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. 

Maybe we will become that couple on the boat docked a few meters offshore. I can see them now, dancing. I don’t hear any music so I close my eyes, but all I hear is the lapping of the waves. I know they are older than we are because I spoke to them on the beach earlier. The man said our children and grandchildren let us escape for the month of February. The woman laughed and said we love the boat, and then she adjusted her sun hat. They are sleeping on their boat for three weeks, and tonight they are dancing.

What about the younger woman and the older man who live in the fancy house with the view and the abstract art? They are parents of a friend and they never seem to have any problems. I know they do, everyone does, but you know what I mean when I say that. The man is eighty-five and the woman is sixty-one. Some people gossip about the age difference but those people aren’t happy. We could become them, even though we are the same age. We could sell our house and buy something with a view. You can take up painting because I have no interest in that. I will take a Vietnamese cooking class and make spring rolls for our friends. You will pinch my bottom and I will throw my head back and say there he goes again.

Or we could be the man from work and the wife he sees every other weekend. They are happy apart, he says. She is studying medicine and learning to stay awake for thirty hours straight. I could stay up all night saving lives, and you could text me pep talks and finally learn Spanish. We could have things we forget to tell each other.

There is also the lesbian couple with the two children, one from each womb. They have tattoos and go to farmers markets on Saturdays. Two different markets because one has better tomatoes. We met them at a birthing class. I had to hold ice in my hand for one minute and you rubbed my back and asked me what I wanted to hear. After I said I want to hear it’s just ice so you can drop it, the pregnant one whispered, I want to tell her I’m never doing this again. The four of us laughed and I noticed their tongue piercings. They run a babysitting co-op and volunteer at the Jewish film festival. We could be like that.

You could get fit and make soft-boiled eggs, and I could get fat and read science fiction. Our nights would be perfect. We would watch the same shows, listen to the same music, and tell our children the same jokes.  Everyone would look at us and say we could be just like them.

Nothing matters except the little things and we have all of those.

The first weird thing is that I was in the bath at all. It was summer in Perth. But the sky was overcast and it was drizzling.

The second weird thing is that, upon close examination of my arms and legs, I discovered tiny clumps of sunscreen in every wrinkle and fold, even in the small creases on my knuckles and the sides of my kneecaps. This shouldn’t have been a shock, given that I purchased this lotion from a pharmacist who said this brand was especially thick as it was originally created “for burn victims who spend loads of time in the sun.” I thought this was an unusual way to sell something, to mention burn victims that is, but what can I say, it worked.

After my bath, I put on my sundress with pockets and small pleats, and googled “exfoliating brush.” I found one with 44 positive reviews including a comment that declared, in all caps, I CAN REACH MY BACK. One week later, a rectangular package arrived from a shop in Sydney, and that night I stood in the shower and vigorously scrubbed my entire body. As I watched flakes of dead skin and old sunscreen wash down the drain, I felt happy because I was fixing something. Goodbye old me.

Attached to the end of the brush was a rope loop. I stuck an adhesive hook next to the towel rack and hung up my new toy. It looked like a prickly oar.

In the morning, I spotted one long, blond hair hanging from its bristles. My husband has coarse black hair, and my daughters are brunettes. I am gray. Holding the hair, I walked to the living room and said to my husband, hey look what I found in my exfoliating brush. He was playing guitar and was annoyed by the interruption. It’s my mistress, he said with a straight face. She’s been exfoliating in our bathroom. I’m serious, I said, don’t you think that’s weird. He shrugged his shoulders and strummed the theme from the X-Files.

The next day I found a small black pebble, and the day after that, a single blade of green grass. Come on, I begged him, this is weird. Stuff keeps appearing in my exfoliating brush. Every time you say exfoliating brush, he said as he laced up his sneakers, you sound like an old lady.

One morning it was a tiny yellow feather and another, a white petal. The day the dishwasher broke it was a perfectly round shell with a swirled pattern, and the morning after they canceled the fireworks due to a plane crash, I found a piece of pink yarn. Each of these surprises I plucked from the brush and deposited in a brown canvas pouch I got for free at a trade show. I stopped telling my husband about all this because he was completely disinterested which angered me to no end. You might think he was playing a trick but that is not his sort of thing.

