City of Angels

Somehow the party lit up the entire street, even though it was held in a single apartment. It was a large apartment, the kind found only in the canyons in Los Angeles. It had a pool in the back, and several polished cars in the front. A girl in a leather dress lounged against one, posed with one high-heeled foot crossed over the other, shoulder tilted down, eyelids heavy with shadow.

Isabel had been to her fair share of parties. But she’d never understood what lured people to these sorts of parties, to places that boasted liquor, music that violated the law, and making out with someone you would likely regret in the morning.

Someone had once called it “chaos without consequence”. That someone obviously never read the papers and saw the endless stories about pretty, glamorous boys OD-ing on the pavement, or rock stars who got behind the wheel with beer on their breath.

But she wanted to see the appeal; she wanted to see how far she could push herself.

The interior of the apartment was a riot of people with drinks in hand swaying to slow EDM. It was absolutely full of people, some who abandoned the music to follow others out to the pool. She looked at them all. How could she ever fit in? Why would she- anyone – want to?

Ultra violet lights flashed. Someone was going around with scissors, cutting everyone’s glow sticks in half. Dancers waved them frantically. The entire apartment looked like a scene from Avatar.

There was an indoor pool as well. A girl lounged on the edge, in a bikini, wearing enough makeup that it was clear she had no intention of actually swimming. She was leaning against a boy in the pool, a hand on his wet shoulder, smiling and nodding. Isabel wondered what kind of person she would have been if she hadn’t left California for Minnesota.

Someone offered her a drink and a glow stick on her way to the patio. She shook her head, hesitated, and then took the proffered cup. It smelled rank and tasted it too. She handed it back after the first sip. The boy holding it looked abashed and slid back into the mass of dancers. She wasn’t sure if she was disappointed or glad. Someone had told her that alcohol could either make you very sad, very happy, or very angry. The world needed her to be absolutely none of those things.

Something blocked the doors to the patio. It took Isabel a moment to realize that it was a group of girls, rather than an art installation. They had taken their glow sticks and deliberately swiped neon paint onto their lips and eyes. A couple had gone so far as to paint every single nail with the stuff. They looked like the fairies in a child’s fantasy brought to life. Beneath the paint nearly every girl had a mouth as shiny as glass. She hated it-

Why couldn’t she just forget it and be as neon-bright as them?

One of the girls looked up at Isabel and made such a high-pitched noise that it could have attracted attentive dogs. Isabel was not a dog, but beneath the phosphorescence and the makeup she recognized Clementine. Celementine leapt from the group of girls – there went the perfect composition of the art piece – and grabbed Isabel’s arm. “Isabel, sweetie! I’m so glad you came. Isn’t this party a dream?”

Isabel made her mouth perform an approximation of a smile. She knew from experience that it made her look a little amused, a little cynical, and sometimes drew men’s attentions to her lips. 

Clementine only beamed back. She pulled Isabel into the group and rattled off several names. Isabel only assumed that they were almost all the same thing, since the girls they belonged to looked like different versions of the same Barbie.

When she was done she held up a glow stick. Isabel didn’t take it, but Clementine only wiped her finger across its tip and ordered Isabel to part her lips. Isabel let her pat the glowing paint onto them.

Isabel caught her reflection in Clementine’s eyes. With her lips painted she almost looked like one of them. It was the biggest lie.

Clementine acted as though they had all been waiting for her. They absorbed her into their conversation as though she wasn’t made of Teflon, as though the words wouldn’t just bounce off her. When the patio door opened she smelled oranges and chlorine and the dusty perfume of the canyon.

She was glad not to be alone; L.A. was not a place to be alone. It was all about connections, a city of freeways that connected downtown and suburbs and beaches, and people who knew the cousin of this celebrity or this producer. People around her held her hand and did little shimmies, air kissed her cheek. It was something you did with strangers in L.A. If you did not do those things it had nothing to do with the fact that you were surrounded by strangers. The point was to not be alone.

After some indeterminable amount of time – how long ago had she arrived? How long ago had she had that drink? – a couple of the girls became genuinely curious about her.

“Where are you from?” Sierra asked.

“Minnesota,” she said.

Sierra’s eyes went as wide as the eyes of a cartoon animal.

A bevy of boys appeared. Most of them were fresh out of the pool. They shook their hair, sprinkling everyone with shining drops. One of them slid down Isabel’s dress. “Where have you been?” Clementine asked one, pulling one down by the shoulder to speak right in his ear.

“Looking for you,” he replied.

Clementine smiled. She kissed him and he let her. For a moment his eyes were closed. They blinked open and focused on Isabel before he pulled away from the kiss.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Isabel,” she said. She didn’t ask who he was.

Apparently she didn’t have to. “Jasper,” he said. He was tanned, the sort of tanned that came from days on these beaches, or hours on ones in Costa Rica. He flashed pearly white teeth when she gave him an almost-smile.

