Author: Belladonna Bennett

Lauralette is Hungry

It is the tail-end of a long, hard week. Lauralette’s bones ache, her breath tastes stale, and there is a sharp pit in her stomach. Lauralette is hungry and she has been trying not to deal with it. Methods to that end include a diet of red meats, idly thumbing the on-off button of her phone, pacing the main room of her apartment, leaning forward with her forehead on the wall and her eyes closed, keeping halfway busy with chores and errands that are quickly given up on, and then thumbing that button on her phone again.

She isn’t going to make the first call, but the person she is waiting on hasn’t either.

Frustrated, Lauralette tosses the phone down face-up on the table. It reflects the dark grey sky through the window. Moon-haze, all clouds and no stars and a glare of red from the lit sign outside.

BLOOD

ROCK

MOTEL

Lauralette owns the place and her living situation is a small two-room affair above the main reception and office. She doesn’t need a lot of space and if her ego needs a shot she can embellish things by claiming that in actuality 22 rooms are hers.

Right now Lauralette is in the dining room which is the living room which is the kitchen. She’s trying to keep down a greasy, somewhat undercooked burger, but it’s already tasting stale at two bites in and the cheap-as-shit chair is uncomfortable and her jaw aches from clenching.

“Fuck it.”

From slouched to upright to standing, her bones creaking all the way, Lauralette rolls her shoulders and massages that space between her neck and clavicle. She ignores the twinge of pain there which carries down from her neck and the top of her spine. She hisses whatever curse she has for it and drags herself through the bedroom to her bathroom.

The light here is a cold green-blue from the cheap lino and wall tiles. Lauralette peels out of her clothes and leaves them discarded over the corner of the towel rack. Her skin is grey, her eyes are dark and sunken. In years past her dirty blonde hair had looked more vibrant and she had put the work in, given it volume and sheen and she had blushed herself, and painted her lips red. She is older now and less interested in putting the effort in. Truthfully she hasn’t had to put the effort in for a while.

Lauralette pushes herself into the shower and washes under cold water. She had put on some mass since her glossy blonde, red lipped days, and then let it go again. Well worked musculature was left behind, along with nicks and scars and calloused knuckles. The water feels good down her back and for a moment she can forget everything aches. Only a moment.

The idea of clean and presentable had shifted over time. These days a shower is body soap and two-in-one shampoo, water splashed on her face and then quickly rinsed off. Clothing then has turned from sparkling black dress and heels to old jeans and a black t-shirt. She hand-combs her hair after drying off and by the front door Lauralette pulls on her bomber jacket and stuffs her hands in her pockets to find her keys.

Lauralette locks up the upstairs apartment and heads down. She is lost in her own head, mind filled with bad ideas, operating on autopilot as she moves through the reception, out the front door, almost bumping into a man.

“Oh thank God someone is here!” He sounds relieved.

“Uh?” Lauralette is trying to remember how to talk.

“Sorry, I know it’s late. I’ve been driving all night, I got totally lost on my way to– Nevermind that, sorry. Do you have a room?”

Lauralette stares at the man. He needs a shave and he’s sweating and his hair is a little greasy and he has thick rimmed, thick-lensed glasses. He looks warm in the literal sense, she knows nothing about him to gauge the other sense. He is also travelling alone. The man is easy pickings. She could take him to a room and rip him open.

“I can pay, obviously. Cash or card. Whichever is easier.”

The man’s saving grace is that he is simply not Lauralette’s type. Neither is it a good look if people go missing so close to the motel. Lauralette makes an irritated sound and heads back into the motel reception, “Fine,” She grunts, “Come in.”

The man’s relief is obvious and immediate. He follows Lauralette inside, who has quickly rounded the front desk, and almost fumbles the catch when she tosses him the key to a ground-floor room.

“Pay me tomorrow,” Lauralette says, already leaving the front desk, “Can’t be asked to open the register.”

“Oh. Oh, well. Okay then! Thank you.” He isn’t certain what to do with himself.

“Uh-huh.” Lauralette brushes past the man and heads out into the night air. She sucks on her teeth, tongue pressing against a sharp fang.

“Thank you!” The man calls out again. He is left to inspect the key given to see if it has a door number attached.

. .

Far flung from the small town she lives at, Lauralette pulls her truck into the parking lot at a roadside bar. Here there are stars in the sky. Lauralette pays them no mind. She climbs out of her truck, boots crunching gravel underfoot, and rolls her shoulders to work out any lingering stiffness from the drive.

She’s about an hour from home.

Hands stuffed into her pockets, Lauralette approaches the bar. It has a neon open sign that contradicts the painted lettering above it.

OLD MASTER’S ARMS

OPEN

Lauralette nudges the door open with her boot and sidles on inside. She catches the scent of tap beer and nicotine and sweat, then someone’s cologne, more than one strand of floral perfume, some kind of chlorination also. Underneath it all is the age that clings to the walls and the wood. Lauralette is hit with noise also – the mild din of conversation underneath a louder voice backed by terrible speakers and microphone pops. It is quiz night from the look and sound of things.

Lauralette licks her top teeth and sucks on a fang. The sharp point digging into her tongue focuses her from the sensation of the world packed into this bar and she scans the space. No patron looks isolated, it’s the sort of night where everyone arrived with a group and are unlikely to break off from each-other. They all look like they are getting along, any falling outs will be lubricated by alcohol and taken in stride.

She is scowling even though she doesn’t mean to. It’s just how her face rests, if rest can be considered as a frown and a knit brow and narrowed eyes. Someone once told her about how her crows’ feet would clench into fists. Scowling then, Lauralette walks to the bar. Most seats here are empty, anyone coming up intends to take their drinks away.

“You all good, hun?” The barmaid asks. She’s pretty enough, that’s the first impression. Warm skin, full lips, big brown eyes. Her hair is pulled back into a tight, black ponytail and the way her apron is tied pulls her whole outfit snug to her figure. Hourglass.

Lauralette reads that with a long look that drags up until finally meeting the barmaid’s gaze – the barmaid wears a knowing look there – and Lauralette says, “Yeah.” A single word typically isn’t enough to lay a line, so she gives the mildest form of elaboration, “Long week.”

“I hear you,” The barmaid’s name tag says CAM in neat handwriting. Cam is cleaning a line of shot glasses with a bit of torn cloth. There is someone else behind the bar with her, he’s name-tagged PAUL and seems to be pulling more than his own weight. This means Cam can be busy with those glasses and with Lauralette’s company and not worry about much else.

“Mm,” Lauralette leans on the bar after sitting and gestures with a nod across the room, “Weekly? Monthly?”

“Few times a year. Look like your kind of thing?” One glass is stacked under the bar, the next is picked up for a polish.

Lauralette scoffs, lip curling, “No.”

The MC cracks a joke at the same time and the whole pub floor breaks out into a mixture of laughter or just polite chuckles. Mostly polite chuckles.

“Bad night to come if they aren’t your thing, then.” Cam says, “Not from around here?” She leans forward, elbows on the bar, glass and cloth still in hand. At this angle she is bent at the waist and Lauralette is unsubtle in dragging her gaze away from the crowd, craning her neck to look behind the bar, behind Cam, Cam’s behind.

“I don’t mind the noise,” Lauralette says, sounding absent, the question goes ignored. Her eyes have darkened, though her gaze is not quite perverse it is altered somehow. Shark-like. Blood in the water.

“You checking me out?” Cam leans to one side and intercepts Lauralette’s gaze. Here she demands they meet eye-to-eye, though her expression is amused rather than offended. Her smile long and lop-sided, one brow raised, eyes narrowed with playful suspicion. She is used to playing this sort of thing off, but Lauralette isn’t the same kind of breed as the good old boys Cam is used to.

Catching Lauralette’s gaze is a mistake.

Her eyes are black pits, abyssal and falling forever, and though eye-contact is momentary the feeling will last. Lauralette calls this her certain something and that’s something she used to say with a coy tone of voice and an easy ‘gotcha’ smirk. These days she hardly says anything about it, little effort put into the social side of affairs. At a certain point it became easier to act as hook rather than bait.

She spares idle thoughts for the concept of catch and release. A back-of-the-mind reminder.

It is Lauralette who breaks eye contact and the experience leaves Cam blinking, staring into space. She glances away and tries to remember herself, what she was doing, asking internally if someone had just given her an order to fulfill.

“Got a light?” Lauralette asks.

“Uh. Yeah. Sec.” Cam stands up straight and then leans back to pat down her apron pocket. Tied around her waist, but not over her shoulders, she has to rummage to find what she’s looking for. “Here.” Cam slides a translucent pink lighter across the bar.

It spins into Lauralette’s hand. “Cheers,” She mutters and pockets the lighter. “Got a cig, too?”

“… Yeah.” Cam obliges again. She is feeling stupefied, malleable, though the feeling is quickly starting to fade. She hands Lauralette a cigarette and adds – voice empty – “You gotta smoke outside.”

“Sure.” Lauralette pushes away from the bar. Cigarette balanced between her lips, she heads for the exit to the pub garden.

. .

Outside is relative quiet. The bar still thrums with the energy of a busy night, though that energy is hitting its peak with a round of clapping, some cheers and jeers, and the muffled unintelligible announcement of the winning team. Moments later, a handful of people step outside into the garden to light up before heading home.

So the smokers smoke, chat, comment on the cold, and one by one snuff out their little lights and head back inside to re-couple with the others they came with.

Lauralette watches this from a corner of the building, one which joins the beer garden and the back wall to a side-alley between the bar and old wooden fencing. There is a dumpster there, garbage bags piled up, a door into the kitchen or some such back area. She is outside of any cones of light from the bar or the garden lamps, marked instead by an ember pinpoint. Smoke curls from between two fingers and then her lips.

She waits.

Time passes.

Lights inside the bar go out, the main floor cleared. Lauralette slips from her corner position to deeper in the alley. Action had managed to push down a certain feeling, but now it bubbles back up from the pit of her stomach, carves a line up through her chest, and grips at the back of her throat.

Hunger.

Lauralette knows that Cam will come out here. It comes from a certain type of intuition gleaned during their brief eye-contact. It’s only a waiting game before the barmaid delivers herself to Lauralette. Cam will come out here, she will find a pleasing shape in the shadow, she will allow herself to be lured deeper. Her mind will ignore the litter, the rust of the dumpster, the horrid scent of it, all in favour of a kiss and hands on each others’ bodies.

Lauralette imagines taking Cam by the neck then, dipping her low while clutched tight. Then there her fangs will sink into skin and Lauralette will be able to drink deep.

Lauralette knows this from both sides. For the giver it is a mix of hot-and-cold. First ice where the skin is pierced, the sensation running through the giver’s veins until seizing and slowing their heart. Then in their head they swim with feverish heat. Their vision blurs with blots of inky darkness. The corners close in.

For the taker it is the base euphoria of a vital need met after too long. Water in the desert. Warm hands in the dead of winter. Food, actual food, after a lifetime of starvation. Satisfaction is reached only when the taker drinks deep of the blooded well and it takes only a moment for it to turn deadly. Only a moment for the giver to take hold of a small strand of their sense and try to push away. Only a moment for the taker’s feral instinct to kick in, like an errant twitch on a hair-trigger.

Only a moment to go from control to a dead woman slumped in blood behind a rusty dumpster.

Images of it all flash hot in Lauralette’s mind.

Door opens, door closes. Cam steps into the night holding a garbage bag in each hand. She mutters something to herself about getting no help and dumps the bags as best she can into the dumpster and it’s then that she hears a sound – movement just out of sight.

“Hey.” Cam’s voice has a shrill quality when met with cold air, “That you, weird hot lady?”

Nothing responds, nothing is there.

. .

“FUCK!” Lauralette slams her hand on the top of her steering wheel once, then twice more. After the third time she grips with both hands on top and rattles her arms, “Fuck!”

She is driving too fast down narrow winding roads, each turn is taken too hard. That feeling of speed, the g-force on each bend, the sight of the world whipping by on either side, none of it is enough to truly distract her from herself.

She had very almost made a terrible, terrible mistake. Though she knows to call it a mistake is part cowardice and would not truly characterize what could have happened. She almost gave into her hunger in the worst possible way, all because she has been avoiding a phonecall.

Her stomach hurts. Her own body is angry at her.

Lauralette slams a cassette into the center console of her truck. She hits play and cranks the volume and the entire vehicle is filled with bone-shaking garage metal.

Another sharp turn with no loss of control. The straight-away ahead is empty and so – screaming along to the wave of sound – Lauralette slams her foot down.

. .

BLOOD

ROCK

MOTEL

The light of the signage casts a red glow about its immediate area.

The dusty road leading two ways to and from the motel – one way goes towards town, an errant collection of shops, businesses, two tourist traps, and a sprawl of mostly single-floor houses. The other way goes elsewhere.

The front of the motel’s lobby. The glass of the windows and door reflecting the sign at odd, conflicting angles, glaring over the signage posted on the window interiors. Rates, lobby hours, local businesses.

Further flung, from the other side, the motel pool is tinged red only if the night breeze catches the surface just right.

Right below, the step that leads up to the lobby doors. A young woman is sat with her knees up looking tired and bored. Without thought or intent she focuses her gaze on the whites of her trainers turned red by the light above.

She sighs. Her name is Dina and she is not sure how long she is going to continue waiting out here. She had called ahead, she had knocked on the doors, she had walked back to the side of the road to expertly toss a small pebble at what she knows is the bedroom window. Only after all that did she walk around the side of the building to see that Lauralette’s pickup truck was gone.

Dina hears a distant engine approaching. The trope ‘speak of the devil,’ might apply in some fashion, but Dina has been trying to manifest Lauralette’s presence for a while now. What this is – the truck fast approaching down from the road towards elsewhere – is coincidence. Good or bad remains to be seen.

Dina braces herself because she truly does not know what state Lauralette is going to be in. Just underneath the sound of the engine and then as the truck draws closer overpowering it, the sound of Lauralette’s rage-out tape. It isn’t an unfamiliar nose and it tells Dina very little about what to expect.

