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By the time the keys are in the ignition, the detective has already staved off a number of missed calls from the Hansons’ attorney. It is another sleepless night on call as one of the few eligible (read: not suspended) officers on duty. Sleep has never been a problem for the detective, having learned from a young age how to fall asleep to loudness, able to bank a handful of hours during his academy days between closing down the bar and showing up fresh-faced the next day. It was something that infuriated any woman he has ever been with (read: 5) despite his most valiant efforts to keep his eyes open for her ongoing astrological theorizing, her one more ridiculous arthouse film, just to wake up from a fantastic and delicious sleep to find his cottage perfectly empty.

You live like a fucking narcoleptic, Shannon wrote on the yellow post-it note currently demanding the detective’s attention, blinding his mind’s eye. So what’s it gonna take?

Detective Sean Burke has a hard time sleeping after what he saw.

Suspended in this humid morning, with the Hansons’ attorney blowing up his phone already, Burke surveys his options. He hasn’t even picked the man up yet. God knows what state he’d be in when he arrives, traipsing with little ceremony into his squad car, where the detective will deliver the mayor of West Murmur back to his gorgeous, rollicking home, to his gorgeous, rollicking wife. Again. There’s always been some sort of incentive for looking the other way in Aquitaine (stupid, fairytale type name for a poor post-fishing industry dock town on the shore, which had maybe 10 good days a year, more so recently due to the bloggers, they’re called something different now…imposers? Influencers) but never enough to make it sound like the Atlantis paradise its name brings to mind.

Aquitaine was once the most beautiful, coveted pocket of land on all of the East Coast. This is what the detective thinks as he turns the key and starts the squad car. When he closes his eyes, he imagines it the way he saw it as a child, when he saw why the French who settled the town named it after their home. They were hearty, salt-of-the-earth people back then, understanding what it meant to work hard and provide, to struggle and not expect anything to be handed to you. At least, that’s what he’d heard from his uncles and great-uncles at the cigar smoke-hazed dinner table once the women and the girls had cleared away, playing dolls or cleaning the dishes in the kitchen, so real conversations could happen. At least, that’s what he’d heard.

The town is called something different now too. It’s West Murmur. But this morning, as Burke drives down to the dock (how did Hanson get himself down here?), it’s all the same. He thinks not of his black lunged uncles but of what he saw. The thing he can’t seem to forget.

George Hanson is waving to the detective like he’s at the airport and Burke is the ride he has excitedly awaited.

“Sean! Had I known,” Hanson started to say, but it came out more like “Sean…hanonn!”

“Good morning, Mayor Hanson.”

“Is it?”

“Unfortunately. I think the party might be over.” There’s not a soul around. “Can I take you home to Cora?”

The mayor’s smile disappears as if Burke had slapped him clean across the face.

“Or somewhere else? It’s pretty dark out here, and I’m sure you could use some sleep.” I sure could.

Mayor Hanson studies the detective for a minute. “My lawyer call you?”

Burke knits his brow in feigned confusion. He casts a glance back to his car. “I must’ve just missed him.”

“Right,” George Hanson says with a nod, narrowing his eyes. Sighs. “Guess it’s about that time, huh.”

On the ride home, Hanson presses his face against the glass of the backseat. Through the grate, Burke studies the paunch of his stomach, his red cheeks, the glassy eyes. The scent of cologne still there. Wearing the crucifix like his father did. The detective’s heart softens as he watches the mayors’ eyes reflect the state of his Aquitaine.

All along the bay side, the boats and their owners are still fast asleep under the moon, but not for long. It will quickly turn from midnight to 1, and 1 to 2. In those two hours, the fishermen that remain in Greater Aquitaine would rise, shaking off the night’s terrors of giant squid and caught lines, or worse, of nothing at all – and trudge heavily, just as Burke’s father did, plod through the house in the dark, get himself up and out and gone. By the time Burke woke up his father had already prepped for the trip with the other sea dogs, departed before the first appearance of the hot sun, and’ve been hauling nets for hours. And hopefully would have some catch. At the end of every night, hands clasped together with his little sister, he’d pray for daddy’s big bite. It’ll come tomorrow.

