OHIO, 2013
You wake up early now. You want to have time to make coffee, drink it on the porch, psst psst at the possum that lives in the compost, and go back inside to mope in Kay’s bed before anyone else wakes up. You know it’s not okay to mope in your dead ex-girlfriend’s bed. Of course you know that, but you do it, and today Mercy walks in on you. She just stands in the doorway until you notice. You wonder how long she’s been there. “I came to tell you Jason Molina died,” she says, and as she talks she shifts in the doorway, changing her grip on the doorframe like she has something she doesn’t really want to say. “You have to stop doing this.” You follow her gaze to Kay’s blaring record player and understand she means the shitty music but also this, the whole situation of you being in a dead person’s bed, staring up at the water stain on the ceiling. Kay used to draw ragged outlines around it in different colored sharpies, marking its creeping growth. “I want you to stop,” Mercy says finally. She leaves and doesn’t close the door. You understand, you do. “Get over yourself,” you say, testing it out. “Now. Get over it.” You sound bitter. You think of Josy, telling you her therapist scolds her for negative self-talk. You try to imagine a therapist, but can’t, and in a helpless reaction that feels like peeling back a scab, you see Kay’s face, floating in the water stain. Her lips curl, sweet, and when she says, “Get over yourself. I did,” you don’t have to wonder if Kay ever wanted to be better than she was, kinder or softer to you or anyone, because you know she didn’t.
You’re a bartender, and you have a shift today. Get up and go to BAR!
You skip work. Tom will understand. You want espresso, so you walk to DEJA BREW
You forget about work. Prior invites you to the CHURCH OF ETERNAL DAMNATION
BAR!
You bike over to BAR! and the familiar race down the hill, past the cemetery, under the freight train bridge clears your head. You lock up your bike in the alley and soon you’re pouring whiskey for day drinkers, mostly no one, and thinking, Kay has been dead for four months. When she died it was snowing, and now there’s a sluggish humidity everywhere, every body crawling with its own slug trails of sweat. You can’t shake the heavy lock of winter from your mind, the dreamy snowfall. The day after it happened, you went to work in that snow fugue, and the whole bar went quiet, staring at you, until Tom pulled you aside and whispered that you should go home. But he’s forgotten now and so has everyone. It’s summer and every bartender has a dead ex-girlfriend. Now your friend Justine walks in and says, “What are you doing here?” You tell her you’re working. Justine waves this off. “Sure. Come to my house burning party. And give me a gin and tonic.” You make her a gin and tonic. You say something dumb about burning a church being sacrilege. Justine shrugs. “Not if you’re only burning false icons. The portraits of Dyl I painted last year are going up, not the whole Church.” Justine and Dyl both live at the Church of Eternal Damnation, the only punk house in town trying to be something it’s not, which is a bona fide Satanic Temple. They want the tax break. You ask when Justine plans to start the fire. You don’t want to see Dyl’s naked body, even done up in tasteful oils. You’d rather go home and stare into the void. “Now, I guess,” Justine says. “Let’s go.” You close her tab and walk out before your shift ends, but Tom doesn’t say anything. He does remember. You know that.
It’s nice to feel wanted. You’ll hang out with Justine, then go home to the CESSPIT
You can’t make yourself. You’re tired. Jason Molina is dead. You go home, GHOST everyone.
DEJA BREW
Your entire diet is coffee and toast and you don’t care. You haven’t felt awake without espresso in years. You leave the Cesspit where you live and cross the street to cut through the car graveyard. This is the most direct route to espresso. You pick your way around spiky weeds and rusting cars, their windshields all labeled with whatever is salvageable about them. Your favorite car, everyone’s favorite, is GOOD TRANS, and the graffiti on its rusted body shows this. Past the graveyard, you take the alley to Deja Brew. You get a sense of it. Before you go inside you steel yourself to see at least an ex or maybe worse, because everyone in town is always here. You push open the door and order this week’s weird latte from Jamie. He’s new to town, not quite thirty, with no romantic connections or feuds—everyone wants to fuck him. “You want a shot of cardamom?” he says. “Not to be weird, but I’m so sorry.” You just stare at him. “About your girlfriend? Josy told me there was an accident.” You don’t answer, because someone grabs your waist and says, “Hey, man.” It’s just Josy, but the kick of rage still pulses through you, catching you by surprise. “You hear about Jason Molina?” you say. You want to see her flinch a little. You want to ask why the fuck she’s telling people about Kay. “Yeah, shit,” Josy says. “Don’t tell Fern, she’s processing break-up texts.” Over on the couch, Fern and Aadya sit scrolling through Fern’s phone, frowning and whispering. “We’re supposed to be setting up,” Josy says. “You alright? You should come.” Josy lives at Clambake, the lesbian punk house. Every year, they throw a Prince vs. Bowie dance-off, one of the only reasons you stay in town. Jamie hands you your latte, his smile so pitying that you want to punch him in his perfect, not-quite-thirty face.
