What if the man flipped on her?

            “Kali!”

            “I need to go,” Kali said. “My boyfriend needs me.”

            “Have some,” the man said roughly, stumbling toward her. His grin had returned. He pushed the glass into her hand.

            Kali lurched backward, away from the man’s sudden nearness, and let the glass fall to the floor. It splintered. Her stomach dropped as she watched its contents slop all over the floor. What a waste, she thought, then stopped herself.

            The man watched it fall. Then his eyes traveled from the shards of glass up to Kali’s face. His own face contorted into something midway between anger and grief.

            “How could you?” he exploded. “How could you?”

            Kali let out a stifled scream, afraid he was going to come at her, but he grabbed another glass and poured the rest of his bottle into it, shoving it into her hands.

            “Have some!” he yelled.

            With nowhere to go, Kali took a deep breath and raised the glass to her lips. There was no sense getting hurt for a silly little promise she was going to break anyway--

            As soon as the contents hit her tongue she knew she was a goner. The old longing came rushing back. She felt like crying. She’d let everyone down. It hadn’t been very long ago that she’d thought she could beat it all by herself.

            The drunk man watched her. Slowly, his anger melted, but he didn’t recover his cheerfulness.

            Kali stopped, desperately trying to hand the glass back. She backed away from the man, conscious of the stink that filled the place and the dim light and suddenly afraid.

He followed her, refusing to take the glass back.

            “Have some more. Come on. I don’t have friends in often.”

            The worst part was that she wanted to so badly. She stopped moving and raised the glass again.

            Everything happened quickly. There was a rush of air behind her. A pair of arms wrapped around her body. The glass flew from her hand, slinging liquor everywhere, and smashed into the ground. She stumbled sideways.

            And then Joel had ahold of her and he was pulling her out, dragging her away from the tent, toward the fence.

            “The police are coming; are you okay?” he yelled as Kali got her feet under herself. He shoved the crowd barrier aside and pulled her out into the dark parking lot until his momentum faded, and then he tried to hold her. “You scared me, Kali. Don’t you ever—”

            “I’m sorry,” she said, swallowing a sob. She pushed him away, repulsed by his touch. He’d come for her instead of waiting for the police. Suddenly her plans for the rest of the night hung on her like a forty-pound weight around her neck.

            “Shhh.” He took her hand instead. “It’s okay.”

            “No, it’s not; I took it; I wanted it so bad and I took it—”

            “That’s okay. That’s normal.” He rubbed his finger back and forth over her knuckles. The lights of the little carnival winked out one by one.

            At his touch, she knew she had to tell him. “Joel?”

            “Yeah.”

            Kali took a deep breath and told him everything.

When she was done, he held out his arms and wrapped her in them. “Baby, thank you for telling me. It’s okay. It’s a process.”

            Kali shook her head.

            “I’m here for you, remember? We’ll figure it out. I’m proud of you. And I’m glad you’re safe.”

            Kali pulled away and crossed her hand over her stomach. He was too good for her.

            “Kali.”

            Kali wouldn’t verbalize it to him. But she had failed. Failed him, failed her counselors, failed everyone who’d worked so hard to get her out of her addiction and all the problems it had caused her. She’d have to start over.

            “Kali. I’ve worked too hard and you’ve worked too hard to give up right now.”

            Kali listened to the soft pleading in his tone. She’d heard him like that one too many times. She’d had headaches and taken her anger out on him because she couldn’t have what her body craved. She’d kept him up till the small hours, video chatting her, to keep from going out or going crazy.

            “One sip and some craving doesn’t change how I feel about you,” he said.

            It didn’t change how she felt about him, either. It only changed how she felt about herself.

            She turned back to him. He was a shadowy figure in the dark and he looked forlorn. She went to him and let him wrap his arms around her.

            “I’ll always be here,” he said into her hair.

            “I don’t deserve you,” she said into his chest.

            “We’ll beat it.”

            It was Kali’s one-month anniversary of swearing off alcohol, and she was going to beat the addiction.

Tick

1000 words

Tick

There’s always a clock, solemnly clicking on to your death in the branches of a dead oak tree.

