[Dis]Connected

by Michelle Halket

  I find myself at that same diner.

  As I enter, I see a table of your friends sporting piercings, colored hair, band T-shirts and that post-gig glow one gets after a night of mosh pits and punk music. These were some of your better friends. They acknowledge my presence, but in a resentful, accusatory kind of way. I know what they’re thinking. I cannot stop the dark clouds from forming, imagining the words they whisper behind their tattooed hands.

  I sit down and order coffee and a plate of fries with a side of ranch. Soon after, I remember that the ranch was only for you.

  It is now 5:32 am. The caffeine sobers me up and I feel more awake than I have felt in days. The chaos in my head gradually subsides as I watch your old friends pay their tickets and leave. In the booth next to me, there is a truck driver who smells of cigarettes and sweat. For some reason, the smell reminds me of the sold-out gigs at the record store. It reminds me of you. The chaos slowly returns. As he pays his bill, he asks if I want his newspaper. Before I can decline, he chucks it on the table.

  The headline is the same as all the others this week. Living in a small town, there isn’t always a lot to talk about, so stories get beaten to death before a new one becomes the flavor of the week. I choke down my fries quickly, like a wolf devouring its kill. You used to remark about how we were just like animals, always acting on instinct and desire. I argued that we were much more sophisticated than that. I now realize how right you were.

  I pick up the newspaper, pay my ticket and leave. I decide to go to our bench to find our immigrant friend.

  “Alex.” He beckons me with sad eyes. “I heard.”

  I nod, worried about what he will say next.

  “It’s going to be okay, young one.” He regards me carefully, a different look than your friends in the diner. “Time for you to grow,” he commands as he stands and pats me on the shoulder. He slowly walks away, turning around one last time to smile at me. I wave awkwardly, more focused on his last five words than his exit. I’ve been attempting to avoid analyzing any of the minimal human interaction I’ve had over the past few days, but I decide to spend some time on this one.

  What does it mean to grow? I want to believe it means simply to be better. But, what does it mean to be better? And better compared to what? I want so badly to understand the thoughts in my head so I can move on and find peace. I want so badly to accept that you are gone, but everything reminds me of you, even when my eyes are closed.

  I look down at the newspaper and for the first time since you left, I see your face. I don’t read the words underneath. I already know what they say: drunk driver, tragedy, young.

  Suddenly, a line I read in your journal that night on the park bench comes back to me. It said, “To grow is to let go.” The gears in my head begin to turn as I let these five words settle in. I think I finally understand. I think I finally see the peace I’ve been chasing. Your words are the dissipating clouds, the lifting of fog, the dawning of clarity. I can learn from my mistakes. My broken parts won’t be totally fixed, but I can grow into something new. I can let go of you. It will take some time, but I need to let this clarity be a seed. Even the smallest seeds can grow into something beautiful.

  You are a feather in the wind. The breeze carries you wherever you want to go. I hope it carries you to a place of peace.

  I make it back to my apartment as the sun rises. It is now 7:03 a.m. I take the needle off the spinning record and silence the noise.

  Doe

  R.H. SWANEY

  I went for a walk in a wooded area to clear my head. I came across the sound of movement.

  There were rustling leaves and branches. I had an overwhelming feeling that I wasn’t alone.

  I positioned my head slightly to the side to get a better look ahead.

  I locked eyes with a beautiful doe. We stood there for just a moment and bathed in curious wonderment, a moment I wish I could carry in my pocket.

  Our gaze was broken by the hands of fear.

  I took a step back, cracking a twig with my heel.

  The doe fled as though the sound was a gunshot.

  Do you feel, at times, we let fright suffocate moments of wonderment we should revel in for a little while longer?

  Wouldn’t this world would be better off if patience and compassion spilled from our bones, helping us grow towards a better understanding?

  We fear what we don’t know.

  When we get to know, progress flows.

  The Unholy Wild

  TRISTA MATEER

  LENA, WHEN ARE WE GOING TO MEET this new partner of yours? You can’t hide her away forever,” Scott said, straining to make his voice heard over the rough chorus of some Jimmy Buffet wannabe crackling through the bar speakers.