Yesterday I got up early to write a condolence letter to my old boss who had recently lost her husband. I didn’t like this woman much, but had a fond memory of her husband from a company Christmas party that I thought I might share with her. When I went to the bathroom I checked the brush out of habit, and there, tucked in the middle of the bristles was a small folded piece of white paper. I sat on the edge of the bathtub and opened it. Written in blue cursive was the following:

Dear Margaret,

I was very sorry to learn of Stan’s passing. I enjoyed meeting him at our company Christmas party and wanted to share something he whispered to me as you were making your toast that night. You were thanking the board of directors and making a joke about term limits. He leaned over to me and said, “Isn’t she amazing? I am the luckiest guy in the world.” I was very touched by his sincerity and thought I would pass on that remark to you, during what I imagine to be a very difficult time.

Thinking of you,

Ruth

I walked this tiny note to my desk and copied it word for word onto my engraved stationery. Then I refolded it and added it to my canvas pouch. As I drank tea and watched the sun rise over my neighbor’s house, I silently thanked the exfoliating brush for providing this perfect condolence letter to my old boss.

This morning the brush was gone. I looked under the sink, behind the tub, and in the shower. The adhesive hook now looked out of place. I peeled it off the wall and tossed it in the bin. I slathered myself with sunscreen and went to the beach.

What if today I announced to my children that from now on I would call them different names? The younger one would be Helen, and the older one would be, say, Hazel. They would now be sisters with the same first initial, more matchy-matchy, I would tell them. Beautiful new names for beautiful children, I would say.

Of course, being nine and eleven, they would reject this notion. They would cry and say they don’t understand. I would assure them this is how it must be, that their old names were temporary, stand-ins for their real ones. I had already taken care of the paperwork. I would love them just as much. Nothing else would change.

Helen and Hazel would grow older, and see each other a few times a year, sometimes with a partner, sometimes on their own. One of them would have a job that requires travel, and the other would share a house with three friends and two dogs. One would fracture her ankle skiing, and the other would research home remedies. One would host Thanksgiving, and the other would be a vegetarian for five years until one night after a comedy show she’d try a bite of her friend’s hamburger and decide to eat meat again, “just once a week, not even.” Helen and Hazel would be very different from one another, and would joke that they might not be friends if they weren’t sisters. One would give the other a photo of the two of them on a hiking trail, taken by a stranger. The frame would have been ordered online. It would be made of wood and the engraving would say, Best Friends.

Sometimes, on the phone, or at a café that serves hot chocolate with pink marshmallows and tiny spoons, Helen and Hazel would talk about their childhood, about the time one of them burned her hand making quesadillas, or the time one of them got stuck in a tree. They’d wonder what happened to old friends, and that doll, the one with the fabric belly and the little black boots that always went missing. They’d talk about the birthday party with the boy who wouldn’t stop crying and The Night Of The Big Fight. They’d remember sparklers, baking soda volcanoes, periods, school exams, scary movies, and flashlights under sheets. One of them would ask, “What was that teacher’s name?” and the other would erupt into a fit of giggles, “Mr. Langley! Mr. Langley!”

Sometimes, usually preceded by a pause in the conversation, one of them would bring up the name change. Why do you think Mom did that? Who does that? Helen and Hazel would talk about their old names, remember learning to spell them, and recall magnetic letters and laminated placemats. They would wonder how their lives would be different with their old names, or what else might have been taken from them. Saying their old names aloud, they would feel naughty and exhilarated. They would feel like they were talking about other people, two girls that used to exist but no longer do.

“The scratch is getting better.”

“That’s good.”

She’s got a three-inch swollen line on her left cheek. The cat.

“I really cleaned it. Got all the blood off. Used an alcohol swab and everything.”

“That’s good.”

“I kind of like it. It gives me character. I’m like Omar.”

“As long as it’s not permanent.” He takes a warm biscuit from the baking sheet she pulled out of the oven five minutes ago and puts it on a plate.

“What if it were?”

“Were what?”

“Permanent. What if I look like this forever?”

“I’d have to completely rethink our marriage.” He smiles.

“Jam?”

“No.” He is scrambling eggs in a bowl.

****

That night she has a dream. She is walking through the bush and a branch hits her in the face. She wakes up. The cat is at the foot of her bed. “See what you’ve done?” she whispers to the cat.

The cat says, “Maybe you should put some cream on that.”

“I don’t want to get up.”

“I’ll get it.” The cat stretches, jumps off the bed, and scampers to the bathroom. She hears him fiddling around in the cabinet, muttering to himself. He runs back, jumps up next to her and deposits a tube of hydrocortisone on her chest.

“Thank you,” she says.

“It’s the least I can do.”

****

The next day, the scrape on her cheek is a faint line. The cream has worked. Her husband tells her she is beautiful. They go to the movies. In the dark, she touches her cheek and decides to leave him. She will not be taking the cat.