You search for the clock in this endless misty land, the clock that drills into your head with every click. It’s in a different place every time. It comes at 5:07, the only constant here.

A thick atmosphere drags at your body. Abandoned buildings tower around you. Cars sit in orderly lines in the traffic circle and it rains from a blue sky and bird-shaped shadows swoop around you. The rain changes to papers falling straight from the sky like rocks.

A statue stands at the corner of the plaza, barring your way. It’s covered in a stack of papers.

You avoid it.

           

Following the road the other way, you look over your shoulder. The statue stands there looking at you--a pudgy, soft teddy bear, striped in brilliant colors, smiling a little. Its eyes are giant and vacant and they stare different directions. It was not there when you walked down the road.

You dodge through perfect, rigid rows of dead cars, your feet shuffling through piles of medical charts. Maybe inside the hospital that looms ahead you can escape the paper rain.

           

Inside, you trip over an extension cord. Beeping surrounds you, pressing on your body. The statue is sitting on a chair in the corner. It’s holding a digital clock that reads 4:51. You think the statue’s eyes move, but you can never be sure.

The hidden clock ticks. Tick. Tock.

A doctor approaches the bed in the middle of the room. He is a tall man and he holds a clipboard with more medical papers. He leans over the bed and speaks to the person on it. Then he looks at you and holds out the clipboard. You cannot see his face.

For a moment, you stand still. Two, three, four breaths. You listen to your gut, deep inside--the voice that says you’ve done this all before.

You reach out and take the clipboard, your hands shaking. You look down at the scrawl, listen to the doctor’s voice, but you can’t make out any words, written or spoken.

You don’t need to. He’s telling you the cancer has spread. He’s telling you she has two weeks to live.

I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, the doctor chants.

           

You drop the clipboard. The words are like a weight on your shoulders, pulling you down, and you slump forward, grabbing the edges of the bed for support, your eyes closed. The metal rail is thin and hard under your palms. There is not enough air in the room.

Something compels you to open your eyes. You know what will be there, but you can’t avoid it. So you try not to look for too long. She died with her eyes open and no one has closed them yet.

The statue stands by the door, the only way out. You make eye contact and something jolts in your gut. You leave by the other door. Halfway down the corridor, you realize you are still holding the clipboard, but do not stop.

A heavy metal-and-glass door leads to a forest. Here, the ticking of the clock fills reality to bursting. You still have the clipboard in your hands, covered in charts and red lines that fill your head.

The clock is close, and it is closer. You can sense its footsteps behind you.

It already came, you tell yourself. For her. Not for you. For some reason, your insides still quiver.

You find the clock, nestled in the branches of an oak tree with ancient, gnarled roots that cling to the side of a crumbling cliff. The clock hangs suspended over the drop.

The clipboard gets in your way as you start to climb, maddened by the constant ticking. You drop it and try not to watch it as it disappears.

If you look back, the statue will stop moving. You don’t want to see it changing places without moving. You don’t look.

The branches end. Beyond you, they stretch brittle twigs over the abyss. The wind rocks you up and down in thin air. You reach for the clock and brush it with your fingertips as the second hand clicks over. 5:00.

The steady ticking that has haunted you all day stops. Branches creak, the only sound as you sway up and down. Your gut clenches so tightly you have to grab a spray of twigs to stay balanced.

           

It’s there. The statue. You edge away as it begins to climb. It’s covered in copies of the chart that told you your wife had two weeks to live. It scoots up the trunk of the tree toward you in dead silence, its eyes pointed different directions. Medical forms--death certificates--swirl around you.

You scoot farther back, ignoring the crackle of smaller branches as much as you can. The branch can’t hold you much farther.

The branch barely sways as the statue approaches. You can hardly see the statue through the storm of death certificates floating like giant snowflakes around your head. Thick, unreasoning panic settles into your stomach.

You know it’s going to happen, but when the statue’s head thrusts between the papers, so close you could feel its breath, if it were breathing, you scream. The twigs give under your weight and you fall. Time seems to stretch out and the whole motion is centered in your gut, stretching it, twisting it, as you scream without making a sound at the silent statue head looking down, watching you fall through a sea of death certificates. You wonder if you will ever hit the bottom.