  “Why do you think there’s such a large proportion of happy-hour music that aims to make you feel like you’re at some shitty backyard barbecue surrounded by tiki torches and dads in Hawaiian casual wear? Like, that’s not happy. I don’t want that,” Lena said, ignoring his question and pulling out her phone. A list of notifications crowded her home screen: a missed call from an unknown number, a voicemail, and a text from her mother. She swiped it open and rolled her eyes at the message. “Does your mother ever text you things like ‘Did you see the post I tagged you in on Facebook?’ Like, yeah, Ma. You tagged me in it. I’m not dignifying that with a response.”

  “Mine does one better,” Scott said with a laugh, taking a swig from his beer and leaning in a little closer than she was comfortable with. “She texts me a question and then calls two minutes later. I won’t even open her texts most of the time because I know she’s just going to call.”

  “Y’all need to respect your mothers, okay?” Dionne said, dropping a cherry stem into her empty glass. “I think I see Vivian over by the bar. I’m gonna go say hey—are you going to be okay here, Lena?”

  “Yeah, of course. Totally fine.” She checked her phone again, hoping for some kind of family emergency or work problem, a friend with a flat tire, some divine intervention in the form of a call from her landlord. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to be out with her friends—her coworkers. Dionne was her friend.

  No, it wasn’t that she didn’t want to be out. She just wasn’t sure she was ready to be there again after what happened—which was totally reasonable, and she knew that because her therapist had told her so. “Lena,” she’d said. “You have to let yourself heal at your own pace. Sometimes this means things might be too much for you to handle and that’s okay. Recognize those signs and do your best to remove yourself from whatever is triggering your feelings of anxiety or post-traumatic stress.”

  Only this wasn’t her body jumping into fight-or-flight mode. It wasn’t those awful chest pains that came along with her anxiety attacks. It was just fear, plain and simple. Elegant in its plainness and its simplicity.

  “Do you want another drink?” Scott asked, tilting his empty bottle from side to side in front of her face. She didn’t. In fact, her own drink was still half full; a thin layer of melted ice at the top made it even less appealing.

  “I’m okay,” she said, raising her glass. “I’ve still got this.”

  “Come on, Lena. Live a little. We never get you out for afterwork drinks anymore.” He laughed and grabbed the glass from her hand, taking a sip from the rim and making a disgusted face. “It’s mostly water,” he said. “Let me get you something fresher. We could do shots!”

  “I’m good,” she said, reaching for her drink. He pulled it just out of range and made that face again, right before he threw his head back and finished the rest of her vodka soda.

  “Now you’re not good! Come on. If not shots, what do you want? You and Di used to throw back those purple monstrosities, right? Sweet Tarts? I’ll get you one of those.” He reached for her … something. Her arm, maybe. It didn’t matter what he was aiming for. Lena stumbled backwards off the stool and onto her feet, taking a quick step away from him.

  “I have to go,” she said, holding up
her phone as if it was supposed to mean something. Like maybe she’d gotten that ass-saving text after all. “Sorry,” she said, apologizing for the timing of her retreat. And then she thanked him, as she grabbed her purse from the table and stepped towards the bar. He started after her.

  “Lena, I didn’t mean to push. It’s cool. We’re cool, right?”

  She nodded. “Totally. I just have to … be somewhere.” It fell out of her mouth like a lie, but it didn’t feel like one. She did have somewhere to be. Home.

  “Do you want me to walk you to your car?”

  “No. Thanks though, again.” Sometimes it felt like she was moving through life in an alternating series of apologies and thank-yous for things she wasn’t actually thankful for. What she couldn’t blame on being a woman, she blamed on being a Minnesotan.

  At the bar she pulled out her keys and found Dionne griping about their new manager with Vivian, the cute Chinese-American transfer from the Minneapolis office. “Hey, I’m heading out. Are you ready to go?” she asked.