“Darling.” Clementine was at her side again. “Enjoy yourself. I’m going to find Candace.” It was a dismissal, but Clementine was the one that left.

“Anything I can get you?” Jasper asked.

“Ross brought a couple mickey’s,” one of his friends offered. He scratched his buzz cut.

“Water,” Isabel said. She got a feeling from Jasper, almost like a challenge, or a chase. It left her stomach buzzing.

“Ha!” said Buzz Cut. “It’s too late for water.”

She aimed her cool gaze at him. She parted her lips slowly. “Does that mean you won’t get it for me?”

In an instant he’d disappeared to find a bottle of water. Jasper laughed and wiped at his hair with a towel. His eyes didn’t leave hers.

She didn’t know quite how to do this. There were only so many steps she could take before she needed someone else to lead. She tried to think of a signal. She parted her lips and nudged his calf with the toe of her enormous heels.

It was all he needed.

He led her up the stairs, where it was only marginally quieter. She’d never known the point of parties, so she’d never known when she had accomplished what she’d come to do: when did she leave?

Maybe this was the point. Everyone did it for a reason, didn’t they?

Jasper pulled her into a dark bedroom. It was full of mirrors, maybe made for someone who didn’t intend to have someone else in the room with them, or maybe it was entirely for that.

Jasper closed the door and spun. He grasped her around the waist, slid his hands down to her hips, and kissed her.

He was taller than her, but not by much in the heels. The heels had been an impulse buy. She bought them because that was apparently what you did in Mel Rose, though she couldn’t remember why.

They were still kissing. She didn’t try to keep track of his hands. She kept waiting to feel like this was wrong. It didn’t.

It was one of those stories that was neither particularly bad, nor good. Just a story of one’s youth that was almost chic in L.A.

His mouth was urgent. She’d been kissed like this, but not by a stranger. He pressed against her like she would only be here for a moment, like he needed to get all of her before she was gone. Ah, so this was what it was like. Passion without affection.

He pulled back, just far enough she saw the corner of his mouth, his dark eyes, his wet collarbone. He laughed, quietly.

She kissed him to keep him quiet. His fingers found the zipper of her dress. Nothing in her head told her to stop. Stopping was as pointless as continuing. But if she stopped he might ask her name. She wanted to objectify, to be objectified. If his name was Jasper or something else entirely, how did it change anything? Even his face didn’t matter. She could reduce him to his hands-

Which were on her bare back and pulling down the shoulders of her dress. This seemed like a very grown-up experience to have. Like saying Last night, in the canyon, I- and it was another story that blended into hundreds of almost identical stories in Los Angeles. It would be distinct and hardly memorable, because these stories hardly ever were.

He tugged the front of her dress down. The thrill of the chase – the one she assumed attracted everyone to this kind of action – was gone. There was no challenge now. His intent was clear. She was fine. Everything was fine.

He pulled her to the bed and leaned back for a second. “Shit,” he said, looking down.

She wasn’t sure if people said anything while they did this. What did they say? What could they possibly have to talk about? Whatever it was, she didn’t want him to say anything. It would only blur lines.

“Shut up,” she said, and kissed him.

In the second between kisses he said, “beautiful.”

She pulled away. Her lipstick had bled cherry across his mouth. “No,” she said. She said it like she said no to her parents when they asked if she’d been the one to break the glass in the sink. It tasted like a lie.

“No?” His voice didn’t sound different at all.

She wasn’t sure if, at the moment, she hated him, or herself, or the city for trying to show her what it had to offer and her attempt to see it and not being able to look at the drugs and the sex and the drinks without seeing past them to the unplanned pregnancies and heroin tracks and rehab stints. Why couldn’t she just turn her brain off?

“No.” She pushed his hands away and pulled up the straps of her dress. He stopped looking at her bra as she reached behind her for the zipper. She tasted the neon on her lips, smudged with her lipstick.

He chuckled under his breath. “You not drunk enough?”

Maybe this would be easier if she was drunk. But alcohol left a taste in her mouth almost as bad as this moment.

“Clementine is probably wondering where you are,” she said, voice like ice.

He looked at her. He clearly couldn’t see beyond her raccoon mask of eyeliner. She’d put it on heavily enough to discourage any emotional guesswork.

She wet to the room’s add-on bathroom and fixed the wrinkles in her dress. She ran a hand through her hair and wiped the lipstick off the side of her mouth. She did not look like a more grown-up version of herself. She did not look like the girls that loitered in boutiques, talking about their surfer boyfriends while they tried on large sunglasses. She looked like those people who had come into the city with screenplays or demo CDs and wound up in bars. No- she didn’t even look like them. She looked like a girl with so many sins that if you took them all away she’d be nothing but her eyeliner and a pair of heels. Everyone in L.A. was nothing but sins.