Everything goes black. In the blackness, something tugs at you, calling your name, and you wonder if you will wake up.

You wake up in the middle of a city. Empty cars line the pavement in orderly rows. From all around you echoes the ticking of a clock, counting down to 5:07.

Tick.

Tock.

Red Handed

300 words

Red-Handed

Sir,

Operatives “Rory” and “Cheddar” were apprehended last night at 1900 hours. We have provided transcripts of their interviews for your review.

 ****

Rory: Here’s what happened. They left it out. But I’m minding my own; if they catch me, they’ll lock me outside forever and ever. But anyway Cheddar comes in and he’s smelling like poop and dirty laundry and I can’t help checking him out, like do you know how great that stuff is—

Interviewer: Stay focused.

R: Sorry. Anyway he says, “Want it, boy?” and I tell him no but he keeps pushing me and shows his claws and do you know how sharp his claws are? I’m afraid for my life, I met this chick one time, her mother had been—

I: Sir.

R: Oh, sorry, anyway his claws are wicked sharp so I had to do it and—that’s him! The little rascal!

Interview terminated due to subject’s excessive distress.

****

Cheddar: Don’t believe a word. Here’s what happened. The poor kid’s in pain. I mean, real pain. I feel so cruel now, but you know, a little fun never hurt. I walk up to him and I ask does he want it? The kid starts drooling. He can hardly contain himself, right? I’m up on the counter, I don’t quite trust him, and suddenly he jumps! Kid’s got wicked teeth. I’m not sure whether he’s going for me or the burgers, and I jump back about to smack him—self-defense, you know—and then he has the burgers in his mouth and it’s too late.

He’s probably trying to blame me for putting him up to it, isn’t he? It would be just the kind of thing—

****

            Subjects have been detained, pending further evidence. The burgers have not been recovered. Please advise us of the next moves. –Station 38372.

Scorched

Word count: 750

Scorched

I do not have time for this.

The dragon’s leathery wings wrap over its body and my finger; it snarls at me as I try to shake it off. The talons scratch the skin beneath my gold ring. A tiny wisp of smoke wafts up from its nostrils.

“Get off,” I mutter, its body heat scorching my finger. It purrs and clings tighter.

I open the drawer of the till and hold it over it, shaking it a little, closer to the scattering of gold coins in the till.

“You little—” I should be opening the shop doors, not prying a dragon off my finger. Can’t customers be more responsible with what’s in their bags?

It spots the gold in the till and flops into it. Grabbing the nearest coin between its claws, it rolls over and hugs them to its smooth, snakelike belly. A plume of smoke rises from its nostrils.

Just another problem, I think, twisting my ring as I open the shop. Getting the little beastie out of the till at the end of the day will be difficult.

My apprentice does not appear before the supply caravan comes. I snap my account book closed. This shop is more trouble than it’s worth, sometimes.

It takes the whole day to settle the new inventory in the shop, indulge the camel drivers’ trading customs, and get them back on the road. Thankfully, no one comes to the shop. My apprentice still does not appear.

I reenter the shop and groan.

The dragon. Now cat-sized, it sits among the splintered shards of my till, its talons full of gold coins. It looks up and coos as I stop dead in the middle of the floor.

It is angry when I try to pick it up; gold rustles against its belly as it gathers the small pile beneath it. Its teeth have grown appreciably. It sneezes, catching a whiff of the peppercorns I spilled on myself, and a lick of flame darts from its mouth.

I think of my father-in-law, who helped train the battle dragons in his day. He could help me get this thing out of my shop. But it is dark now, and he will be abed. A thought flashes through my mind and I watch the dragon contentedly lower its head to the floor.

I dig out my secret stash of gold, the small bag I keep for emergencies. The dragon’s head pops up as I jingle the coins. It cocks its head like a puppy. Then, like a puppy chasing a bug, it pounces, bounding into the storeroom after the bag of gold, and I close it in and leave it for the night.