“My lawyer call you yet?” the mayor interrupts his thought from the backseat.

“We talked,” Burke lies. “I’m taking you home.”

“Excellent,” Hanson says into the window, his breath forming a ghost on the glass. “Excellent.”

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Just the day before this show, I had tagged along on a lunch date with my parents and two of their closest friends — she and my mom met working as nurses, and she was present at mine and all three of my siblings’ births, and he with my dad (also Matt) found a kindred camaraderie over the years in their quieter conversations. Anyway, I had been thinking of them already because Kat and I had a long standing date to see Hilary Duff at Madison Square Garden the following day. I remember as a young kid hanging out with their daughter, Lauren, in her (own!) room, fitted with incredible things like a CD player, and listening to Metamorphosis, songs I would have stuck in my head over the next 20 years. I remember wishing I could take the music home and listen to the songs whenever I wanted.

This distinct memory is always followed by another, where I’m sitting on my bed in 2006 with my Limited Too portable CD player having just come home from Borders and spending my gift card on Vanessa Hudgens’ V and the Hannah Montana soundtrack. I heard the music in my headphones and couldn’t believe no one else in the room could hear it.

On Thursday afternoon, I was at the beauty shop thinking about buying the rainbow butterfly clips for my hair but didn’t, thinking I’m too old for that. Imagine then how stupid I felt hours later at Madison Square Garden, surrounded by my kin wearing the early 2000s outfits of my dreams. Kat and I took our seats and scanned a QR code to “leave Hilary a message.” To my right in Section 104 my best friend types I see myself as a child when I see you and I have to look away.

(Whenever I see a live act it always trips me out. Not that anyone cares but I DO remember the moment One Direction came out at the IZOD Center in 2012 and had the deeply unsettling feeling that they too had bodies as flimsy and corporeal as mine. But I digress:)

Seeing Hilary Duff onstage, I realized the truth in all her lyrics — even a woman so beautiful it hurts to look at can imagine the worst over and over again. I hear myself in “Holiday Party” as she imagines in detail transgressions from loyal lovers, in “Future Tripping” as she spirals into everything that hasn’t happened yet, but will:

"2028 will you skip the headache 
and settle somewhere out of state with a younger heart
Will your crisis be a car, or some bitch at a bar 
who’s saying she loves Bon Iver (calls him Bon Ivar)" 

At one point Hilary’s daughters came out and they sat together eating pizza, a clear indicator from Hilary that despite her (and undoubtedly our) drastically different lives now, we can still all gather together and do both, have both. Or maybe that’s just what I received from Section 104.

Kat cried during her favorite song, everything meaning triply more to us now. I was okay until “Adult Size Medium,” when the fever pitch of nostalgia and remembrance comes

I remember everything and nothing at all 
I'm waking up in a dream sequence
Sometimes I can’t see me in it

Was any of it worth it after all?
Is my reflection someone else’s I stole? 
But if it’s mine, can I still keep it - 
if i can’t see me in it?  

And nobody runs faster than time — the set list moves on but I stay right here, through “What Dreams Are Made Of,” through the balloons, the pink confetti, the return to real life, the subway home, the days that follow, I feel something far beyond the usual post-concert depression, crushed by exactly everything that she said: remembering it all, remembering nothing, finding myself sentient in a crowd of thousands as an adult older than I really ever thought about from inside that room, beyond the beaded curtain, headphones in the lime green music player knowing exactly what track would be on next because I never shuffled, and still after all these years remembering which 00:02-00.00 bleeds into the next 00.00.-00.02 and staying right there.

To have dreamed so much and so hard of the big world only to try at every turn to come back to that exact moment between the songs. It was with 20,000 others that we were girls again all together, for a moment outrunning that demon time. I felt it, and remember it all: the plush carpet, the beaded curtain, the Bermuda shorts, the Juicy Couture bag, the straightened bangs and side ponytails, the braces, the tied T-shirts, the multi-tap texting, the ankle socks, the curly handwriting, the posters, the dreams upon dreams upon dreams I had to make it, to be somebody exactly like who I am, to be where I am, here right now.

It was the green leaves of the morning glories that brought him to her attention.