You want to dance, to stop feeling like shit. You go with them to PRINCE VS. BOWIE
You grab a flier on the coffee counter, any excuse to leave and hide how angry everything makes you. It’s for a tarot reading at NINE OF SWORDS
CHURCH OF ETERNAL DAMNATION
You reread the text from Prior, your favorite all-purpose goth/metalhead. It’s timestamped 3:38am. come over when u get this. i found the record. praise satan. Prior is the only real Satanist who lives at the Church of Eternal Damnation, and the only one who will be truly Damned. You appreciate this purity. You bike to the Church, a small, cute house painted entirely black. It looks like a hole in the neighborhood, a missing tooth. You lock your bike to the scrubby redbud tree under Prior’s window. Through the low branches, you see Justine in the backyard, heaving oil paintings of her ex into a bonfire. You don’t have the emotional energy to deal with that, so you knock on Prior’s window. Noise metal stops. The frame scrapes open and Prior sticks his head out, his face lost in his tangle of hair. You don’t know Prior’s real name (you assume it isn’t actually Prior Offense). Nothing surprises Prior, nothing makes him mad, and he’ll listen to anyone. Since Kay died you think about him constantly. You want to sink into a calm like that. You want to be still. “You okay?” Prior asks. He pushes the window wider and sticks out his hand. This isn’t the first time you’ve crawled in someone’s window, but it is the first time you’ve done it to listen to a record. Prior pulls you over the sill and you collapse on the floor. “It’s just like I remembered,” Prior says. He switches out the record and sets the needle down, releasing weird, twinkling forest sounds. It’s the music from a mom & pop theme park in Oregon that Prior went to in 1989, and it took him ages to find. “Wish Kay was here,” he says. “She went there all the time as a kid.” You didn’t know this. You’re starting to think all you know about Kay is that she was from California, and she died in Ohio. This music is unlike her, and you wonder about the Kay that Prior knew. He sees this in your face. “Hey, let’s go see Val’s band. Get out a little.” Val is Prior’s on-again-off-again stoner friend. You feel a curl of shame, that Prior has to drag you along with him. Still, it could be fun.
You go with Prior to see Val’s band, SPIRITUAL ATHLETES
You feel selfish, antisocial. You ask Prior to stay in and watch ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE
CESSPIT
“Burning art is a new low for us,” you say. Justine struggles to keep the bonfire lit. “No way, this is a performance piece,” she says. “This is better art.” You help her balance two paintings of Dyl over the fire like logs. The paint cracks and melts, the canvas sags and blackens. “What the fuck is that smell?” Prior’s voice rings from the porch. He pops open the tab of a beer, and when he sees you he hands it over. Prior is the best goth you’ve ever met. He’s huge and terrifying. He gets another beer and comes to stand next to you by the fire. You lean against him and hope he’ll put his arm around you. When he does, you want to cry. “There’s a show at your house,” Prior says. “You going?” You didn’t know about this. Everyone at the Cesspit has been avoiding you, the house plague rat. Suddenly seeing Dyl’s image die in the fire is too much for you, thinking is too much. “Yeah,” you say. “Come with.” You leave Justine to it. When you get to the Pit, the porch light is on, and people flit in front of it like moths. Prior clears a path up the stairs—people move for goths like Prior. Inside the floor trembles with bass and the whine of an amp on its last legs. Mercy has made new friends in the last few months. You don’t know the band. You don’t know anyone. “Hey! Kay’s ex,” says a drunk voice. You stop. “Kay borrowed my cymbals,” the man says, standing too close to you now. “I need them back. I couldn’t find them in her room. You got them?” You feel light, like you could float up above everyone. “You went into her room?” you say. The guy shrugs. “Yeah. Sorry. I just need them back.” His hand is on your back, sliding low. “Maybe we can go look together.”
