Intersects

What Cynthia liked about Justin, was that he genuinely didn’t seem to see the difference between her and the rest of the world.

He sat beside her in her bedroom or on the grass outside with the same ease with which he sat beside the doctors and analysts. He carried with him a subtle energy that seemed to extend to everyone around him.

He brings it with him to her bedroom when he visits, along with two brown files leaking pictures that Cynthia identifies before she reads the accompanying documents.

“This one’s your Mom,” Justin says, laying it before her, like a tarot card.

“She’s pretty,” Cynthia remarks.

“And this one is your Dad.” The pictures are similar fluorescently lit photographs, like passport pictures.

Cynthia skims the documents, lists of positives and negatives. Negative for hereditary diseases, for nickel allergies, no police records. There are contact details for familial relations, but Cynthia flips those pages quickly.

There are brief details about their personal lives, hobbies. Justin is silent as she reads through them.

None of them resemble her own.

Not that she has any.

“Their phone numbers and stuff are there too,” Justin says, suddenly, drawing her attention to him. “I could call them, or you could visit them.”

“Dr.Kane wouldn’t let me,” Cynthia says. Her insides feel disjointed, in pieces like a jigsaw puzzle.

“Then we wouldn’t tell her. I could get you out, just for the day; your Mom is in the city. She’s across the bridge.”

Cynthia glances at her open door. The hallway beyond it stretches out like a vacuum.

People didn’t live in a vacuum, she realized. She wouldn’t either. 

Art by Joanne Young

Text by Lucie MacAulay