Sincerely, Valentine @sincerelyvalentine - Tumblr Blog

For the Town and the Forest, and the Girl Wrapped in Plastic

Let the Douglas firs stand sentinel, their needles whispering secrets of the sawdust and the mill.

Let the logs speak, for they have seen the generations rise and fall, and hold the memory of the axe.

Let the traffic light blink its single useless eye where the ordinary meets the owl,

And let the girl wrapped in plastic, a cameo in the cold, wet mouth of the river, be the question mark that bends the whole world out of shape.

The coffee is hot, and as black as a moral quandary, cherry pies cut in perfect angles of small-town solace,

But the sweetness sours the tongue when you see the giant, or the man with a log for a soul, or the dwarf who peaks in tongues of backwards fire.

The air smells of pine and diesel, of burnt pastry and something else, something organic and wrong, a sweet, fungal rot in the in the wood’s dark heart.

Glide, Plastic Girl, on your borrowed angels,

Dwell in the shadow of the ceiling fan fan’s slow spin,

The trembling is everywhere, in the flicker of a neon sign, in the jump-cut of a dream, in the way a kind Sherrif's brow furrows at the edge of the known world.

Here is an agent, a good man, who loves his coffee black and his mysteries slow-brewed.

Here is a father, his grief a raw electric socket.

Here is a roadhouse, where the music is always just sad enough to dance to, and the drape runners are always just out of frame.

Look! The young pines sway, agitated, by the powerlines.

Look! The cream corn is not just corn, and the ring of Saturn is not just a ring.

Look! In the red room, the curtains part for a one-armed man to preach of the owl was not what it seemed,

And in the black lodge, doppelgangers wear our faces like ill-fitting suits.

We are searching for a killer, but the killer is a part of the place, a splinter in the timber,

We are searching for a meaning, but the meaning is in the grain of wood, in the silent screams of the saw blade.

We are searching for a girl, but the girl is everywhere now, in the wind, in the trees, in the frozen face of her father’s house.

The owls are not what they seem.

The woods are full of eyes.

And in the town, there’s always music in the air.

#twin peaks #poetry #david lynch #laura palmer #surrealism #free verse #fire walk with me

The Space Where You Were

⋆₊⋆︎⁺☣︎ You don’t remember turning the radio on.

That’s the first thing that comes back to you later, in the milliseconds when you’re still trying to be a person. The way the dial was already set to 89.3, the public station your roommate listens to when he’s cooking. You’d come home from work, the cafe, the one with the chipped mugs and the manager who smells like cigarettes, and you’d dropped your keys on the counter, sat down on the couch, and you’d pressed the power button without thinking. Muscle memory. The same way you’d check your pockets for your wallet even when you knew it was there.

The broadcast was already in progress.

“...repeat, this is not a test. The following information is verified by the North American Aerospace Defense Command. At approximately 4:12PM Eastern Time, an unidentified projectile was detected over the Arctic Circle. Trajectory confirms the target is the metropolitan area of...”

You reached for the control knobs. Not because you wanted to change the station. Because you didn’t know what else to do with your hand.

The voice on the radio was a woman’s. Calm. The kind of calm that takes training, or maybe just the distance of a microphone in a room far away from whatever she was describing. She could’ve been reading traffic updates. She could’ve been announcing a school closure.

“...current estimated time to impact is thirty-two minutes. Authorities advise all residents to seek immediate shelter underground. If underground shelter is not available, move to the interior of a building, away from windows, and take cover on the lowest floor. Do not attempt to outrun the blast wave. Do not...”

You looked at your window.

It faced west.

The sun was still up, that late afternoon light that makes everything look soft and ending. Your neighbor’s cat was on the fire escape, cleaning its paws. A delivery truck was double-parked on the street below, and the driver was arguing with someone you couldn’t see. Normal. Everything was normal, and the radio was saying something about thermal radiation and blast radius and fallout patterns, your hand was still on the control knob.

You thought: Thirty-two minutes.

That’s a sitcom without commercials. That’s a shower if you don’t wash your hair. That’s the amount of time you’d spend scrolling through Netflix until you gave up and watched Arrested Development again.

You thought: I should call my mother.

But you didn’t move.

Here’s what you remember about the next few minutes. Not in order. Not cleanly. The way smoke remembers the shape of the room after the fire’s gone through.

You remember standing up. You remember walking to the kitchen and opening the refrigerator and looking inside at the half-empty jar of pickles, the yogurt that expired three days ago, the six-pack of beer your roommate had been saving for the weekend. You took one of the beers and opened it with the church key magnet on the fridge door. The hiss of the cap was loud in the quiet. You drank half of it standing there, the cold glass against your palm, and you thought about how this was probably not what they meant by seek immediate shelter.

The radio followed you.

