by Dahlia Adler
The last body crumples to the floor as the clock delivers its final chime, never to ring out again.
I peer at their final postures in this temple of affluence. With little ceremony, I remove my camouflage coat. I replace it with one of fine Italian craftsmanship, the sleeves too long for my arms, the silk lining warm and scented with expensive cologne. I button the double breast. I flip up the collar so it touches my ears. The candelabras of the club flicker and wane as I make my way to the fire exit and out into the cold November night. I walk narrow Boston streets, the wind shrieking past my ears, my red hair streaking over my skull demi-mask.
The marquee behind me proclaims Prospero’s dominion across the night sky.
I do not bother proclaiming mine.
Lygia
Dahlia Adler
inspired by “Ligeia”
The only thing I remember about the day we met, Lygia, is that you smelled like oranges. I would learn later that you tasted like them, too, but in that first moment it was just a scent and I was lost.
I should remember more, I know. It was the day I met my light, my love, my life. But to be honest, I do not clearly remember a time before your wild tangle of dark hair, your eyes of wildfire smoke.
Memories of you now, though … those come unbidden nightly, daily, hourly. They come whether I call them or not, but they are never entirely unwelcome, nor are they ever entirely gone.
My favorite memory is of you on my fifteenth birthday, firelight reflected in the silvered coal of your eyes as you watched me blow out the candles on the beautiful cake you’d made me from scratch. Strawberry buttercream. You knew it was my favorite, knew I’d love the touch of the fresh strawberry layer and the way it tinted pink just the tiniest bit of the sweet crumb.
Another favorite—when we got caught in the rain in your backyard, the automatic lock proving its strength when I attempted to karate chop the door down. You looked so beautiful with wet drops in your thick, dark curls and feathery eyelashes, streaking down your long neck, that secretly, I didn’t try all that hard.
The one I hold closest, though, is prom, you stunning in a dress the color of rubies with a high front hem, showing off your gorgeous legs, gorgeous shoulders, gorgeous everything. Your head tilted to mine as our parents took pictures with happy sighs and pretended not to notice as we sneaked kisses. The limo ride where we giggled together as we sipped bubbly champagne until we both admitted we hated it, though it didn’t stop us from taking every taste of it we could from each other’s lips. Dancing under foil stars amid the scent of Calla lilies. A teary kiss when we were announced prom queen and queen, a dream I hadn’t even known you’d had. And afterward … well, a lady wouldn’t talk about afterward. She would just think of it for eternity, a small smile playing on her lips each time she remembered silken skin and happy sighs and murmured promises.
That’s the memory I’ll never get.
* * *
Cancer is a greedy bitch, and it devoured you with a racing fire we never saw coming. The disease wasn’t content to make its home in your soft, golden skin; it needed to worm into your liver and gnaw at your lungs, too. It was too late by the time we realized your constant nausea, cold symptoms, and propensity for smelling everything were actually symptoms of a disease that would steal prom, steal Sunday waffle breakfasts, steal the melody of your voice when you read me poetry, steal the twinkle in your dark eyes at my attempts to impress your mother with my mangled Portuguese, steal the richness of your soft, citrus-scented hair, steal graduation and whatever came next and everything after, steal my heart and my soul and your future and my future and our future.
* * *
Now school is a stage, one where I play the role of Girl Moving on with Her Life every day to no applause. No one shouts “Brava!” for driving myself to the building without your feet up on the dash. No one throws roses at my feet when I pass your locker without breaking down. And no one suggests I break a leg the day I pass that same locker and see a girl with a curtain of blond curls putting books inside, as if that locker door had never held photo-booth strips of two girls in love or a mirror in which you used to check your cherry-red lipstick before every period.
But breaking something is exactly what I feel like doing. I could snap that locker door in two with the sheer will of my grieving mind. Yet I remain still, staring at the back of the new girl’s golden head, fixed in my hate, until I feel an arm wrap around my shoulder—and then Joanna Glanvill is there, coffee breath assaulting my nostrils. “You know you don’t have to leap on every lez in this school, right?”
I answer her on autopilot. “Actually, it’s my civic rainbow duty. They revoke your queer card if you don’t.”
Joanna’s lips twist into a grimace when she’d rather die than smile. At this point, I could easily trace it with my fingertip in the dark. And while I couldn’t give a fraction of a damn about the class bully, her words have somehow gotten into my head and sparked like fireflies.
Is Joanna just being her typical trash-fire self? Or does she know something about this girl I have not somehow gleaned from the back of her head? As if Joanna Glanvill has some sort of Gaydar wizardry.
Then the girl turns. No wizardry required to decipher her Hayley Kiyoko T-shirt. She is blond where you were dark and sunshine where you were lunar beauty and her big blue eyes look like they’ve never held a single secret.
She is nothing like you and maybe that, or maybe the joint I smoked in my car, is why it feels safe to say, “Hi, new girl.” My lips lift in one corner and I hate myself for it.
“Roberta,” she says.
“I like your shirt.”
Her smile is full and open, nothing but ChapStick on her lips.
It isn’t your smile, not at all, and maybe that’s why I smile back with my heart in one piece.