The touch shocks you, you lose control of four months of grief. Your face burns, you’re so mad you want to cry. Kay always called you a CRYBABY
You can’t fucking believe this. Good thing you’re always up for PUNCHING CREEPS
GHOST
Mercy is setting up for a show when you get home, and for a moment you stare at each other, Mercy with cymbals and a beer in her hands, until she says, “It’s a noise band.” You just go to your room and lock the door. “Sorry,” she yells. You wonder how long this will last. The hug Justine gave you outside the BAR! replays in your mind, but now instead of whispering “You’ll be okay soon” in your ear, she says, “How long do you expect us to do this? When is this gonna end?” She hugs you and leaves, on loop. You watch, apart from your body. You feel apart from your body even remembering. You didn’t say anything to her, you can barely talk anymore, you have nothing to say. No thoughts, just the awareness that you’re wrong, your brain is wrong, that you used to have a mind filled with things and now you don’t. You fall deeper into this emptiness every time it occurs to you, a looping pit with no end. Back in your body, in bed, you put your phone on the floor but don’t turn off the notifications. You listen with growing shame as it doesn’t buzz. You want to ghost your whole life. You wonder if there’s a way to stop feeling this. Before Kay died and before she stopped loving you, she used to find you this way sometimes. She’d pull on one of your flannels and get beside you in bed. “Now I’m you,” she’d say, reaching to hold you. “Hug me like we’re friends.” The first time she did this your chest cracked open, unable to hold your amusement and despair. “We’re not friends,” you’d said. You’re still not friends. Your skin prickles with the memory, like you could turn your head and see Kay’s face on the pillow beside you, feel her body pressed into your side. You don’t turn, and she’s there. You tell yourself she’s there.
THE END
You wake up in OHIO, 2013
PRINCE VS. BOWIE
Fern is crying now, and Aadya clucks at her soothingly. “Yeah, alright,” you say. “Let’s dance.” Josy smirks and you remember why you love her. “Fightin’ words,” she warns. Josy is a diehard Prince fan. She kicks at the couch, everyone gets up, and you all walk to Clambake. The rails of the porch are covered in seashells, glued there by generations of lesbians. The owner allows this because she’s an old hippie and a strategist (she also owns the gay bar, to make everyone forget she’s a landlord). There are already people crowding the porch, smoking and talking or hanging up string lights. “You’re thinking about Kay,” Josy says, elbowing you. Anger simmers up again. “I’m not,” you say. You’re tired of the surge of vulnerability her name dredges up, tired of wishing she wasn’t dead. “I’m done thinking about her.” Josy does you the kindness of saying nothing. She just grabs your hand and leads you into the kitchen, where she ladles you both mason jars of neon trash-can punch out of an old fishtank. “May the best man win,” she says, clinking your glass with hers. The sun sets into the fishtank, displacing the punch into you, everyone. You dance with Josy until you feel almost nothing, just your smoker’s lungs and your stupid heartbeat. Kay swirls past you in someone’s arms, laughing, and you close your eyes so hard that pulses of bruising color light up the dark. When you open them again, Fern is there, reaching towards your face. She runs her finger down the tear tracks there. Fern is beautiful in a delicate, awkward way. Easily breakable. You wonder if your friends worry about breaking you too. If you were Fern, you’d want someone to cup your face and brush your tears away with their thumb, so you do it. She offers you a wobbly smile.