How stupid she had been to reduce L.A. to the stories of those on the decline, when it was the collection of those who were already fallen.

She emerged from the bathroom. Jasper had disappeared; when she went down the stairs she couldn’t see him or Clementine. Someone offered her a hit of something. There was sweat at his temples. The veins in his arm were dark as bruises. He smiled the smile of someone who was so low he didn’t see there wasn’t anywhere else to go.

None of the people in this party would ever drive through Los Angeles and see more than the grey pavement in front of them. They may not all have been born here, but they were made out of – into – this imaginary kingdom, this hipster nirvana. This place where dreams came true if you made them come true, and destiny was for the wealthy and luck was for the poor. This dry, dustbowl. This glowing, glittering metropolis. This city. This city.

Isabel left the party. She did know it had ended. It had ended and there was nothing accomplished. That was the appeal, she decided. They had nothing to accomplish, and therefore nothing to distract them from the non-reality that was all of Los Angeles.

It didn’t matter if you’d come here to make it big in the industry. It didn’t matter if you’d come here to surf. It didn’t matter if you’d come here to forget an ex boyfriend, or to find one. The moment you entered the city, you were dead.

Art by Cara Delevingne

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Bargain

I didn’t know how to deal with loss. I’d never experienced loss like they had. The kind of loss that set families off-kilter and pounded cracks through them. I wasn’t prepared for the heavy quality of the air in the house, as if the loss of one person was the loss of a pillar under a ceiling that was constantly pressing down. I’d known people distantly who’d had deaths in the family, from illness or car accidents. But a family that had lost a child, and not lost a child in death, but lost them, to some place or even to some person, was entirely different. I expected they would be frantic, searching for answers, or upset that the police investigation had ended. Torn apart and looking like it.

They weren’t like that.

The first thing that struck me about Lisbeth’s family was how functional they seemed. No one looked ready to dissolve into a puddle of tears. I’d met her mother before, before Ariadne had gone missing, and she looked just as she had that day in the spring. She wore a cardigan and had her hair up in a very utilitarian bun. There were shadows under her eyes but they could have been from working late. Lisbeth had said that her mother was taking regular twelve-hour shifts at the hospital, on-call constantly and finding a reason to be out of the house. She stood there in the living room looking worn but not taut, not pulled to the end of her emotional tether as Lisbeth had when Ariadne had first gone missing.

Lisbeth was better now. Coping, as her mother obviously was. Sean didn’t look like he wanted to cope at all.

“Sean,” Lisbeth said when he didn’t get out of his chair to greet me. “Aren’t you going to say hello? Ella’s here.”

His complete lack of interest was the first thing that told me that he was dealing with Ariadne’s disappearance differently from his sister and mother. Sean was full of vitality, and his personality always had an edge to it, like he was an inch from bursting into laughter or shouting. It was intense, like the sharp and handsome features of his face. He usually said hello, looking either aggrieved to say it or genuinely glad to see me. There was nothing on his face now but a distant disdain, as if he were angry with something none of the rest of us could see.

“Sean?”

Sean pushed out of his chair and headed to the kitchen. He grabbed a glass bottle from the countertop and a bottle opener. Without answering, he headed toward the stairs, prying the top off the bottle. Listbeth muttered, “asshole,” under her breath as he stumbled on a step. Soda (it was too fizzy to be beer) sloshed over his hand. He grabbed for the banister and pulled himself up, not bothering about the fizzy mess on the floor. He stomped up the rest of the stairs.

At the top of them he turned so quickly the carpet under him slid and he almost slipped. I heard him going down the corridor above us too, and the crash of a door being flung open so hard it hit the wall beside it. Then another slam as it closed.

I didn’t say anything. Lisbeth might have been embarassed in another situation, but now she just looked furious. “He thinks this is all his tragedy,” she said. “Asshole.”

“He’s been having a hard time with the police and the inquiry,” Lisbeth’s mother said beside us. Her hands were twitching as she held them in front of her. The expression on her face was reassuring and brittle, so shiny that I knew there was something darker beneath it. I felt like I should say something about her daughter, but in doig so I might open up and bleed that darkness. “He doesn’t like the attention. He wanted to be alone for all of this. And it was a shock to all of us. He just doesn’t want to think about how we might have lost her. He’ll be embarrassed later. He’s just angry for now. We all have our ways.”

Lisbeth gave me a newspaper clipping in her room later and I read it while she painted her toes. It summed up the entire investigation, she told me, and I took this to mean that she did not want to explain it to me. I knew only bits and pieces, and after I read the article, what I knew was this: Ariadne, fourteen, disappeared three weeks prior. Went for a walk before dinner, never came home to dinner. The investigation started a couple hours later because she was a minor. It had been three weeks and there was no sign of her body, though the woods in the ravine by the house had been searched. There were no clues. The public searches had been called off.