On any normal day she’d have never been outside at this time, let alone awake. If she weren’t so heartbroken, the sound of the birds, the muted watercolor of the sunrise, the secrecy of the predawn would have gone unnoticed. But through the rigid bamboo slats of her fence, the flowers dared bloom in all their elegance. How ugly and beautiful a root could continue finding the sun despite a barrier – but it did.

That dreamless night found her awake with the vines hungry for a dawn wet without light. All through July she’d watched orphaned leaves chase each other in circles through the alley. And that day was undoubtedly a day unlike any other. The summer sun rose one marigold after the next.

Day after day, she found solace in the cool dark of the bar, but she never found what she really sought: anonymity. For that, she’d need to put the keys in the ignition and try to leave this place, but that’s something she could never do. Instead she peels back one layer of humility after another – I’ll take one more. I’ll take one more. One more then I’ll close. One more then I’ll close. This is the last.

I promise.

This bar had always been paneled in the warm wood of her dreams. On that night, she asked the bartender for one more. He’d been talking to someone down the bar and glanced sidelong at her. He moved in a way that made her feel more like a character and suddenly everything was flat like a set. She said her lines in the way she hoped was most satisfactory.

If her fate hadn’t been written already, hadn’t been scratched on the face of the moon, this extra round may never have mattered. But the fact was that the shift had changed at the bar, and the person making the drink mattered. He mattered very much.

I’ve been away so long that Substack logged me out and I feel like a bad parent. Even so, my weedy blog has grown wildly. A few weeks ago, I got my 100th subscriber. A few weeks before that, I got notice that the first poem I ever published on this blog was chosen for a digital magazine.

But I’m back now, and that counts. Thank you all for being here.

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Almost every night, I dream a specific dream. My parents took my siblings and me on vacation a few times to a mountain resort in New Paltz called Mohonk. The several long weekends I’ve spent with my family at Mohonk are beautiful, peaceful, inspiring.

Yet almost every night, I dream that I am at Mohonk, either cognizantly or knowing innately, and I dream that I am trying to get to the gift shop. There are always similarities to the dream: it is the last day of vacation or some other hourglass is nearing its end and it’s all I can think of. But there are differences to the dream every now and again; once I started telling my sister Natalia about them in real life, I would start telling her in the dream as well — “This is the dream. I just have to get to the gift shop.”; there were sometimes different obstacles I had to cross to get where I needed to — I was on the wrong side of the lake, or at the top of a waterslide that doesn’t actually exist, or couldn’t walk without pulling myself by my fingertips along the walls, that’s a common one; and probably the worst ones, when I do arrive and it’s not the same. Last week I got the closest I’ve ever been to the gift shop, but it was one of the latter. Instead I stood on the soft carpeting staring at a dark storefront full of shiny automatons.

I don’t know what I seek in these dreams. I haven’t been back to Mohonk since they started, and I wonder if I did, would the dream stop? What is in the gift shop that my mind cannot reach?

I did some research into the science of recurring dreams on my quest to better understand why I return night after night to the gift shop. It is widely accepted that recurring dreams typically appear during times of stress. In the world’s most popular recurring dreams, we are being chased; walking around without clothes; falling into a deep dark abyss; taking an exam unprepared; arriving late somewhere; and trying over and over again to do something we cannot.

What stumps me is the lack of danger. Why do I need to get to the gift shop so much that it appears day after day, reminding my subconscious of…what? Of all the situations I have weathered in my life, Mohonk remains a bastion of peace and happiness and family security in my mind. Which makes the dream all the more terrifying every time I have it.

There was one year that we went to Mohonk a few days after I had been broken up with suddenly by someone that in hindsight I really didn’t like that much, but the idea of being left was devastating to me. My heartbreak was painful and severe and seeped into every thought I had for weeks. I have memories of staring into the deep lake, reciting the morbid last verses of “The Lovesong of J Alfred Prufrock,” trying to find the beauty in the sunset, and feeling only pain in my heart even so. This is not the overwhelming memory I have when I go to Mohonk, but it’s something that even in my last visits I remembered. Why, in all the beautiful moments of the world, with life teeming everywhere I look, is my sadness still insurmountable? Why do the beautiful things seem to make it worse?