The sun rises on the ruin of my life.

The dragon sits in a smoking pile of charred wood and embers, steam rising from its sides into the air. Abandoned buckets lay scattered among the ruins.

            It happened quickly, they tell me. Just before sunup. Someone heard a terrible sound, and a moment later the building was afire. It lasted about an hour, not even enough time to come fetch me.

I should be devastated. I pick my way through the steaming embers and come face-to-face with the dragon.

It growls softly, its teeth half-hidden by the thin cloud of smoke hanging above its head.

“You bastard,” I whisper to it. It looks me in the eye. I would almost swear it smiles. Beneath it lies the small hoard of gold I kept in the shop—all of it. One look at the dragon’s eyes and I know it won’t leave the hoard alone. No way I’m getting that back. It’s almost as large as me, now that it has been sitting on the gold overnight, and I don’t dare approach it closely enough to get my gold back.

Thank goodness that wasn’t everything. I look it in the eye again. It rumbles deep in its throat.

“Keep it,” I say.

The little dragon that started off no bigger than my finger has grown as large as me and ruined my business. I regret the shop a little—my father built it from the ground up when he was my age. But I do not regret it that much. Not enough to rebuild.

The soft, contented growl of the dragon echoes softly off the walls of the buildings as I head down the street toward home. Time to start over. Somewhere new. Somewhere exciting. Somewhere profitable.

Time to start over.

I Never Knew

1900 words

I Never Knew

Will you be okay tonight?

I’ll be fine, why wouldn’t I be?

I just don’t want you to be melancholy on your birthday.

You always use the funniest words. Melancholy.

You know what I mean. Call me when you start feeling down.

I’m sitting atop my duvet with a glass of red wine, a blue scrapbook on my lap. Brian left an hour ago, leaving me to wash the dishes in peace. It left me a lot of time to think--to be melancholy.

I’ve just turned thirty, and I’m in the mood for memories. My cat curls up next to my leg, lazily swatting the flicks of sunset light that bounce off the shiny pages as I open the scrapbook. I run my fingers over the sharp edges of the pictures, remembering.

            I open to a grainy old photo. It’s me--skinny, leggy, gap-toothed, my hair in tight pigtails that stick straight out above my ears. I’m clutching a puppy so tightly I can almost see its eyes bugging out. I close my eyes.

****

            I hear his car pulling up in the driveway and I run for the door, eager for him to grab me off my feet and swing me above his head until my wispy hair touches the doorframe. I remember the smell of the sunshine and the hot glare of the pavement outside--it must be July or August. Daddy has his hands behind his back. Suddenly nervous, I stop short.

            “Jamie,” he says, and I hear something in his voice I haven’t heard before. “Jamie--”

            I wait. My mother puts her arms around me from behind. They are cold and her skin is damp from washing. “Jamie,” she says into my ear. “We brought you something. But you have to be very careful with it and take good care of it yourself.”

My father slowly brings his hands out from behind his back. In them sits a squirming puppy, round-bellied and soft, pink skin showing through the fine hair. I open my mouth and squeal so high I stop making noise. I lunge for the puppy and wrap it in my arms, not caring that it squirms. It licks my face and I think I might faint with happiness.      

            My father kneels down, looking straight into my eyes. His eyes are wet as he watches me cuddle the puppy. “Now you’re big enough to have this responsibility. You have to take care of it.”

            “Yes!” I squeal. “She can have a pink collar!”

            Daddy tries to explain to me that Natasha is a boy. But all I remember is Mommy sinking onto the couch, watching us and crying. The sound of her sobs is as real to me as the warm, soft fur on the puppy’s belly. I remember falling asleep that night to soft puppy breaths on my cheek and Mommy’s sobs in the next room.

****

            Before I met Brian, I didn’t know that parents often give their children gifts to cover up the rifts that are growing between them. I never realized that Mom and Dad were moving apart, even then. To me, they were just two proud parents who’d made their little girl very happy.