I tried to recall Ariadne as I’d last seen her. The youngest of the family, Lisbeth’s small sister, who looked even smaller, who read books about mythology and loved the original fairy tales and spat at Disney adaptations. Lisbeth had once told me that Ariadne wanted to be a fairy hunter when she was older.

“Mum cries all the time, now,” Lisbeth said. She tapped the wall behind her bed, between her and her mother’s room. It made a hollow sound; her nail scratched the wall paper as she slid it down. “Sometimes at night. Don’t worry. You’ve got your mp3 player, right? You can put it on if she does it tonight. I don’t think she knows that I can hear her.”

I looked outside at the ravine. It dipped into a green mess, filled with so much foliage that from this vantage there was nothing to see but the tops of trees. The ground under it, which I knew from experience was filled with rolling hills, some as high as if they hid houses under them, all covered with moss, was invisible. I imagined Ariadne in those woods and where she would have gone. A hand reaching out to grab her, from the roots of a tree. A tree swallowing her up.

I didn’t sleep well that night. I was used to waking a few times in a night, as if, no matter how deeply I fell into sleep, there was always something attached to me, something wound tightly around me, that was ready to bring me back with a small jerk. I was jerked back to wakefulness and Lisbeth’s long, slow, bragging breaths in the small hours of the morning. It was dark and cold, the wind biting at me where it crept under the windowsill. Lisbeth had opened it, likely, when I’d been asleep. She always complained about being a hot sleeper.

I was a cold sleeper, and now I was not a sleeper at all. I pushed my legs over the edge of the bed and looked for my jumper. I tugged it on, tucking it into my sweatpants. The floor was dark, but there was a prickle of moonlight that bled a line across the room, like a long blue light bulb hung above the bed. I crept out of the room and pulled the door shut behind me. In my socks I went to use the bathroom, blinking when the light seared my eyeballs, stumbling for a moment when I turned the light off again while the toilet flushed. Darkness always seemed darker when there’s been a reprieve from it.

I went back toward Lisbeth’s room, but didn’t go inside. There was a sound coming from inside, like she was scarping her nails against the wall again, but the light was off. I knew she must have been asleep, so I didn’t bother opening the door. I wasn’t going to go back to sleep if I lay next to her, if I lay down at all. Sleep was far away. I left the muffled noise along and continued. I padded past Sean’s room. The light wasn’t on either, and it was completely silent.

I went downstairs, as quietly as I could. Sean was there. I paused on the bottom step of the stairs, staring at the couch. It was easy to see him, with his wild dark hair and dark eyes, and his sharply-cut face and body. The moonlight lit the room like a sun under a silver veil. It flooded in through the glass doors that made up most of one wall and looked out into the small garden. The world outside was grey, dark, misty. I could see the grass just in front of the door, the shapes of trees not far away, but nothing else.

Sean was sprawled on the couch, his bare feet hanging over the edge of one arm. Under his heavy eyelids I saw a sliver of black. He was awake, drumming his fingers on one leg and on the couch cushions. He tilted his head toward me when I stepped off the stairs. “What are you doing up?” he asked.

“I don’t sleep well.” I came over and sat on the edge of the couch. He didn’t make room for me but he was lean enough that, propped up at this angle, he left enough room that I could perch on the cushion.

“So you came to invade the living room instead?” He sounded annoyed.

“I didn’t know you would be here. It isn’t your bedroom.” I crossed my arms. The cold air must have been coming in through another window. Gooseflesh rose on my arms. “Why aren’t you in you bedroom?”

“It’s my house,” Sean pointed out. “I couldn’t sleep.”

I tried to think of something to say to him. Sean and I had never had real conversations. I’d never had a real conversation with Ariadne, either. I had no idea what they meant to one another, or what to say to him. I tried to imagine was I would want to hear if someone I loved had vanished without warning and not come back. When people were suspecting the worst. I couldn’t think of anything except a question. “What do you think happened to her?”

Sean’s pointy face got pointier.

“I’ve heard people talk about all the things it could be,” I told him. “I don’t know what it’s like, obviously, but- It’s just, I know everyone says that they want to help and you can talk to them. But I’m actually good at listening. And not saying anything. So it’s almost like not talking to anyone, except I’ll actually hear. And I won’t give you advice. Or anything. So, if you want to talk…”

Sean’s narrowed eyes got a little wider. I could hardly see them in the hollows under his brow. “Congratulations for saying what almost everyone has said. With your own twist. I’ve never heard anyone say it so free of eloquence.”

“I try,” I said, even though I didn’t.

“I can tell,” he said. After a long moment, when he wasn’t looking at me, he said, “Thanks.”