Tonight may be the night I reach what has eluded me all these years. In a way, I wish I wouldn’t. At least in my sleep I know where I am.

the sense I make of it

you can never read the same poem twice
almost like you can never walk the same beach after two twilights
through the frosted window of tomorrow 
i twist the corkscrew from yesterday’s sorrow 
turn over that empty page      i was 17 once and        
heading for humility the long way
but if i were a man would i’ve ever found myself wrong
weigh the route against my power and in every hour
find rooted in me       someone I’d have always believed  

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The last party

is a drink for us three 
as goodbye sun lights forever fantasy 

What’s a dreamer to do 		but seek the moon beyond tomorrow’s moon?
But see a world for all its blooms	
	                           the universe and all it needs
 sure as June	
sure as the avenue 		changes its tune but never changes you

When	 I play pretend 
I see in rosary beads
and all I'd do
if I weren't steeped in all I could never amend

And how many flies in my drink died
before I could make that rhyme
   
or if I had it all this time?
What would that mean then? 

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It’s true — I went to Jupiter		they smiled and asked what I was drinking 
but beautiful people turn ugly when I stop to listen

I saw the breeze from beyond the trees
catch seeds in my glass and eavesdrop with a chill in 89 degrees	

	I’ve never been a real girl	 it seems
but I dream
of 	Violet bent backwards over the grass				
spend the day in sunbeams and 		get its disease		
 float on the wing of 	double-means

I seek the world transparent!	and concede that the thing only I hear
 lives the live fantastic	          but  feels so pretend

what about the reel ever spinning in my head?       if I can't unsee the thing I dread
what enemy could lurk around every corner but
myself — 

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Pic of a married friend posted to Facebook in which I could see the sadness but we don’t talk anymore

In a world we didn’t leave – and I see nothing unless through the heavily beveled glass of nostalgia – you meet me on the same street – ignore the bite of the bittersweet and pocket the knife of memory – I hear a song only you would’ve thought of – and imagine one untouchable thing after another – the bride is sad – forgetting when future was all we had – I’m writing this from the place that I am – cutting the lyric into a curve – singing a melody and forgetting the words – is he man enough to remind you – not to take what the devil says you earned

“A nice girl talks to everyone.”

Twelve faces turn to face her – “Cheers” – but this instead is what she hears. She thinks about these words all night as she watches the ice melt and lets memory trickle into her bloodstream. A nice girl talks to everyone. Then there was something in her inherently broken, and that is why she was singled out. Chosen. A girl deserving.

When she was five she cried in her mother’s arms. Hid under things. She didn’t know how to tell her that she saw her as a little girl too and that everything hurt, even the beautiful things. Especially those.

She felt she was waiting for an inevitable disaster that would split her life into a before and after, not understanding that there was no such thing as a beginning, middle and end, just time unending but contained, like a page folded over and over on itself, constantly creased by patterns that preceded it. This is what she thought as she turned the cocktail napkin over and over as if looking for a sign. She had a sudden vision of herself drinking the burning candle instead of what was in her cup and her insides turning to wax.

After he saw what he saw, he dreamed of long dark tunnels and the sound of his children opening doors, running through them, and splashing down into whatever was on the other side. He dreamed of speaking in languages he never knew.

He thought himself quick but knew time was faster. He understood there were many ways in but there was only one way out. He lived a story that only should have been told to him.

His phone was ringing, ringing. Memories curled in his mind like yellowed images and evaporated as he ignored the call again and again.

Yes, he thought to himself. This is what the end of the world would sound like. It would feel like getting high, like going to sleep. Maybe what love might feel like, if he knew. Like watching the rain turn to snow and night turn to day and suddenly finding a way to undo his sins forever.

But he did what he’d do – set both eyes fixedly ahead on a single unmoving unbodied end. Some nonreal destination that could be either success or total destruction. But either way, it would be pulling him like an anchor to the bottom of that sea.

He knew that. No matter what, deep down, this is something that he knew.

“That one is truly enamored by his own misfortune,” the woman said, rolling her eyes with a delicate snort. “I mean, come on.