Lauralette parks the truck opposite where Dina sits. The windows glow red from the motel sign, but through that red Dina can see Lauralette. Lauralette is staring straight ahead. She takes a few moments to compose herself and then with a forceful thump she cuts out the music. Dina pushes herself up to her feet and Lauralette exits her vehicle. Neither women say anything to each other just yet, instead they hold eye-contact over the few feet between them.

It’s a game of chicken. It’s a game of who will blink first. It’s a game of Dina staring Lauralette down under the red haze and wondering if she’d see any blood. Lauralette with her hands stuff into her pockets, pulling the jacket taught and encouraging a slouched stance. Dina with a long narrow satchel over one shoulder, her hand steepled on the end of it, stood up straight to force Lauralette into meeting her gaze.

Lauralette blinks first. She bows her head, steps forward, and then steps past Dina entirely. She takes the step up to the motel lobby, opens up the door and says, “Alright. In, then.”

. .

Red glow, lunar grey-blue, dark shadows where the windows can’t reach. Lauralette sees just fine in darkness, though she’s familiar with home enough to navigate blindfolded. Lauralette winces when Dina hits the light switch behind her. The space still isn’t brightly lit by any measure, the bulbs are old and take a while to warm up and the furnishing harkens to an era where beige and muted greens were the fashionable thing.

Dina has said before the space needs an update, Lauralette always tells her it is the way she likes it.

“Tried calling you,” Dina says. She sounds distracted while looking around the front room of the apartment, looking for clues as to how Lauralette spent the week since they blew up at each other.

Lauralette shrugs off her jacket and tosses it over the back of the sofa. Then with the attitude of stepping into an old routine she pulls a chair from the table and sits slouched, legs parted, fingertips balanced on a surface. She looks up at Dina who is still in the middle of the room, “Didn’t take my phone with me.”

Dina had come here telling herself she wasn’t going to play caretaker, but still she sees that old plate on Lauralette’s table with the going-stale food and she feels compelled in some way to take it to the kitchen.

Tap-tap. Fingertips on the table. The chair creaking when Lauralette leans back, head turned to track Dina, tentative, curious, too-satisfied, hunger roils and it feels too easy to think this is how her week ends.

When Dina returns Lauralette makes sure to smooth her expression to something less shark-like.

“You fuck up?” Dina asks. She stands at the end of the table and looks down at Lauralette.

“Not all the way.” Lauralette is clean. No blood on her lips or her chin or her collar and sleeves. Hungry as she is, hungry as Dina knows she must be, she hadn’t tasted blood tonight. “Want to talk about it?”

“Nope.” Dina folds open her satchel on the table. It’s a knife-roll, though hardly a standard kit. Rather than the tools of a butcher there is a scalpel and a wooden stake and zip-ties and gauze and adhesive bandages. Lauralette had helped her put it together more than a few weeks ago and she had called it a Bloodletter’s Kit. “Hands behind the chair.”

Lauralette obeys. She sits up straight, reaches her arms behind her, and watches carefully as Dina prepares. Earlier she had felt like a predator. If she’s still an animal she wonders what sort this makes her. Dina rounds behind her and binds her hands, the zip-ties looped through the spindles of the chair. Dina pulls them extra tight and Lauralette just barely hisses at that.

“I feel teeth and I stake you,” Dina warns. It’s nothing new, but Lauralette doesn’t roll her eyes, doesn’t take any of it disingenuously. So many aspects of her – her boredom, her attitude, her confidence – they get washed away and replaced with need. Hunger. Blood is close.

“Yeah,” Lauralette answers because she doesn’t want to fuck this up. Her eyes catch the glint of silver and she licks her lips when Dina raises the scalpel to her own wrist. Dina cuts a small, thin line without flinching.

The line of precious red. Thin but thickening. Terrible in its inches out of reach, almost enough to make Lauralette lurch.

“Please,” Lauralette gasps.

That seems to do it, the plea. Dina holds the cut to Lauralette’s lips and instinct takes over from there. Lips to skin, tongue over the red line, then eyes closed she suckles from the wound. Dina holds the back of Lauralette’s head, fingers in her hair, ready to yank her away if needs be, but until that might occur only cradling. Not a drop is spilled.

This isn’t their first time doing this. The sensation is familiar to Dina. Cold up her arm, hot in her head, a silent bee-swarm sensation that buzzes throughout her body and rocks the world from left to right. For Lauralette it is a vital heat that floods into her, flushes red in her cheeks and her chest. Nothing can replicate this, nothing comes close. Not from an animal, alive or dead. Not from a donor bag, lacking a pulse. The pulse is important. Lauralette drinks to the rhythmic throb pounded out by the beat of Dina’s heart.

Then it is over. Dina pulls her arm away and stumbles backwards until she is able to catch herself by the edge of the table. Lauralette lunges forward. The chair creaks. She gasps, teeth bared. Animal. The zip-tie bindings dig into her wrists and she remembers herself.

“Ugh.” Dina grabs the gauze and turns to sit heavily on the floor. She puts pressure on her wrist and keeps the limb raised.

The room is hot. Sweat prickles at Lauralette’s skin. Her mouth is wet and that void in her stomach is gone. She sits herself up and stares up at the ceiling and feels animal instinct abate and subside. She can’t look down at Dina, not right now, not while she is too painfully aware of how warm that body is, aware that the cut on her wrist hasn’t fully closed yet.

Time passes with silence between them. The buzz of the lightbulb, the heat of their breathing. Eventually the floor groans and Dina picks herself up. Lauralette catches her in the bottom of her vision – Dina looks tired and pale, but there is less red on the gauze than one might expect. The cut is already healing. Through some property of Lauralette’s mouth, wounds close quickly, but Dina still bandages up her wrist.

“Can I?” Lauralette’s voice comes out wet and sated, but the question itself is pathetic. She’s staring at the gauze, at wasted drops of blood.

Dina’s expression curls. She’s amused and disgusted and a harder to read third thing. It’s this strange third thing that has her indulge. She shoves the bloodied gauze into Lauralette’s mouth.

“You good?” Dina asks.

Lauralette nods. She can still taste blood all over her mouth. Metallic and warm. There are precious few drops left, soaking from the gauze to her tongue. She knows how it looks, she doesn’t care.

Dina waits a beat just taking Lauralette in. This woman who had drifted into her life with supreme confidence and unsaid history and some kind of raw magnetic power. This woman who is now very much bound and at the mercy of Dina. Dina, someone who really has no idea what she would want to do with power. Dina shakes her head. She kneels down behind Lauralette and with a deft hand she cuts the ties that bind.

Lauralette slouches immediately. She folds forwards and rubs her thumbs against her wrists. “Mn.” She takes the gauze from her mouth and uses a clean side to wipe her face before tossing it across the table.

“See you tomorrow, Lette.” Dina has already packed her things away. She is shouldering her satchel and getting ready to leave.

“Wait.” Lauralette sits up, one hand on the table and the other about to reach out.

“What do you want?”

“It’s late,” Lauralette says. “You should stay.” It’s impossible for Lauralette to sound innocent here. Even sated there is a wet hunger to her voice. Blood itself makes her feel whole, but she is always, always left wanting more.

“Ugh,” Dina scoffs and shakes her head, “You’re just fucking horny because I fed you.”

Lauralette takes Dina by the wrist, leant forward almost out of her chair, “That a problem?”

Dina snatches her wrist back. She’s starting to remember clearly why she stormed out last time, why she told Lauralette to go fuck herself and tossed the spare key she had been given at the vampire’s face.

“Sorry.” Lauralette says the word like it physically pains her.

“See you tomorrow, Lette,” Dina tries again. This time she leaves without interruption.

. .

The next day, about seven in the morning. The world is dusty yellow and orange and the colour blue strikes through all that in a big rectangle shape. Lauralette is standing poolside with a big net. She has a wide-brim hat and large shades and a short sleeve floral print shirt and the heat of the sun only mildly stings and the brightness of the summer morning atmosphere is not enough to dampen her mood.

It is quiet. Soft breeze and the glug-glug of the pool’s water filter and the splash whenever she swoops the net through the surface to catch more dead leave and the occasional cigarette end.

“Oh, hey!” Some man’s voice in the distance behind her.

Lauralette squints at something odd in the water. She has to lean to reach it with the net, but an expert’s hand swipes it from the water.

“Hey!” He’s getting closer. The man is loud, but trying not to sound threatening.

Lauralette pulls a face when she has to touch the net to get the strange bit of litter free. It must be some type of business card, but the ink is all run and ruined.

“Did you know the ice-machine is broken?” The man asks her. He’s not just a few feet away.

Lauralette doesn’t want to deal with all that. She swoops the net back into the water. She will pretend not to hear him for at least six seconds longer. It’s going to be a good week.

The Long Fingers

It starts with a scratch.

Ellie is taking her rubbish downstairs – food waste and wrappings emptied from the kitchen bin, tied in a knot, then taken out of her first floor apartment, down the stairwell, past the letter boxes and out through the back into the parking garage (where there are no cars). From there, Ellie takes a left to the drive-in entrance of the garage and a right around the corner to the cracked double doors of the disposal unit. The white paint is bubbled and faded, and marked by splinters and scratches, particularly around the edges.

This is where the scratch is. It’s the sound that Ellie hears after the clattering noise of the rubbish being hoisted into the dumpster. It’s subtle, like paint flecks peeling from brickwork, or a nail digging at the concrete lines between them. Just a scratch.

Ellie often has this odd reaction to noises she thinks might be little creatures. She’s never been good at baby talk or pet talk, or talking to something that isn’t recognizable as a direct peer, so she says into the darkness behind the dumpster, “Uh. Hello?”

Her voice doesn’t echo in the filthy, claustrophobic acoustics of the disposal unit. There’s no response from whatever it is that had scratched behind the dumpster. Aside from Ellie’s breathing, it is utterly silent.

The air here is thick, still, and rancid.

Ellie frowns and takes a step back out from the darkness of the unit and into the early-morning grey light. She attempts to firmly close the white wood doors, but although the locks were new, the frame was ancient and the door itself half-rotted from the inside and worn on the outside by the rain. As such when Ellie steps away, the wind picks up and blasts the doors back open.

She startles every time this happens.

And she does not hear the second scratch.

*

Later that evening Ellie is downstairs again. This time she is waiting for a friend, leaning against the brickwork corner at the entrance to the parking garage. She’s mildly annoyed at herself because she’d headed downstairs too soon without taking her phone for distraction, but then didn’t want to run back upstairs for fear of missing her friend. They were bringing take-out and needed help getting it out the car.

The garage always carried an eerie feeling inside it. Each parking space was empty and lit up by yellowing light. Without the gloss of a row of vehicles it was easy to see the interior concrete walls, the material matched by four pillars spaced out evenly from the front to the back. Any sounds carry easily over the often-damp pavement and echoes of those sounds bounce in the metal gratings and pipes that crowd the ceiling.

From where she is stood, Ellie reckons she must be directly below her fridge. Her apartment occupies the space directly above the front half of the garage. She envisions the layout, looking up, matching pipes and ventilation to which rooms they might be under. The wind then briefly picks up and Ellie takes a step back to spare herself from a thick drizzle of rain swept in her direction. The stark line between wet and dry that marked out the entrance now disrupted.

Each time that a car turns down Ellie’s road she stops leaning and stands up straight to peer out from the entrance, only to be left disappointed when the car isn’t her friend and turns away at the junction instead of towards her building. The engine sounds fade and the town-at-night ambiance picks up again. Electric street light buzz. Occasional generic shouts. The current of the nearby river.

If there is too long without a passing car then the garage lights shut off – Ellie needs to move occasionally to trigger whatever sensor it is that turns the lights back on. Without the lights there is no electric buzz and the garage feels all too dark and cavernous and when Ellie waves her hand there’s a loud click and it all flickers to life again.

It happens twice without event. Silence, darkness, click, light. Then on the third instance the pattern changes. Silence, darkness, click, light, gasp. Ellie’s breath caught half-way through her throat and her heart almost missing a beat. Without a sound the disposal unit door had swung open and from her angle and position Ellie could only just see the white edge of it. It is held in place and Ellie can see part of what holds it.

Four white bony fingers. Even in the rain they appear dry, the knuckles gnarled and cracked. There is a facsimile of nails, but they appear to be the same texture as the rest of the digit, dug into the door for extra grip. Ellie thinks that maybe if she leans further out then she might see what the fingers belong to. It could just as well be a person, though a person would have surely moved by now or made their presence better known.

Ellie says nothing, just as the maybe-person remains silent. It is quiet, aside from the drizzle of rain, and the door is held still. The fingers remain gripped at its edge.

Ellie swallows.

She considers speaking.

She is relieved when she chooses not to.

She decides she shouldn’t make her own presence known.

Stood where she is looking out to the outside world draped in shadows and the mist of rain, Ellie reckons the fingers could be one of two things. They could be nothing, a trick of the light, the same illusion as a coat appearing as a person when seen at the wrong angle from her bed. Or they could be something, most certainly not a person – intrinsically she just seems to know that – they could be something.

Then suddenly light blinds Ellie, sweeping from the road and turning into the parking garage entrance. The sound of an engine smothers the electric buzz of the lights above and a silver hatchback comes between Ellie and the maybe-something. The car stops in front of her and Ellie’s friend inside rolls the window down.

“Hey! Wanna grab the food and I’ll go park?”

*

Together Ellie and her friend watch a horror film and fill up on fast-food. It had been a few weeks since Ellie had seen her friend and though she is quiet for most of the evening, it doesn’t take too long for her mind to be taken off the odd maybe-something that she had seen downstairs. Ellie has been really looking forward to catching up with her friend, she doesn’t want to miss out on it.

After the film they spend a while sat on opposite ends of the sofa just chatting, both of them internally trying to decide if they should suggest a second film or call it a night. Ellie’s friend also considers asking Ellie how she’s feeling – but in a way that’s more genuine than the usual greeting or surface level conversation. They have noticed Ellie being more quiet than usual, and they think that Ellie’s odd living conditions must get lonely.

However, Ellie says she has work tomorrow and so starts the usual farewell ritual, “Not that I’m trying to kick you out,” She says.

“No, yeah, I totally get it. I’ve got work too,” Ellie’s friend replies, patting themself down to make sure they’ve got everything.

“Thanks for coming though,” Ellie says.