“...reports of panic on major thoroughfares. The interstate has been shut down in both directions. Officials remind citizens that remaining in vehicles during a nuclear event offers minimal protection and may in fact increase...”

You sat back down on the couch. The cushion still had the dent from where you’d been sitting before. Your body heat was still there. You put the beer on the floor and you pressed the heels of your hands into your eyes until you saw stars.

Twenty-eight minutes.

You thought about the dream you’d had last week. The one where you were walking through your old elementary school and all the lockers were open and there was no one there, just the sound of a bell ringing somewhere far away. You’d woken up with your heart pounding and you’d lain there in the dark for a long time trying to remember what you’d been running from.

You thought about the girl you dated sophomore year, the one who cried during The Iron Giant and never explained why. You wondered where she was right now. Whether she was looking at a window too.

You thought about the laundry you’d left in the dryer this morning. The blue towel. The socks with the holes in the toes. The way you’d told yourself you’d fold them when you got home.

The radio voice changed. A different person now, a man, older, the kind of voice that reads the news on Sunday mornings. He was saying something about the emergency alert system, about the presidential warning that had already gone out to every phone in the city, about the fact that the cell towers were already starting to overload.

You pulled out your phone.

No service.

The little bars in the corner were empty, and the word SOS was blinking where the carrier name usually went. You stared at it for a while. You tried to think of who you would have called anyway. Your mother would already know. Your father wouldn’t answer. Your roommate was at work across town, and you didn’t know if that was better or worse.

You put the phone face-down on the arm of the couch.

Twenty-two minutes.

The radio had stopped giving instructions. That was the thing you noticed. The voice was still there, but it wasn’t telling you what to do anymore. It was telling you what was happening. Like a narrator. Like someone describing a weather pattern.

“...projectile is now within the upper atmosphere. Visual confirmation from multiple sources. Object is believed to be a single warhead with an estimated yield of...”

You stopped listening to the numbers. You’d seen the movies. You knew what a megaton meant. You knew about the flash and the shockwave and the shadow of a person burned into a wall. Knowing didn’t help. Knowing was the problem.

You got up again. You walked to the window. The cat was gone. The delivery truck was gone. The street was empty now, which was worse than the arguing, because it meant everyone else had figured out something you hadn’t.

You thought about going downstairs. The building had a basement, a dirty concrete room with a water heater and a row of storage lockers and the smell of mildew. Your roommate kept his snowboard down there. You’d been down there once, when you’d first moved in, looking for the fuse box.

You could go down there now. You could sit on the floor next to the water heater and wait. It wouldn’t save you, probably. But it was something. It was doing something.

You didn’t go.

You stayed at the window, and you watched the sky, and you thought about how the light was changing. Not because of the bomb. Because the sun was going down. Because the day was ending the way days always ended, with the long shadows and the streetlights blinking on one by one and the first few stars appearing in the east.

You thought: I’m going to miss the stars.

The radio was quieter now. Not the volume. The voice. The man was speaking more slowly, like he was reading something he didn’t want to read.

“...impact in approximately twelve minutes. If you are in a structure that is not reinforced, you are advised to assume the brace position. Feet flat on the floor. Head against a wall or between your knees. Hands covering the back of your neck. This will not prevent injury, but it may...”

You sat down on the floor. Not in the brace position. Cross-legged, like you were in kindergarten, like you were waiting for story time. The carpet was scratchy against your legs. You could feel each individual fiber. You could feel the wooden floor underneath, the way the building settled and shifted like something alive and breathing.

You picked up the beer again. The rest of it was warm now, but you finished it anyway. You put the empty bottle on the floor next to you, and you lined it up with the leg of the coffee table, and you thought about how strange it was to care about something being straight when it didn’t matter at all.

Eight minutes.

There was a song playing on the radio now. You didn’t notice when it started. The man had stopped talking, and someone had put on music, something orchestral and old, something you almost recognized from a movie your parents used to watch. It was soft. It was almost pretty.

You closed your eyes.

You thought about the last time you’d been truly happy. Not fine. Not okay. Happy. The way you felt when you were a kid and you’d wake up on a snow day and the whole world was white and quiet and yours. The way you felt that one time at the beach, when you were seventeen, and you’d stayed in the water so long your fingers turned into prunes and the sun went down without you noticing.

You thought about the person you were going to be. The one you hadn’t gotten around to becoming yet. The one who would have learned to play guitar, who would have called his mother more often, who would have finally figured out what he wanted.

You opened your eyes.

Three minutes.

The radio was counting down now. Not the voice. The music had stopped, and there was a tone, a steady beep like a time signal, like the sound the atomic clock makes when it syncs. One beep per second. You counted along without meaning to.

One. Two. Three.