We stayed on the couch, and Sean moved over just a few inches, enough that I could relax the leg that had previously been holding half of me up, and I could slide fully onto the cushions.

Something hit the glass door. It was a clear sound, like a nail tapping a crystal glass. Sean’s eyes went so wide they looked like tunnels. He didn’t turn toward the doors but reached a hand forward, spreading it across my knee. It gave me a jolt but only because I could his fingers were shaking. “Ella, are you looking at the door?”

“Yes,” I said, as there was another tapping sound. I recognized it. Someone or something had thrown a rock at the door. Whatever it was, I couldn’t see it through the grey. There were squirrels near my house, resting in all the trees that surrounded it, and acorns were constantly dropping on the roof. These taps were from objects hurtled horizontally, though. “Why?”

Sean ducked his head as another tap came. He didn’t answer as there was a fourth. This one was aggressive, the small pebble ricocheting off the glass with the force of a bullet. Whatever was throwing it was strong.

“Are you still watching?” Sean whispered. He was so quiet. I could tell he was trying to breathe softly, trying not to disturb the silence. “Is there anything there? Do you see anything?”

I shook my head. His quiet was contagious. I had the sudden desire to stay silent too, soundless, though I couldn’t tell why.

“Pretend you don’t see anything. Pretend you don’t hear anything. Ella-” he breathed. His hand on my knee reached for my wrist. He pulled me down on the couch, rolled me so I faced him, my legs lining up with his. His pupils were blown wide, his breath puffing on my cheek. I could feel his pulse in his wrist. He was blinking fast, as if with each blink he could see the world more clearly.

“Ella. Don’t move at all,” he whispered. “Don’t say anything.”

Two hands hit the glass door.

Their fingers lingered as the palms pulled way, then they retreated back into the mist.

“Sean,” I whispered. My voice felt like I was speaking around cotton. My pulse was dangerously quick. “What was that?”

The scent of mist and moss was pervasive, as if we’d opened the doors, and every window.

The mist hissed, like the wind through the trees. But a wind would have pushed the mist away. The sound slithered in the air, in the space between my heartbeats. It was several sighs at once. “Sean. Sean. Come out. Come out, Sean. We want you.”

“What is that?” I said again. I couldn’t take my eyes from the place where the hands had been. The prints were still there, clear in the condensation.

“Ella, you have to go back upstairs,” Sean said. “Come on, go. I’ve got to go.”

“What? Where?”

Sean pushed himself up on his elbow. I was on the outside of the couch, trapping him in. He looked down at me. “I’m going outside. I’ve got to see them. I don’t want them to come inside. I don’t want them to come after Lisbeth too. That’s not fucking happening.”

“Too? What do you mean too? What are-”

“I have a feeling,” Sean said, pushing himself up the rest of the way, knocking my feet out of the way so he could stand on his.

I wasn’t nearly brave enough to go up the dark staircase on my own. But I was brave enough to stand next to dark-coloured Sean as he walked to the back door. I said, “I’m coming.”

The mist swirled around our feet as we walked down the steeply sloped side of the ravine. Sean had let go of my wrist but sometimes I wanted him to take it again. We were walking close enough that we wouldn’t lose one another in the mist, but the possibility still made my stomach twist. It was probably a good thing that he didn’t. I would have crushed his fingers.

My socks were soaked through when we got to the bottom. The springy moss felt as wet as if I’d walked through a stream. There was dew on the trees. The boughs were a complicated, blurry spider web above us. Occasionally we heard sighs, from far away, then so close that I spun in the mist, not wanting to see the source of them, unable to stop searching.

We found a clearing. There was a stream running through it, slowed to a trickle. Sean grabbed the edge of my shirt to pull me to a stop. It was cold as winter here, as if we’d climbed into a dark hole. Sean stood in the moss, squinting into the mist.

“Do you see them?” he said-

-just as they came out from behind the trees. The water at our feet shivered. The trees seemed to bough. The mist rolled at our ankles like a tide pushed up onto a beach. I watched the hands curl around the trees, the delicate bony feet stepping out, the faces appearing. I could not tell if they were girls or boys, they were androgynous, like children whose faces had not had time to mature. But their features were sharp, sharper than Sean’s. Their skin was poreless, as soft and fine as porcelain, their hair shining, drifting about them like seaweed in water. They were naked, but they had nothing to identity their gender, their bodies smooth, without crevices. I tried to summon a word for them, for the entities, but I could come up with nothing that did not sound impossible.

“Oh, Sean,” they sighed. Their voices came from all around us, like they were the air itself. “Sean, you brought company. You came for us.”

I counted them, the things that came from behind the trees. I got to seven, all in front or beside us. There might have been one behind us, or a few, but I didn’t look. I saw that one of them held something in its hands, a lump of fur that wasn’t moving. Another smiled with a cluster of teeth that was not perfect, but thin and sharp. There was something about it that was so other. I tried to reason that what looked bad, or cruel, wasn’t always so. But it was everything humanity was not and something deep inside of me recoiled from it.