  “Let me finish this drink, okay?” Dionne said, flagging down a bartender to pay their tabs. Lena took the spare moment to craft a text: Heading out soon, anything you need? The response came a moment later: Figs? She shook her head and smiled.

  “So how was it tonight?” Dionne asked, pulling her jacket more firmly around her as the two picked their way through the lines of cars in the parking garage, their footsteps echoing off the cement. “Not as bad as you thought, right?”

  Lena sighed, unlocking her car and easing into the driver’s seat as Dionne sank into her familiar spot on the passenger side. “I’m glad I came out but I can’t wait to get home,” she said truthfully. “It was exhausting just being in there again.”

  “I’m proud of you and I love you,” Dionne said. “It’ll get easier. It happened to Karlene when she was in high school and she’s mostly okay about going out and stuff now. It took her a long time to date again, though. You seem to be getting along okay in that department. You know,” she said, switching gears, “you do have to introduce me to your girl sometime. I understand not bringing her out to meet Carter—”

  “You mean Scott?”

  “Yeah, Chad, Carter, whatever.” Dionne laughed. Lena laughed with her, and the heaviness of the evening broke. “Seriously though, I’m your best friend. When’s the last time you wanted to keep a secret from me?”

  “She’s not a secret. I’m just not sure what it is. I mean, I know what it is but I’m not sure what it’s going to be. It’s unnecessarily complicated,” Lena said, “but it’s good, too.”

  “Yeah, yeah, rub it in! Meanwhile I’m over here waiting for Greg’s boring ass to get off work at 3 a.m. so we can fool around for twenty minutes before one of us—” She paused to point at herself. “—has to catch a few hours of sleep because they’ve got to be up at seven for class.”

  “I thought you liked Greg. Aren’t you guys basically dating?”

  “I do like him but I’m so swamped between school and work, and then our schedules never seem to line up in any decent kind of way. Even if they did, I still don’t know if I’d have time for something full-blown. Greg’s sweet, though. I like that.” She paused for a moment, before laughing to herself. “Cecil says I should just cut him loose because ‘Sweet doesn’t bake the cake. You need more than sugar to make something stable.’ Can you believe my own brother said that with a straight face?”

  “Honestly, I’m not at all surprised. Maybe you should listen, though. Between him and Gabe and Karlene, he’s the only one of your siblings who’s been in a successful long-term relationship in the last five years. They are still together, right?”

  Dionne rolled her eyes. “Yes, together and happy and always at my mom’s house doing cute shit like baking cupcakes together. I swear, last time I went over there he and Carlos had matching aprons on. Hold on, I think I have a photo.”

  Lena breathed a sigh of relief as she pulled into the reserved spot in front of her apartment. After she dropped off Dionne, she’d stopped at the local grocer’s to look for figs, although she didn’t know why she was looking. She and Artemis both knew they were out of season. Instead of coming back empty-handed, she’d grabbed a pack of Fig Newtons and a mixed bouquet and hit the self check-out.

  Lena’s modest one-bedroom apartment was a sanctuary. A shrine to introversion and paintbrushes in coffee cups. A temple of the working artist and her vices. And there, nestled on the couch at the center of it all, was a goddess, half asleep with a book still open on her lap. Lena paused in the doorway, mentally etching the scene before her, wondering how it would look on canvas or just sketched out freehand in a notebook. The idea of a background faded away until it was just Artemis, all warm browns and beige, and then cool-toned grays blended with white for that hair that hovered like a loose cloud around her shoulders.

  Locking and bolting the door behind her, Lena moved with purpose, like a paperclip to a magnet or a parched throat to water or some other overused metaphor for need. She deposited the keys on a hook by the door with her purse. The cookies and flowers didn’t even make it to the coffee table. They landed on the floor by the couch, just like Lena. She sank to her knees and placed her head in Artemis’s lap, stirring the other woman from her doze. “I’m so happy to be home,” she mumbled.

  Artemis pulled The Voyage of the Dawn Treader from her lap and tossed it aside, leaving nothing between Lena’s flushed face and the hot skin of her thighs.