“We need to do this more often,” Her friend insists, “Especially now that I’m living closer.”

“Yeah, definitely. Could grab lunch on the weekend?”

“Yeah!”

It’s almost eleven at night so at each door between Ellie’s apartment and the downstairs garage she makes sure not to let them swing closed too loudly. Even if no one would be disturbed, it feels wrong to make too much noise at night. She doesn’t let the backdoor into the garage close at all, holding it open just-to with her foot as she waves her friend off. She figures it’s polite to linger long enough to see them safely leave.

Then after they’ve gone Ellie lingers longer still, gaze caught at the corner of the garage entrance. From here she can’t see the disposal unit doors, she can’t know if they are still held open. The maybe-something is maybe gone and the only way she would be able to confirm would be by leaving the safety of the back doorway and going to investigate.

Instead of investigating Ellie retreats inside and closes the door behind her. With her back pressing against the door she takes a long, shaky breath out and then laughs at herself. She knows she couldn’t have seen what she had seen, or at least she is trying to convince herself that she couldn’t.

To assure herself she turns and opens the door again.

She looks at the right side of the garage entrance.

She sees nothing is there.

Nothing but the wall.

She thinks that should make her feel better, the second look, but she’s not as assured as she expected to be when she heads back upstairs. She takes them two at a time and double checks that her apartment door is locked once safely inside.

*

Ellie is determined to have an uneventful day. She always needs one to decompress from entertaining company, no matter who that company is. So she wakes, she washes herself up, she dresses, and she eats breakfast at her dining area table. The early morning sun is the only light, fixing Ellie and her cereal in a dull grey square. Ellie stares absent-mindedly at the corner of the window, transfixed by a little web without its spider.

Ellie then tidies the main room of her apartment, finally clearing up the waste left behind by the take-out. Already the bin is full again, but she makes the decision to deal with that in the evening after work. She doesn’t examine why she wants to delay it too closely.

Ellie works at a failing retail store on her town’s high-street. It has been struggling to rebrand itself away from being a pound store now that prices had to go up and it had to branch out from its usual cheap stock. Foot traffic had become more and more sparse over the year and Ellie is given plenty of time to stare into space, day-dreaming.

Twice she has to be pulled from her day-dreams. Both times her gaze is torn from the corner of the front display window towards an impatient, but too tired to care customer.

“Sorry, sorry,” Ellie also mutters both times.

Ellie doesn’t hang around in town after her shift, instead opting to walk straight home. Her apartment building is tucked away between the river and the high-street, far enough from the center of town to be a quiet location, but close enough that Ellie doesn’t need a car to get anywhere. She cuts through a tightly packed residential street, then down a steep left-curved road to her building.

There are two ways to get into Ellie’s building. Through the parking garage at the back where she only needs a door code, or around the front where she needs a main key. Usually she goes the back way, too lazy to fumble through her purse for the key, but today she opts for the front entrance to avoid the garage.

The front of the building is a little bit sad. The two ground floor apartments always have their white curtains closed, as does one of the first floor apartments, and both third floor apartments. The explanation is the two stack of real-estate VACANCY signs adjacent to each other over the front door. This building had only one occupant.

Ellie takes the stairs up to her apartment by twos and is out of breath by the time she closes her front door behind her. She takes a moment’s rest with her back against the door. She breathes in, then out, then she peels her work clothes off as she heads into her bedroom. It’s only three steps, since her bedroom is directly opposite the front door.

She remembers after making a late dinner that she hasn’t taken the bin out yet, but it isn’t too full and it is already dark outside, so she figures it can wait. She shoves the rubbish on top down hard enough to keep it balanced without spilling.

Her friend then texts her about meeting up on the coming weekend and she texts back positively. She has been wanting to hang out more.

*

“Ridiculous. Ridiculous. You are being ridiculous,” Ellie tells herself, pacing the length of her living room. She reaches the kitchen and the overflowing bin, then she turns around and walks the length again to the glass balconette doors. She scolds herself another time, turns, and heads back towards the overflowing bin, “Being ridiculous.”

Sometimes Ellie finds it hard to do things. In those situations she paces, she chews on her lip, she scolds herself, and she then eventually sucks in a deep breath and gets to it. Sometimes it takes minutes, sometimes it takes hours. When she does get to it she has to hold her breath and brace herself, so her chest is tight as she pulls the bin-bag out from the plastic tub under the sink. She ties a knot at the top and hoists the bag through the hall and out of her apartment.

Ellie lets herself breathe out once she’s heading down the stairs, telling herself that obviously this wasn’t so hard. That she has been getting herself worked up over nothing and how nonsense that has been. She turns left at the bottom of the stairs and hurries past the letterboxes and out into the empty parking garage.

As soon as she is out the door Ellie comes to a sudden stop, slippers scuffing the pavement, bin-bag knocking the side of her leg, breath caught in the back of her throat.

Ellie drops the bin-bag.

Ellie swallows the breath and holds it in.

Ellie opens and closes her hand, hesitating to move.

Then she turns quick on her heel and runs back inside.

The bin-bag is left discarded in the parking garage, split slightly at the bottom from where it had been dropped. Also left behind is the thing that had caused Ellie to run. The fingers. They had moved now from the doors of the disposal unit to the corner of the parking garage entrance. In broad daylight there is no mistaking them, they are not a maybe-something, they are not a trick of rain and shadow. Seeing the digits once in the dark is an over-active imagination. Seeing them for a second time while in daylight is harder to ignore.

Ellie races up the stairs two at a time, then she runs into her apartment and slams her door behind her. She doesn’t want to acknowledge it; that there is a thing in her building, a creature that holds itself poised around blind corners. She doesn’t want to acknowledge that it might not just go away, that it might be waiting around that corner for her. In fact, she chooses not to.

*

Ellie is not on the work rota for the next two days. This helps her to not think about needing to leave her apartment. She has enough frozen meals and canned goods to not need to make a grocery run and she hasn’t any social obligations until the weekend.

She is aware of the thing she saw downstairs, but she doesn’t want to disturb it, or to pick at it, or to do anything that might make it all worse. She wants it to go away on its own, a strange unexplained not-maybe-something. Overnight she has decided that whatever the long fingers belong to is an it. Not a person. An it.

On the first day Ellie tries to function as normal, though she doesn’t brush her teeth or get properly dressed. She spends the day in the clothes she slept in and passes the time with whatever is on TV and the endless scroll on her phone.

Breakfast is the last of the cereal, the box and plastic bag shoved into the bin. Lunch is skipped entirely. Dinner is oven chips and chicken nuggets. She sits at the table to eat, but it doesn’t help her feel like an adult about it. Overcooked chip scraps and breadcrumbs from the nuggets are scraped into the bin, filling the gaps between food wrappers.

While eating, her gaze fixates on the corner of the table and not the window.

On the second day Ellie struggles to feel normal. She neglects her teeth again and opts not to dress properly either. She can’t stop thinking about all the rubbish she left in the parking garage. The split bin-bag and the potential smell and the chance that someone walking by might see it. Ellie is the only person in her building, but her building is not the only one on the road.

What plagues her is the thought that someone might walk by and think of her home as dirty. She knows she would be the source of that thought. The idea gnaws at her and so she starts to convince herself, “It’s been a day,” maybe the thing is gone.

Ellie mutters this idea while pacing the length of the hall between her front door and living room. She spends five minutes doing this before she finally heads into the stairwell, then she descends and ascends the first four steps for another eight minutes.

“It’s gone. It will be gone. It should be gone,” She tells herself. It’s what she needs to say to commit to taking the rest of the steps down to the ground floor. The stairs face the front door of the building, you can reach the bottom and head outside without ever turning towards the letter boxes or the back door, so Ellie only turns around once she’s actually at the bottom.

That’s when she sees the door is open.

She sees also the contents of her bin-bag.

It has been split and the contents strewn across the ground.

Four long fingers cling to the doorframe.

*

On the third day Ellie calls in sick. She rarely does this, she knows she’s got plenty of sick days, and she still feels guilty over it. She tells her manager she has some kind of flu, that she is probably infectious, and that she can barely leave her bed. She does not tell her manager that some kind of rancid smelling thing is clinging to her back door. She does not tell her manager that she is afraid to leave her apartment, just in case the thing has moved again.

Ellie still has enough dried food and cans that even after depleting her freezer she doesn’t need to worry about shopping. Her meals might become a bit sad, but that doesn’t bother Ellie too much.

Her friend texts her to ask if they are still good for the coming weekend and Ellie is less positive this time. She tells her friend the same thing as she told her manager, she is unwell, she doesn’t want to infect anyone. She knows she couldn’t tell her manager about the thing, but she considers briefly telling her friend. Maybe they would help. Maybe they would find it utterly disgusting. Maybe they would see the garbage in the garage, the dirty plates on Ellie’s kitchen counters, the bin that was already starting to overflow again, and their friend would say, ‘No wonder you have an infestation.’

The filth is how Ellie knows the thing is real. It has a smell to it. The same smell that clings to the walls of the disposal unit. The smell that tells Ellie that this thing is real is the smell that shames her away from telling anyone about it.

So the smell itself is shame and it permeates the building and the person in it.

Ellie lies in her bed with her phone in her hand and considers that maybe she has always been unclean. There have been insects in her apartment before. She had to deep-clean the kitchen to get rid of them, taking apart the counters to pull out her oven. In the space that is between the wall and the oven was food waste that had fallen and gotten stuck. It existed there half-rotted and infested. The sight and smell and shame of it made Ellie sick.

Sorry you’re sick, Ellie’s friend texts her, We’ll hang out soon though? I could come over.

They absolutely could not.

*

Ellie can not sleep, or Ellie is dreaming that she can not sleep.

The building is meant to be empty. Out front are two adjacent stacks of vacancy signs and out back is an empty parking garage. It’s only ever Ellie’s waste inside the disposal unit.

The building is meant to be empty and Ellie can not sleep, or Ellie is dreaming that she can not sleep, because there is movement above her bedroom. It sounds like footsteps. Like three people pacing up and down their own room.

They must have room to pace because the building is meant to be empty.

*

On the seventh day Ellie had missed her shift, so when the eighth day comes around she calls her manager to explain that she won’t be coming into work anymore. She accepts it as a failure on her part, of course. She has lied about her situation, she hasn’t been sick at all, she has been trapped. Maybe someone else might be able to get themselves untrapped. Accept that a thing is just a thing and get on with cleaning their home of it.

Of course, Ellie does not tell her manager about the thing. That can’t be explained.

The phonecall happens in Ellie’s living room where she tells her manager in a choked voice that something has come up, her situation has changed, and she won’t be able to come in anymore. The manager, irritated and already thinking about how to replace Ellie, does not pry.

After the call ends Ellie lets herself deflate down to her knees. She drops her phone for it to tumble dully on the carpet, then she herself follows it down to lie on her side. Her fall and her weight disturb the carpet and from between the fibres just in front of her face an insect unborrows. It’s a little black-brown thing with many segmented legs, twitching antennae, and mandibles that click to taste the air. It walks an aimless circle, first towards Ellie and then away and then it starts to burrow again.

The bugs are back. Ellie isn’t surprised, though the revelation twists at her expression and stings her eyes. The cupboard beneath the sink is overflowing with rubbish, the countertops are crowded with dirty plates. Ellie has been eating from cans or making pasta sauces from the dwindling supplies in her dry cupboards. At first she had tried to keep on top of the food waste and dirty plates, but it started to seem so insignificant when she ran out of room under the sink. She had since stopped trying, so now the bugs are back.

Ellie’s phone buzzes just above her head. She reaches to drag it into view and sees – distorted sideways from being parallel to the screen – that her friend is texting her. Her friend wants to see her tomorrow, they’re worried, Ellie has been more distant than usual and she doesn’t need to push anyone away. She can talk, if she needs to. They offer again to come over tomorrow and they are insistent about it.

Ellie digs her fingers into the carpet, feeling the rough scratch of the fibres. It’s not the bugs, or the mess, or the thing downstairs that tightens Ellie’s chest now and sends a shiver down her spine. It’s the threat of a visitor. Ellie pushes herself back to her knees because she knows her friend, she knows that they will visit, and if they do they will see the state that her home is in and what Ellie has allowed herself to waste into.

In certain conditions, shame becomes a motivator.

“You are being pathetic. Ridiculous,” Ellie tells herself, pushing up to her feet. She takes one step towards the kitchen and then turns to pace towards the balconette, “Disgusting. Living like this,” She says. She turns to face the kitchen once again, “Come on.”

She decides to get to work.

She drags the bins from under the sink.

She ties them tight at the top.

She stares down the hall to her front door.

“Ridiculous,” She tells herself again, a bin-bag knot held tight in each hand, her own knuckles white with tension. She grinds one foot against the carpet and an insect scurries away from her heel to join the little line marching from her sink to her fridge.

That grinding is all she is capable of for a few seconds, telling herself, “Just do it. Just unstick yourself.”

Ellie’s phone buzzes again in the middle of the floor. She glances at it and then back down the hall and then sucks in a deep breath through her teeth (- the taste of her kitchen tightens her throat). Ellie marches forward. One foot after the other down the hall, “Ridiculous, disgusting,” she mutters to herself until turning right and freezing where she stands.

Her heart stops and her throat seizes up and she opens her mouth to make a scream barely louder than a whisper. A choked, spluttering little sound.

Ellie’s front door is wide open. It is held rigidly in place by five outstretched appendages, two gripping the edges and three flat against the surface. The thing is here, clung to the opposite wall of the door, flattened out over the frame and poised with a dozen more arms holding it in place, the appendages pressing into the carpet and the ceiling.

Ellie hadn’t seen the fingers on her approach and now there are so many of them. Too many to count. She can’t figure out what she is looking at. She’s not sure how she’s meant to comprehend it. Her chest feels tight, any sound in her lungs and throat empties out entirely, and she begins to feel light-headed.

Ellie takes an accidental, stumbling step backwards and when she moves the thing moves too. Front appendages slacken and the tip of its body peels back, glistening lines acting as wet connective tissue between the thing and the wall.

Ellie continues to stumble back until she hits her bedroom door and that jolts her into panic-informed action. She moves quickly, rushing into her bedroom to slam the door closed behind her. The corners of her vision blur out and the only thing she can think to do is childishly hide under the covers of her bed.