Sean looked at them with empty eyes. He released the hem of my shirt and spoke to me without turning his head. “They- I don’t know what they are. But Ariadne… she…” his voice caught and he stopped trying to speak, but I knew what he wanted to say.

The creatures came a little closer, but not within touching distance. Some of them were smiling, or making an approximation of it. Nothing on their faces could convey actual joy. Their features moved like some moldable mask, but there was nothing human under them. They reached forward with long, long fingers. Every one had an extra knuckle.

“Sean, what do they-” I began, but I stopped. Because all of their gazes had turned to me, as though they hadn’t noticed me before. Seven pairs of green eyes, seven toxic green gazes, settled on me. They were eyes you didn’t want to see in the forest at night, eyes that cut through mist and the dark.

I remembered something I’d once heard from Ariadne. When she’d tried explaining that people were wrong about fairytales, that the real enemies weren’t just humans. That in other parts of the world there were myths about creatures, creatures with long fingers that reached into cradles, or beckoned from beneath waves. Horses with teeth or seals with human legs under their skins.

I saw a face in the mist. It was quick, like a coalescence of shadows and moonlight. It might have been a trick, of the light, or my eyes betraying me, but my throat burned anyway. The face had Lisbeth’s amused mouth add Sean’s strong eyebrows. “Sean.”

“It’s her,” he said. His voice was as violent as the look he’d given me when I first saw him the day before. “I know. But I don’t know how to-”

The creatures must have seen me looking. They gave me those imitation smiles again. They faded in and out of the mist. In. Out. In. Out. Then in again, much closer to the both of us. I almost stumbled back.

“Pretty,” one of them crooned, reaching a hand forward like she meant to touch my hair. I felt a whisper on my scalp, as cold as if dew had fallen on my head, rolling over my crown, toward my ear.

Sean, jostled me, throwing out an arm. “Don’t touch her.”

“He likes her,” they sighed, together. Sean went still. My fingers felt numb. My face was prickling. “How much? How much?”

I took a step back then, quickly. I could still see half of Sean’s face, hardening, his eyes darkening. “Sean. How do we leave?”

“Bargain,” one of the creatures shrilled, and the rest shrieked with delight. The sound was a death knell, high and keening like the howl of a hyena.

“Sean…” I began.

“For what? What do you want for Ariadne?” Sean said.

Something came back to me. I recalled passing Lisbeth’s room, the scraping sound, as if she were dragging a hand across the wall, or the floor. The cold air in her room of the window I no longer believed she’d left open. “Oh, Sean,” I said, before they could. He looked at me. I didn’t want to say it. But it wasn’t my choice. He had to make it. “Lisbeth. Would you rather have Lisbeth or Ariadne?”

Art by Anonymous

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Where She Went

Mama and Papa didn’t understand that he wasn’t imaginary. Mama said imaginary like she really meant dream or hope, and when Papa said it he always sounded as though he’d missed the words fucking childish and landed on imaginary instead. I tried to explain that he was invisible, not imaginary, but that seemed to siphon away at their conviction instead of fortify it.

Mama asked if he was my guardian angel. He was my guardian. I couldn’t say he was an angel. He looked nothing like the creatures in the stained glass windows of the church we went to Sunday mornings. He looked nothing like the paintings I saw in a picture book at school that looked more like a catalogue for the L’Ouvre than a children’s story.

I didn’t have a name for him at first. I thought of him as an echo, because he arrived after spring, in June, when the damp was tapering and the heat was swelling and bleaching the rocks in the river, schorching the grass and turning our yard into a burnt brown rug. The air was filled with breathlessness and swelling like it would pop. He appeared, cool and dark like soil that had been rained on, like an echo of spring. I was trying to sleep under my bed, which was cooler than under my sheets. I was covered in sweat, everything sticking to me, and flipping onto my stomach, then my back when sweat pooled on my stomach. Outside the window cicadas were already humming, too loudly to hear thoughts. Frogs chirped. Birds didn’t bother. It was too hot for their song.

It was black. Outside the room. Inside of it. Even with the fan whirring and blowing a weak cold breath across my tummy, I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t think I would ever sleep.

I turned my cheek against the floor. It was sticky but cool, the ridges of the wood so pronounced I could feel it as I rubbed the side of my face against it. I whispered a word into the dark, to test it. House. Language dissolved in the dark, as if the neural mechanism to turn sounds into words could be eclipsed by the dark. House sounded made up. It delighted me endlessly to say it, over and over, hushed.

House, said a voice that was not my own, joining in.

