With less of a howl than a deathbed whisper, an icy wind passes over Elliot’s sleeping form, rustling the hairs at the nape of their neck and leaving a trail of goosebumps along their moon-washed skin. They stir a little and nestle deeper into their tangled mass of blankets, their arms tightening around the star-streaked, softest one, their lanky legs folding up closer to their stuttering heart. The watery moonlight makes their face shine like a silver coin turned on its edge, waiting for gravity, waiting for something. But still Elliot sleeps.

In this big house, filled with corners and crannies, with rooms left empty or stained with memory, with the hummings of computers and the clawings of cats, with shadows, there are some things that do not sleep. Against the closed windows and snugly shut doors, the wind presses, just a thread of chill, but an insistent one. And it always circles back to Elliot’s room, brushing their curled fingers, rasping secrets against their ears.

Sometimes the wind isn’t a wind. Sometimes the shapes it traces become strands of hair, a cool breath, the memory of running feet. Sometimes if someone were watching (although no one ever is) from the corner of their eye, they might see a boy perched on the edge of a windowsill.

The boy had a name, once, but now it matters little. He has been here a long time. In this big house there have been big sadnesses. There have been little boys who slept and never woke.

The boy has lost his name, but he has a name for Elliot: Little Sibling. Ever since the day they set foot into his old room, a ten-year-old with big blue eyes and tufts of tawny hair peeking out from under a baseball cap, the boy has watched them, seeing echoes of a half-forgotten brother in the shape of their shoulders, of a half-forgotten sister in the curve of their face.

He has followed them around the house, at first rustling about as they read Warriors books and studied servers, peering over their shoulder as their fingers closed around their first sweet, sweet raspberry pi. He has watched through the window as they walked toward the river in their backyard, first with a mother and a life jacket and then with nothing and no one, and stared at the sky as they dreamed of flying again. He scared Skipper once or twice, and cooed unheard in soft apology, and has scattered dust away from a few books in the library. He has explored every corner of the big house, from the bean bagged book nook to the boxes in the basement.

His Little Sibling has grown up now, but young ghosts still become ancient things. And so every night he still guards their sleeping shape and touches their moonlit hair.

He knows they won’t live there forever. Other boys and girls and people in between have passed through before and will again.

But deep in his cold dead heart, Elliot, the teenager with the head full of wires and the hands full of keys, with their dog in their lap and their headphones on their neck, now asleep and breathing softly into their starlit dreams, is the one that will always be his.

by A.J.

It’s dusk. The sky is an oil slick seeping down into the horizon, scraps of twilight catching in the bare bones of trees. Everything has taken on a bruised sheen.

Elliot sees it all. Their headphones curl dormant around their neck as they press their nose to their bedroom window, breathing in the coolness of the glass. Restless. That’s what they are. Too restless for any noise that’s not their own, and so restless they could fall asleep already. Anything not to be where they are.

But at seventeen, they do not have to be. With a sudden movement Elliot’s long legs launch them from the bed and down the stairs, two at a time. With the friendly weight of the car keys settled in their pocket, they shout something to their mother’s work-worn shape and bound into the garage.

The Tesla would have been nice, but they don’t need nice. They need out. They fold their lanky limbs into the storm-gray Acura and feel a surprising pang of gladness that they did, for its soft familiarity. They start the engine and flip through channels on the radio until they hit the news, soft NPR voices shrinking the urgent and the unbearable to just the right size. They turn around and speed down the long driveway, faster than they should, they know, they know, but they have cracked the window open and can smell a trace of too-early sweet summer rain, feel the glow of the wounded sky, and are quite certain that nothing on earth could stop them.

Elliot drives. Later, they’ll think of a destination, some candy or coffee that they needed so desperately. But this, this is what they need. Their heated seat against their back, the evening breeze through their copper hair, the feel of motion deep in their chest. The world rushes by, trees and houses, and they take none of it with them. The whole earth is spinning, they can see it now, with inexpressible speed, and Elliot is moving faster than all of it.