She grips the sheets tight to her body, as tight as she can. Her hands seem to be the only part of her capable of tension, and even that quickly starts to fade. Ellie squeezes her eyes shut, she tries to tell herself this is all a feverish nightmare. That she could will herself to wake up in a version of her home that isn’t permeated with the stench of something rotten.

Surely she can wake up. This isn’t really happening. Surely she can wake up. This is only maybe-real.

*

It’s dark all of a sudden. The only light being the pale blue of night barely penetrating Ellie’s bedroom curtains. Ellie thinks maybe it worked, that maybe she had woken up. For exactly five seconds she is able to trick herself into thinking it was all a dream, and that behind her is a clean apartment, empty of infestation.

It is the smell that convinces her otherwise. The rancid heat that started in the disposal unit and had coiled its way across the inside walls of Ellie’s building until there was no escape from breathing it in.

It’s in her bedroom now.

The door had creaked open a second ago.

The thing rolls footsteps on her floor and ceiling.

The mattress dips with the weight of the thing on her bed.

Ellie can’t move, her limbs don’t want to. It’s sleep paralysis, her mind frightened enough to wake before the rest of her muscles. She can’t pull herself away from the thing behind her or stop her bedsheets from slipping away.

One by one the fingers settle over the side of Ellie’s face. One presses over her forehead. Another curls under her chin. The third digs under her eye just above her cheek bone and red flares inverted at the top of her vision.

The fourth finger presses against the corner of her mouth and then digs, curling between her lips, prying at her teeth. The grip on Ellie’s face tightens and the thing pulls itself close. An appendage wraps around and between her legs, some kind of arm crosses over Ellie’s chest. There is a slither of skin between her pants and her shirt and that is where she feels the wet press of a tongue larger than her torso.

Ellie’s mouth is pried open and the finger digs in and scrapes against her tongue.

The taste is smoke and burnt caramel.

*

Scratch. No one hears.

*

Hands settling at ten-and-two, Ellie’s friend hesitates at the top of the road. They feel guilty. They knew Ellie was going through something and think that maybe they could have supported her better. Been more present. Though it’s hard to be more present than someone allows, maybe they should have insisted on it more. Then they also feel guilty for that insistence, because though Ellie had not invited them over they are still making the drive to Ellie’s building.

They take the turn down Ellie’s road and pull into the parking garage.

“What the…” They don’t bother picking a space to park in, instead just pulling up nearby the back door to the building. The first thing that hits them exiting their car is the smell of it all. Rotten food and something else – something harder to place. Garbage is strewn all about the ground.

They hold their breath as they enter the building and inside the smell does not improve. There’s something on the walls, large dark marks like damp or growing mould. Ellie’s friend stuffs their hands into their pockets, not wanting to touch anything as they climb the stairs.

“Ellie?” They call out, peering into the hall that leads to Ellie’s apartment and noticing all the doors open, “Hey, Ellie? Are you okay? What’s going on in here?”

They see it when they step inside the apartment. Both front and bedroom doors are wide open to provide an easy view of the thing pressing itself down on the mattress. Dozens of appendages like sinew support beams hold fast against the ceiling, the headboard, and cling to the mattress.

Strands of Ellie’s blond hair curl from underneath the glistening bulk of the dozen-limbed-thing’s body and the whole thing pulsates like it’s breathing. Or drinking.

“Oh what the fuck, oh Ellie, oh fuck, Ellie!?”

Ellie’s friend can’t look away.

They don’t notice the four fingers gripping the door.

They don’t notice the thing that has followed them inside.

*

Featured

Haunted Houses

There is a street near the edge of town where each house sits empty, quiet, and alone. The reasons people gave for leaving often varied at first, like being able to afford a better place, or moving closer to family, or a tragedy staining the upstairs carpet. Then eventually the reasons started to lean towards one thing, nobody wanted to live there. Nobody wanted to live surrounded by gaping empty windows or boarded up doorways.

So there is a street near the edge of town and it is a street left abandoned.

The headlights of Sara’s car casts a streak of light across those abandoned windows, each home lighting up with a glare of pale white. Ammy looks up at them from the front passenger side. She and Sara had driven this way a lot, but it still causes a shiver when the headlights reflect off the upper windows. She reckons they look like big blind eyes. Or faces with gaunt brick features.

Sara pulls the car to one side of the road. With hers being the only car on the street there is plenty of space to park, though she has chosen this one in particular.

“77?” Sara asks Sammy.

“Yeah,” Ammy confirms. House number 77 is next on their list.

Sara cuts the engine with the headlights still on and in the dead quiet of night their electric buzz is the only sound. The sidelong white beams cast looming shadows over the fronts of the houses.

“It’s probably gonna be empty,” Ammy says and then she’s silent for a beat before realizing she has nothing to actually back up her hunch, but should maybe elaborate anyway, “Maybe? I dunno how you do it, honestly.”

Sara just flashes a grin in response and then she twists to reach back between the two front seats so she can grab her backpack. From it she pulls out her notebook and cracks it open. Ammy flicks the interior light on for Sara.

“Number 77,” Sara mutters, scratching the house number in ballpoint pen on an empty page. The notebook and pen is then handed off to Ammy.

Sara climbs out the car first, nudging the door closed behind her with her foot. Ammy takes a moment to zip up Sara’s back pack and sling it over her own shoulder before exiting herself. She exits onto the road and as always she takes a moment to reckon with just how still it is here. How in that stillness she can never shake the feeling of being watched.

“Coming?” Sara asks.

Ammy blinks as though waking up from a daydream and circles around the car to join Sara. Side-by-side they look up at house number 77. It is attached on both sides, squeezed tight by the adjoining houses. 75 they had been inside before, but 77 and 79 had not yet been explored.

“Alright then,” Sara nods. She nudges Ammy with her elbow and steps forward. She pushes open the rusty front lawn gate and the metallic whine echoes painfully across the asphalt and up the brickwork and gutters. Ammy cringes at the noise and follows closely behind Sara.

Neither Ammy or Sara pay much attention to the front garden. Sara goes right for the main door and she’s a little disappointed when it isn’t locked. In fact, a curious thing that both Ammy and Sara had learned was that so few houses on the street at the edge of town were actually locked. Though they did not have an explanation for this, it did make the whole operation a lot easier (and Sara’s lockpicking skills unnecessary).

Sara enters house number 77. Ammy follows without hesitation.

*

Ammy is here with Sara to take notes, to keep a catalogue of abandoned houses. Sara will step into a room and Ammy will follow her and Sara will say something to the effect of, ‘This one. This room isn’t empty. This room has a ghost,’ and Ammy will look around at the space – and she would really try to look at it – but she would never see it the same way Sara did. Then Ammy would write down Sara’s judgement and follow her to the next room.

In the next room, Sara might say something like, ‘No. Not this one. There is nothing here,’ and Ammy will still try to see the same thing Sara is seeing and whether or not she gets it she would take notes anyway.

House number 77 has no furnishings. The carpet in the hall is a dull green with a faded pale layer of dust. Sara has Ammy write that detail down: No furniture, hall left carpeted. The house is utterly silent also, which means Ammy is trying her very best to not make any sound on the hardwood floor in the living room. Sara makes no effort at all, giving Ammy goosebumps when she lets the floor creak under her boots, or says aloud her assessments of the space.

Sara had often told Ammy about the different qualities of silence. For example, there is the silence of standing alone in an orchard, or in a farmer’s field, or – if Ammy could remember – Old Grady’s stables after the horses had been taken out. In those instances you could speak, or sing, or shout, and it would feel easy and free.

Then there is the kind of silence where you are huddled under a blanket, or holding your breath and trying very hard to make no sound at all. The silence of sneaking out of your room at night, or hiding inside a classroom when students are meant to be outside. In those kinds of silences speaking, or singing, or shouting might as well be death.

House number 48 was very much a house holding its breath. House number 77 feels more like the horses had been taken out with the refrigerator.

Ammy notes this down in her own way: The word ‘quiet,’ written next to a smiley face.

This idea of the quality of silences is what had drawn Sara to the street at the edge of town. She was less interested in any sort of record about how it became empty, but instead she wanted to feel that emptiness for herself. It wasn’t like this for Ammy, Ammy didn’t quite get it. She didn’t feel it in the same way Sara did, but that didn’t bother her. Ammy was here because she and Sara did everything together, just like how Sara never really got rom-coms but watched them anyway.

It was through explaining the qualities of silence and emptiness to Ammy that Sara had been trying to justify the process to her. Why they had to go after dark. Why sometimes it was very much necessary to climb the back fence and pick the locks. They were not just passing through, they were not just visitors, they were not allowed here.

They had to be trespassers.

Ammy had once told Sara that she was a criminal. Sara countered with the claim that no, she was a ghost hunter, and in both versions Ammy is an accomplice.

*

“Empty,” Sara announces while standing in the front room of the house. From the window she can see her car and she can also see Ammy’s reflection as she is approached from behind. Ammy leans the notebook on Sara’s back so she can quickly scrawl the note, ‘Front room – empty.’

“Okay,” Ammy says. She pulls the notebook back and folds it under her arm. Her voice has a slight shake to it because her nerves are always present on ghost-hunting night. Sara would tease her about being afraid of ghosts, but she knew better. Ammy was far more afraid of being caught by actual, living people and only vaguely unsettled by the eerie quiet of night.

An actual ghost sighting might in fact be a relief for Ammy, Sara thinks. Then she would have something to witness, something more tangible than Sara’s gut feelings.

Sara moves through to the kitchen and Ammy follows. The dining space between the front room and the kitchen is disregarded, the open plan of the house removes it as its own space. The kitchen counters have not been torn out, but there are empty spaces where a fridge or an oven or a dishwasher could have been. The pantry is empty, which disappoints Sara. Sometimes they find the strangest things tucked away in cupboards and pantries.

Ammy waits with her pen ready for Sara to announce, “Nope!” So that she can write it down.

“Upstairs next,” Sara decides. She brushes Ammy’s back with her knuckles as she walks past and the gesture leaves Ammy blushing.

*

With a rate of one house per night, Sara and Ammy had been working their way down the street at the edge of town for 77 nights. Two and a half months marks ghost-hunting as the longest fixation Sara had ever experienced.

It had out-lasted sleeping in a tent in her garden, collecting bottle caps (though Sara was too young to drink at the time, limiting her options severely), swimming and jogging combined, and boys.

Boys were the shortest fixation. It had only lasted for a week towards the end of middle-school. It ended when the boy she thought she had a crush on touched her boob and she vomited on his hand.

Ammy was more able to commit to things. She had gone swimming once a week for a year before Sara had decided to join in and to this day she continued going. She had never slept in a tent in her garden, but she did join Sara for many nights in hers. Ammy had also never once said no to any of Sara’s ideas.

Ammy had promised that they would be friends not only for life, but forever and ever. That she would support Sara through every one of her endeavours. What tested this resolve was in fact the whole boys situation. Ammy had found herself intensely jealous and uncomfortable and she was utterly unable to articulate it. At the time she was worried that it would damage their relationship, but then when Sara vomited it was a gross sort of relief and worked well to fix things.

So Sara was the truth believer, her fixation intense and earnest and likely fleeting, she would announce with certainty how some houses were haunted and how some were definitely not. It was Ammy who was prepared for long-term commitment to the operation, and in being supportive she always took Sara at her word.

*

Ammy and Sara sit together in the middle of the largest upstairs room.

“This was probably the parents’ bedroom,” Sara decides. Ammy writes that down in the notebook. She senses Sara’s disappointment and adds next to the note a little frowny face.

House number 77 was not haunted, Sara had decided.

“How do you know?” Ammy asks. She is sat upright, the notebook in her lap.

“I just don’t feel it,” Sara says.

“No, about this room.”

“Oh. Every house has a family in it at some point,” Sara explains, “And the parents always take the largest room.”

The explanation works well enough for Ammy. She clicks her pen closed and tucks it into her pocket and then she shoves the notebook into Sara’s backpack.

Sara grins suddenly, already entirely done with being disappointed. It always puts a smile on her face to explain things, to feel right about something. Once Ammy is done putting things away, Sara takes out a black marker from the backpack’s front pouch.

“Mark it,” Sara says, offering the marker to Ammy.

This part is something of a ritual. From Ammy’s perspective, Sara needed to do it to feel complete. Each one of her fixations had something like this, like using a spreadsheet for lap times when it came to swimming or jogging. How she’d taken note of the weather each night while sleeping in the tent. How the bottle caps she had collected were organized based on qualities like style, simplicity, and colour.

When it came to boys Sara had taken a magazine with the intention of ticking or crossing out each face. She had only ever left crosses.

Ammy uncaps the marker, leans forward, and draws a black X on the floorboard between herself and Sara.

“Not haunted,” Sara says.

“Not haunted,” Ammy echoes, “But I still don’t know how you know.”

“Well, it’s just empty,” Sara explains. She sounds like it should be obvious to Ammy, but she never sounds impatient. Sara leans back on the heels of her hands and she shakes her head a little to let her hair fall loose. It is long enough to brush the dust from the floorboards behind her, “There is nothing here to haunt. The carpet doesn’t count.”

Ammy doesn’t respond. They’ve had similar conversations before and Sara had only declared a very few houses haunted. Ammy didn’t know why the carpet didn’t count, but the old shoes they found in house number 18 did.

“Hey, Ammy,” Sara’s tone cuts through Ammy’s thoughts. Suddenly Sara is not on the heels of her hands, but she is leaning forward to take the marker from Ammy and to put a hand on Ammy’s knee.

Sara kisses Ammy just once on the lips, like it is another step to the ritual.

*

In the houses that Sara had declared to be haunted there were always things. Ammy knew that much. She just didn’t think that things made a house any less empty. Most things never really took up space, not in the way that Sara seemed to think they did.

Sara had explained those features time and again. How there was a difference between a kitchen counter – something that she acknowledged most certainly existed as an object – and a cracked picture frame left face-down on that counter. It got muddied when emptiness itself became a thing, like in house number 36. It had a room devoid of any objects at all even though the rest of the house was otherwise furnished.