Fern takes your hand and dances you towards the stairs, to LITTLE RED CORVETTE
Guilt jolts you away from her. You need a cigarette, and you don’t want to listen to HEROES
NINE OF SWORDS
You focus on the flier, on controlling your face. “Can’t. I have a reading.” Josy’s face lights up. “Ooh. Did you know they’ll read your moon blood like tea leaves?” You didn’t. “Bye, Josy.” You follow the flier to M’s house, a friend of a friend, like everyone in this town, that you’ve never met but will probably recognize from the co-op. On the porch you wade through overflowing recycling bins, bottles you assume are kombucha mothers, and spare bike parts. M opens the door and says, “I’ve been expecting you.” They’re wearing a long, ratty bathrobe and the perfect, glittering smoky eye. “I bet you say that to all the boys,” you say, and they laugh. “I literally do and it never gets old. Come on in.” You sit on the couch as they wander around shuffling cards. “Pull,” they say, offering you the deck. The card in your hand shows a woman with her face in her hands, surrounded by swords. “Says here you’re not doing so good.” You look at the tiny picture, the tiny despair, and say, “I am daily overwhelmed by swords.” M takes this in stride. They gesture behind you, and you turn to see the wall is covered in mounted swords and daggers, even a poleax. “Maybe let a few go,” they say. “Think about why you always buy the same sword.” You avoid the truth in this, physically, leaning back into the couch. You say, “Now you’re going to tell me the best defense is a vulnerable, tender offense.” M wrinkles their nose. “Don’t say tender in my house.” They sound a little bored now. “And the best defense is a sword and buckler.” You take their word for it. You feel fluttering in your gut, an anxious bird flexing its wings. You like M’s house, their swords and plants and incense, and you don’t want them to kick you out. As if they sense this, they shift in their chair. “Hey,” they say. “Do you want to smoke? I have to do my dishes, and I can’t face it sober.” You follow them into the kitchen, where they light a joint rolled in lavender paper and offer it to you. You take it. “I’ll wash, you dry?” you say on the exhale, expelling breath, words, anxiety. They all spiral away. You both stand at the sink, shoulder to shoulder, in silence like old married people, until the weed makes M start humming and you smile. They hug you before you leave, and you remember they knew Kay too. You walk home and lay out in the yard of the Cesspit, the ground still locked with cold, the grass dreaming, and you doze, watching the buckeyes in the tree above you toll like mute bells. It gets dark. Damp seeps into your clothes and sinks to your bones, your limbs grow tangled, rooted, and you feel with relief your mind and tongue still, dumb and finally unechoing, quiet as the tree.
THE END
You wake up in OHIO, 2013
SPIRITUAL ATHLETES
A few years ago the sign fell down in a storm, and instead of paying to get it fixed Tom just spray-painted BAR! above the door. You’d wanted to work there since you first walked in and saw the huge, blown-up photo of the HELL IS REAL billboard behind the bar instead of a mirror. Tom took the photo driving down the I-71 for the first time, after he moved here from Tennessee. Hell is real: Ohio. You and Prior walk in and the photo reminds you what else is real: you forgot your shift today. Tom sees you and his face goes blank. Your neck and cheeks flush, you feel the flutter of panic under your ribs. No one is in control of your life and no one wants to be. Prior leans on the bar, distracting Tom, and you push open the door to the venue. Val is up on the stage, sitting cross-legged in a nest of wires. “Hey,” she says. “You look like shit.” You walk up to the stage and she hands you her guitar. “Tune,” she says. “Tell me your sorrows.” Holding it feels painful, nostalgic, a cocktail of emotions you swallow back. You pluck the strings.
“Forgot to show up to work,” you say. She winces. Behind her, two people you see at shows but don’t know are play-arguing over the drum kit. Flirting makes you sick. You hand Val her guitar back. Someone touches your shoulder and you tense, hold back the snap of revulsion, because you’re pretty sure it’s just Prior and it is. The two of you sway back into the small crowd, and you enjoy the feeling of bodies near you, the wail of Val’s voice over the shitty goth bass. You and Prior get steadily drunk and the show ends in a numb calm, so close to what you wanted. Prior leans closer. “Graveyard?” His voice is hoarse. Val is eyeing you from the stage, where she’s breaking down the gear.