  The next morning, Lena woke in a familiar panic. It had been happening at least once a week since she’d met Artemis. She kept expecting to wake up and find the magic gone, the wardrobe closed for good, so to speak. Her brain always settled after a moment, at the smell of coffee wafting in and the light sounds of Artemis laughing in the kitchen.

  The night before had unfolded in a blur of mouths and white skin pressed up against warm, tawny brown. Still, the cookies made it to the kitchen and the flowers found their way into an old sangria pitcher. There were fits of productivity between the laughing and touching. There was laundry put away. There was dinner made. There was a lengthy discussion over the distinct lack of actual, discernable fig in a Fig Newton. There was Artemis, lying with her face propped up above Lena’s, whispering into her hair. “I love the unholy wild of you. The scars on your hips and the blood between your legs. The trail of soft fur on your stomach. Your resilience and your bite. The way man saw in you something tamable and you said no.” Then it was mostly just mouths and skin again.

  Shaking off her memories of the previous night, Lena pulled herself into the bathroom to pee and brush her teeth, ignoring the mop of her hair in the mirror for as long as she was able to before finally giving in and pulling it into a small knot on the back of her head. It was mostly successful, but there were always a few shorter pieces on the right side that escaped the grasp of the elastic. She’d tried an undercut after her last breakup and was still trying to grow her hair all the same length. As it was, when her hair was clean enough to leave hanging loosely, most of it hit just above the shoulders, aside from a mismanaged bit of bangs.

  She pulled a floral silk robe off the back of the door and threw it on over her striped boxer briefs, not bothering to tie it closed. She gave herself another once-over and a shrug.

  In the kitchen, she went straight for the coffeepot. She could barely stand to look at Artemis in the morning at all, much less only half awake. It was just too much, her standing there bathed in sunlight, licking icing off her fingers. Icing? Lena blinked and took a step back, registering slowly that they weren’t alone.

  Dionne burst out laughing from the kitchen table. “It’s almost noon and you look like you drank more than I did last night.”

  Lena forced a smile and scrambled to pull the robe closed, but it was more reactionary than anything else. She knew it wouldn’t close all the way. It wasn’t her small breasts that were the problem, but her hips. The robe was made for Artemis’s lean frame, not her pear-shaped one.
She ducked back into the bedroom and grabbed a T-shirt off the top of the hamper, cursing as she pulled it over her head.

  “Di,” she said, retrieving her abandoned coffee cup from the counter and trying to shrug off her embarrassment as she pulled out a chair at the table beside her friend. “What are you doing here? Not that I’m not always happy to see you, I just—”

  “Didn’t plan on getting caught with your tits out in the kitchen. I get it.” Dionne laughed again and Lena rolled her eyes.

  “She came bearing sugar,” Artemis offered, already pulling the white paper liner off another cupcake.

  “Yeah, I told you last night how Cecil’s been on this baking binge,” Dionne said. “My brother,” she clarified for Artemis. “Anyway, I thought I’d bring some over to get them out of my apartment. He keeps giving them to me because my mom doesn’t want them in the house or she’ll eat them, and there’s only so much I can handle. These are pumpkin with buttercream frosting—” She paused to tap the box in front of her. “—and Artemis has the red velvet.”

  “Oh, fuck, I’m so sorry … um, Dionne, this is Artemis. Artemis, this is Dionne,” Lena said, stumbling over the glaringly late introduction.

  “Yeah, we already covered that while you were sleeping. I’ve been here about twenty minutes, I think,” Dionne said, pausing to look at Artemis for confirmation. The other woman glanced outside for a moment before managing an approximation of both shrugging and nodding. “Right, so about twenty. She didn’t want to wake you. She said you’re kind of like a bear if you aren’t left to wake on your own—which is true, by the way.”

  Artemis smiled and Lena smiled back at her. Another soft moment to catalog. Watercolor and ink. Lots of yellows. It wasn’t a piece she thought Dionne would have belonged in, but maybe she had been wrong to keep this new and strange part of her life separate from the old and familiar part. After all, Dionne’s dark browns and blacks did go so well with yellows.