The most obvious haunting was when they found a TV in the corner of an upstairs bedroom in house number 24. The screen was still glowing as though holding the after-image of white noise and had only recently been turned off. Ammy hadn’t seen the glow as she had been delayed, sat on the stairs trying to dislodge a pebble from under her shoe.

Certain things had a certain power to them, Sara had explained, and this power or quality is what made the difference between trespassing on a presence or trespassing on a property.

To Ammy it was all just trespassing.

*

The street at the edge of town remains unpopulated even years later. Still abandoned long after Sara’s fixation of investigating it. Sara had never returned after house number 99.

Ammy has her own car now, and her own backpack, and her own notebook. The marker in the front pouch, however, is the very same. It is dried out now, useless for marking.

The gate complains as it swings open just like it did before. The front door is silent, pushing open with inviting ease. Ammy had been thinking a lot about the street at the edge of town lately, even more-so than when she and Sara originally investigated it. Ammy had been feeling adrift, set loose with nowhere to run, unmoored without a current to carry her. She had been home to clear out old things left behind in her room and in doing so she had found Sara’s old marker and notebooks.

This time around, Ammy ignores the bottom floor of house number 77 entirely. She passes straight through the hall and up the stairs and makes no stops to investigate or to take notes.

Ammy enters the old parents’ bedroom, the room marked with the X.

Ammy sees it now for what it is. Something like an old photo frame, or an empty room in a full house, or an after-image on a TV screen.

Ammy knows that Sara was correct when they were first here, that house number 77 was not haunted all those years ago, and Ammy gets it now. She walks up to where the room is marked and she sits cross-legged before that marking, opposite an empty space that not even dust touches.

Suddenly there is a lump in her throat that she just can’t swallow down and when she opens her mouth to talk her voice comes out like a croak, “Hey, Sara.”

Now every house on the street is haunted.

Thank you for reading! Haunted Houses is one of 24 stories in the Girls and Ghosts collection, releasing for ebook and paperback on October 3rd and now available for pre-order.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CHMS1NZL

All I Am Is An Alley Cat

I am a creature that comes out at night.

There is an alley that I like. It’s always cold and it’s always damp and it’s always lit up all shiny from an artificial hue – either yellow on one side from the street-light or sometimes green on the other side from the faulty fire-exit sign.

Sometimes I crouch in the shadows of a dark corner, half-poised and hidden. From there I listen to the sounds of murmured conversation passing by, or the music muffled through the brickwork of the wall behind me.

This is a place that is often only incidentally stumbled upon and rarely lingered in. Liminal like someone discarding garbage and quickly leaving, or intimate like a couple thinking they are alone and unobserved.

I know when a person has a need and it is them I show myself to.

“I need to be someone else,” They tell me. Their voice has a tremble to it because they are not quite sure what they are looking at. They don’t understand how it is that my features can ripple and shift, yet they understand what it is I can do for them. They know it in their bones just by looking at me.

So I pull them close – my tail around their leg, my hand on the back of their neck. I say to them, “Just tell me,” And they start to babble all their wants and needs.

When I kiss their jaw I leave it smooth. When my fingers push through their hair it starts to lengthen and tangle around my digits. When I move my hand up under their shirt and palm at the flat of their chest they feel themselves dip, then pull, and they know that the intimate feeling is them being altered.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” They whisper, “Turn me into her.”

*

Sometimes I stand in plain view under the yellow light.

My back and my foot are flat against the metal post. One hand is stuffed into the pocket of a jacket that wears a little too small for me. My other hand has my thumb itching at the inside of my knuckles. In this moment something feels missing there – an absent shape between my index and forefinger.

I realize I am being stared at. I leave it for a few seconds until she is almost past me and then I look up and stare back. She seems surprised and shy and a little sad when she says, “Oh, I’m sorry. I thought you were someone else.”

It’s an easy mistake to make and she is looking at me like I am someone she misses, so I tell her, “I can be.”

She takes me to her home. Inside she tells me about the person I reminded her of. I bring myself closer to that shape and each new way she sighs informs another change for me. I become callouses at the ends of my fingers. I become stubble scratching at her jaw. I become a comfortable cigarette scent. A nicotine man.

In bed I tell her with his voice, “This is the last time,” And she understands. She says goodbye to me and to him.

*

Sometimes it is raining, so I take shelter.

I slip through the fire-exit and shift myself into a forgettable face. Inside it is warm and beer-scented and full of people. Each person is in their own group and sitting at tables half-turned to the little stage. There’s a local band playing everyone’s favourites.

I choose a table out of the way and sit on my own. From here, with my boring face, I can people-watch without disturbance. Nobody glances my way as I scan the bar and tune myself into each conversation for only moments at a time.

“Can you believe–”

“–I just don’t, when he–”

“–our jam, so our jam–”

“–yeah, alright. Bye.” It’s a woman sitting alone that my gaze lingers on. She is watching someone else leave and she strikes me as someone who often gives more than they get.

I make the conscious decision to let her see me and we exchange smiles across the noisy space. Then she comes to me.

In the ladies’ toilets she tells me everything that is wrong while my mouth is pressed against her collar. The stall is narrow and I am all limbs and a tail, each part of me is over, or under, or around her. She says that she gives and she gives and she gives, and I look up at her for a moment so that she can nod before I sink my teeth in.

After it is done, I press an old silver coin into the palm of her hand. She squeezes it tight and she asks me, with a neatly squared wad of tissues pressed against her neck, “Is this all that I’m worth?”

I rarely understand people beyond what I can give to them, “No,” I tell her. My voice is wet and sated, “But it’s yours.”

*

I am an alley cat and sometimes I do not want to be found.

I am perched high against a wall. The brickwork is damp and comfortably rough and I have a view of the alley down below. It’s quiet here, though occasionally a car will sweep past and light up all the little details in the concrete and the litter and the shiny wet puddles. Occasionally someone will come from inside to toss a black bag into the dumpster. Occasionally a passerby will take a detour to snuff out their cigarette on the gutter.

Occasionally I will see a familiar face. I don’t let myself known to them, even if I know they are looking for me. I’m not sure what I could give them a second time around.

I just remain on my perch and I watch them go.

Waiting For D5

Viv and Laine both sit slouched in the back-seats of the taxi, their hand-luggage (two backpacks) between them. As the vehicle crests an awkward hill the expanse of the airport parking lot is pulled into view. Viv has a good angle of it and she nudges for Laine’s attention on the rows of shiny car roofs and the front-facing facade of the main building. They both reflect a gradient of midnight whites and blues down to the artificial yellows of the parking lot lamps.

“Looks smaller than it is,” Viv says.

Laine replies with a delayed and slightly bewildered, “Huh?” As she had only caught the last part of what Viv had said. For the last hour Laine had been unfocused and dozing with her head against the window, fried by the buzz of the engine vibrating through the glass.

“The airport,” Viv clarifies, “Like, we know it’s actually huge, but from here with the lights and in the dark it looks like a little thing. It looks small.”

“Mmyeah,” Laine replies. She sits herself up properly as the taxi comes to a stop, pulling into the drop-off lane by the side of the carpark.

“Here we are then, girls,” The driver announces. It’s not an entirely useless announcement because he’s politely letting them know not to linger in the backseat for too long.

Laine and Viv share a look. Laine’s is nervous, but Viv’s is grinning and excited.

“Good luck to the two of you,” The driver says, nodding them along.

Viv and Laine step out into the early, early morning. Laine’s side is dull and grey and facing the airport, Viv’s side is a sickly spotlit yellow. The word DEPARTURES looms over them both, a sign situated above the quintuple row of revolving doors.

“I’ll grab our bags,” Viv offers.

*

In these early hours the airport looks near abandoned, ran on a skeleton crew of staff that briskly walk between desks carrying office supplies and forms. They all look busy, but nothing seems to be really moving along – at least, nothing that Laine can see.

Laine and Viv are in a check-in line. Viv sits on her suitcase and Laine stands opposite leaning against the handle of hers. Viv’s case is bulky and plastic and pink, stuffed full enough to easily take her weight. Laine’s suitcase is smaller and the handle is so tall and spindly that she doesn’t actually trust it to take her weight, so the way she is leaning is mostly on the heels of her feet.

“So how long until they call us, you think?” Viv asks, “‘Cause they’re gonna call us.”

“Mm,” Laine shrugs, “Left my room a mess.” Her voice is a little bit absent from the conversation and her gaze is not focused on Viv, but on the empty desk at the end of the line they’re in. There are two groups waiting ahead of them, also in various states of sitting or leaning on luggage.

“Psh. Yeah and they’ll probably tidy it before they call,” Viv says.

“Hah,” Laine’s laugh sounds entirely fake, a single distracted sound. She’s now tracking a woman in airport uniform walking from an unknown door to the check-in desk. The line doesn’t start moving however, there’s apparently things to do behind the counter that Laine is not privy to.

“I’m excited,” Viv decides, “We’re free!” She wiggles her shoulders and flashes jazz-hands up at Laine for emphasis, “Free!”

“Not yet,” Laine counters, trying to temper that excitement. Finally she is paying Viv proper attention, “We’re not in the air. We’re not even through the first line.”

“Air-shmair and line-shmine,” Viv retorts, perfectly confident in her own wit, “We’re— Oh,” Behind and ahead the line starts to move forward and Viv has to stand to shuffle along, “See? We’re moving!”

*

The security line is a constant stop-and-start with no time to sit around. Viv and Laine have only their backpacks now, which is just as well for all the crowding going on around them. Straggling groups of early-morning travelers all get consolidated towards the same two security checkpoints, shuffling along a zig-zagging partitioned line.

Laine realizes that the hall is a suspended interior bridge. At the peak of a zig she can see out the window towards the sea of cars, rows of yellow lights entering and occasional red lights departing. At the peak of a zag she can see through the other window into an expanse of airport-industria. Men in orange coats walking to and from odd-looking trucks, designed for singular purposes and decked out with flourescent hazard strips. The airport is a contrast of reflective glass walls from the main buildings, and then dull see-me-not greys for the hangars.

Some details are only seen at certain points in the queue and only from certain angles, so Laine leans from one foot to the other while Viv just leans against her.

“So how about now?” Viv asks, looking up at Laine from her shoulder.

“Still not in the air,” Laine replies. Her face scrunches up a bit, her nose tickled by the frizz of Viv’s hair. When the line moves forward Laine nudges Viv along without breaking contact.

“Okay, okay,” Viv says. When they stop shuffling she glances around at all the people crowded in the queue ahead and behind and around them, “So how many people do you think are in this building right now?” Viv asks, once again looking up to make very serious eye-contact with Laine.

“Too many,” Laine answers. The line moves so Laine nudges Viv along again.

“Well, yeah,” Viv replies. Her heels scuff the smooth tile floor as she walks backwards, “But how many?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Laine says – she whines this time, at first it’s truly a sound of complaint from this random interrogation, but then her frown contorts and turns slowly into a grimace and then a grin, “Just a lot. Yeah?”

Viv grins back, “Got you,” She says. She feels like the winner here.

*

After the security checkpoint everyone is spilled into the departure lounge’s largest duty-free store. There is a winding path marked on the tile-floor with faux-wood veneer that Viv immediately abandons to explore, much to Laine’s discomfort. Still, Laine follows Viv.

“God,” Viv sounds exasperated, “Place is a maze.”

“Yeah,” Laine replies, her tone is irritated because she saw the marked out path and would really like to get back to it. She’s craning her neck to look around for an exit, but Viv has already wandered a few more feet away and found something to point and laugh at.

“Okay, come on, who buys this much booze before a flight?” Viv grins, gesturing with one hand at a large display stand of vodka. Bottles and bottles of all sizes stacked up high.

Laine momentarily looks pained by this continued distraction, but an answer comes quick enough for her to indulge Viv, “Really nervous pilots.”

Viv snorts and then cackles, head thrown back. She’s satisfied with that so she starts to walk on ahead, overtaking Laine who quickly catches up, “Okay, let’s go find our gate for you. Let you finally relax.”

“Please. Thanks.”

*

Making it through the departure lounge, Viv and Laine find their designated gate two hours before their flight is meant to take off. Viv looks around at the waiting area, it’s a barren corner of the east wing with silver benches and dull off-white tile flooring. Viv shoves her hands in her pockets and wears an appreciative frown on her face.

“Gate D5,” Viv says with a click of her tongue, “She’s a beaut, to be sure. Lotta space, quiet area, nice and out of the way of the hustle and bustle.”

“Easy to find, too,” Laine joins in with the act, mimicking Viv’s wide stance, “Good walking distance from the lounge, for sure. Got a view of the airstrip,” She’s not fidgeting so much with the passport in her pocket, relaxed now that she has a route in her head from the lounge to the gate, “Could settle down here.”

“Mmhm, mmhm,” Viv nods at Laine, “You could, you could,” She looks at her partner expectantly.

Laine rolls her eyes, taking the hint, “Okay. Sure, we can explore now.”

“Yes!” Viv pumps her fist and immediately starts to pull Laine back towards the main departure lounge, “I saw a florist. Had no idea airports have florists. You ever seen flowers on a plane?”

“Probably in movies,” Laine suggests, “Like a romcom, maybe.”

Viv finds that answer acceptable enough and moves on to her next question, “You hungry? I could eat.”

*

The main departure lounge is a thick L-shape with a crowd of metal benches filling most of the middle section with over-priced stores surrounding at all sides. The corner of the L is where the food court is found, which is either fast food joints or those odd restaurants that seem to only exist in airport lounges and train station platforms. Restaurants that simply couldn’t survive outside of their natural habitat – surrounded by blue cushioned chairs with metal frames and shiny tile flooring, nestled between big steel columns mounted by information terminals listing flight details and airline advertisements.

Laine is staring at one of these restaurants. She isn’t sure when the last time she saw a ‘Zazzo’s’ in the wild was, but she appreciates being able to see one up close in its enclosure. It advertises some kind of fusion between Italian cuisine and hamburgers.

Viv and Laine are not indulging the Italian-hamburger fusion, they are sat in a neighbouring fast-food joint. There’s a small bouquet of blue and white flowers between them.

“It just hits different,” Viv is speaking with her mouth full and pausing only to swallow, “Crap food at three AM, I mean. At this hour burgers just hit different.”