You stay and hook up with Val in the bathroom, because nothing matters and HELL IS REAL
You and Prior and Val drunk walk to the graveyard for some CEMETERY & CHILL
ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE
You shake your head, you have nothing to say. Prior’s gaze drills into your skull and it almost itches. You wonder why you came over here, what it was you wanted. “I picked up a new vampire movie,” he says, standing up and stretching. “You could learn about my culture.” A laugh startles out of you. “You think I don’t know goth?” Prior shrugs, and reaches down to grasp your hand and pulls you up too. “I’ll go make popcorn,” you say, and he smiles. You shuffle to the kitchen in the dark, make the popcorn, grab the beers–you know where everything is. Kay died and left you her friends, the nicest thing she’s done for you, a thought so sour it twists your mouth. It follows you back to Prior’s room, twining around your ankles and tripping you up. You look down and see Carmilla, her copper eyes shining out from the depths of the void. “Hi, scary baby.” She gives you an aggravated, imploring stare, so you drop a popcorn to bribe her to stop. You sit next to Prior on the bed, hand him his PBR, and press play on his laptop. Carmilla jumps onto his chest and purrs like a Geiger counter, presenting you with her butthole. Your heart constricts, this is too sweet for you, too good. Melancholy seeps into your brain again, you wonder distantly if Prior wants to fuck you, or if you’re a cynical monster. Tilda and Tom swan moodily around Detroit. The last time you were there, you went to a punk show in a vintage shop, and a mannequin fell on you. You loved it. You can’t imagine feeling something that intensely again. Carmilla tucks her tail into the hollow of your throat, you drowse. On the dark screen, you watch Tilda and Tom look at each other with anguish and something like excitement, wondering if these people’s deaths will be the ones that kill them too. Living forever strikes you right now as bad luck. You’d be a shit vampire, relieved to die and finally surrender all of this careful effort, all of this grief and love. Their faces fade to credits, rolling on. “Do you think they die?” you say, and your voice is cracked, unfamiliar. “No,” Prior yawns. “They just go back to the beginning.” He presses play again.
THE END
You wake up in OHIO, 2013
CRYBABY
Instead of the band, or the laughing voices of Mercy’s friends, you hear a dull swishing, a low noise that rocks through you and deadens everything. Prior is back, and he takes your hand and pulls you into the bathroom. You lock the door. You lean over the sink and Prior hesitates, then places his hand on your shoulders, and that pressure is the only feeling in your hollow body, the warm weight of his hand echoing through you, the dull noise flares like a kick drum and you wait until you recognize it as your heartbeat and the cold returns to your fingers gripping the chipped tile. You open the medicine cabinet and pull out Eli’s clippers. You take off your shirt. “Hey,” Prior says, but you ignore him, you plug in the clippers and press the vibration against your skull. When you falter at the back of your neck Prior takes the clippers and fixes the hanks of hair you missed. He brushes the hair from your shoulders. “Take a shower with me,” you say. Prior’s eyes widen. “Uh,” he says. “That’s not—” You step into the shower and turn it on, letting it fill the rest of your clothes with steaming water. Prior sits on the edge of the tub and says nothing. People knock on the door and curse, and more people knock, dragging on, until all you can hear is the shower. After a while Prior reaches behind you to turn off the water. He wraps you in the wrong towel. “Come on,” he says. “Everyone’s gone.” He walks you to your room, through the trashed house, through the slashes of moonlight that glare across the floor like floodlights and closes the door behind you. You let the towel slither to the floor and drag the comforter off your bed, wrapping it around yourself. You pull Prior onto the bed with you and press yourself against his chest. You feel his heartbeat, slow, still. “Sorry,” you say. You can feel him breathing against the back of your neck, the loose hairs there tickling. “It’s okay,” he says. “You’re okay.” You don’t think so. It doesn’t seem that way. Things are fucked. You want to say so but Prior is asleep, his breathing a wave of warmth that pulls you down too, finally, into an uneasy calm.
THE END
You wake up in OHIO, 2013
PUNCHING CREEPS
You punch him in the stomach, turning into it. “Fuck, ow,” he says. He looks shocked, ugly. “Come on, she was fucking everybody, how was I supposed to know?” He grabs at you again and you knee him in the balls this time. People turn around to see what’s happening. You see Prior shoving his way closer. “Get the fuck out,” you say. You feel sick, your hands are shaking. You watch Prior drag him over to the door. A feeling kicks you in the gut, a whirl of adrenaline and sour frustration that you don’t want to identify. You don’t want to feel bad for what you’re about to do. When Prior comes back to check on you, you take his hand and lead him to your room. The noise of the show muffles. You push Prior against the closing door and kiss him, he lets you do this, until your hands fumble at his belt and he steps away from you. “You don’t want to use me,” he says, and you’re so angry that he won’t pretend like everyone else. “Fuck off, then,” you say, and for the first time you see Prior look annoyed. He closes the door behind him and leaves you there. You trip onto your bed and fall asleep with your clothes on. When you wake up in the middle of the night now there’s always a tension hovering above you, like you’ve exhaled your dreams and they’re still waiting around. A miasma, spiraling. Kay unfurls herself from the center like a dumb fucking horror movie and you yelp, awake. She laughs unpleasantly. “Hey, I really got you,” she says. You press the heels of your hands into your eye sockets. “Fuck you, fuck.” You take them away and she’s still there. Kay laughs again. “Are you going to fuck Prior?” she asks. “No,” you say. “I don’t know. What do you care, you’re dead.” Kay floats above you, gloating. “I guess I don’t care. I’m just bored. Want to know what it’s like?” You pull the sheets over your head. “No,” you say. “I wanna fucking wake up.” Your face is wet, the sheets stick to you. You cry harder when you realize you want Kay to come down and comfort you, that you aren’t mad at all. “I’m not haunting you,” Kay says. “I’d haunt somebody else.” You calm your breathing. You always hated crying in front of her. “I know,” you say. You drift in and out until dawn, knowing that.