****

My fingers brush over another picture, bringing back a sharp smell of disinfectant and white tile. People are everywhere--tall, gangly kids in braces and graphic tees and too-short pants, short, childish kids in braces with spiky hair. Puffs of perfume and cologne assault my nose. I hold my two thin spiral notebooks close to my chest, trying to hide the growing sweat stains I feel under my arms, as I search the endless progression of tiny metal plaques for my room number.

            I find it. The teacher is tall and has his hair slicked back, wearing a tee shirt and jeans with sneakers. He smiles at me as I walk in and I feel myself blushing. I smile back and make my way to a desk in the back. Everyone else in the room is head and shoulders taller than me and already talking in small groups. They look at me sideways. I move toward my desk and, like a shark swimming through a shoal of fish, I clear a path through the 6th-grade science class of Room 554, leaving me alone in a pocket with the teacher smiling at everyone but me.

            I drop my books on the floor when I try to put them in my desk and everyone stares at me as I pick them up, hundreds of fish eyes staring right at me, unblinking. They don’t make a sound but I can hear their laughter beneath their unsmiling faces.

****

            I pull out the picture, grimacing, and tuck it away toward the front of the book. Middle school was a difficult time. It was difficult for everyone, I supposed. I always thought that I’d just forgotten my deodorant that day. Before I met Brian, I didn’t know that I must have been experiencing a developmental delay in my growth and coordination.

I pull a picture out of the binding of the album. It must have fallen and gotten tucked away. It shows the perfect summer day, the grass a vivid shade of green.

****

I’m barefoot and I can feel the sponginess of the ground beneath the thick grass. We’re all wearing white and Mommy is holding onto me, trying to keep me from running off and spoiling my dress. She doesn’t have to hold on to me. The dress is the prettiest thing I’ve ever worn and if I stain it, Mommy will be upset. She’s been crying a lot recently and she’s gotten angry too. Natasha sits down a few yards ahead of us and starts pulling at the white ribbon around her collar. I call her back and she comes obediently.

            Mommy has not said a word to Daddy the whole day. She looks like she’s been crying. I don’t want to ask her about it because she spent two hours in the bathroom doing her makeup and if I make her cry again she’ll smudge it. So I don’t ask. Last time, she cried and then she yelled at me. Just a little; she was very upset. I don’t want to upset her--today is our family picture day!

            It’s hard to keep my eyes open because the sun is shining into them. But the photographer is nice and takes a thousand pictures. She gives me a sucker when she’s done.

            “We’re bound to have gotten one nice one,” she says as my parents give her a tip.

It takes forever to walk back to the car. I’m hungry and I wish my parents would hurry. They don’t, though. They just look at the ground when I tell them to hurry up.

            Daddy doesn’t open the car door for me like I’m a princess, bowing and helping me up with his hand. He just opens the door. I get in and buckle myself into my car seat. When I look up, Mommy is crying and there’s a streak of black makeup on her hand.

            “Mommy,” I say softly, waiting for her to get upset at whoever made her cry.

            “Might as well tell her now,” Daddy says. He’s holding the steering wheel with both hands and he doesn’t make vrooming noises when he starts driving.

            Daddy always makes vrooming noises when we pull away. Something is wrong. My stomach hurts and I feel like crying, but I try hard not to. Mommy needs me to listen. Natasha puts her head in my lap.

            “Baby,” Mommy says. “I have to move away. I can’t live with Daddy anymore.”

            For a second I think I might throw up. “Why?” I ask.

            “Daddy has done some very bad things.”

            Daddy’s hands hold tight to the steering wheel. I try not to cry but the tears hurt my throat. They buy me ice cream and I pet Natasha’s head, but it doesn’t help. I’m sick for days. A few days later, Mommy gives me the picture as she kisses me good-bye. It’s the most perfect picture of our family we’ve ever taken.

****

            Mom told me later that Dad cheated on her with a lot of other women. But I never knew that he probably cheated to relieve the stress of raising me while they both worked. I never knew...until I met Brian. It explained so much.

I hold the family picture as I turn the page. I pause over one on the second-to-last page of the album, touching it with my fingertips.