You stood up. You didn’t know why. Your legs felt heavy, like you were moving through water, like the air itself had thickened into something you had to push against. You walked to the window one last time.

The sky was purple. The color between sunset and night, the color that doesn’t last, the color painters spend their whole lives trying to mix. There were no planes. No birds. Just the empty sky and the first few stars and the lights of the city going about their business because they didn’t know any better.

Forty-seven. Forty-eight. Forty-nine.

You thought about the radio. About the people in the studio, wherever they were. Whether they were still talking. Whether they’d already left. Whether there was anyone left to listen.

Fifty-nine. Sixty.

The tone stopped.

Silence.

Not the silence of a paused broadcast. The silence of a microphone that had been left on in an empty room. You could hear the hum of the equipment. You could hear the faint crackle of static. You could hear nothing else.

And then the voice came back.

It wasn’t the man. It wasn’t the woman. It was someone new, someone younger, someone whose voice cracked on the first word like they were trying not to cry.

“...we are still on the air. I don’t know why. I don’t know if anyone is listening. But we are still...”

A pause. A breath. The sound of a hand moving over a face.

“...the object is now visible from the ground. Reports are coming in from across the city. If you are outside, do not look directly at it. Do not...”

You looked.

Not at the sky. At the window. At your own reflection, smudged and tired, a person you barely recognized. You raised your hand and pressed your palm against the glass. It was cold. The coldest thing you’d ever touched.

You thought: I should have gone to the basement.

You thought: I should have called my mother.

You thought: I should have folded the laundry.

And then the radio said something you didn’t hear, because the light came through the window all at once, and there was no time to close your eyes, and the last thing you saw was your own hand on the glass, the bones visible through the skin, the way the light made everything white and simple and over.

Here’s what you don’t remember.

You don’t remember the sound. Because there wasn’t one. Because the sound came later, after the light, after the heat that turned the glass to liquid and the walls to powder and your body to something that used to be yours. The sound came when there was no one left to hear it.

You don’t remember the pain. Because there wasn’t any. Because the nerves stopped working before the signal could reach your brain, because the brain stopped working before it could understand what was happening, because the whole thing took less time than it takes to blink.

You don’t remember the silence afterward. Because there was no afterward. Not for you. Not for the cat on the fire escape or the delivery driver or the people in the radio studio or the girl who cried during The Iron Giant or anyone else in the city that used to have a name.

You don’t remember any of it.

But here’s the thing you would have wanted to know, if there had been time to want anything: you were not afraid at the end. Not because you were brave. Because there wasn’t room for fear. Because the light filled everything, and in that light, there was no difference between the living and the dead, between the person you were and the person you never got to be, between the beer bottle on the floor and the laundry in the dryer and the phone that would never ring again.

You were just there.

And then you weren’t.

The radio kept broadcasting for another forty-seven seconds after the signal died. Nobody knows why. The equipment was old, the kind of analog system that doesn’t know when to quit. It sat there in the empty studio, broadcasting silence to a city that no longer existed, and then it broadcast static, and then it broadcast nothing at all.

Somewhere, in the hours that followed, a different radio picked up the signal. A ham operator in another country, scanning frequencies, looking for someone to talk to. He heard the silence. He heard the static. He heard, at the very end, the faint sound of a voice he couldn’t quite understand.

He wrote down the time and the frequency and the date. He told himself he’d heard something important. He told himself he’d remember.

By morning, he’d forgotten.

The tape of the broadcast, the one the station had been recording automatically, the one that would have captured everything from the first announcement to the last second of silence, that tape melted in the heat. There’s no recording. There’s no transcript. There’s no proof that any of it happened, except for the hole in the ground where a city used to be, and even that will fill in eventually.

The wind will bring dirt. The rain will bring seeds. The years will bring grass and trees and the slow forgetting of everything that was ever there.

And somewhere, in the space between the atoms, in the static on a frequency no one listens to anymore, there’s the echo of a voice saying something you almost remember.

You almost remember.

But you don’t.

And that’s okay.

That’s the end.

#creative writing #short story #short fiction #writers on tumblr #creative fiction #original story #original fiction #authors of tumblr #creative storytelling

⤷ʜᴇᴀᴅʟᴏᴄᴋˎˊ˗

💿✮˚.⋆ We sat on the guardrail like we were waiting for the bus. The air smelled of gasoline and hot rubber, and the red and blue lights from the cruisers kept washing over us in waves, but nobody looked our way. Not the paramedics kneeling beside the overturned SUV, not the state trooper scribbling on a clipboard, not the group of teenagers wrapped in shock blankets. One of the kids kept trying to stand up, and a woman in an EMT jacket kept pushing him back down.

The other car was a 1990 Buick Estate wagon, the kind with fake wood paneling down the sides. Its front end was accordioned into the guardrail just a few yards from where we sat. The driver’s side door hung open, a cassette still playing inside, the sound thin and distorted like a radio station losing signal. I recognized the song; I’d had the same tape once.