They taste freedom, like sugar and salt, and feel something inside them unfurl, some wild thing they didn’t know had been wedged between their ribs. They drive, outrunning every heavy thing, alone except for NPR and speed-mangled birdsong.

They drive, and they half-believe that they will never be still again.

by A.J.

Lucy’s knife scrapes across her plate, making a massacre of her soggy mozzarella sticks. For the fourth night in a row, it’s the only sound either of them makes. Larry doesn’t say anything. His eyes follow the path of a fly buzzing through fan blades on the misty smoker’s patio, glazed with sleep.

Lucy pulls out a cigarette. She doesn’t light it.

“Thank you for the dinner, Miss Lucy.” Larry says and smiles.

She grunts, her fingers tapping restlessly along the cigarette. Larry is surprised it hasn’t caught on fire of its own accord. But she reaches into her breast pocket…then her side pocket…then finally up her sleeves…until she lays a rumpled wad of dollar bills on the table. “Let’s go.”

“Oh, alright!” he says with an enthusiastic smile. The waitress comes to clear their table and doesn’t bother with receipts because, well, look at them. A tall man with clown makeup and a slept in suit carrying a shopping bag that smells of baby powder, and a girl who barely looks old enough to drink with a badly hidden array of knives on her person.

Larry stumbles out from the table, humming a snatch of an old Shirley Temple melody, and Lucy follows, looking over her shoulder every few seconds with poor subtlety. There’s an ugly silver rental car in the fenced lot, which the two of them climb into, Lucy in the driver’s seat, Larry first in the passenger, then climbing out and into the back. There’s a piece of tarp vaguely resembling a circus tent stretched over the rear windows, and bottles lined with dark red residue litter the seat. With a man plaintively staring from a car window and a woman swearing at a suburban intersection, the couple is on their way out of this town.

Larry Love had been claustrophobically close to forty a century ago, with a name that screamed identity theft, black ringlets well washed but never combed and the faint bulge of fangs beneath his full lips. His clothing had been picked out by his mother for much of his life and he’d never really stopped looking like it. A penchant for florals and frills that didn’t much fit together gave him the perpetual appearance of a lost first grader, just a little too tall for his age, or an acid fried vampire. He often smiled, but was careful of his teeth.

No one was quite sure how old Lucy was, probably because she had enough open warrants that she might actually need the fake ID’s for non-alchohol-related reasons. Probably not though. At five foot one, with pixie-like features, she sometimes seemed able to shapeshift from thirteen to thirty at a moment’s notice. Most likely she was somewhere in between. Old enough to drive, quite possibly young enough to count her parent’s income on financial aid.

By now they were on the highway and the suburban outcrops were growing more and more spread out. The mom and pop shops morphed into Arbys and K-Marts, which Lucy appreciated for the anonymity their locale provided but dreaded as Larry’s stream of commentary on the merits of different brands of onion rings and the relative hygiene of their sellers became more and more frequent.

“You don’t eat, man.”

“I still like to be an informed consumer.”

“Hey, does Walmart blood taste better than Target blood?”

Larry sniffed primly. “That was uncalled for.” He ran his tongue over his teeth as if they were new, never having completely adjusted to his supernatural state. “I was too polite to ask a lady for a meal, but we really must stop soon.”

Lucy checked the ratio of dead grass to cars outside; they were in country radio territory. “Rest stop. I get his wallet.”

He blanched, face turning as pale as his powder. “I…I would never do that sort of thing with a man. No matter how I may-”

“Cry at the thought of being loved and content?”

“Allergies!”

“You’re dead, Larry.”

“Well I simply will not sneak up behind a man in a dark alley and sink my teeth into his soft, creamy skin! I will not feel the ecstasy of his life-blood leaving his heart to become my sustenance! I will accost a beautiful, young woman, and drink her blood,” and further he continued with the finality of an equation “As God intended.”

“Okay, you can stop talking now. Like, really. Before I run over a deer and make you drink it.”

