Every week, a beautiful lady who looks like me comes into the shop. Or rather, she’s beginning to look like me, like a fancy version of me, because every time she comes in some piece of her face has changed. And I have studied her face, believe me. I know the shape of her nostrils, the peach fuzz gleam on the side of her jaw, the little crease on her bottom lip where a crescent of pearly lip gloss shines like a tiny moon. I don’t know how or why this is happening, but all these features have been shifting to make her face look more like mine, and it might be that I’m starting to look more like her, too.
In the end, this could work to my advantage, because Luke, the college kid who works with me at the shop, is in love with this lady, and I am in love with Luke, and if the lady and I become indistinguishable that puts us one step closer together.
I’m alright with getting Luke in a roundabout way. I have no pride when it comes to that.
Today, which is Friday, the lady arrives around 11:00 a.m. like usual. She’s wearing a coral jumpsuit that matches our aprons, her hair pulled back in a lacy white scarf. She looks like one of the confections in our bakery case, a raspberry petit four.
“Do you want to hear the joke of the day?” I ask.
Luke groans.
“Why not,” the lady says. “Let me hear it.”
“What’s the sweetest farm animal?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “What is the sweetest farm animal?”
Luke pleads, “Krista, don’t,” but there’s no stopping me:
“Your candy ass.”
“Ah-ha.” The lady’s laugh is bright and shiny, like a jewel. “That’s good. I’ll remember that one.”
“You can have it for free,” I say.
She laughs again. “Two profiteroles, please.”
Luke boxes them for her, moving stiff like a little robot, and I watch her hands as they extract her credit card. Her fingers are bare except for one silver band on her pinky. My fingers are crowded with rings, an assortment of cheap stones and metals that are meant to improve my luck and confidence. When I take the card, I hold her gaze. I feel something moving between us, little air particles carrying a mix-and-match of difference and sameness. Does she feel it too?
“For you, mon chéri,” I say.
She says, “Thanks, beautiful.”
When she’s gone, I turn and see that Luke’s ears are so red they’re almost purple. I love that. I love messing with him.
“I wish you wouldn’t,” he says.
I say, “Wouldn’t what?”
Luke doesn’t notice what I notice about the lady, the transformation, the shifting features. She and I are too different in his eyes. I’m shorter, for one, and broke, for another, and this lady is, to him, a paradigm of sophistication. She can’t be much older than me, thirty at most, but I seem younger because I’m a college dropout who works the counter at a patisserie, and I live with my folks in a room above their garage, and when Ray, the owner, thunders in like a god to bark about a mess we left or an order we fucked up, I salute and shout “Aye, sir,” like I don’t have a care. Charm alone was what got me through high school. I was, still am, a sterling sweetheart. My older sister by comparison got her master’s in business right before the 2008 financial crisis, specializing in debt management. So she did pretty well for herself.
As for the lady, I don’t know what her job is specifically, but she works at an art gallery downtown. I know this because I once followed her on my lunch break when I went out to get burritos for Luke and me. I didn’t mean to follow her. I realized I was behind her car at the light heading out of the shopping center, and my steering wheel just kind of turned by itself. Soon, I found myself parallel parked on her work street, watching her eat lunch with a female coworker in a marble courtyard. They were both eating something noodly and colorless from Tupperware containers, but the two éclairs the lady had bought that day never appeared. What did she do with them? Was the second éclair for somebody else, or were they both for her?
Luke is sure she’s seeing someone. He laments to me about it all the time.
“Not like it matters. I’d never have a chance with her anyway.”
“Ask her out and see,” I tell him.
“You’re insane,” he says. “There’s no way.”
We’re having a luxurious coffee break, our second of the afternoon since Ray left early to go watch his daughter do karate. Overall, you could say I’m a lazy worker. A bad influence.
“One day,” I say, “I’ll ask her myself.”
He says, “If you did that, I would die.”