The younger man next to me couldn’t stop staring at the Buick. His hands were shoved into the pockets of a grey hoodie, and his shoulders were hunched so tight he looked like he was trying to fold himself into a smaller shape. A sneaker sat in the middle of the highway, maybe 50 feet away, with a red stripe, like it had been placed there carefully by someone who had forgotten to come back for it.

“They’re not gonna do anything,” the younger man said, his voice was hoarse.

“They’re doing what they can,” I said

“No, I mean-” He nodded toward the Buick. “There’s still someone in there. They haven’t even tried.”

I looked toward the Buick again. A white sheet was draped over the driver’s side, weighted down at the corners with whatever was handy, a flashlight, a rock, a tire iron. The sheet bellied slightly in the breeze off the highway, and underneath it I could make out the shape of the person, still strapped in to the seat.

“They know,” I said.

He turned to look at me for the first time since we sat down. His face was young, early twenties maybe, with a deep gash above his eyebrow that wasn’t bleeding anymore. He looked like he’d been crying, but his eyes were dry now.

“Why aren’t they doing anything?” he asked again.

I didn’t have an answer for him. I just sat there with my hands in my lap, watching the paramedics load the last of the teenagers into the ambulance. The kid who’d been trying to stand up, a boy, really, maybe sixteen, kept craning his neck to look back at the Buick. The EMT closed the doors before he could see whatever he was looking for.

The younger man made a sound then, something between a laugh and a choke, “My mom’s gonna kill me,” he said.

I nodded like I understood. Because I did. I was forty-two when I died, which was older than what most people think is young and younger than most people think is old. I’d spent the morning packing boxes in the garage, listening to that same cassette, Imogene Heap, the one my daughter had made for me before she left for college. I’d been planning to drive up to see her that weekend, bring her the lamp that she’d forgotten and a bag of oranges from the tree in the backyard. The oranges were still in the passenger seat when I’d hit that patch of black ice on the overpass.

I remember the car spinning. I remember the sound of the tape warping as the player skipped, that one word stretching out until it wasn’t a word anymore. I remember thinking, This is the part where you’re supposed to see your whole life, but all I saw was the dashboard clock clicking to 11:14 and the oranges rolling around on the floor.

When the car stopped, I was upside down. There was a ringing in my ears, and the air smelled like coolant and something sweet from the broken oranges. I tried to unbuckle my seatbelt, but my arm wouldn’t work right. It took me a long time to realize the steering wheel was in my chest.

I don’t remember much after that, I remember the sound of sirens and a woman’s voice telling me to stay still, and the way the light looked through the shattered windshield, all fractured and golden, like looking at the sun from under the waves. Then I remember sitting on the guardrail, watching them cut me out of the car, and understanding that the person in the driver’s seat wasn’t me anymore. That was 1997. Or maybe ‘98, time gets weird when you stop moving through it.

The younger man started talking again, mostly to himself. He kept saying the same things, I was just going to get cigarettes, I wasn’t even supposed to be on this road, I should’ve taken the other exit, and I let him. I’d said the same kind of things once; I should’ve left earlier. I should’ve stopped for coffee. I should’ve let the oranges rot in the tree.

He stopped mid-sentence and pointed at the Buick. “That’s my car.”

I looked at the crumpled front end, the shattered windshield, the sheet that was starting to slip off one corner. “Was,” I said.

He stared at me. I could see him trying to fit the words into his head, trying to make it make sense. He looked at the paramedics, who were packing up their gear now. He looked at the trooper, who was talking into his shoulder mic. He looked at the body under the sheet, and then he looked down at his own hands.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

I’d said that too, for a long time. I’d sat on this same stretch of highway for weeks, maybe months, watching the cars go by, waiting for something to happen. I’d watched them tow my car away. I’d watched the skid-marks fade. I’d watched my daughter come and stand on the shoulder with a woman I didn’t recognize, a grief counselor maybe, and I’d tried to call out to her, but my voice didn’t work that way.

Eventually I’d gotten up and walked away, because sitting there wasn’t doing anything. I’d walked to the gas station down the road, then to the diner where my wife and I used to eat Sunday breakfast, then to the house I'd grown up in, which had been painted a different color and had somebody else’s car in the driveway. I’d walked for years, following the shape of my old life like a song you can’t quite remember the words to.

I never found what I was looking for, because I didn’t know what it was. That was the thing I only understood later: you can’t let go of something if you don’t know you’re holding on to it.

“Come on,” I said, standing up from the guardrail. My legs didn’t creak the way they used to. They didn’t make any noise at all.

“Where?” He didn’t move.

“Away from here. There’s nothing left for you.”