When they did stop, he scrambled out of the car, long legs tangling together, but closed the door gently. Lucy leaned her head back on the cracked vinyl of the seat, wondering if there would be a scream this time. There was, and after it there was a pitchy giggle, before the ugly slurping started. It really did sound like sucking a county fair slurpee with a broken straw. What an undignified end.

But when Larry emerged from behind the graffiti scarred port-a-potty, he somehow looked cleaner than ever, his shirt unrumpled and unstained, with only a smear of red on his chin revealing the nature of his midnight snack.

Lucy was plenty used to the sight of blood (with enough proof that it might seem indelicate to ask), but something about the machete-mouthed manchild set her on edge, so her “get in,” sounded a bit harsher than usual. Larry made no reply, except to lick his lips gloatingly as she glared, and he returned to the back seat.

He’d been trying for some time to make his old Victrola work in the car, however jumpy, but antique wax pairs badly with worn highways, so finally he’d been given a fifty dollar smartphone that he could fill with as much music as he liked, none of it newer than the great war. Lucy occasionally growled complaints or sang Led Zeppelin with the melodiousness of an air raid siren, but Larry could have sworn he caught her mouthing the words along to “I Got You Babe” at least twice.

Today it was nineteenth century ragtime, with a frenetic energy that jangled Lucy’s nerves in the stillness of the car. She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel, spat curses at slow signallers, did anything she could to drown it out with something fucking normal.

Suddenly, without taking her eyes from the road, Lucy asked, “What does it taste like?”

Larry blinked. “Blood?”

“No, chocolate milk. Of course blood. It’s always blood, with you.”

Larry hesitated. In that moment between moments, as he sucked a pointless breath into his pointless lungs, he looked very very old. “It’s like velvet in your mouth. Peaches and cream. Milk and honey. Water and the Word. The Word made flesh. The forbidden fruit, and yet the sweetest and most sacred thing. Carnal desire. Like the kiss of a young…” He trailed off, his fingertips touching his lips, just barely. The buildings and billboards rushing by outside the window were reflected in his glassy eyes. And by the time the rising sun rays drenched his curls through the tarp meant to protect him, he was dreaming of sweet, forbidden things.

by C.G.

Ash stands in the yard, the night breeze brushing their harvest-moon skin. It’s cold (although, master of homeostasis that they are, they do not shift or shiver) and their bare arms prickle with scattered goosebumps that mirror the steady stars above. “Look, Olly, the Big Dipper,” they croon, but the dog continues to attend to his business, keeping his nose pointed firmly toward the ground. Ash sighs and shakes their head, already resigned to adoring him.

Absently, they tap their watch. It’s nearly ten, and they feel sleepiness tugging at every part of them with the blind insistence of a toddler. But they stand guard over Oliver all the same, their toes pressed into the edge of the dirt. Ash watches him until he finishes and saunters towards them, taking his time. Ash stoops to pet him, scratching the soft place behind his ears, burying their face in his warm fur.

Finally, they smile against him and give his head a quick peck. “Come on, boy.” They lead Oliver to the garage and he bounds inside towards the waiting shape of their mother.

Tired as they are, Ash pauses outside the garage door and takes another look at the stars. Their brain orbits through half-remembered names of constellations, dying galaxies and spinning plants, points and lines and pieces of physics that make impossible things make sense.

They also see that the stars are beautiful.

They walk inside to sleep.

Behind them shines Sirius, unblinking eye of Canis Major. Long ago, storytellers, faces glowing in fragments of firelight, told stories of the Dog Star that guarded the earth. The memory of perfect puppy love, strung together, lines of light, easy as magic. Beautiful as physics. A fact: Sirius spins closer to us each year. Maybe Orion stands waiting for the Dog Star, arms open. Maybe all dogs know a bit about coming home.

Now Canis Major stretches in the sky above Ash, half wrapped around the silhouette of one night-painted house, wrapped around one sleeping kid with harvest-moon skin, wrapped around a dog that couldn’t be anywhere else.

by A.J.

Once upon a time, there was a hill, with a tall tower at the top and a tangle of a forest at the bottom. In the tall tower was a princess with a dark river of hair and eyes like stained glass windows. In the forest were trees and soft shadows and flowers that smelled of saffron and the stars.