“Yeah,” Laine replies. She’s smirking at Viv for moments at a time, her attention keeps shifting back to the flight information terminal mounted on a nearby column. Every twenty seconds the display cycles through to the list that has Viv and Laine’s flight on it.

GATE D5 – INFO PENDING. They had arrived too early to get a live estimation of what time the gate would open, but their boarding passes claimed they’d only be waiting another hour or so.

Viv pulls a face suddenly and starts to dismantle her burger, “Hey, Lai. You want my gherkin?”

Laine pulls a face when she turns back to see what Viv is doing, but she answers, “Yeah, obviously.”

*

Some time after eating Viv and Laine explore again and wind up in one of the airport book stores. They are leaning back-to-back with their bags at their feet and the bouquet balanced between them, the pink and white petals are in full bloom. Viv and Laine have a book each that they are flicking through, concentration marking both of their faces.

It’s quiet for a good few moments and Laine eventually speaks first, “Page 36, Madame Loretta with the groundskeeper,” She announces.

“Ugh, hang on, hang on,” Viv murmurs. Her look of concentration grows increasingly severe as she hunches closer and closer to her book, right up until she exclaims, “Damnit! I’ve only got kissing and hand-stuff until like page 50.”

Laine turns so she can waggle her book in Viv’s face, “Told you. Gold glossy title text covers, they give it up easy.”

Viv pouts, “Nah, nah. I reckon you already know them all, been reading up. You’re cheating.”

Laine scoffs, “What?”

“You’ve got a secret collection back home. All the airport romances. All just so you can win.”

Laine rolls her eyes and taps the cover of her book against Viv’s forehead, “Sore loser.”

“Am not!” Viv counters, hand over her chest, mock offense all over her face.

“Whiny baby. Sore loser.”

Viv gasps, staggering backwards, wounded, “This? After I got you flowers?”

Laine gives Viv a long, affectionate look until Viv cracks – she snorts, then she laughs.

*

“Surprised it’s so busy,” Laine says, glancing out at the middling crowd of the departure lounge. Checking in was quiet, then it was noisy as they were all funnelled through security, but after that the crowd had dispersed again. Now it seems as though more and more people were trickling in.

Laine is standing next to Viv inside an accessories store and Viv is trying on various styles of shades.

“It’s not that busy,” Viv says, looking from the little mirror to Laine. There’s a big price-tag strapped around the bridge of the shades she’s wearing.

“It’s busy for four AM,” Laine replies.

Viv glances to all the other waiters sitting on their benches and chairs. Men in cargo shorts and women in cardigans and kids who hang onto the arms of those chairs or cardigans like they’re life preservers in a sea of travel-boredom, “Sure, yeah. Busy for four AM,” Viv eventually agrees, “But more importantly – Am I rocking these?”

“Hard to tell,” Laine replies, looking at Viv with a studious sort of gaze, “You’ve got 12.99 in impact font dangling in front of your forehead.”

“Hmm, gimme the flowers,” Viv takes the bouquet from Laine and poses with the flowers in the crook of her elbow, like she’s holding a precious little baby with blooming white and blue and pink petals, “How about now?”

“Uhh?” Laine cocks an eyebrow, half about to laugh and half not sure what Viv is getting at.

“You know, first-time traveler chic? Bitch who has no idea what to do at an airport styling? Disaster gay flair?”

“Okay,” Laine chuckles, “Okay I’m starting to see that. You need a bucket hat and a canvas bag.”

*

Viv and Laine are back in the main area of the departure lounge. Laine is sat leaning back on a metal bench and staring up at the ceiling way high above her. The lights hang on thick unmoving wires, ventilation shafts droop down just above them. About Laine is the murmur of airport noises – families, PSAs, rolling luggage – and on her lap is Viv’s head.

Viv is lay across two seats of the bench with her legs dangling over the arm at the end. Her hands idly thumb the bouquet resting on her belly.

Laine is a bit self conscious when sat like this, she’s always worried that unsubtle public expressions of affection are going to garner her looks or unwanted attention, but then that worry always fades away just as soon as Viv opens her mouth.

In this case it is Viv saying, “I like your chin.”

“What?” Laine frowns. She looks down at Viv.

“Your chin, it’s nice. I don’t look at it that much, but it’s nice from down here.”

“You’re weird.”

“Yeah, and you’re pretty,” Viv sticks her tongue out.

Laine tries to shrug it off and her smile gets all pushed up to one side, but then she lets out a bashful giggle. She can’t help it, she always giggles when someone she admires compliments her. It’s a knee-jerk reaction that always comes before she practices her best self-worth and accepts the compliment, “Thanks.”

The departure lounge feels less busy when in the middle of it. From the outside it’s hard to see through the crowd with everyone moving in their own idle ways. Some from one place to the next, others from one seated position to another, but from the inside all that movement seems to thin out. From the inside Laine can see it’s just a handful of tired people who all feel like they’re awake too early for travel. The metal frames and blue cushions and terminal columns stretch on forever and in that forever they begin to appear sparse.

Laine is acutely aware that the current time has just ticked beyond what it says on her boarding pass, but her repeated checks of the airport displays still tell her the same thing. The flight is delayed. Gate opening time is to be determined.

*

It’s about forty-five minutes after the time printed on their boarding passes and Viv and Laine are back at the fast-food kiosk. Between them the bouquet of flowers looks tired, set neatly to rest in a large disposable cup.

Viv is examining a fry like it’s suspicious and Laine is looking left and right at the neighbouring restaurants. She’s trying to figure out if there is a functional difference between the ‘Zazzo’s’ to the left and the ‘Zazzo’s’ to the right. She considers that maybe it is the kerning on their signs or maybe something else. The row of restaurants and kiosks goes on and on in both directions as far as Laine can see. Table arrangements and display menus and logos repeating in a pattern.

“I’m bored,” Viv announces.

“You were hungry,” Laine points out, her attention drawn away from the expanse and back to their table.

“Yeah and I’m realizing just now that it’s because I’m bored,” Viv admits.

“Mmhm,” Laine smiles and shakes her head. She looks left and right again and wonders if the restaurants on either side had identical floor plans or if they were mirrored instead.

“Laine?” Viv asks.

“Yeah?” Laine responds, still looking right.

“Let’s explore some more.”

*

Between the departure lounge and Gate D5 there is a junction. If Viv and Laine were to take that turn they would end up in a part of the airport that looks abandoned. There are wide hallways and empty storefronts and interlocking metal shutters and signs without signposting and empty benches. Columns hold up the ceiling for miles with nothing on their display terminals and around the corners natural light floods in without any actual windows in view.

Viv and Laine do not take that turn, but they do look into it, “Always find this stuff weird,” Viv says, “Like, why have this here?”

“Everywhere has something like this,” Laine points out, “Everything is always closing down or being built.”

“I guess. They should put a GAP in there or something,” Viv decides.

Laine pulls an amused expression and shoots a sidelong glance in Viv’s direction, “And that’s because..?”

“Well if you see your plane and it’s not matching your look or your vibe, like the colour is off or something. ‘Cause you know planes have some out-there paintjobs these days.”

“Right, but I’m not sure if people should look like their planes.”

“No duh, I’m not saying we put in a costume store,” Viv counters, sticking her tongue out at Laine.

Laine rolls her eyes, but she can’t help smirking, “Let’s just check the board again.”

*

Viv and Laine are standing before one of the column mounted terminals. Their necks craned, holding hands. Viv has both backpacks on one arm, Laine has the flowers. They wait for their flight to appear and they see that it is still delayed.

“Sorry, Laine,” Viv says.

“It’s alright,” Laine replies.

One hunded identical columns display the same information to the left and one hundred more mimic this to the right. It’s quiet enough here that Laine hears the squeak of her trainer when she shifts her weight from one foot to the other. Between each column is a bench, metal frames with blue cushions.

“Always wonder how a plane gets delayed,” Viv muses, still looking up.

“Probably took a wrong turn,” Laine replies, not missing a beat, “Clouds move a lot, y’know. You don’t really get landmarks up there.”

Viv nods like it all makes sense to her, “Or they get cold feet. Nervous pilots.”

“No-no,” Laine shakes her head, “Don’t get nervous pilots because of all the drinks back in the duty-free.”

Viv continues to nod, “Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. Makes sense, makes sense.”

*

Airport restrooms feel bigger than they need to be when they aren’t busy. Four rows of sinks, a hallway of stalls, enough space for a small party, but always only two functional hand-dryers. Viv is leaning with her back against the wall by one of those dryers and Laine is drying her hands. For a moment the women’s toilets are blasted with the sound of hot air and not much else.

Viv waits until there is silence and then asks, “Okay, but it has gone really quiet.”

Laine looks around. It’s all empty stalls and unoccupied sinks and mirrors placed at such an angle that you could lean a certain way and stare into forever.

“Everyone’s got on their planes,” Laine suggests, a bitter edge to that comment.

“Yes, but soon,” Viv assures Laine, waggling her eyebrows.

“Soon,” Laine echoes. The idea excites her. She and Viv will be in the air soon. They will be going somewhere soon. They will be free soon.

Just outside the restroom and down the next hall is a moving walkway, both Viv and Laine step onto it. Viv drops both bags at her feet and Laine balances the bouquet in its disposable cup on the rolling handrail.

“These have a name, don’t they?” Viv asks, “Like, this human conveyor thing. Flat escalators. Something like a travelator? Is that it?”

Laine doesn’t answer. She’s looking past Viv to the wide poster that stretches the length of the travelator – it’s a sunset in brilliant oranges and yellows, the shades sinking into a still sparkling sea.

“Travelator… I think that’s right,” Viv mutters.

Laine still doesn’t answer, but she does look at Viv properly, standing right in front of her partner. A soft push has Viv leaning back against the rolling handrail. Laine, with one hand on Viv’s hip and the other on her shoulder, leans in and kisses her.

The travelator slides them along the mile-wide poster sunset, Viv and Laine kiss as they pass it by. As close as they are – and with their attention on eachother – the sunset loses all defintion. It’s a stretched-resolution blur of brilliant oranges and yellows and peach-shaded rays of sunlight.

“I love you, I love you, I love you.”

*

The flowers are wilting. The largest and tallest of them now droops low with its pink petals sagging towards the ground, edged out by a dull yellow starting to set in. The flowers get their own seat next to Viv and Laine and the three of them are sat alone in a sea of empty benches. Each terminal has only one flight listed and it is delayed.

Viv straddles Laine’s lap with her face buried in the crook of Laine’s neck, “Could explore more, could eat something,” Viv suggests.

Laine smiles, she acknowledges the question with a hum that Viv feels and eventually says, “I don’t mind this. I like this, actually.”

“We can keep doing this,” Viv replies. She breathes out slow and her breath is warm on Laine’s collar.

“Just this,” Laine goes on, “And not just this moment, but all of this. If we were here for hours or days or weeks I wouldn’t mind. If I get to feel like this for hours or days or weeks then that’s fine.”

Viv doesn’t interrupt, she doesn’t even lift her head. She just listens with Laine’s voice close to her ear and Gate D5 a thousand miles away down a series of junctions and travelators.

“Was scared when we got here. Impatient. Waiting to check in. Waiting for security. Not knowing if home would call me. Not knowing if this would be forever, or if you’d want to go back home—”

“— I don’t, but we can if you want—” Viv mutters her response, quiet and easily interrupted.

“— I don’t. I want to go, always wanted to go,” Laine says. She’s smiling and it’s fluttering and uncertain, worried that she’s talking nonsense, “Always wanted to go and that’s all I was focused on and I almost missed it.”

Viv kisses Laine’s collar as reassurance before asking, “Missed what?”

“That we’re going. We are finally going and I don’t mind where we end up or when we end up there, because right now I’m with you and I like this. I don’t mind this.”

Viv is quiet for a bit. She shifts her weight slightly, hands at Laine’s sides, and she kisses Laine’s neck once and then twice and she carefully asks, “So… I was right?”

“What?” Laine furrows her brow.

“I was right,” Viv says. She finally sits up to look at Laine properly, “We’re free. Right now, we’re free.”

Laine’s expression twists into something incredulous, then something annoyed, and then something smiling and open and carefree, “Yeah. Yeah, we’re free.”

Featured

In The Back Of His Car

I met him at a bar.

I was only just old enough to drink and he looked about a year old than me. He looked dangerous too, with a burn across his cheek that warped his skin and tightened his gaze. I approached him, I bought the first round of drinks, I took him to the alley behind the bar.

I think I wanted to hurt. I kept moving his hand to my neck and kept pressing my back against the rain-slick brick wall. He obliged, but with a sort of restraint that kept me irritated and impatient.

He was dangerous and angry, but the anger in the black pits of his eyes was not meant for me. Instead he recognized something – he must have recognized something.

So I asked him, “Were you there? Couple years ago at the Summer Rager? The burning of the Oswin Farm?”

He stared at me, hand still on my neck, the other palm-flat against the wall by my head, “Were you?”

“You were there, right?” I asked him again.

He nodded and so I admitted that I was there too, but I had nothing to do with the fire.

Since that night in the alley I’ve been riding along with him, laid out in the back of his car. My mom asks me where I go at night and she’s a cool mom, she isn’t charging rent or trying to lay down ground rules, she’s just concerned. She knows I’ve been sneaking out at night and she thinks I’ll resent her if she tries to stop me. All she can do is ask me where I’m going.

All I can do is tell her, “Nowhere. Just out.”

She doesn’t need to know.

*

It is the third night.

I am in the back of his car, the printed rib-cage on my shirt flashes between midnight shade and streetlamp yellow. My head is against the passenger side window and I can feel each bump in the road through my skull. I have my eyes closed, but without looking I know that we’ve turned off the road and onto the dirt-track that runs along the school football fields. I feel the shift from dirt to dew-damp grass and the drive smooths out.

We are not meant to be here, but neither are the lads lit-up by our headlights.

“This them?” My driver asks me.

I sit upright, confident that the headlight bloom blocks me from the lads’ vision. It makes sense to me that we would find them here, that they would linger on the fields where they peaked in life.

There are five of them and all five of them are shitheads. Four are staring slack-jawed and the fifth keeps pacing in-between the others and the car saying out loud, “What the fuck?” And raising his voice each time.