He laughed again, that same broken sound. “I can’t just leave. My car’s right there. My...” He stopped. His eyes were fixed on the sneaker in the road, that white shoe with the red stripe, lying on it’s side like someone had stepped out of it and kept walking.

“I think that's yours.” I said.

He looked down at his own feet; one of them was bare.

I waited; I could see it happening, the rearrangement of everything he thought he knew. I’d been through it myself, that terrible moment when the story you’ve been telling yourself splits open, and something else crawls out.

“I remember the truck,” he said slowly. “I remember swerving, I remember thinking; this is so stupid, because I was just going to get cigarettes, and then there was this noise, and then I was sitting here.” He looked at me, and his face was young again, young in a way that made me ache. “That’s it, that’s all I remember.”

“That’s all there is.” I said.

“But I’m here.”

“You’re here,” I agreed.

“So what happens now?”

I didn’t have an answer for that. I’d spent eight years trying to figure it out. I’d walked across four states, through cities and farmland and desert, following the thin threads of things I’d left unfinished. I’d stood outside my daughter’s apartment in Portland and watched her through the window while she’d laughed at something on TV. I’d sat in the back pew in the church where they’d held my funeral and listened to my brother stumble through a eulogy he’d written the night before. I’d waited for some kind of sign, some instruction, some door to open, nothing ever did.

But somewhere along the way, I’d stopped waiting. I’d started watching, and I’d started noticing others like me, sitting on curbs and park benches and guardrails, looking at the world like they’d forgotten something important. Most of them didn’t see me. Most of them weren’t ready to.

This one was; he’d seen me the moment I’d sat down.

“I don’t know what happens now,” I said. “I don’t know if anything happens. But I know you can’t stay here.”

He looked back at the Buick, and the sheet, at the shoe in the road. The paramedics were pulling away now, the ambulance’s lights fading into the night. The trooper was unspooling yellow tape from a cone, cordoning off the wreck. In a few hours, the tow truck would come in. In a few days, the skid-marks would be gone. In a few months, no one would remember any of it except the people who had been there, and eventually they’d forget too.

“What’s your name?” He asked.

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Mine’s Danny.”

“Okay, Danny.”

He stood up, he was a little shorter than me, and younger than I’d first thought, maybe twenty-two, twenty-three. The cut above his eyebrow was starting to fade, the way things do when there’s no blood left to feed them.

“I was supposed to pick up my sister,” He said. “She’s at a friend’s house, I told her I’d be there at ten.”

I looked at the clock on the mangled dashboard of the Buick, It was still glowing faintly, 11:14, the same number I’d seen on my dashboard all those years ago. The tape was still playing, the song winding down to it’s last, warped refrain.

“She’ll be okay,” I said.

“How do you know?”

I though about my daughter, about the lamp she’d never gotten, about the oranges that had rolled across the floorboard while I died. She’d been okay, eventually. Not because of anything I’d done, but because that’s what people do, they keep going.

“I just know.” I said.

We walked away from the highway, Danny kept looking back at first, but after a while he stopped. The night was cold, the kind of dry cold that settles into the desert after the sun goes down, but neither of us felt it. We walked through the scrub and the sand, past the last strip mall and the last gas station, until there was nothing but open road and the faint line of mountains in the distance.

He asked me questions, and I answered as best I could. How long had I been there? A long time. Had I tried to go back? Yes. Could I see people? Yes, but they couldn’t see me. Could they feel me? I didn’t think so. What was the point? I didn’t know.

“That’s a shitty answer,” He said.

“It’s the only one I’ve got.”

We walked in silence for a while. The wind picked up, carrying the smell of creosote and dust. I’d been in this part of the state before, a long time ago, when my wife and I drove out to see the desert in the spring. She’d wanted to see the wildflowers. I’d wanted to stay home and work on the car. I’d complained the whole way, and now that was one of the things I'd remembered most clearly, not the flowers, but the way she’d looked at me when I finally shut up and looked at them too.

“I was an asshole sometimes,” I said.

Danny glanced at me. “Okay.”

“That’s not the point. The point is, I spent a lot of time thinking about some things I should’ve done differently. I thought if I could just figure out the right way to do it, I’d be able to... I don’t know, move on. Whatever that means.”

“Did you figure it out?”

I stopped walking. The road stretched out ahead of us, black and straight, the white lines glowing faintly in the dark. I could see the lights of a truck in the distance, coming towards us, and for a second, I felt the old pull, the desire to step out on the asphalt, to feel something, to be seen.

“I figured out there isn’t a right way,” I said. “There’s just the way you did it.”

The truck passed, and for a moment the wind and noise filled everything, and then it was gone. Danny was standing next to me, and I could see him starting to fade, just a little, the edges of him going soft like a photograph left in the sun.