He was on top of the bed, speaking over the edge of it, down to me. His voice was smooth, like butter softened by the summer heat. It was deep like nighttime. I giggled so loudly that Papa came stomping down the hall in his boxers and Coca Cola logo t-shirt to tell me to shut the hell up because the middle of the night was no time to make noise and it was already too goddamn hot and loud to sleep. If I wanted to goddamn play I could do it when the sun came up. He didn’t mention my invisible friend.

But I didn’t stop talking. We traded nonsense words through the night, in whispers, both of us trying to speak more quietly than the other until we couldn’t hear the words we exchanged at all. House, sugar, gecko, bat… We played with my dolls and I tried to show him how to use a yo-yo, but he just liked to watch me do it, even when I tangled the string and had to get it undone, slowly, in the dark, feeling for the knot.

One night, before bed, I was having tea with him, when Mama came and stood in the doorway, with a can of beer in her hand, condensation gathering on her fingers, her eyes narrowed, or maybe just looking narrowed because they were red and puffy. I looked up at her, because he did, and said, “Mama?”

Mama didn’t look at me at first. She looked at the window, like I’d spoken from outside. The heat made her curls stick to her neck. Her curls were shiny, her lip stain fading, but I thought she was beautiful. Mama was always the prettiest person, I thought.  Then she turned to me. “What?”

“I don’t know what name to choose. I want a good name. He needs one.”

Mama’s red lips pursed. One of her eyebrows was critical of me. “Who’s he?”

“My… guardian.” I tried out the word on my tongue. It tasted like house did in the dark.

“Why can’t your guardian think up his own name?” She didn’t sound indulgent or amused, but not angry about him, like Papa was. She didn’t care what his name was, and that bugged me, made my throat sticky.

“He wants me to name him. But I can’t think of anything good.”

“Spot,” Mama said.

I shook my head. There was an age when you realized your parents didn’t have the answer to everything, and I wasn’t at that age yet, so answers that didn’t satisfy me still left me feeling betrayed. “That’s a dog name. He needs a good name.”

“Alshat.”

Alshat was a star’s name. Mama had probably learned it in her days at university, which we almost never talked about because one time I’d asked my parents if I was going and Mama had gotten a sour, pinched look on her face while Papa’s cheeks and ears turned red. But Papa didn’t know Alshat was a star’s name. Mama called him Alshat when she asked if he was coming to dinner, or asked if he needed an extra seat at the table. Papa told me that if I didn’t stop pretending Alshat was real, I was going to get my head shoved in a toilet at school because people don’t like retards, Ginny.

Mama and Papa got into a lot of fights over that summer. It was too hot not to fight, and too hot to stay in the same room, so once they were done shouting they always went into separate rooms, or Mama left the house while Papa knocked something over. They were fighting in the kitchen while Mama made gravy and Papa tested the meat to see if it was done cooking, glaring at its pink insides. Alshat and I were sitting quietly at the table in the dining room to wait for dinner. I’d put out all the plates, but Papa had shoved the meat back under the grill, so I guessed it would be a while before we ate.

“-dying out here. This heat. There’s nothing to paint. Nowhere to study, for Christ’s sake,” Mama said. The wooden spoon she used to stir the gravy traced a wobbly shape in the air as she talked and gestured. Alshat was watching it too. “Not that you care. What’s wrong with university? Too hard or do you really not care about living in this dust bowl with no idea what’s out there in the world? Do you even know who Van Gogh was? Do you know him from your brother?”

“Don’t condescend to me. I bring home your food. What fucking right do you have to talk to me like that?” Papa snarled, sounding more like an angry cat than a man.

“I have every right,” Mama said. “I-”

“Alshat, don’t say that,” I said, putting my hand on the table between us. I leaned in and whispered, “We can go to my room and finish having tea. Or we can build a castle.”

Papa slammed one of the cupboards in the kitchen closed. It banged, once, then twice as it bounced. Mama looked ready to kill. “Fine!” Papa shouted at his fist. “Go to your fucking room, Ginny. Go!”

“Don’t you dare speak to her like that!” Mama growled. “Ginny, baby, don’t worry about that. Don’t worry about your daddy.”

I wasn’t worried about Papa as much as I was about her. I didn’t like the scraped sound of her voice, or her gentle hands curled like claws, reaching for me. I hopped off my chair, Alshat behind me, and bolted for my room. I pulled it shut, even though it was like putting cardboard between myself and the hallway. I lay under my bed, the fan pointed at me, tracing my fingers in the dusty, and another in the sweat on my tummy. The dust stuck to my hot palms. “Alshat. I don’t want you to say that again, all right? They were just having a fight.”

Alshat apologized and found new words to make un-real. Then he started to sing. It felt like a siren, like an ambulance coming down the road, like the promise that something bad had happened and it was only going to get worse until it didn’t.