“Yeah,” I say, “That’s them.” It’s hard to make out their faces, twisted into harsh shapes by the shadows cast over them. Some of them have shielded their faces, a couple of them have their hoods up. I just know who they are by the sound of the loudmouth’s voice.

“Okay,” My driver says. He keeps the car idle for a while longer, the headlights staring down the lads. I can only imagine how it must look outside, the high-beams cast across the field, a dark trespassing shape illuminating the five figures who deserve to die.

The engine rumble echoes across the flat of the field, punctuated by that lead man’s shouting, “What’s your problem? What’s your problem, mate!?”

He takes a step forward, hand raised like he’s going to smack the hood of our car. That’s when my drive moves and I hear heavy twin thunks as he puts the car into reverse. We back out the same way we came and I settle back down, my head on the window once again. I feel the shift from grass to dirt, from dirt to road. Yellow light strobes across my closed eyes.

“Doing it, then,” My driver says.

It’s my last chance to back out, I guess. “Yeah.”

*

I told my mom I would get a job after leaving school. I had only completed half my exams, but we lived local to town and there was always a wanted page in shop windows. It never happened.

My mom isn’t angry that I didn’t make good on my promise, I don’t even think she can bring herself to be disappointed. She knows that something happened and in her words, she just wants to help me if she can. In her words, it is okay too if I just need space.

*

It is the fourth night.

We are parked up on the side of the road in the residential outskirts of town. The houses here are all detached, all two story, and all a shade of white or pale-blue. I guess they are supposed to look like simple suburban living. I hate it here.

There is a warped rubber face on the dashboard of the car. I lock eyes with it from the back, between the two front seats. Its forehead is caved in, twin stubby horns angled from the distortion to be almost touching. Half of the mask is lit in yellow, the other half is in shadow.

It stares at me with it’s empty slit-pupil eyes and I stare back.

Our staring contest is interrupted by my driver grabbing the mask and pulling it on over his head. He turns around to look at me and he is all in shadow, backlit yellow from the streetlamp outside. The rubber horns could be a crown, the light could be a halo, the knife he takes from the front passenger seat can’t be anything other than ill-intent.

Behind the slit-pupils of the mask I can see the black glimmer of my driver’s eyes. He doesn’t say anything, I don’t expect him to when he has the mask on, but I know he’s waiting for something from me.

So I nod. This is what I want. I understand what I’ve asked. My driver behind the goat mask only stares at me a moment longer and then he nods back, breaking his eerie stillness.

He exits the car and I flinch when the door slams behind him.

I sit up on my knees and then crawl forward across the backseats to press my knuckles and forehead against the glass of the window. I watch as my driver in the mask and combat boots hops the bolted front-gate, strides up the garden path, and stands before the front door of the pale-blue house.

He tries the door and it is unlocked, swinging open in dead-silence. He tilts his head, amused by this, and then a moment later he vanishes inside.

My knuckles are white with pressure against the glass of the backseat window. My mouth is open, my eyes are wide, and the reflection of the house must mirror my expression. Lights out on the top floor, front door wide open.

I am straining so hard to try and hear what must be happening inside. I need to hear it – I need to know it can be heard. I can imagine easily the slam of a body against a dining room table, but I don’t know if it’s real. If the sound can really carry through a home, across a garden, and into this car.

I hear shouting and I hear a door slam and then moments later I see an arc of red splash across one of the downstairs windows.

If from here I can hear any of it – any of it at all – then what could they have heard two years back from inside that same house? What could they heave heard through a closed door, down a hall, down the stairs. What could they have heard over the sound of thumping bass and drunken party games?

If from here I am convinced I can hear the sound of a head smashing into a vanity mirror, then what did everybody downstairs convince themselves of not hearing? If from here I can so easily imagine a knife slipping between two ribs, evidence being my driver in a goat mask stepping through an open door, then what did they imagine when they saw a girl helped-not-really-helped up the stairs?

The foyer light comes on and I swear I hear the click of it. Then silhouetted I see my driver and the stubs of his horns casting twin shadows down the lawn. His knife is bloody and there is a red-streak across his rubber face.

I back away from the window and my back presses against the door behind the front passenger seat. My driver opens the door opposite (the window still marked by the condensation of my breath) and with one hand atop the door he leans down to look at me.

“You did it?” I ask him. I’m hugging my knees to my chest. I can feel how hard my heart is pounding throughout my entire body.

My driver exhales long and slow. His knife is discarded by my feet and the bloody mark it leaves on the seat is evidence enough that something happened. He pushes his snout up and the rubber drags another red mark up his neck and over his chin and lips.

“Three,” He tells me.

I almost don’t hear the answer underneath my own pulse, the sound throbbing heavily in my ears. He smells like sweat and copper, or at least what I imagine copper to smell like.

I sit forward suddenly, taking the knife and tossing it out of the way to the front seat. I grab a fistful of my driver’s hoodie and pull him into the car with me. I kiss him just once above the corner of his mouth, a spot where the rubber of the mask indents his skin. Then I kiss him again on the side of his jaw and again it is half-and-half between rubber and flesh.

I sit back again and he touches his face where I kissed him. He seems almost confused by it, like I had somehow caught him off-guard. Like I had acted too hastily. He pulls off the mask and drops it where he had dropped the knife before.

“Still more,” He says. He backs out of the car to enter the driver’s seat.

I am left staring at the bloody goat mask, crumpled inwards now there is no one filling it. The slit-pupil eyes are crossed, but they still manage to stare up at me. I cup the distended side of its face and get a bit of red on the palm of my hand.

*

For a while after the Summer Rager I just didn’t dream at all. It isn’t that I forgot what I had dreamed the night before, I knew for certain that I never had one. I would close my eyes and there would be nothing and then it would be morning. I think dreams are important to not wake up with a big empty feeling in the head.

Now I have been having the strangest dreams. Dreams about the goat mask. Dreams in which the rubber of its snout drags against my neck. Dreams where I crush the stubs of its horns between my teeth. Gloved hands press against my body, ride up over my collar. On the underside of my jaw I feel the hardened padding of the knuckles.

Friction burns down my chest, down my stomach, and reaching down my palm presses against the flex of plastic.

I dream about our car in a scrapheap. I am still in the backseat and my driver is with me and our bodies are pressed together. Metal crushers squeeze either side of the car and we brace on all sides. It is no use, our bodies cave into each other.

My head isn’t empty when I wake up now. I wake up sweaty and out of breath and thinking about my driver, the Goat. I imagine the heat behind my face is something I would be questioned about at the breakfast table if I had a little sister. She would sit with a spoon and an orange slice and just like mom does she would ask me where I’ve been going at night.

I think a little sister would be cheeky enough to ask if it is all about a boy.

I am glad I don’t have a little sister.

*

It is the sixth night.

We live in a town that is decaying. Anything new is only open for a few months and so many of the buildings are abandoned monuments to a time that had money. This town doesn’t produce anything real anymore, not since the Oswin Farm burned down. A whole horizon of fields up in flame. That night looked like the world was ending and I know exactly who laughed about it.

My driver and I are waiting in our car, the vehicle hidden by the shadow of a big blank signpost. It used to be the marker for the town leisure center, just off the main road. Now it’s a marker for a derelict building.

My driver and I watch as a car pulls into the parking lot. I get a perverse sort of kick from this – they are here to set up some kind of ambush, to lure out the Goat Mask Killer and end him. We are just watching them do it.

They park their car just to the side of the building’s main entrance. It’s a big glass facade with revolving doors that lead into a main lobby. There is no cash register anymore, there are no vending machines, and there are no chairs. The tables were nailed down, so they are still there.

Three people exit the car. Two lads and a blond girl about my age. I don’t blame her for being here, the Goat Mask Killer killed her brother and she took it personally. She has always been on his side. The girl is taking charge. We’re too far away to hear properly what she is saying, but she is pointing out directions and overseeing the guys she’s with as they unpack duffel bags from the boot of their car.

It’s a nice fucking car. No rust under its rims, no dust in the windows. I doubt it has any cigarette pock-holes.

The girl doesn’t leave all the heavy lifting to her friends, she also pulls something from the boot. When my driver sees it he exhales a mild chuckle. It’s a bear trap. They’ve brought a bear trap.

We sit in silence for a full minute after the group heads inside. It’s so quiet that I can hear myself swallow and the friction of fabric against car-seat when either of us fidget. It is startlingly loud when my driver finally turns the keys in the car ignition.

The engine growling, he creeps the car across the parking lot until the headlights illuminate the front of the derelict leisure center. The lobby area is empty, the group set up further inside. From my position I can see the front counter, the seating area, and towards the back where the hall splits off left towards indoor sports and right towards the pool.

“Leave it running,” My driver tells me.

“Okay,” My voice croaks, I hadn’t realized I’ve been holding my breath.

He pulls on the goat mask and he takes his knife and this time I don’t flinch when he slams the door behind him. I watch him approach the nice fucking car first and he circles it, stopping four times to slash each tire. With that done, he heads towards the main entrance of the building.

I sit upright on my knees, hands holding onto the shoulders of the front seats. Just like last time I strain my hearing, but I know there is so much I won’t hear over the sound of the idling engine and the gulf of space between myself and the derelict building. I won’t hear the slice of a blade deep into someone’s stomach, or the sound of a combat boot bending someone’s knee the wrong way.

I cock my head to one side because I swear I hear a snap and a scream, like someone’s beartrap just backfired on them. I suppose if I am lucky he will tell me all about what happens inside the building. He will confirm for me if that really was the bear trap – and he will confirm if I really did just hear the sickening crack of someone’s skull against the deep end of an empty swimming pool.

Suddenly I see two flashes of light instantaneously followed by two whip-crack pops of noise. Gunshots. We never saw them with a gun, they must have been hidden inside their bags. I swallow hard and picture my driver stunned by it, caught off-guard and staggering backwards until finally falling to the floor.

I bite the inside of my lip. I try to keep my expression stoic, but I just can’t help it. I can’t help the tug of a wicked grin pulling at the corners of my mouth.

I’m grinning because I can picture also the way my driver sits up and palms over the burned-out holes in his hoodie and the kevlar underneath heated by impact. I don’t hear any more gunshots, the final girl hasn’t double tapped and she must have dropped her gun too because I see her now, running through the lobby of the building, bursting out of the revolving doors.

First she sprints to her car and with her hand on the driver’s side door she notices the slashed tires. She screams out three words, “Fuck! Fuck!” And, “FUCK!”

Next she sprints over to my car and she almost falls on the way, stumbling until she catches herself with both palms on the hood. She leaves handprints in blood and her shirt and hair are stained too with red streaks. She has a cut across her cheek and nose.

She clocks me through the windshield and the wild whites of my eyes must startle her because she stands up straight and shuffles a step backwards. We stare at each other, caught in this moment that neither of us expected.

At the same time we look at the driver’s seat – the keys in the ignition – and then we lock eyes again.

There is a second to anticipate it and then we both move. She skids around the side of the car to the driver’s side door and I lurch forward to yank the keys out of the ignition, killing the engine.

The girl screeches, angry and frustrated, “You bitch!” And moves along to the back door. She yanks it open and starts climbing inside trying to grab at my legs. I kick back at her, holding the keys up and out of reach.

I’m just playing for time because she hasn’t seen what I’ve seen. She hasn’t seen the shape moving behind her and she’s screaming too loud to hear his approach. My driver, my hero, my Goat Mask Killer. He grabs a fistful of the final girl’s hair and yanks her from the car. She is sent sprawling a meter across hard pavement.

I follow her partway out, stopping at the edge of the seat on all fours. I want to watch it happen.

She picks herself up halfway and then my driver does the rest, pulling her kicking to her feet. He exposes her neck with a hand yanking her head back and I remember something particularly vicious. Something she said to me after the Summer Rager and the fire at the Oswin Farm.

“Why aren’t you fighting harder?” I taunt her.

My driver doesn’t let her answer. A flash of metal, a stinging sound, the swipe of his knife across the final girl’s exposed throat. I’m bathed in a fountain of her blood, splattered by it from chest to forehead. She doesn’t even scream, she just sort of gurgles before crumpling to the ground.

Then it is all quiet.

I am drenched in blood, panting a little, tasting it on my lips. I am staring up at the slit-pupils of the goat mask and the glimmer of darkness behind them. My chest heaves with excitement, his heaves with exertion.

“All of them?” I ask. Is it done?

My driver nods.

He takes a step towards me and over the body between us. I reach up and take hold of his hoodie, finger looped through a still-smouldering hole in the fabric. He drops the knife and I pull him into the car and over me. I press his head against my collar, the mask is wet and slips against my skin. His hands are rough and as greedy as I am.

My lips crush against an inflexible ridge on the mask’s temple. I taste blood and I catch the scent of it – along with sweat and gunpowder and plastic. The car shifts under our weight, the suspension complains, and the next sound I make is a gasp and a thump – my palm leaving a bloody print on the window above my head.

*

It is the next morning.

The town still smells of smoke. It has been two years since the Oswin Farm burned down. So much of the land went up in flames and the people that did it never really got caught.

I remember the day after the fire my mom asking me if I was involved. She knew I had been to that party. I had nothing to do with the fire and I told her as much, but I still hate the scent of smoke. I hate the way it persists, clinging to fabric and hair, like booze on someone’s breath.

Nobody ever fixed up the land, but I think I read somewhere that ash was meant to be good for soil. It must have been true since the fields are now a vibrant green of tangled weeds.

I am sitting in the front passenger seat of his car, dried blood cracking on my forehead. The goat mask is on the dashboard right in front of me, the handle of the knife pokes out from underneath is snout. It is so bright out that even with the sun-block lowered I have to squint to see the road.

We’re leaving.

“Should get you a mask,” My driver tells me.

Featured

Girl Friends,

For Millie the day doesn’t really start until she’s out of her door. It’s all killing time – lounging in bed, scrolling through her feeds, jerking off before dragging herself to the shower.

She has plans to meet Nora in town at around eleven-ish, so between everything she does (Cereal in the half-dark of drawn curtains,) she checks the time to see if she should be going yet, (Laying her clothes out on the bed to try and envision the outfit). Millie is excited to see Nora, they meet up every month or so and do nothing in particular, (Taking her time trying to even out her eye-liner and giving it far more scrutiny than anyone else will) but it’s always fun to catch up.