He saw it too. He held up his hands and looked at them, and I watched the recognition move through him; not fear exactly, but something like it. The same feeling you get when you realize you’ve been dreaming and you’re about to wake up.

“Is this it?” He asked.

“I think so.”

“I didn’t...” He stopped. He looked back the way we’d come, though the highway was already out of sight. “I didn’t get to say goodbye.”

I knew that. I’d carried the same thought with me for the last eight years, across four states, through a thousand empty nights. I’d carried it until I couldn’t feel the weight anymore, until it was just another part of me, like the scar on my hand from when I was twelve or the sound of my daughter’s laugh.

“You don’t have to.” I said. “They know.”

He looked at me, and I could see him wanting to believe it. I remembered wanting to believe it too, back when I still thought there was someone on the other end who could hear me.

“How to you know?” He asked again.

I thought about the way the light had looked through my broken windshield, all those years ago. I thought about the oranges, and the lamp, and the Sunday breakfasts I’d never have again. I thought about my wife’s face when she’d looked at the wildflowers, and the way my daughter used to sing along to the same song when she thought I wasn’t listening.

“I don’t,” I said. “But you have to let them go anyway.”

He didn’t say anything. The wind picked up again, and I could feel myself starting to go the same way he was. The edges of me thining out, becoming something lighter. I’d been here for so long I’d almost forgotten what it felt like to be solid. Now I was remembering what it felt like to be nothing at all.

Danny looked at me one more time. The cut above his eyebrow was gone now, and his face was smooth and young and almost transparent. “What’s your name?” He asked again.

This time I told him. It didn’t matter, but it felt like something I should give him before I left.

“Thanks,” he said.

And then he was gone. Not suddenly, more like a song fading out, the last few notes stretching thin until there’s nothing left but the silence they leave behind.

I stood there for a while, alone on the side of the road. The mountains were starting to lighten in the east, the first pale line of dawn creeping over the desert. I could feel the sun coming, the way you can feel a storm coming, a pressure in the air that tells you something is about to change.

I thought about the Buick, still on the highway, waiting for the tow truck. I thought about the tape deck playing the end of that song, over and over until the battery died. I thought about the shoe in the road, and the sheet over the driver's seat, and the teenager who’d be telling this story for the rest of their lives.

I thought about my daughter, somewhere in Portland, probably still asleep. She’d be thirty-two now. Maybe she had kids of her own. Maybe she’d kept the lamp, or maybe she’d thrown it out. Maybe she still thought of me sometimes, the way I’d thought about my father, a vague shape in the back of her mind that she couldn’t quite bring into focus.

The sun broke over the mountains, and all the light hit me at once, warm and golden, the same color it had been through my shattered windshield. I felt it go through me, the way it goes through water, and I didn’t try to hold on.

There’s no door, I realized. There’s no light at the end of the tunnel, no voice calling you home. There’s just the wind, and the sun, and the ground under your feet, and the slow work of letting go.

I let go of the oranges first. Then the lamp. Then the sound of my daughter’s laugh, and the way my wife said my name when she was happy, and the smell of coffee on Sunday morning. I let go of the highway, the guardrail, and the dashboard clock that stopped at 11:14. I let go of the question I’d been asking for eight years, and I let go of the answer I’d never found.

And then I let myself go, piece by piece, until there was nothing left but light.

The sun rose over the desert. The tow truck came, and the last of the yellow tape was taken down, and the highway opened up again. The shoe on the road was swept to the shoulder, and eventually it would be thrown away, or taken home by someone who didn’t know what it was.

The cassette in the Buick played until the battery ran out, the song stuck halfway through the end, a voice asking something that no one would ever answer.

But if you’d been standing on the side of the road that morning, just as the light was breaking, you might’ve felt something. A warmth that wasn’t the sun, a breeze that wasn’t the wind, a moment when the air itself seemed to breathe in and hold it. And then nothing. Just the desert, and the highway, and the long stretch of road that goes on forever, the same way it always has.

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⋆˚꩜｡ 𝕭𝖑𝖊𝖊𝖉 𝕷𝖎𝖐𝖊 𝕸𝖊 ｡𖦹°‧

⤷ ゛ 𝕾𝖎𝖓𝖈𝖊𝖗𝖊𝖑𝖞𝖁𝖆𝖑𝖊𝖓𝖙𝖎𝖓𝖊 ˎˊ˗

🦇་༘࿐ The last thing Leo owned that meant anything to him was his dad’s 1991 Fender Jag-Stang, and by midnight, it would belong to Mick at the pawn shop. He sat on the curb outside Shop-n-Save, the cracked pavement warm through his jeans even at this hour. A torn Soundgarden shirt hung off his bony frame, and his combat boots, duct-taped at the toes, were propped on a discarded lottery ticket. The amplified hum of bad fluorescent light buzzed overhead, a sound that felt like it lived permanently in his teeth.

