Fiction

The stage is dark except for one lit candle poking out of a blood orange, balancing on a card table. The second movement of Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” is blasting and it’s the frenetic strings part that sounds like rats running across a roof. A woman sprints down the center aisle of the theater and leaps onto the stage. She is wearing a hot pink cape and matching leotard. Barefoot, she begins to twirl. When the music stops the woman calls out, “Shepherd? Where is my shepherd?” She leaps through the air, back and forth across the stage, exactly six times, before putting out the candle with her thumb and index finger. At this point, a chandelier is lowered from the rafters. The fixture is made of dinosaur bones, bicycle chains, and battery-operated tea candles. It represents how far we have come, and how much further we have to go. The woman sways her arms overhead and starts singing “The Promise” by When in Rome. When she gets to the line, “I’m sorry but I’m just thinking of the right words to say,” she begins to cry. She pulls the candle out from the orange and throws both of them to the ground. Standing directly under the chandelier, she looks out to the audience and stage-whispers, “It didn’t have to be like this.” 

The crowd goes wild. 

I ran into myself today. She was waiting for the bus, wearing a floral print baby doll dress, a black ribbon choker necklace, and clunky black shoes. She had a pixie haircut, deep purple lipstick, and had just recently turned twenty. Black leather bag slung over one shoulder, she was reading the bus schedule posted next to the shelter.

I pulled over and popped on my hazards. I slammed the door and walked towards her. “Hey!” I called out.

She looked over and seemed annoyed and not at all surprised. “Hey yourself,” she said, glancing at my white sneakers. “Or myself. Whatever.”

She smelled like clove cigarettes.

“What are you doing here?” I said, jamming my car keys in the back pocket of my jeans. “You’re not supposed to be here.” I had left my sunglasses in the car and was now squinting at her.

“Well I’m here.” Me at twenty was snarky. She was also chewing gum.

“But you don’t live in San Francisco yet.” I lived in Boston in my twenties.

She scowled. “I’m visiting.”

“Visiting who?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know.”

Of course I did know, once I thought about it. “Philippe,” I said finally, shaking my head.

Philippe was a French exchange student I had met earlier that year, in Boston when I was nineteen. He and I worked at the same Tex-Mex restaurant until he moved to San Francisco on a whim, at least it had seemed that way at the time. Of course it wasn’t a whim. His French girlfriend was in San Francisco and he moved here to reunite with her.

This me standing in front of me didn’t know this yet. She had had dinner with Philippe last night. They kissed in the car and he told her he loved her. Then he went across town to fuck his girlfriend but I didn’t find this out until tomorrow.

“He’s not worth it,” I said to my younger self.

“Maybe not,” she said, shrugging. At this point, she was already regretting flying out here for a long weekend to visit Philippe from La Caverna. Tomorrow he will call her, sobbing, saying he’s still in love with Anne-Marie, Anne-Margaritte, Anne-Something. I won’t cry because I won’t be shocked. This was never a real thing. I just wanted to hop on a plane and chase after something.

“Do you need a ride somewhere?” I asked her.

“I guess you know that I do.”

We got in the car and she held up my New Yorker magazine that she had found on the seat. “Really?” she said and laughed. “Is this what you’re into?”

“What we’re into,” I said, putting on my sunglasses, suddenly self-conscious.

“Whatever,” she said reaching in her bag for a slip of paper. “Ninth and Judah. I’m going to Ninth and Judah.”

Grace’s apartment. Holy shit.

“I forgot Grace lived there,” I said. Grace was my best friend for fifteen years. “Have you met her roommates yet?”

“Nope, first time.”

“You’re in for a real treat,” I said sarcastically. Grace lived with two supreme slobs who played video games all day. One of them peed in a Snapple bottle in his room instead of walking eight feet down the hall to the bathroom.

“It’s annoying,” she said, propping up her foot on the dashboard and wiping the corner of her mouth where her dark lipstick had accumulated. “How you know everything.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, honking at the car in front of me. The driver was distracted and the light had turned green. “It must be really annoying.”

“You must remember this, yeah?” she said.

“Remember what?” I said, turning on Lincoln Drive.

“Running into your older self?”

“Yeah,” I said, shaking my head. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. Wondering when it was that I ran into you. Or me. Whatever. It’s weird being on the other side now.”