****

I’m standing outside, in front of a cluster of vines loaded with flowers. My hair is blowing in the warm breeze, covering my face. I’m laughing, a corner of a neon sign poking out from behind my head. I’m blissfully unaware of how much that coffee shop will change my life.

I step inside, hit with the warm, grassy smell of coffee and tea and essential oils. My friend heads to the restroom and I study a menu, scrawled in messy chalk calligraphy on a dusty board. I’m frowning over an iced or hot drink when he walks in and sits down at the counter, talking easily with the barista. He’s eye-catching, cute, with thick brown hair and a beard and a ratty, colorful sweater. His smile is a mile wide. My friend comes back and catches me staring and we laugh together, self-consciously smoothing our hair behind our ears.

It doesn’t take long for him to notice us. He orders another coffee and drums his fingertips on the counter while he waits. He winks over his shoulder at us.

As the barista hands him his coffee, her hand bumps the register. A little coffee sloshes out onto his hand. He jerks his hand away and slaps the counter, spitting profanity. My friend looks at me and giggles. “That must have hurt,” she says, swirling her own drink and taking another sip.

When I look back at him, he’s smiling, showing the barista all his teeth as he helps her mop up the puddle. He drops a dollar bill in the tip jar as he walks away.

“Hey,” he says, stopping by our table. “You look like new friends to me.”

He buys another coffee and sits down with us and smiles and laughs and chats. He’s charming, sweet, caring. He asks questions and listens genuinely to us, and he puts us right at our ease. When he leaves, he asks very politely for my number.

****

I pull the picture out of the album and smile at myself. If I’d known I’d meet him when I stepped inside, would I have looked different? Less carefree, more nervous? More relieved?

Meeting Brian has changed me. I hold the picture and look at it as the light fades and my wine gets warm on the table beside me. He helped me talk. He opened up my past. I’d always thought I got away with a pretty good life. But no one really understands how much childhood events affect adult behaviors. I’d thought I had a couple of sad things happen in my life, but I didn’t realize how much they’d really happened to me. How much they really hurt me.

I sigh and put the picture away, a faint shiver going through me.

Call me if you start feeling down, he said.

I run my fingers over the pictures. Their brilliance has faded a little. The feel of them beneath my fingertips fills me with...melancholy. I pick up the phone.

Before I met Brian, I never knew how much I never knew.

The Bridge

1200 words

The Bridge

I hold my breath as I approach the bridge at the edge of the world. He is moments ahead of me. The brilliant birds sing of a stranger beneath the trees. The shy jungle cats cry he has passed.

            I need not return home, the Grandmothers say, if I am not bold enough to take him, the last of his kind remaining on our world, before he crosses the bridge.

            I catch glimpses of his tawny body through the trees. The trigger on my blowpipe bulges beneath my fingertip; I raise it from my side as the trees thin around me. We near the bridge. The trees break, and he starts across the clearing, running fast and low.

            I break cover, pushing through a spiderweb covered in bright, jewel-toned drops, and shout.

            “Hey!”

            He freezes, one foot on the bridge.

            Glistening and slick, the bridge springs from the brilliant green side of the canyon, stretching into the hazy distance without suspension or pillar. Against the rainbow of sunlight glaring off it, his coloring is dim and tame. He eases his foot off the edge.

            I raise the blowpipe to my lips. The red sunlight flashes in tiny points off it as my hand trembles. My hand always trembles.

            His eyes meet mine across the space between us. His are brown, and they catch and reflect the light like the surface of a pool, all sharp twinkling points.

            I come from a race of mighty hunters. We have hunted his species all our lives. I learned it from my mother, and she learned it from her mother and she learned it from her mother, forever and forever into eternity. My finger tightens over the trigger button.

            He speaks.

            “You don’t know what you’re losing,” he says.

            My free hand flies to my translator, sitting just inside my ear. I tap it, my heart pounding—I turned it off an hour ago. The blowpipe drops to my side.

            “Please don’t shoot.”

            His voice is soft, smoother and deeper than anything I have heard before among the women in the city. It rumbles. It resonates in my bones.