I am looking at the world with new eyes. One girl at the edge of the world. Lately, I’ve been forgetting _____, and I’m becoming ________. This was an exercise my therapist told me to consider, as deeply and thoroughly of course as I consider all of her advice, so I’ve completed it. This bar is hot, wood-paneled and old, but necessary in a place that shuts down all winter. Grimacing, I remember wishing to be taken out of the city and rescued into the open arms of quiet nature. As if silence hasn’t been hanging like a dome or an echo chamber repeating the past back to me.

At night there is nothing, absolutely nothing. I stare at the wall and think about how boring sobriety is. I wish for anything, everything to change yet there was nothing I could do but think. So sobriety is over. It was never anything I wanted anyway. When my therapist asked if, given there was a way without consequence, money, or impact to physical health, would I be high all the time?

Yes, I told her. Wouldn’t you? If there was a way, wouldn’t you?

With everything in the world, wouldn’t you still be wanting? Isn’t that what keeps you, too, up tossing and turning in the middle of the night?

Brooklyn, 6:54 am

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2 blind captains kissing in the cockpit

I saw it:		      two blind captains kissing in the cockpit 
It was never a quiet world I wanted, 	and then I got it

   Me and my shadow girl: are throwing down the gauntlet

On a sidewalk outside the Bitter End
Things change in a way I could never comprehend
      Time gives              but karma lurks around every bend

If I bought the coincidence		would it turn out the same in the end? 	
Would you say the same thing?     Would you do it again?  

All through the night 
under the guise of a lonely star
There's a side door into the dark      
and it's always left    ajar

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k tenga un buen día!

Igual, igual 
Pa el país tengo el portal 	

En otra vida, en otra mundo podrá ser — 
But here 		I slip a side door 
to the algo que solo yo podía ver

And trip to an edge		
	where love makes a knot 
(Uno debe amor lo más que puede before he gets got!)

But I swear I saw you en el campo 
en la jacaranda	y la Cantuta 	
en todo lo que decía la música

 From east to west		I paint the sky  in something only 
youth could possess
Dare myself   to meet the eyes of mis fantasmas 
	
    el mundo y todas sus mentiras 
La playita y		las cositas que repito 	
cada día		cada respira 
 
un amanecer más hermosa que sonaría

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Galactic solitude

A song arrived from across my life 	and I heard it like I did the first time
	watched gravity tug my narcissistic skin	 
told my other self come in 		
 
Pretty twin 
what other alien 			would hear my important part of the song 
		without seeing eyes that see them wrong?
and all the dreams growing up the wall 		new skin for the disco ball 

You see
it wasn’t the party I craved at all		
what I sought in the stall            already lived within the eyewall 
	
And what about love unconditional 
		encircling the moon like a caul		is that all? 
Or is it something new			
and can it come too soon? 		
	
       I left a strand of hair on the moon	
would anyone think to photograph that too?	 
A sign of life from across the universe — was this what I was missing? 
	Is this my awaited-for sign	         from you?  

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This article comes with a companion playlist, which can be listened to in any order. All songs on this list were coded into my Tumblr homepage.

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I, like most girls my age, had a Tumblr. More than one actually — at one point I did indeed have a dedicated One Direction blog and I’m not ashamed to say it. Us fangirls were busy back then.

It’s difficult to remember how exactly my obsession with Tumblr developed, but eventually I was scheduling hourly posts to my blog for the days I’d be away from my laptop. And these weren’t any original posts — just reposts that fit my aesthetic. No photos of me, and rarely ones that I’d taken myself of something #clean or #grunge or whatever theme it was that I was going for at that time. My blog was entirely, completely, fully inconsequential, and my posting — or not — made no difference to anyone’s life but mine.

But it all meant something great to me. That was when the future felt as exciting and dangerous and vast as the internet itself. I can credit Tumblr with so many of my musical influences: Lana Del Rey, the 1975, Sky Ferreira, Marina and the Diamonds, The Strokes.