* * *
My heart is still with you, Lygia, but God, I am lonely. When Roberta asks to sit next to me at lunch, I say yes. When she asks me to show her around town, I say yes. When she kisses me one night in her chintzy bedroom, I say yes, yes, yes, without any words at all. My heart is yours, Lygia, but my body has its own mind.
Still, you are there, you are present, I promise you. When I tousle her hair and wish it were dark, and examine my skin for bright cherry lip prints, you are there. When rain patters on her lone picture window, casting shadows on the tapestried walls, I am right back in your yard. When Roberta puts her favorite music on in the background, Halsey is singing to you, to us, to that night we accidentally left “Ghost” on repeat for hours but were too busy kissing to care. When she shows me pictures of her old life, neon glimpses of concerts and Pride parades and suburban house parties, all I see are our memories, the ones we had and the ones we won’t.
That night, she smells like vanilla and vanilla is fine, but it isn’t oranges. No perfume, no soap, nothing from the rows of body sprays and fancy soaps in the drugstore can re-create your scent. Did you know that? Did you know how uniquely you it was? Did you know that I could gift Roberta every orange-scented item I could find, and still it would never be yours, never be you?
“What is this?” she asks as I give her the latest, a blend of orange and lily that I think might be the closest match yet. I call it a present for one month together. “More oranges?”
I don’t answer, just help her dab the oil on her neck and breathe in. It’s still not you, but it’s closer, and I only realize I’m burying my face in her skin when she makes a sound of pleasure that curls my toes. “You like this one, I take it?” she asks, a teasing lilt to her voice.
“Mm-hmm.”
“Now that you’ve finally found the one, whatever will you do about buying me gifts?”
“Lipstick.” There is not even a moment’s hesitation. I miss your cherry lips, Lygia, and I wish now I’d had the foresight to tattoo your last lip print right below my collarbone. “I think you’d look just perfect in red lipstick.”
She pulls away slightly. “I was joking about the gif
ts. You don’t need to buy me anything. You didn’t need to buy me this. Although you like it so much, I admit I’m glad you did.”
“And I will love the lipstick, too,” I promise, and I kiss her only so there will be no more talk at all.
* * *
I am right, of course. I love the lipstick, especially when paired with the orange-lily oil. I’m so elated the first time she wears them together that I suggest we extend our day and go tanning, because what’s cherry-red lipstick without your glow behind it?
That day we talk more, Lygia, and forgive me, for I tell her of our prom memory that isn’t a real memory at all. She wants to know it all, and it feels like so long since anyone has pried me open like an oyster and searched for the pearls you left behind. Roberta is quiet, so quiet, as we look at picture after picture that captures only a fraction of you, and I wonder if she’s falling in love with you, too, with the way you threw your head back when you laughed and the designs you painstakingly applied to your nails and the final poem you left scrawled on a scrap of paper stained with your favorite cherry tea.
I tell her the bad along with the good. I tell her how you hated that no one could pronounce your name, how even I bungled it that first time. “You can change it to Lydia, if you want, when you turn eighteen,” I said once, and I knew immediately it was the wrong thing to say, hated that I ever said it, hated that I couldn’t take it back. Your pride in your Portuguese heritage is something for which I have no equivalent and I would make that slip up to you a thousand times if I could.
Roberta forgives me immediately, doesn’t understand your ire at all, and at first I am mad for you—but then I’m relieved, I admit, to be absolved of this sin I have always regretted. And in that moment my heart catches up with my body and I will spare you the knowledge of how we spend that night, Lygia, but there is no shortage of lip prints on my body afterward.
In the morning light, her lips are nude and your scent is gone and I slip out into the dawn because the glow alone is not enough.
* * *
If she is disturbed by my disappearance, she doesn’t say so when I see her at school on Monday morning; she just chatters about what fun we’d had and what we might do next. I’m barely listening, I admit, allowing myself to be swept back into your lipstick, your scent. But when she mentions prom, suddenly every nerve ending in my body becomes keenly aware of her presence. “I don’t know if I want to go to that.”
She crumbles, just a little bit, though she must have known that after the prom I’d already dreamed for you and me, Lygia, no pale imitation would suffice. “Okay,” she says, in a voice that means it isn’t okay. Only then do I notice the way her clothing hangs differently in just the few weeks we’ve known each other, differently, even, than it did a few nights earlier. Her face has lost its fullness. Her wrist bones poke out of her skin. You would think she was the one who had lost someone. But there is no grief in her life. There is no hole in her heart.
She knows nothing at all of what real love and real loss can be.
But it doesn’t repulse me. Because her impossibly slender ankles remind me now of yours, and the sharpness of your cheekbones now juts up against her skin. So I tell her she looks beautiful, because she reminds me that you were, too, even as you disappeared right in front of my eyes.
“Do you really want to go?” I ask, because thoughts of you have made me soft.
“I know it’s silly, but I do. I want the bad music and bad decorations and to dance with the beautiful date I never thought I’d get to have. I already found the perfect dress,” she says, and her face glows, and for a moment, I can dream. “I promise, you’ll love it. And I know the perfect scent and lipstick to wear with it.”