“Don’t do it man, that guitar’s your soul.” Leo didn’t look up. He knew the voice. Ash. Ash, who always had cigarettes, who knew where the house parties were, who wore the coolest vintage flannels and had that effortless slouch Leo had spent hours practicing in his bedroom mirror. Ash dropped onto the curb beside him, a cloud of sandalwood and clove smoke settling around them. His hair was a curtain of black silk, and his eyes, even in the sickly parking lot light, were a weird pale gray.

“Soul’s not worth much,” Leo muttered, picking at a rip in his jeans. “Rent is.”

“Rent’s a drag,” Ash agreed, offering him a clove, Leo took it. “But a Jag-Stang? That's a piece of history. Kurt’s ghost lives in that thing.”

“Kurt’s dead.” Leo said flatly, lighting the cigarette. The sweet, spicy smoke was a small mercy.

“Exactly. Makes it haunted. Makes it valuable.” Leo just shook his head. His mom had been gone since he was fourteen, off with a trucker named Big Mike in Bakersfield. His dad was a ghost in his own right, a hollowed-out vet who spent his days on the couch watching war documentaries, and his nights in a bottle. The few hundred bucks the Jag-Stang would fetch would keep the lights on for another month, keep the social worker from sniffing around. It was pathetic. He was Pathetic.

Ash leaned back, looking up at the faint, polluted stars. “I’m getting out of here tonight, Leo.” This got his attention.

“Where? Portland? Seattle?”

“Further,” Ash’s lips curled into a slow, secretive smile, “A friend’s hooking me up. An upgrade. A permanent one.”

“What, like a band thing?”

“Something like that.” Ash turned those pale eyes on him, and Leo felt a strange flutter in his chest. He’d had a crush on Ash for what felt like forever, a dull, hopeless ache he’d never admit to. Ash was everything Leo wasn’t: confident, cool, untouchable. He had a magnetic pull, and Leo was just a piece of scrap metal.

“You should come,” Ash said, the words dropping like stones into still water.

“To…wherever?”

“To meet my friend. What have you got to lose? A guitar you’re about to sell? A dad who still doesn’t know you’re alive?” Ash’s voice was a low, persuasive hum “This is a chance to be,” he paused, considering his words, “more.” The word hung in the air. More. Leo looked at his own reflection in the pawn shop window across the street, a pale, gaunt silhouette against the neon. He was seventeen, and he already felt used up. Empty.

“Okay.” he heard himself say. Ash’s smile widened, revealing a glint of canine.

“Awesome.”

They walked through the dead streets of their town, past the closed video store and the diner where the waitress always gave Leo a free coffee if he looked cold enough. Ash led him to the old textile mill by the river, a hulking brick corpse of a building. Most of the windows were smashed, and the graffiti was old, faded.

“This is where your friend lives?” Leo asked, his voice echoing in the cavernous entryway.

“She’s particular about her privacy.”

They climbed a dark, rusted staircase. Leo could hear the river running below, a constant, hungry sound. On the third floor, in a vast, open space lit by dozens of thick white candles, a woman waited. She was sitting in an old velvet armchair, and she was the most beautiful thing Leo had ever seen. Her hair was the color of dark honey, cascading over pale shoulders, and she wore a simple black slip dress. She looked like a heroin-chic supermodel, but ancient, too. Her eyes, when they met Leo’s, were the same unsettling gray as Ash’s.

“Ash,” she said, her voice a low, melodic purr, “You brough a guest.”

“This is Leo,” Ash said, his own voice softer now, reverent. “He wants to come with us.” The woman rose, a movement so fluid it was almost liquid. She crossed the concrete floor, her bare feet silent. She stopped in front of Leo, close enough that he could smell her, cold night air, expensive perfume, and something else. Something coppery underneath.

“Does he?” she reached out and traced a cold finger along his jawline, her touch was like ice, and Leo flinched. “He’s very young, Ash. Very… raw.”

“He’s ready.” Ash insisted. She studied Leo, her gaze seeming to peel back his skin.

“You’re sad,” she said. “And lonely. You think no one sees you. you think you’re nothing.” Her words were a perfect, brutal echo of his own thoughts. “Ash sees you, that’s why you’re here. You’d follow him anywhere, wouldn’t you?” Leo couldn’t speak. He could only nod, mesmerized and terrified. The woman, who’s name he still didn’t know, smiled. It was a kind smile, almost maternal, and it was the most terrifying thing he’d ever seen.