I started seeing the beauty in everything: the lights on the highway, shadows against pavement, my parents together in the front seats of the car. Sunsets, sunrises. Timing the right song to play at the right time as the bus drove me to pre-sunrise band practice and I saw the scattered lights of the businesses below streaming past like shooting stars and knew they were mine, and that I saw them even if no one else did. And they moved me. Every morning. Those minutes between school and my house, my little self shooting through the night imagining the endlessness of possibility and the rush that that feeling gave me.

Tumblr gave me something creative to focus on, a collage of feelings, stupid grainy photos of hands; of a bicycle leaned up against a French restaurant; the silhouette of Lana Del Rey against a neon light; a screengrab from Fight Club of the blimp that said THE WORLD IS YOURS; anyone and everyone and everywhere I was not.

I didn’t know how lovely I was back then. There was a whirlpool in my chest and I was diving into it searching for something. That me was fixated on predicting possible heartbreaks and channeling whatever I thought that might mean for my art. Maybe manifesting what I thought was beautiful back then, because I thought feeling pain might make more sense.

It’s been more than 10 years now since I graduated high school, which means the me I’m referring to here is even older than that. That me was a flightless bird, rushing to unravel every mystery of life and finding only myself in every reflection and on every street corner. You can go anywhere in the world and there you’ll be. What did I think I’d find?

Since then I’ve been avoiding these very songs because of what they hold, still no closer to discovering what any of the feelings they reveal mean.

When I started this blog I wished I had my Tumblr to go back on and reference, to copy the code and continue what I’d started all those years ago. But I’ve never been able to log in again, nor remember what my URL even would be. I’m sure by now it would be a broken page, or reclaimed by a new Tumblr user. But I’d like to imagine little me is still reblogging her aesthetic photos and checking her homepage to make sure the songs are playing right. In a purple room with posters on the wall. It gives me something to dream about. And for a minute it gets easier to pretend like all that time hasn’t really passed at all.

This might be the closest I get to writing a letter to my younger self. I hope she reads it.

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It’s about Georgie

The worst one is the first one.

Her words echoed through the telephone like the two were girls again, speaking through tin cans in the woods.

How do you know for sure?

It was May. Spring heaved and hid, bringing muddy skies in the morning and brief moments of patronizing stubborn light when no one was looking out the window to enjoy it in the afternoon. All the typical start of season joys appeared washed out like old shiplap sunk to the bottom of the bay. Even the church bells hovering on the breeze sounded more like a badly pieced together memory than any song.

There was a list of things needing to be done before the weekend — as the mayor’s wife every Memorial Day was more important than the preceding. Last year the committee had managed to book some new popular band all the kids liked, and had thousands of attendees spending their money (all tax deductible) in the name of fundraising for the island. The year before, they chose a retro theme and had a vintage car show in their mile-long driveway, old school carnival rides and treats down the lawn, and Donny Osmond himself flown in from Vegas to perform a pre-fireworks show, all hosted on the sprawling Hanson property that spread like manifest destiny out to the horizon and dropped off hard into the dunes below.

Last night Cora dreamed she was trying to climb up the side of the dune with two wet hands clutching a ceramic punch bowl while Georgie and all her guests watched from above, laughing. But then the juice was intestines and she was sliding farther and farther away from the wretched party and into the sea. When she woke, she of course was alone — Georgie had taken no time at all in packing up his pressed shirts, topsiders, and hats, and was happily bobbing in his boat on the bay, steps from here, but miles from her.

If you ask Georgie, he’d likely say it was his choice. They grew apart. They changed. They had new, different interests. They had different friends. New desires. New ambitions. Everything was new, except for her. That was the problem — somehow, between every Memorial Day and Labor Day, from Halloween to Easter, anniversary and birthday alike, from every cloth napkin laid and centerpiece built and invitation sealed painstakingly with wax, every sparkling lemon-scented countertop and man cave renovation and salon blowout — all of it be damned. She could never be new. She could never do life again. In the waiting room of the plastic surgeon’s office on Fifth Avenue, she watched a 16-year-old wearing a rhinoplasty splint from behind a flimsy brochure on laser hair removal and cried to herself.