The princess, like most princesses, spent her days within the tower’s walls, smiling and feasting and dancing, seeing the world from a window that made it beautiful and terrible and small. Unlike most princesses, she was not a girl at all, but a changeling, a gift from the shadows of the forest. They had fashioned her out of little twigs and painted bark and flower stems and good solid oak. They had laid her in the royal cradle, threading wisps of shadow songs into her hair. They had stolen away the way they came. Now no one knew, of course, not even the changeling princess because they had charmed her so well. But still, the trees stretched out their limbs to the sky, waiting for her to come home. And the shadows of a forest run deeper than its roots and rivers.

One day, a shadow broke from the forest and became a sparrow. He perched on the window of the princess’ tower. She fed him breadcrumbs as a good princess does, and wished he would go away.

“Come with me,” sang the sparrow.

“Why?” said the girl.

“You are a wooden girl in a tall tower. You come from the trees, and to the trees you shall return.”

Something shifted inside her, a tug and an ache and the settling of weight. “Will the trees ever give me back?”

“Mostly.”

The princess nodded, unfolded the smile she kept in her back pocket, grasped the sparrow’s tail, and let him bear her into the sky and down the hill, into the arms of the trees.

The earth beneath her beckoned, so she kicked off her dancing shoes and squeezed the moss between her toes. She traced the bark of her mother trees and the veins of the leaves that mirrored her own. She felt her oak legs shift and carry her more surely than they ever had before. The rivers filled her hands with sweet water and fruits that tasted like the dappled sunlight between branches. Home, murmured the wild beasts and birds and shadows. Home, murmured her wooden heart beneath her breathing shape.

But she soon found that not all the paths of the forest were for her feet. Every time she made a turn too deep, a tree scooped her up in its branches and placed her back on the path it had laid out for her, strewn with flower petals and smooth, round stones.

“I want to know you,” said the princess, but the forest only pressed more roses into her palms and held her tighter in its vine-tangled arms. Yet the shadows of a forest run deeper than its roots and rivers, and so she felt her shadow-sparrow’s feathers tickling her ear again. He sang all of the forest to sleep, all except the princess. Then he lead her into the forest’s heart.

---

Once upon a time, I was a little girl who was getting less little every day. At twelve, my sister and I became aware of our status as the only girls at the Diwali party who hadn’t ever been to India. It didn’t much bother us – we connected to our heritage just fine via Slumdog Millionaire and microwave chicken tikka masala. Nevertheless, our family decided that we needed to set foot in the place where our father had spent twenty-one years of his life, where we had nine aunties and uncles waiting for us to come home.

After months of planning and sixteen hours of sky, I breathed my first Indian air, the taste of of spices and moonlight. It was warm, even at 2 a.m. in February, and so were the arms of the aunties and uncles who had come to greet us. A giddy, swelling rush bubbled up inside me as we sped towards the hotel in a car on the other side of the road, the road painted with street light and shadow, my ears filling with lilting Hindi I didn’t need to understand.

The days after were much the same. I saw the Red Fort and Taj Mahal, of course. I looked at sari fabrics at the market. I rode an elephant. I messed around in the hotel’s fancy glass elevator with the cousins, and devoured rotis fresh off the pan from the fingers of the aunties, who insisted I needed feeding.

But there wasn’t only laughter in the streets.

Every day our family braved the Indian traffic to see some new wonder of the city, we passed by lots of other cities that no one stopped to look at for so long. Tiny slums held up by cardboard and garbage and the scrawniest of hope. Laundry in bright reds and oranges dangling above the dust. Blade-boned people boxed in by shabby metal walls.

Of course, every time a girl with an armful of flowers (or once, inexplicably, a teetering stack of copies of The Fault in Our Stars) tapped on the car window, my parents and aunties and uncles told me and my sister not to open up. There were too many of them, and if you gave one even a rupee, you’d have to help them all. You can’t know what they’d do. You can’t fix the world, not like that.

I wasn’t naive enough to think my grownups heartless.