Millie sends a message to make sure that Nora is still planning on meeting her, just in case (Squaring away the mess of her things on the table, neatly separated from her roommate’s), and she gets a thumbs-up in response. The thumbs up could mean disinterest, or it could mean that Nora is also in the midst of getting ready, (Suddenly worrying that the roommate is still at home while she’s been wandering around in her underwear) but ultimately Millie puts her faith in the thumbs-up simply being a thumbs-up.

Then it’s time to leave and the day actually starts.

*

Millie takes a break to catch her breath. There’s an awful, awkward hill just outside her apartment building, the road into town then is a steep curve upwards. It only ever takes less than a minute to reach the top, and then she’s only another minute away from the center of town, but the hill always makes her sweat and makes her think of how itchy the back of her collar is.

Millie pulls at her collar and considers the possibility of some kind of stair-lift, but for outside. It’d probably get all ratty from the rain and the general wear-and-tear and all the vandalism that would no doubt happen. It would take up a lot of space, also.

Millie adjusts her collar again and looks both ways before crossing the road. An outdoor stair-lift in her town would definitely end up covered in graffiti and Millie probably wouldn’t want to ride on it if it were missing most of its padding and had the word ‘Cunt’ written on its arm. Millie pulls a face at herself, that word choice was rather crass.

Millie crosses the road again and cuts through a side-alley that brings her to the town’s high-street. She wonders if stair-lift is the right terminology, or whether she’s thinking of a chair-lift. Up ahead is where Millie is meeting Nora for lunch and they spot each other outside at about the same time.

“Hey!” Nora says, perpetually cheerful, “Happy International Women’s Day!” She’s in a flannel shirt and a black beanie hat and she has a paper coffee cup. She always has a paper coffee cup.

“Hey,” Millie replies. She smiles wide and worries it looks a bit fake, even though it is not at all fake. Outwardly expressing that sort of joy just seems to take a certain amount of intentionality, Millie considers it’s probably because she’s still trying to get over the irony-poisoning of spending a childhood on the Internet. “And, uh, what?”

“It’s International Women’s Day,” Nora explains, “According to the Internet at least, I got a notification about it.”

“Oh,” Millie squints at the idea, “Do we like that? Is that a good one or is it a bit… You know.”

Nora shrugs, “I think it’s neat enough. A good excuse to give girlfriends and girl friends and mom’s something nice.” Nora holds both hands at either side of her face and waggles her fingers theatrically, “A whole day to celebrate women!”

Millie suddenly regrets watching gangbang porn earlier this morning. She doesn’t say that out loud, obviously, biting her lip about it. She thinks it’s probably weird enough to watch any porn in the morning, even just as part of her routine.

“So you hungry?” Nora asks, “I’ll get lunch.”

“I can eat,” Millie says, stepping aside so Nora can lead the way into the shop. Millie wonders if something like porn should be part of a routine. Not all habits have to be addictions and she is definitely not addicted. If someone told her ‘no porn!’ she’d probably be disappointed, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world. And she would still jerk off.

“I’m just getting the chicken and chips. How about you?” Nora asks. There’s not much of a line, despite it quickly approaching mid-day. The lunch rush hadn’t quite started yet.

“Yeah, cheers,” Millie seconds the order, “And a coke.” Millie knows she’s being a bit quiet, but Nora also knows that Millie is a woman prone to being lost in her own head. Nora probably doesn’t know that it’s because Millie is stuck thinking about jerking off. Not that she’s thinking about wanting to do it right then and there, but that she’s hung up on the very first thing she did on International Women’s Day (apparently) is watch porn on her phone.

Nora picks a booth to sit in while they wait for their orders, “We might as well eat in. Chilly out.”

Millie nods. Maybe that’s feminism, Millie is reasoning with herself, she’s probably a feminist. Though there’s almost definitely discourse about who gets to say they are a feminist and she would never claim that gangbang porn in bed is praxis.

“What’re you thinking about?” Nora asks, nudging Millie’s forearm. She’s clearly caught her friend deep in thought.

“Just nothing,” Millie says, remembering to smile. She isn’t sure if ‘praxis’ would be the correct word, “So! How’ve you been, mate?”

*

It’s a day off for both Millie and Nora (data-entry for Millie, admin office for Nora), so they’ve decided to spend it together milling around town, getting a couple of errands done, and touring the many charity shops that dominate the high-street.

Dominate might be too intense of a word, Millie thinks. She looks up at the Red Cross sign above her, the colour of it faded over the years into a much softer pink. They’re charity, it’s hard to imagine charity dominating anything. Even though most of these shops had been standing for as long as Millie could remember, but the really cool independent music store shut down after less than eight months, it felt like an unfair thought.

“Hey, what do you think of that dress?” Nora asks. She’s standing by Millie in front of the Red Cross window, peering inside to the store front. She’s eyeing up a summer dress in black with red floral patterns and a cinched waist. At least, Millie reckons that’s what a cinched waist is.

“Mm. Hard to tell. Would probably look good with the right shirt over it, but I never know how I feel about dresses,” Millie reasons. She doesn’t want there to be less charity in the world, even if the word ‘dominate’ is what came to mind. She’d just like more music stores.

“I wouldn’t want to dress it down. I’ve been looking for something to wear for that work do,” Nora explains.

“Oh, then yeah,” Millie says. Both of them step inside the shop where it’s nice and warm and smells of old fabric. Millie has always liked the smell, finding it comforting somehow, but she couldn’t really explain why and has never expressed that out loud. It’s probably odd to take too much notice of smells, “You looking forward to the work thing?”

“Kind of? It’ll be fun once I get there, I guess. It’s just very mandatory ‘You Will Have Fun,’ you know?” Nora says as she carefully picks at the dress for a price tag.

“Corporate mandated joy hours,” Millie murmurs. Culture would probably be different if smell was put on the same level of importance as sight or sound. There would be scented clothes. Scented birthday candles.

“Yeah, exactly. I just always find them a bit rigid? Maybe I’m just overthinking it,” Nora shrugs. She finds the price-tag, “Oh, bargain.”

Millie’s expression twists slightly. She’s thinking about scratch-and-sniff clothes and how awful scented birthday candles sound. She wonders also what scent a corporate office party would go for.

“I’m gonna have to find someone to get the dress off the mannequin,” Nora says, already craning her neck to see if she can spot anybody.

Sensing that another person is going to get involved soon, Millie says “I’m going to go look at the books,” already stepping away.

*

“– And it’s like, every time I say I don’t care they act as if that’s me caring!” Nora complains. She’s sat on a park bench next to Millie and they both have a chocolate milkshake each.

“Right, yeah,” Millie says. They had both pretended to need to justify the milkshakes by claiming it’s their Women’s Day treat. Millie has the perverse thought that the gangbang video was her Women’s Day treat.

“It’s just the way she says it,” Nora goes on, “All, ‘I’m seeing mark tonight, is that okay?'” She scowls, “Yeah it’s okay. I don’t give a fuck about Mark? I don’t give a fuck about my roommate dating him.”

“Right,” Millie says again. Mark was an asshole, Nora’s roommate was on thin ice.

“But every time she says that and every time I say I don’t care it makes me sound like I care! And I care about sounding like I care, because I don’t care, and if she gets the wrong idea she’s going to be fussing even more than she already does.”

“Also, like, Mark? Come on, love. Have some standards. She saw you two together and thought, ‘I want some of that’?” Millie scoffs. Recently she had been more brave about putting Mark down in front of Nora as it became increasingly clear that they were not getting back together.

Nora snorts, “Right? I know he’s not a catch. I’m not crying over that.”

Millie knows Nora appreciated her comment, but she’s suddenly considering that she might have come on too strong. Yes she had been more brave lately, but Millie suspects that Nora does still get hung-up sometimes.

“What’s annoying is other than that she’s great! I actually like this roommate situation I’ve got going on. You read so many nightmare stories and stuff,” Nora sighs.

“Yeah,” Millie agrees, “You do.” It’s very unlikely Nora and Mark are going to become friends though, but she’s not sure if that makes it more or less likely that they get back together. Some people are like that, and Millie knows that Mark has a huge dick. Though Nora had said she was writing off men, which could actually be true because Nora is definitely into girls too.

“So how’s yours?” Nora asks.

“Oh, mine’s a ghost,” Millie shrugs, “Basically never see him, but he takes out the bins and the rent gets paid.” Nora had made a pass at Millie’s sister once, they’re only one year apart in age. Millie thought that was crossing a line, but she didn’t say anything and was relieved when the whole thing went nowhere anyway.

“That sounds ideal, actually.”

“It is! But also it’s like, I dunno. I share an entire apartment with somebody and I think I’ve only seen him about three times this week. It’s a bit eerie.”

“But he’s not a creep, is he?” Nora asks – there’s genuine concern there and Millie appreciates it. It’s gestures like that which allows Millie to forgive Nora of the whole sister thing.

“Nah. I actually think he’s trying really hard to not seem like a creep, especially when he first moved in. Hard to explain what I mean, though.”

“No, I get you. I don’t think I’d want to have a dude as my roommate.”

“No?”

“It’s terrible, but I’d probably end up sleeping with him.”

Millie thinks that it’s just as likely she would sleep with a woman as her roommate, though she’s never slept with any kind of roommate she’s had. This is a thought Millie actually says out loud, “I’m just as likely to sleep with a woman as my roommate.”

*

Millie is waiting outside Nora’s bank. She would have gone inside with Nora, but she hasn’t finished her milkshake yet and she didn’t want to bin it when the best bits were still at the bottom. So she’s leaning against a concrete pillar and people watching.

She’s also thinking about the comment she’d made about sleeping with her roommate in a hypothetical scenario where her roommate is a woman. Her phrasing had suggested she’s just as likely to sleep with a roommate who is a man and while that is true, it’s not what Millie had intended to imply.

Half-blended lumps of fudge sit at the bottom of her cup and she has her head down while trying to fish them out.

Her roommate is pleasant enough, and he’s her type insofar as he has not yet annoyed her. Nora probably knew what Millie meant anyway, but Millie is still unsure if she should have sait it. It was a very explicit comment about her own sexuality said out loud and Nora made one first and is probably also bisexual, though somehow Millie’s own sapphic desires feel more immodest. Millie wonders why that is, aside from the stifling heterosexuality of her hometown. Maybe it’s because she can’t envision Nora watching porn.

A baby squeals in its stroller as a tired mother pushes the pram by. She has a dog zig-zagging by her feet and the whole affair just looks very exhausting.

A few weeks ago Millie and Nora had shared drinks together and then shared insights about themselves that could only be unlocked by drinking. Millie had confirmed for Nora that she is still a virgin, but only if neither of them count hand-stuff. Nora suspects that Millie is a bit pent up as a result, and now every time Millie mentions anything that could be related to romance or intimacy, she’s worried that it either makes her sound unreasonably horny, or conjures imagery of nervous devirginization. She’s rarely actively horny, even during her morning routine, and she’s not particularly nervous about the act.

Millie rests her head against the rough concrete. The sensation grounds her in the present moment and she pays attention again to the squeaky wheels of a baby stroller, a distant dog barking, a group of lads shouting about whatever it is lads shout about, and the more immediate sound of someone approaching.

It’s Mark, “Hey,” He says.

“… Uh. Hey,” Millie says. He’s a head taller than her, dark haired, sporting neatly trimmed stubble. Millie is also aware that he’s got a massive dick.

“You seen Nora lately?” Mark asks.

“Why?” Millie asks in return. She’s trying not to think about what she knows of Mark (hung).

“Not any reason,” Mark shrugs, before then going on to explain the reason, “I just wanna make sure she’s alright. Since I’m seeing–“

“Oh my- Fuck off, yeah?” Millie interrupts, immediate agitated by this man.

“What?” Mark is caught off guard, going so far as to take a step back and look around like he’s expecting some kind of audience to parrot his shock. Nobody is paying any attention, however.

“Like… Fuck off?” Millie repeats, now less certain about how strong she had come on, but unwilling to back down from it, “She doesn’t care, man. And you’re a bit of a prick.”

“Fuck, alright,” Mark further backs off, offended. He starts to walk away, but not before muttering the word, “Bitch.”

“Asshole,” Millie counters, but also muttering because neither her or Mark are interested in making an actual scene and he’s already walking away, “Ugh, ‘bitch,'” Millie frowns, “It’s International Women’s Day, bell-end.”

Millie watches the back of Mark’s head for a while until he vanishes inside a local bakery. He’s always annoyed her, even back when she was meant to like him. Millie turns her gaze back towards the bank in time to see Nora exiting.

“Hey!” Nora grins, “Sorry about the wait.”

“It’s fine,” Millie gestures with her cup, “Wanted to finish my milkshake.”

“Cool. Are you good?” Nora asks, “You look intense.”

“Lost in thought. What’re we doing next?”

*

“I had fun today!” Nora beams. She had walked with Millie all the way to Millie’s building, which Millie appreciates. The down hill walk is fine, sure, but trudging back up hill is going to be a pain in the ass. Nora nudges Millie’s arm affectionately.

“Yeah!” Millie says, nudging back, “Yeah, so did I. We’ll do it again soon.” Millie knows Nora doesn’t go in for a hug because years ago Millie had expressed not being a hugger. She regrets it, because she almost certainly is a hugger now and simply does not know how to communicate that.

“Totally,” Nora says, “I’ll let you know when I’m free next. Could go see a movie or something.”

“For sure. I’ll see you later, mate,” With that Millie unlocks the building’s door and steps inside. She lingers halfway through the threshold while Nora turns to head down the street and after what feels like a polite amount of time to wait, Millie heads inside.

Millie liked spending time with Nora. There’s not many people that can drag Millie out of her own head the way that Nora does, even if some days she doesn’t feel entirely present.

She’s lost in her thoughts again while heading up the stairs when she bumps into (figuratively) her roommate just as he’s leaving.

“Hey,” He says.

“Hey,” She replies.

“Heading out,” He says.

“Cool, see you later,” She replies. She probably won’t sleep with him.