……………………………………………………

Emily was right when she said the worst of it would be the first time she saw him again. She had stopped down at Cassidy’s to inquire about the prospective catches for the weekend — she had a grand idea to serve full roasted fish to coincide with the Mediterranean theme of the party, which now seemed stupid and corny and out of place and incredibly too much money and work and who would even be deboning all of these fish and why were we having a Mediterranean party for an American holiday, just cancel the whole thing why don’t you — when she heard his voice and a jolt went through her like she’d touched a live wire. It had only been a matter of days since the incident that resulted in the police knocking on their door at four in the morning but they had each lived lifetimes since then.

It’s about Georgie, Cora had said when Emily picked up the phone that night.

Where is he?

He’s in the back of a police car. In the driveway.

Did they say what happened?

They won’t. I think he made them promise.

Emily sniffed and sighed. What are you going to do?

What can I do?

The night buzzed around them like the wings of a hummingbird. Cora’s heart pushed on her esophagus and she swallowed into the phone.

Can you take him tonight?

I can’t, Cora.

Please.

He’ll dry out by tomorrow.

It’s not just that.

Then what?

Cora felt the phone in her fingertips, the glass slick with sweat against her cheek, her feet in her shoes flat on the earth. I meant I don’t think it’s just that easy.

Of course it isn’t.

The darkness gummed up the scene like molasses. In an hour’s time the lawn might be dappled with morning light, the colors of another day hurting the bruised hearts of the weary. But now, the only visibility came from the squad car, stuttering as the officer crossed its path to approach the Hansons’ front door. He took his hat off like he was a soldier preparing to deliver news to a widow that her lover had been blown to bits in some faraway land. But worse — her lover was someone she could never reach, here or not.

Cora?

Yeah?

I think we should handle this in the morning.

It is morning. Cora smiled weakly into the phone. Thanks for picking up though. Cora looked up at the approaching man, young enough to be her son. How humiliating.

Good morning missus Hanson ma’am. Cora surveyed the academy-fresh plebe stuck with the graveyard shift. She knew Alan was happily in his bed, likely fermenting, while his new charges handled the only real crimebusting of their little town: keeping its mayor alive.

Hi, officer. Can we maybe just —

Yes ma’am. He walked around the side of the patrol car and unlocked the door. Georgie, who was up against the window until now, came out onto the gravel like a dead body.

Cory.

Hi, George. Her voice was tinny and wrong. Can you get yourself inside or do I need to wake one of the boys?

At their mention, George put both feet on the ground and heaved himself up to his full height. Sloshed, sweaty, and smelly, but still gorgeous Georgie. No. Don’t wake them.

I turned the lights off around the corner ma’am I didn’t want to cause any disturbance with the kids tonight.

Thank you, officer.

Georgie put two large hands in front of his face and walked toward her like a zombie. You know you did this, right?

What?

The officer looked between man and wife. An owl hooted in the trees.

Ma’am, is there anything more I can help you with tonight? I know you have quite the busy week with all the festivities. Me myself, me and my brothers, we used to love coming down for the chowderfest, you know, that was one of our favorites. And that one year with the —

Yes, it’s going to be quite fun, Cora interjected. The young officer shut his mouth with a snap, blushing. I think we’re just fine here. Good night.

Yes ma’am. My apologies. I will see you.

He held her gaze for a moment longer, and within it, a silent covenant to keep the night’s occurrences between themselves. He nodded curtly and pulled away from the property, into a dawn cut only by the soft beam of his headlights.

Cora stepped to the end of her property line, staring out at the long stretch of road connecting her to the rest of that grayscale world. The sun was rising like a pitiful white orb over all the wicked and the damned. Georgie must have already been inside when he broke the night air in a voice clear as ice.

You know, I used to be someone else. Before I met you.

The words fell on Cora like hailstones. She turned around. What did you just say?

But he was gone. The night was gone and those words, when recalled, were more like a dream than any memory. It was late into the morning when Cora awoke again and had no recollection of those words ever being said. When she saw Georgie at the fish market days later, she said nothing. Neither did he. He called her once, but let it ring just twice before changing his mind. Noncommittal as he ever was. Cora had watched the screen go from alive to dead and for a moment didn’t recognize herself in its dark reflection.

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