Nevertheless, I did, just a little.

And I thought myself more heartless still, as I drank cool bottled water from the car seat’s restraining embrace and imagined the bed I would return to that night, the omelette I would eat the next morning, each bite a flat and mechanical thing. Not a gift, not pure eggy gold.

I didn’t have any money. I didn’t speak Hindi. I couldn’t fix the world, not like that.
But when I saw a young woman with a tattered red sari and a face like mine and a baby in her arms, begging for a scrap of mercy from our pockets outside of an ancient temple to some less-than-merciful god, the Indian nights tasted more like broken glass.

---

Once upon a time, there was a hill, with a tall tower at the top and a tangle of a forest at the bottom. In the tower had been an empty cradle, but no one remembered that anymore. In the forest, equally forgotten, was a girl, sleeping without sound in the branches of a great oak tree. A princess with a dark river of hair and eyes shuttered closed. A princess of breath, of blood, of bone.

The wide-awake princess stared at the sleeper who shared her face. She fought against the wild thing snarling in her chest.
Silly girl. There can’t be a changeling without a change; she knew. But she couldn’t help but want to run away very far and very fast, because she didn’t want to know that she had stolen every sunset she’d seen framed in the tower’s window from this other girl’s closed eyes. She didn’t want to know that if it weren’t for her, there needn’t have been an empty cradle.

She hated that this was coming home.

She sank against the other princess’ tree, feeling the bark scrape into her back. She raked her fingers through her bramble-hair and felt a tear on her cheekbone like dew. She looked up at the shadows beneath the leaves above her.

“Wake up!” she screamed, louder than she intended but not loud enough. “Come home!”

The other princess did not stir.

The oak tree’s bark offered no handholds. There were no strong branches tucked within its leaves. The soil hid no ropes or swords or magic rings. The shadows made no sound.

A flesh-and-blood girl is too heavy to carry.

And so the shadow princess blew her a kiss, with the truest love a stranger’s lips can hold.

Then she followed the path out of the heart of the forest.

by A.J.

Jane shifts in the chair. Despite the rough powder blue fabric stretched over it, it is not soft, and she feels it pressing into her, flat and harsh. She has crossed and uncrossed her legs more times than she can count, but the one resting on top now has already begun to prickle with numbness and the one on the bottom feels hot and tense from holding its weight.

There is a TV with the volume down too low for her to hear anything but a quick and constant muttering. Faces flit across it, all of them bright with long-lashed eyes and big mouths, always open. A ginger haired woman laughs and shakes her head at a little boy with the same red curls. She looks about twenty-five.

A car passes across the screen. Jane closes her eyes.

She feels how badly she is slouching against the chair. The smooth wooden edge of its back buries itself in the space below her shoulder blades, and from there her back sags downward, inward. She imagines her spine buried inside her, clinging to every soft squishy thing with its angles, taking her with it as it curls. She tries not to imagine other things.

A magazine, filled with stories of lush dresses and lurid affairs, sits in her lap, partially wedged between her thighs. It is still cool, and she hears its pages bend when she twitches. She grabbed it at random off the stack by the front desk, thinking it would help, but she hasn’t opened it.

She reaches up and pushes her hair behind her ear, slowly, sweeping her fingers along her aching temple. Her hand still smells of Purell. Her other hand rests in her lap, with her forearm pressed against the side of her stomach. She likes the feeling of something heavy holding her.

Jane remembers sitting in a room like this six years ago with a hand on a rounder, softer belly. She sometimes misses that feeling of something being in there with her, something moving and alive. There was that stretch of two months after he was born when she felt as though her battery had been removed.

She is tighter, now, drawn in by time and sleeplessness. Her cardigan barely brushes against her skin. Despite the layers she wears, she feels goosebumps popping up on her arms.

Her foot is asleep.

When Jane opens her eyes, it’s at a “Ma’am?” sounding from somewhere close. Too close. She looks up at a woman in a white coat who does not smile.

“Your son.”

Silence.

“I’m so sorry.”

Jane closes her eyes again.

by A.J.