The next day I went to the front door and looked for my shoes. They were usually under Mama’s but Mama’s weren’t there. I put on my shoes and looked for her boots, the ones with the little hills and the holes at the toes that made her look beautiful and made men look at her when we went to the proper grocery store. Mama was gone with the shoes. Papa came out of his room to make coffee and grab a bear, and in the afternoon he went to the backyard and starting putting together the flattened cardboard boxes we kept in the shed. He made one phone call during dinner, and I watched him while I ate spaghetti from a can. I couldn’t hear the person on the other side of the phone but I guessed it was Grams, because he kept saying No, She’s your daughter, and Well, she’s all right, I didn’t tell her anything, I don’t know what the hell to say, She’s fine, Really?

“Ginny,” he said, holding out the phone as far as the cord would stretch. “It’s your Grandma. Talk to her. Stop talking to your invisible friend, talk to Grandma, come on.”

“Yes, sir.” I took the phone- somehow the cord stretched a little bit more to read me, all the way down on the kitchen floor, because the received was high on the wall. The phone smelled like Papa’s beer and cigarettes. “Grams?”

“Ginny. Oh, baby,” she said. She sounded a lot like Mama, but like Mama’s voice on a scratchy record. Mama had never smoked. “I’m getting a bus. I’ll be with you the day after tomorrow, all right?”

“Mama’s gone,” I said. “Alshat, stop.”

“Al- what? I know your Mama’s gone. You’re going to be just fine, sweetie,” Grams said. When she said it I knew that Alshat had told the truth, and he hadn’t listened to me the night before when Mama and Papa were fighting.

Grams came two days later, with her small bag full of things that smelled like her house in the larger town. She cleaned the linens and I helped her hang them on the line in the garden. She prodded Papa until he took a shower, then vacuumed his room while he was in the bathroom, then the living room, and my room. She set up a chair at the table for Alshat, even though Alshat was tall enough that he could stand during meals. She asked me to stay quiet at night because she was a room away from me and could hear me talking to him.

Alshat stayed all summer. Grams did too. The branches on the trees sagged, like the heat took something out of them as well. The air over everything shimmered, like the earth had become a furnace. Papa ate in the garden, or his room, and didn’t give Grams the chance to vacuum his floor a second time. When we ate I spoke to Alshat when Grams was staring at nothing, the way Mama sometimes did. But Grams heard me, when Mama didn’t. She looked disappointed when I only gave her one-word answers to questions. But I didn’t have anything to say to her at the empty table.

“You’re excused,” she said, voice laced with sadness. “You can go to your room, Ginny. You and Alshat. Except- listen. Even if your Mama doesn’t come back, you know maybe she’ll send you a letter, right? You know she loves you, right? She didn’t leave because of you, baby. You know that, right?”

I nodded and waited for her to finish. Sometimes people needed a few moments to let the words coalesce and sort themselves out on their tongue before speaking them. Grams leaned across the table and patted my hand. She had painted nails, like Mama, but her hand was covered with wrinkles, like the folds in laundry. She raked my wrist with her nails as she pulled her hand away. Alshat was looked at the spot on my wrist she’d touched.

“And here,” she added, picking up something from one of the chairs. It had been pushed under the table so I hadn’t seen the shopping bag sitting on it, but it had a plastic bag inside of that, and in that there was a Polaroid camera. It was black and plastic-looking with a few stickers on it. “It was your Mama’s. She said you could have it. She said you could have anything of hers you wanted. That’s nice, isn’t it?”

“Yes, ma’am.” I remember smiling, so wide it almost hurt, because I’d never had my own camera. And Grams looked happy to give it to me, and I could feel Alshat excited beside me. “How many pictures can I take?”

“As many as you want,” she said. “We’ve got extra rolls of film. Try to make these ones last at least a week, all right? I have to go into Golden Lake to get more film, and I don’t want to do that too often.”

I nodded. I didn’t say thank you. I was already running to my bedroom. I kicked the door shut and told Alshat to pose for the camera. He didn’t want to pose anywhere except under the bed. I lay down on my tummy and slithered halfway under the bed, turning the camera on, the bulb leaping up, ready for action. It was dark under the bed, even though the sun hadn’t gone down and my room was bright with sun. “Say cheese,” I said, like the photographer who took our school photos.

Alshat didn’t say anything. I took his picture and listened to the camera spit it out, looking at the shiny grey surface of it before I waved it around, waiting for the grey to resolve into shadows, into shapes, into Alshat. I held up the picture to show Alshat himself, like wide crocodile-mouth, his eyes like slashes of light, the outline of him, which was all that appeared in the dark, and all that showed up on film.

Your Mama is never coming back for that camera.

“I know that, Alshat,” I said.

Alshat’s eyes were all colour in the Polaroid picture. No pupils.

Do you want me to get rid of your Papa too?

Art by Anonymous

Text by Lucie MacAulay