It is possible, my love, that Roberta has come to know me in her own way these past weeks, because she has indeed found the perfect words to say to convince me. “I’m not sure you’ll be very impressed by my dancing,” I warn her, because I know you never were, even if it made you laugh.
Again, that glow, that twinge in my heart. “Does that mean you’ll go? We’re going to prom?”
I can taste the salt on your skin as surely as if we were already dancing under that spotlight, tiaras glittering in our hair, when I say, “We can go.”
The glow burns bright, and it smells like oranges.
* * *
As prom nears, Roberta somehow drifts further away. She claims the flu day after day until a week has passed. I spend it missing you, as I always do, smoking enough to relax and imagine that you are lying by my side, your dark curls cascading over my arm and your lips brushing my ear.
I’m gazing at your locker when Joanna passes by and asks, “Where’s your new girlfriend?” her voice and her question both making my skin crawl.
My palm tingles with the urge to leave its print on her freckled cheek, but I’m tired and high and well aware she isn’t worth it. “Did your mom not show up at work today?”
She doesn’t particularly care for that response but I don’t particularly care for her, although Roberta urges us to play nice for reasons I do not understand. She’s one of those people for whom kindness is the greatest virtue.
You know how boring I find those people.
My week is no less interesting for her absence, and no more interesting for it, either. Without you, what difference is there from one day to the next, really?
In truth, I don’t care if she returns or not, and part of me hopes she won’t and I’ll be free of this prom farce for good. It’s silly to think I should do this without you, my Lygia, and sillier still to think that I could.
But when the day comes, she calls to assure me she’s in good health and as excited to go as she ever was, and she teases the lipstick and scent again and the assurance of more. Perhaps it feels disrespectful to you, Lygia, that I am going, and perhaps it is, but I can’t say no, although I would give anything to affix this ridiculous corsage to your dress instead.
The limousine may as well be a hearse for all my heart feels on the interminable drive to Roberta’s parents’ Victorian house. You well know I have never lacked confidence in my looks, but tonight I couldn’t care less for the cut of my tux or the perfectly shorn side of my skull; none of it means anything without you biting your lip in approval.
I’m grateful when the limo hits inexplicable traffic on its way to her house, and I pop a pill, wash it down with vodka, and close my eyes. Conjuring up the image of you coming toward me in the dress I’ve envisioned for you, your curls pinned up and your eyes aflame, is effortless as always. This should be our night, Lygia.
This should be ours.
You should be mine.
You should be here.
But it’s not your house I pull up to, and it’s not your bell I ring. It’s not your mother who greets me with a glare. At first I think it must be the tux, although judging by the rainbow flag that flies in their bay window, this is unlikely. Perhaps my breath mint hasn’t masked the vodka as intended or the eye drops have not done their work.
But her eyes are their own shade of red, one that suggests tears and distress, one I recognize so clearly from your own mother’s that final night. A wild part of me wonders for a moment if there was more to this flu of Roberta’s, if she has been consumed as you were, as my heart was, as we will all someday be. Perhaps it’s a blessing to be taken sooner rather than later if this constant fear is all that life is.
I don’t know how to comfort her now, as I did not know how to comfort your mother then. But then she turns to the staircase and calls “Roberta!” and slowly I find my heartbeat return to its normal rhythm, and my feet mechanically move toward the stairs. The pill has kicked in and I feel off balance on my wing-tipped feet, stumbling as I look at the stairs, my tongue stuck to my palate as her mother calls her name again, and again once more.
It is on the third call that she appears at the top of the stairs, a bloody waterfall of red silk pouring down lithe limbs. Behind me, her mother moans, but I cannot spare a gl
ance in her direction; my eyes are tracing up a high-hemmed skirt and ruby bodice to raven curls, pinned up into messy curtains for silvered coal windows, shaded by the thickest and darkest of lashes. The scents of citrus and lilies are so thick in the air I can barely breathe, and the glow that radiates from her golden skin blinds my eyes to tears.
With every step down that winding staircase the beat of my heart pounds louder in my ears. The world grows hazy with the taste of salt and champagne, the twinkle of foil stars in the air, and when those red lips curve into a smile my heart and lungs give up completely but to shout, “Lygia! LYGIA!”
* * *
They tell me I was still screaming your name when they brought me here, as if there is something strange about that. But how can I not scream your name when you have finally returned to hear it?
The Fall of the Bank of Usher
Fran Wilde
inspired by “The Fall of the House of Usher”
A cold rain beat against the shuttered windows of the Offshore Bank of Usher the night my brother and I tried hacking our way out.
Rik and I hit the walls with everything we had: decrypts, burners, a handful of worms, and a genuine military-grade safe-cracker. None of it worked. Not at first.
The bank’s artificial intelligence and its human host, Dr. Tarn, laughed at us as attempt after attempt failed. A low-pitched rumble echoed from deep within the walls and the man’s wiry human frame by the fireplace.
“Your reputations far exceed your abilities, it seems. Turns out you’re just script kiddies after all,” Tarn said.
“Asshole.” I curled my fingers into fists and then spread them again before diving back into the lock codes that controlled the bank’s doors and shutters.