From far away, he is a scar. He is hole in the seam of the sky, a piece of the darkness gathered beneath, the first blot of night. A shard of shadow borne by the sea.
On closer inspection, he is a man, an old one, standing on a twilit beach.

He is barefoot, and November has made the sand cool. He feels it sift between his toes and shade the crescents of his nails. Blue shadows wash over the rivers of his veins and the twisted valleys his seventy-nine years have left on his skin. He looks straight ahead.

The sea seethes and murmurs under his gaze. White foam spreads itself thin across the sand, stopping an inch before his toes. He shivers, and steps forward.
The water meets him at last. He lets it sink its freezing blades into his ankles. Goosebumps prickle up along his calves, beneath his rolled-up cargo pants. The cold subsides to a dull, thin burning.

Jimmy, says the sea, as he knew it would.
He exhales, swallows, takes another step. “No one has called me ‘Jimmy’ in a long time.”

Your mother. Always her.
“My mother made many mistakes.”

More wet rustling, rising and falling with the old man’s shoulders. The sea is up to his knees now, the water seeping into the edge of his pants, so that they stick to his legs, sending a fresh shock of cold through him. He’s heavy with it. He dips his fingers into the bitter water.
“What do you want?”

A wave, bigger than the rest, pushes into him, splashing up to his hips. He stumbles, just a little. “Well?”
We want what was promised.

“Promises can be broken.” With withered hands he reaches into his pockets, weighted with silver coins and sea glass, love letters and little white pills. “I have so much, you know. So many things.”
We want what was promised.

“There has to be something.” His toes are numb now, but still he shivers.
We want what was promised.

“But not by me!” He shouts it, with every scrap of air in him. He wheezes, then, so very small. The water laps at his chest, at his fluttering seagull heart. “Not by me.”
A love for a love. A grief for a grief. One drowning man for another. A deal is a deal and a choice is a choice.

“And she chose saving him every time.” He feels a different sort of salt sting his face, something warm.
The waves do not soften. The sea is the sea. A mother is a woman. A woman is a woman and a woman can love too many things.

“He wasn’t the right thing.”
Your mother is dead. You outlived her, outlived them both. Now you are alive and alone. “Lucky me.” His feet grip the sifting sand with all his might, propelling him forward.

Yes, says the sea. She wept for you, in the end. Isn’t that enough?

He shakes his head, just once. His smile is a waning moon. “Not for me.”Goodnight, Jimmy, says the sea, and the old man’s wind-swollen lips offer no answer. The numbness has spread now, up to his shoulders, muffling the screaming of his bones, so that when he finally slips his head under the water, he feels nothing, nothing at all.

by A.J.

I grip the handle of my suitcase harder and step out into the crowded airport. Follow the signs, check in to my flight. Security is that way. I haven’t seen her in three months. I haven’t seen her since the accident. While I flew home with my parents, she stayed at the hospital in Boston. They wouldn’t let me return until now. I could feel their eyes on me as I limped down the hall to the bathroom every morning. Their rush to hand me my crutches every time I stood up. They wouldn’t let me book the flight until I could walk to the store and back with no help. Every day before I go to sleep I call her. But calling just isn’t the same. I need to see that she’s okay. I need to know that she’s okay.

The line for security reaches at least five feet past where the line is marked. It moves slowly, I walk a couple feet and then wait; walk, then wait. I wonder if she’s mad at me. It was my fault. What if she hates me? I manage to reach the front of the line. What if I get back and she’s packed all of my things into boxes, dozens of cardboard boxes, and tells me to leave? Take off shoes, belt, jacket. Put in bin. What if I get back to the apartment and it’s empty and she’s just gone? All technology larger than a phone out of bag. Put in bin. Laptop in separate bin. What if I have to rent a moving truck and drive all the way back to Florida? No liquids. Drink last gulp of water. Put in bin. Would I have to stay at crappy motels on the way? and get all of my food at rest stops? and…? Push bins and bags onto conveyor belt. Walk through.