THE END
You wake up in OHIO, 2013
LITTLE RED CORVETTE
Fern’s room is on the third floor, and you’re both laughing at how hard it is to breathe when you get there. You sag against the doorframe while Fern opens the window out onto the roof. The curtains billow like sudden ghosts in the bright spring wind. The air still smells cold and dark to you. Fern grabs an old-fashioned cookie tin, and your hand, and brings you all out onto the roof. Soft with moss, and damp. You scrape your palms leaning back on the old shingles. “Look,” Fern mumbles around the joint she’s lighting. “That one’s yours.” You follow the arc of her arm, up into darkness. You accept the joint and raise your eyebrows. “You’re a Leo, aren’t you?” she says. She takes your hand lightly and raises it to sketch out the lion between shivering points of light. Fern is in grad school for astrophysics, which is objectively cool and gay and hot of her. You feel a swoop of embarrassment, that you’ve never studied anything, that you’re making nothing of your life. “What will you do when you graduate?” you ask her. She gives you a loose, dreamy smile. “I’m gonna work at CERN. Or I’ll be an astrologer.” You laugh and say, “Tell me if the stars think we’re compatible.” Fern brings her hand to your face again, her fingers so light and cold against your cheek you think you’re imagining it. “No.” She kisses you. The weed makes you both slow, careful. You want to remember the stars she pointed out, but to you they’re just stars. Above your house is just darkness, kept at bay by the giant old pin oak’s shivering canopy. Fern’s breath catches a little, she’s crying again. You draw apart to admire the gleam of tears on her face. “I’m cold,” she says, and you lay back onto the roof, bringing her with you in the crook of your arm. She puts her head on your chest and hiccups. You try to remember the girl Fern had been dating, the one who broke up with her, but you can’t. Her breathing softens, and you wonder how long you should stay out here and let her sleep. You think about, if you were Fern, how sober you might want to be when you wake up in the wrong person’s arms.
THE END
You wake up in OHIO, 2013
HEROES
You push your way through twisting limbs and spill out onto the porch, surprised at the sudden quiet, the yawning space around you. Josy is leaning over the porch railing, lifting up her feet to hang there on her belly, shrieking and giggling. Mercy is here, her hand on Josy’s back to keep her on the porch. She’s talking to Prior, the only cis dude allowed at Clambake (only on the porch), and the sight of them all brings you up short. All of Kay’s friends. They’ll all think you got this drunk over her, but you didn’t. You always get this drunk. Prior takes the cigarettes out of the front pocket of his flannel and shakes one out for you. You feel pleasantly floaty, enough to smile at him. We’re nothing, wails Bowie, and nothing will help us. You ignore him. “I was thinking about you,” says Prior. “I just came from a show at your house. Look.” He pulls out his phone, shows you a glowing picture of a possum hissing up at you. “My son,” you say, swaying closer, looking at his angry little teeth. “How is he?” Prior smiles, a startling expression from him. “Good. Eating garbage.” Mercy snorts. “Just like his dad.” You narrow your eyes at her. “It’s Daddy to you.” Josy laughs and crashes her boots back onto the porch. You think maybe this is okay, maybe you’ll talk about nothing and smoke all Prior’s cigarettes. You’ll bicker about if you should all move to Chicago, or start a new band. You’ll stop hating Mercy, leaning her head on Prior’s shoulder where you wanted to lean. Or maybe you’re drunk enough to do zippo tricks and then wake up tomorrow embarrassed and hollow, only awake enough to stare at the sharpie-ringed water stain and listen to the kitchen floorboards creak as Mercy makes coffee, as the closed door of Kay’s room stays shut between you, between the living and the dead.