            “Where did you learn to speak my language?” I demand. “The Grandmothers—”

            “The Grandmothers are wise,” he says. His body is rigid and upright and his sparkling brown eyes do not leave mine. If it were not for the voice, for the flat, square body—

            I cut myself off. He is still speaking.

            “They do not remember everything.”

            “They tell the ancient stories back a thousand years,” I say, shaking off the hypnotic pull of his voice. He is wrong.

            “They have forgotten what they once were.”

            Only once before have I hunted a creature—a tiger—with such eyes, large and innocent and frightened. I killed him right before he leaped at me. His words distracted me, flattering, fascinating words in an animal tongue through the translator I had forgotten to turn off. I swore I would make no similar mistake. Not with Man. Not with any other beast.

            I raise the blowpipe once again to my lips. My hand shakes so I can hardly sight down the barrel. The thought of killing a creature that speaks my language, that looks so unnervingly like me, sits like a hot pebble in my stomach.

            “You’ll never know, if you kill me,” he says, and I press the trigger.

            The little yellow feathers at the end of my dart never appear in his neck. His eyes meet mine, wide and smooth and no longer sparkling.

            The blowpipe slips from my fingers. I have missed. The blowpipe cracks as it hits the ground.

            “What were they before?” I ask. I can hardly force the words out.

            “We were all the same.”

            His curious voice, of all the jungle creatures the closest to my own, yet so different, holds my ear spellbound.

            “Before the Grandmothers,” he explains, “there were spacemen. They came and built cities and left ancestors. We were all the same, then, your people and mine.”

            I look down to my cracked blowpipe, lying half-hidden in the jungle grass at my feet. I pick it up.

            “Your kind always tells that story,” I say. I can hear the Grandmothers’ rebukes for the broken blowpipe and empty hands even now. Without a weapon, I realize how much larger he is than me, and I wonder how fast he can move.

            “What lies beyond this bridge?” he asks suddenly.

            “Chaos,” I answer, sliding my fingers into the chamber of the blowpipe and extracting my spare dart. I handle it with my fingertips, careful not to get the poison under my skin. The answer is the one the Grandmothers give the first time they take their daughters to see the bridge at the edge of the world.

            “Did they tell you that?”

            My answer hurts the back of my throat, so I do not make it.

            “Just a yes or no,” he says. His voice is thick and warm like fresh milk.

            “Yes,” I mutter.

            “Look,” he says. He turns and points; across the chasm, rising above the wet jungle haze, stretch five long, jagged fingers of glass.

            “They’re buildings,” he says. “Left by the spacemen who came before the Grandmothers. When we were all one.”

            I stare out over the chasm at the glinting buildings, my mouth open.

            I can’t believe I’m talking to him. Believing him. My prey. The Grandmothers would be furious. But why is it they would not tell us if such a thing were true?

            “How do you know?” I ask.

            “We, too, have our stories,” he says. He puts one foot back on the bridge. The skinny length of it begins to bounce up and down under his weight.

            I stare out across the chasm, across the mist, into the endless distance. “A city?” I ask.

            “Yes.”

            Impossible.

            “Why are you going?”

            “Because the Grandmothers have forgotten,” he says, “what it is like to be one.”

            I look again into his wide eyes, and a little hot longing awakens inside me to see what he will see and to hear the ancient stories still more ancient than my own.

            “And you will find out?” I ask.

            “Perhaps we can learn it again.” He shrugs. I wonder if he might be right, that we and Man were one in the years past.

            I look at the yellow dart I have concealed in my hand. The Grandmothers will be angry when I come home empty-handed. I will tell them that I dropped my blowpipe. I will tell them he escaped. They will be angry but it will pass.

            “Watch for it,” he says, turning back to the bridge. His back is broad and his neck exposed.

            I look at the dart and drop it to the ground. He steps out onto the bridge, bouncing up and down with the chasm winds. And then he disappears, and the bridge is still, and I have failed. Far in the distance, the fingers of glass buildings poke up into the sky.

            Without taking my eyes off them, I place my own foot onto the slick glass surface of the bridge and commit myself to the chasm winds.