We drove in silence. I glanced over at her occasionally but she was staring out the window. Her haircut showed off her neck, long and freckled, and her choker was held together by a gold clasp wrapped in scotch tape. I loved that necklace and wore it months after it had broken, peeling off the tape at night and attaching a new piece in the morning.

Younger me scratched her thigh aggressively. I was still having eczema breakouts, hadn’t yet sorted that out with the shea butter and the avoiding wheat. I opened my mouth but decided against saying anything. She’ll figure it out.

I thought about Grace. How we were still close at that point, before her mental health veered into a dark pit. Now, as a forty year old, I hadn’t spoken to her in nearly ten years. She called when my mom died. She was married to a banker and living in Westchester. She had recently spent three months in a locked ward following a miscarriage.

Our mom died. I looked at younger me, and blinked back tears.

“I think it’s that faded pink one on the right,” she said, after glancing at her paper with the address.

I pulled into the driveway.

“Thanks,” she said, looking at me. It startled me how unremarkable she seemed to think all of this was. Later, she’ll tell Grace and the slobs, and they’ll gasp and convince her it was a remarkable coincidence, running into her future self. They’ll think it’s crazy she didn’t ask me a single question about my life, our lives.

She slammed the door and rang the bell of the four-story apartment building. She was bouncy, even in her clunky shoes. As I started to drive off, I watched her and Grace embrace. As I caught a glimpse of Grace’s smile, a lump formed in my throat. Before she fell apart, years later, before her shadow took over, her smile was radiant. It could have saved the world.

The article read, Fatal Bear Attack In Wyoming. A man’s body had been found outside of a cave in Bridger-Teton. Most of the flesh had been ripped from his bones. The man’s name was John Lister.

When I was at university, I spent Australia Day with a girl named Lauren Lister at her family’s house in country Victoria. Lauren and I have since drifted apart, but back then we were close. Her childhood room was very girly, with lace curtains and yellow rose wallpaper which she used to peel back to write the names of boys she liked, as well as anything else she needed to get off her chest. Harry, Lucas, Mum is annoying. I slept on the bottom bunk and stared up at the glow-in-the-dark adhesive butterflies.  

Lauren had a brother named John who was still in secondary school and lurked in doorways. He was the kind of person who would have hidden behind a tree at someone’s funeral. I got stuck sitting across from him at dinner, and had to watch him gnaw on a chicken leg until it was bare, at which point he deposited the large bone beside his plate on the faded purple tablecloth and wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his flannel shirt.

He leaned over and whispered to me, “I can’t wait to get away from all this.”

I hadn’t expected him to speak. I don’t think I had heard him say one word since we arrived the previous night. “I don’t know what you mean,” I responded, scooping more corn onto my plate.

“This is bullshit. All this luxury,” he said, rolling his eyes. I looked over at their father who was emptying a third packet of sugar into his coffee. The older couple on either side of him kept interrupting each other as they talked about a local politician they had run into at a bowling alley. Lauren was in the kitchen helping her mum defrost a store-bought cheesecake.

John continued. “When I graduate, I’m selling all my stuff and flying to the states. I wanna drive cross country and have time to think, you know?” He gestured at the devoured leg. “Gotta stop eating meat. This stuff is disgusting.”

“You looked like you enjoyed it,” I responded, wiping my mouth with a paper towel, which I then crumpled and held in my fist under the table.

“I did,” he shook his head. “That’s what wrong with everything. Humans just take whatever they want. We don’t even have to kill for it. We just go to the shops and buy dead animals wrapped in plastic for a holiday commemorating the slaughter of millions of Aboriginals.”

“I don’t think it was millions,” I said. John glared at me.

Lauren came back to clear the table. “Hey Kate, wanna help?” As we stood at the sink scraping remaining food into the bin, she apologised for her brother. “He’s such a creep. You should see what he writes in his diary.”

“You read his diary?” I asked, stacking dishes in the dishwasher.

“Only once,” she said, “when I thought he might blow up the school.”  

John ended up doing exactly what he said he’d do. Two weeks after he finished school, he flew to Boston, bought a used Honda, and drove west with a large duffel bag and a gas stove.

The article said that park rangers shot and killed the bear they thought was responsible for the attack. They weren’t certain this was the bear that had ripped John apart. But they killed it anyway. They had to do something.

****

This is a work of fiction and was shortlisted for the 2018 Peter Cowan 600-Word Short Story Award.