THE END
You wake up in OHIO, 2013
HELL IS REAL
Val kisses like she’s dying, or maybe you do, but you don’t care as long as she doesn’t care. Your nose is full of bleach, stinging, so you breathe Val’s breath instead. The bathroom is a floor to ceiling scrawl of sharpie and plastered-up show fliers, dim and dank and horrible. You try to lift Val up onto the sink but you can’t, and you both giggle and stagger into each other like teenagers. The thought sobers you, dredges up the familiar panic that you’ve had so much time and you haven’t grown up at all, you fucked it up so easily. Val feels you falter and leans back against the mirror, her hands still on your shoulders. “You want to go find Prior?” Val shakes her head. “We’re both on a break from cis dudes,” she says. Her face brightens into a goofy, evil smirk. “Did he tell you about the show we went to last weekend? The singer was like, ‘You sad fucks will love this, next one’s called Sorrow,’ and they played it over and over and over until we all cried together. Anyway, he tried to pick up Prior at the bar after.” You snort. “Did they really play it over?” Val nods, solemn, and leans up close to your ear. “It was art,” she whispers. When you get home, you look up the song. Set it to repeat while you shrug off your clothes and brush your teeth, eyes slitted in the mirror. You don’t like to look at yourself, your eyes always reveal what you’re thinking. You slap off the light and darkness flies into the room, eddying around you in an almost audible rush. Waiting for your eyes to adjust, you wonder if this is art, playing yourself over and over again to remember that you’re broken. Instead of going to bed, you sit outside on the porch stairs, willing the smells of sweat and bleach out of your scalp. Anger bubbles up out of nowhere, you’re surprised to realize it’s because you liked the song. You feel like an open wound on everyone’s skin. They just want you to go away, you just want to go away. If you stay still enough maybe you can just drift apart into the concrete steps and the thicket of weeds and the unearthed, sickly smell of the compost heap, and the twin, shining points of light in the grass being reflected from the eyes of spiders, your atoms all seeping into a night tableau so calm because it knows that tomorrow, again, the light will fall and the spiders will creep out and the possum will wake up to scratch around in the compost in the same way, unconcerned by being alive to see it all end, and end, and end.
THE END
You wake up in OHIO, 2013
CEMETERY & CHILL
You drunk walk to the cemetery with Prior on one arm and Val on the other. You all sway, making the moon turn above you pleasantly. “Waxing gibbous,” Val says, seeing your head turned up. “Really?” you ask. Val shrugs. The graveyard appears over the crest of the hill, tombstones creeping taller as if being coaxed up towards the sun like any growing, living thing. You all duck under the pine trees and wind along the moonlit path. “The little lamb statues are the graves of infants,” Prior whispers. You trip over a snarled root and push away from him, giggling a little. “Fuck your goth trivia,” you say. Stars come out of the void, gleaming at you in bright clusters like insect eyes. Prior takes out his cigarettes and you all sink to the ground to loll bonelessly against the headstones, grinning and coughing up at the winking clusters of eyes. “Mary Shelley lost her virginity on her mom’s grave,” Prior blurts out, and you all collapse laughing, then wheezing and stilling into drowsiness against the rough stones, giving in to the numb cold rising up from the thawing earth. It’s a little much to wake up in a graveyard, and when you do, you feel overwhelmed and unreal. You shake the dirt out of your hair and push yourself to your feet. Prior and Val are making out a few graves away, and you breathe out a laugh. Walking home, the streets are a haze, every house looks unwelcome, not yours, you worry that you’ll never make it back, and in your dream, after you find your house and rattle open the door and fall into bed with your boots on, you’re still walking, still looking.
THE END
You wake up in OHIO, 2013
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Mariah Gese is an artist and writer from a haunted swamp in New York. They received their MFA from Indiana University, where they were the Editor in Chief of Indiana Review. They like plants, math, and other scary things. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, Black Warrior Review, Shenandoah, Adroit Journal, Split Lip Magazine, The Offing, Cleaver Magazine, Lunch Ticket, and Speculative Nonfiction.