“It’s a gift, what we offer,” she said. “An escape from all of this.” She gestured vaguely at the broken windows, the dying town beyond. “From being sad and small. From being nothing, but it comes with a price. You will belong to us. To me, and to Ash. Forever.” Leo’s eyes flickered to Ash, who was watching him with an expression of desperate hope. This was it. This was the upgrade. It was crazy, it was insane, but the alternative was the pawn shop and the smell of his father’s whiskey and another empty, pointless day.

“Okay,” he whispered. The woman laughed, a sound like silver bells.

“Such a simple word for such a big decision.” She turned to Ash, “You will do it. It is your first task. Your first act of love for our new family.” Ash’s face went pale, but he nodded. He stepped forward, pulling Leo away from the woman, into a pool of candle light.

“It’ll just hurt for a second,” he murmured, his hands on Leo’s shoulders. “Then it’s over. Then we’re together.”

Leo was confused, but he trusted ash. He always had. Ash leaned in, and for a dizzying moment, Leo thought he was going to be kissed. Instead he felt a sharp, searing pain at his throat, like the worst bee sting he’d ever imagined. He tried to pull back, but Ash’s grip was like iron. He felt a terrible, pulling sensation, a draining, a cold that spread from his neck throughout his entire body, freezing his veins. Then, just as suddenly, it stopped. Ash pulled away, his lips stained dark. The woman was there, pressing her own wrist to Ash’s mouth, then turning to Leo. Her wrist was bleeding a thick, dark stream.

“Drink,” she commanded, her gray eyes boring into his. “It’s the only way.” He was so cold. Shivering violently, on the verge of blacking out, he pressed his mouth to her skin. The liquid was not like blood. It was fire and dark chocolate and the richest wine imaginable, flooding his frozen body with unbelievable heat. It was life itself. He drank until she pulled away and the wound on her wrist was already gone.

He collapsed, but Ash caught him. The world was sharpening, not fading. He could hear the rats scuttling in the walls, the individual drips of water from the pipes in the corner, the distant thrum of a car on the highway. He could smell everything; the dust, the rust, the woman’s perfume, and underneath it, the rich, salty smell of Ash. And he could feel Ash, a bright, burning presence in his mind, tethered to him by an invisible thread.

“Welcome, little brother,” Ash whispered, his face full of a joy Leo had never seen there before. The woman watched them, a satisfied smile on her lips.

“The first night is always the most intense,” she said. “The hunger will come, you must learn to control it. Ash will teach you.”

For a few blissful hours, Leo was high on it. They left the mill and the world was a new, electric place. Colors were brighter, sounds were a symphony. They moved through the town like ghosts, and Leo felt a power he’d never known. They ended up at the all-night diner, Leo wasn't hungry. The thought of food was repulsive, but he was drawn to the warmth, the human activity. They slid into a booth. The waitress, the nice one who always gave him coffee, came over.

“Leo? Honey you look even paler than usual. You okay?” He tried to smile.

“Yeah Mags, just tired.” Her pulse was a loud, tempting drum in his ears. He could smell the sweet blood just under her skin. The hunger the woman warned him about uncoiled in his gut, a snake of pure, desperate need. He gripped the edge of the table, the formica creaking under his new strength. Ash’s hand clamped down on his wrist, hard enough to hurt.

“No,” he whispered, his voice a low, sharp command. “Not her. Not ever. You feed from the herd, not the shepherds. You understand?” The Herd. The Shepherds. Leo looked at Mags, who was just bringing him his usual free coffee. She was a person. She was the only person in this town who was ever kind to him.

It hit him like a physical blow. This wasn’t freedom. This wasn’t an escape from being nothing. This was a different cage, a more gilded and horrible one. He had traded his dependence on a broken father for a total, soul binding dependence on a monster and her acolyte. Ash wasn’t his friend, crush, or his liberator. Ash was his sire, his keeper, his jailer. The look in Ash’s eyes wasn’t love, it was ownership. He was bound to Ash for eternity. He could never leave, never go back. He couldn’t even have a cup of coffee with the one person who showed him simple human kindness, because her very existence was now a temptation and a threat.

As the sun began to lighten the eastern sky, a terrible, physical sickness washed over him. His skin prickled and smoked.

“We have to go,” Ash said, pulling him from the booth, “Now.” They fled back to the mill, to the darkness. The woman was waiting in her velvet chair, seemingly unmoved. As the first ray of sunlight cut through the broken windows, Leo felt his body seize up, a paralysis worse than death forcing him into the deepest darkest corner.

He was aware, in the back of his mind, of Ash’s presence, a comforting, terrible warmth. He was aware of the woman’s cold satisfaction. And he was aware, most of all, of the pawn shop, and the Jag-Stang. It would still be there, on the wall. His dad would probably never even notice it was gone. And Leo, the new, improved, immortal Leo, would never be able to play it again. He was a creature of the night now, and his soul, the one he thought wasn’t worth much, was no longer his to sell. It belonged to them. Forever.