When I get to my gate, it still has the flight number up for the flight before mine, and all of the seats in the nearby waiting area are taken. So instead I grab an overpriced cup of horribly mediocre coffee and wander. On our call last night I confirmed the arrival time with her. We don’t say much, just the basics. How are you doing? Fine. How’s the weather over there? Good. We’ve never been away from each other for this long since we first met three years ago. It was summer and the cafe was bustling with people, plastic cups in hand, all looking for a place to sit. I clutched my own cup and scanned the small place as well. I spotted a seat in the corner and tried to squeeze over to it, but someone sat down moments before I got there. Frustrated, I spun around to look for another seat and crashed right into someone; spilling my coffee all over their white dress. “Oh my god I’m so sorry” I managed to gasp out as I reached out to take some napkins from the nearest table and pass them over. Their skin was a stunning golden brown and their dark hair framed their face in tight curls.

“Shit, shit,” I could hear them mutter as they dabbed at the large stain now present on the front of their dress. They didn’t seem to have a jacket or anything to cover the stain.

“Here, let me go get some wet paper towels; They’ll probably work better than dry napkins.” I squeezed my way across to the bathrooms. The lines for both the men’s bathroom and the women’s bathroom were at least 5 people out the door, so I went over to the all-gender single, pushed the door open, and grabbed some paper towels. When I turned around, they were right there, standing in front of me again. I passed them the paper towels. It didn’t seem to be working.

“Here, if you want, you can change into my extra set of clothes and I’ll wash your dress for you” I reached into my bag and pulled out a t-shirt, pair of jeans, and belt. They took them gratefully and I stepped out of the bathroom and let them change. After they had changed into my spare set of clothes they opened the door again and handed me the dress. I have to admit they looked adorable in my oversized shirt. I washed their dress and dried it as best as I could with the hand dryer before handing it back to them. By the time they had changed back into their dress and given me back my extra clothes, I needed to head home. Outside the cafe, I unlocked my phone, and it opened to the contacts app. Halle. What a beautiful name.

By the time I get back to the gate, the flight before mine has left and the screen now shows flight 429 to Boston. I sit down and open my computer, but find myself simply staring at the login screen. I can’t help thinking of all of the questions I want to ask her. How is she really doing? Does she hate me? Is she staying in the apartment alone? Does she have a friend to help her? I wonder if she’s been going back to work. Did she tell her students what happened? Have they asked? I picture her at the front of her classroom. Presenting slides to her students. I picture her face as she sees me walk through the door, running towards me. I picture her in my arms, I can feel her hair against my face. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.

I spent days in the hospital with her, even after I had been discharged. She looked so small in the large white hospital bed with tubes all attached to her. During the day I read to her. All of her favorite books, one after the other. During the night I held her hand as she slept. I ate whatever food my parents brought for me. Then one day my parents told me that they were going home. And that they had bought a ticket for me as well. I told them no. I told them that I was staying with Halle. I told them I could take care of myself. That she needed me. But they wouldn’t budge. The next morning I boarded a flight to Florida.

Finally, we line up to get on the plane. I roll my bag down the narrow aisle, trying not to get stuck on too many seats in the process. Up into overhead bin. Backpack shoved underneath seat in front. Water bottle and book in seatback pocket. With everything stashed away I hold one last thing in my hands. A gold bracelet, with three small charms of pink, purple, and blue that shimmer gently in the light from the window next to me. I saw it online about a month ago and knew I had to get it for her. I was worried that it wasn’t going to arrive in time to bring it with me. When I stepped out onto the front step with all of my bags and saw the small package, I couldn’t help the smile that spread across my lips. We can be okay. We will be okay.

I jolt awake, my breathing jagged and unbalanced. I can almost feel the cold seeping in like it did in the car. We had the heat blasting and the seat warmers on high, but the car was still freezing even after 15 minutes of driving. We were both in hats and gloves, shivering from the cold. Laughing and joking. I should have been more careful.

The airplane seat arm digs uncomfortably into my side, and my neck is stiff from its tilt against the wall. I can feel a buzzing through my limbs like they want me to get up and run. Run away from it all. It was the first snow of the season. The first winter where we had our own car. She didn’t have her license yet, growing up in a city meant that she never needed a car to get around. So it was up to me. And I screwed up.

My hands feel clammy and my pulse races. I was inexperienced and naive. The snow was piled thick on the road. Coming down in flurries. I was going too fast. Hands on the wheel. The turn caught me by surprise. I couldn’t see it coming up in the distance. The snow blocked out everything. Turn to the left. Quick. To the left. And then we were skidding. And I could hear someone screaming. Whether it was her or me I didn’t know. There was a series of thuds. A crunch of metal. Someone screaming. Someone crying. I couldn’t see. I fumbled around with my left hand, closing my fingers over my phone. I don’t remember dialing 911 but I must have.

If there’s a possibility of damage to the car’s engine, battery, or gas tank. Get out of the car and move to a safe distance. I can see again, but everything is blurry when did everything become so blurry. I shove the door open and tumble out onto the ground. I can feel pain as I push myself to my feet, although where it’s coming from I have no idea. My right shoulder feels damp and sticky and I can see that the windshield has been shattered. The roof is dented. I stumble my way to the other door and yank it open. Halle. Hal. Hal, please. I can’t tell if the words are actually reaching past my lips and escaping into the cold air or if they are stuck inside my throat. I fumble around to her seatbelt and unbuckle it, grabbing her underneath her arms and pulling her out of the car and into the snow. Hal. I can hear her moan as I half-carry half-drag her away from the car. I can’t hear anything, can barely see. I sit in the snow, my arms around her, for what feels like forever.

We’ve been delayed in the air. Our arrival time has been pushed an hour back. And there’s no wifi. I have no way of reaching her and telling her that my flight has been delayed, I just have to hope that she is checking the updates for my flight, hope she wrote down the flight number. I only told it to her when we were talking one night. What if she’s forgotten it and is at the airport waiting for me. Waiting. I can picture her standing there. Getting exhausted after 15 minutes of waiting and finding a nearby bench to sit down. I picture her disappointed face when, after 30 minutes, I’m still not there. If she doesn’t remember the flight number she has no way to know I’ve been delayed. I picture her getting up and leaving. Exiting through the doors without turning back.

I can feel the wheels bumping against the runway pavement. The patches of snow blind me from outside my window. My legs are stiff. My neck hurts from looking down at my book; I had been staring at the same page for I don’t even know how long. Why did I have to choose a seat near the back? When we pull up to the gate people begin to stand up and stretch. I can’t even stand up all the way without bumping my head into the ceiling. I will the people in front of me to move faster. Every moment feels like it’s taking too long. I need to see her. I need to get to her before she leaves. I call her as soon as my phone gets one bar of service but it goes directly to voicemail.

I remember exactly what our apartment looked like when we left that day. The dirty dishes in the sink. The empty bottle of maple syrup left out on the counter from breakfast. Our bedroom door left open and the bed not made. I haven’t been back since it looked like that.

I squeeze my way into the aisle, lift my bag down from the overhead compartment, and painstakingly slowly make my way off the plane. I force myself not to run as I make my way towards the exit. It’s hard to maintain a steady pace when all I want to do is sprint.

The waiting area is packed with people. The enormity of the crowd causes my breath to catch in my throat before I remember to breathe again and release the air out in a slow exhale. I scan the crowd slowly, people jostling me to get by even though I am all the way against a wall. I grip my bags tightly so that I don’t lose them as I glance around me at the crowd.

And then none of that matters because I see her. One braid of her dark hair falls across her face as she sits bent over a book. Her glasses are sliding down her nose, and as I watch she pushes them back up her nose without looking up. The line of a scar disappears into the collar of her jacket, her left arm is in a brace, and I see a pair of crutches nearby that must be hers. But other than that she just looks lonely. Even in the overly crowded room, the spaces beside her are unoccupied, and while her right arm holds her book, her left arm wraps around herself. Even with the warmth of the room, she seems to fold in on herself as if keeping out the cold. I stand there, completely frozen until she looks up and her eyes catch mine.

by C.H.