I am in love with Luke’s sad, straight eyebrows, the little flame of his mouth. Maybe he would die. Maybe that last shock would destroy him, my poor nervous boy. He is so terrified of his future. Like me, he lives with his parents, and while they have no money, they do have stratospheric expectations and a strict, unimaginative vision of success. As he explains it, he will either save their souls or be cast out among the rabble.
Nowadays, he spends most of his time chewing his nails to the nub, making his cuticles bleed. But I’m into that. I want to put his fingers in my mouth and taste the iron in his blood. Something tells me he doesn’t get enough Vitamin C, that he wakes up in the middle of the night, heart pounding.
Sometimes, I really do like working at the shop. I think the word “shopgirl” is classy as fuck. I like how Ray keeps saying, “I should fire you. The only thing you ever do is flirt with that college kid all day,” and, “If you take another two-hour lunch break, I’ll fire you,” and, “If I hear you singing ‘Yakety Yak’ as you’re taking out the trash, which is a song that I hate, and which you know that I hate, I’ll fire you.” But he won’t fire me. Firstly, I flirt with everyone—women, men, coworkers, customers, health inspectors, delivery people, lonely people, hungry people—and that’s good for business. Secondly, we have a rapport, Ray and me.
Three days a week, Ray comes in at 5:00am to make mille-feuilles. Sometimes, I come in early so that I can help him decorate. I said earlier that he would thunder through the shop like a god, and he is a god, really, because baking is worldbuilding. Baking is an ongoing invention of cream clouds and hillsides and ridges, foamy egg swells, starry gem mines, emeralds and rubies, fragrant sugar mists the color of Easter. Ray likes to decorate the mille-feuilles on theme. This week, it’s Fantasy, meringue dragons, gold and fire made of sugar glass, marshmallow toadstools capped with gold leaf. Always, the mille-feuilles are so meticulous and beautiful it’s hard to imagine eating them, which makes them hard to sell.
I watch Ray decorate with my chin on my hands.
“When are you going to teach me your secrets, Ray?”
“Hm,” he says, hunched over, deeply focused. He’s a huge guy. I think before this he was a bounty hunter, a mafia man.
“Ray, when are you going to retire so I can inherit the shop?”
At this he looks up, his red face blank as an almond. “Retire? I can’t retire. I can’t afford to retire. I’ll be working here until I’m dead. Even after I’m dead, I’ll be doing exactly what I’m doing now. Just prop me up with a stick or something. I’ll keep going.”
My rapport with Ray is this: I won’t say, “I’ve been working here three years, Ray. When am I getting a raise?” and he won’t say, “What are you doing here?” and I won’t say “Well, my prospects are thin right now, but at least my heart is pure,” and he won’t say, “No, what are you doing here now? Your shift doesn’t start for another two hours.” At the best times, we regard each other with silence. We each know exactly who the other is.
The lady who looks like me comes in and buys two pistachio cannoli, two brandy-soaked clafoutis, two fruit tarts crowned in electric-green kiwi. She gets a haircut. Now her hair is shoulder-length like mine. Her teeth look smaller. Every time she hands me her credit card, we seem to trade a little bit more. My hair gets shiny. My nails get strong.
“Thanks, beautiful.” “You’re welcome, mon chéri.”
I imagine Ray, dead and deified in all his cosmic glory, decorating mille-feuilles until the end of time. I imagine the lady who looks like me taking home all his sweets and hoarding them in her house like a dragon, a seeping pile, a riverflow of caramel and cream.
*
On Tuesday, I visit the gallery.
I would’ve invited Luke to go with me, but he’s having some kind of breakdown and won’t leave the house. And he probably would’ve lost his mind here anyway, seeing the lady outside his natural habitat of the shop. The gallery is a chilly space of glass and cement and exposed air ducts. There is an elaborate installation piece, a rope woven out of crimson fabric. It slices the entryway in half, tucks around a doorway, zigzags through an adjacent exhibit room. In one corner, toward the ceiling, the rope is threaded around the rungs of a kitchen chair; in another, it creates a web, a dreamcatcher shape filled with shards of glass. Sometimes, the rope is thin as a finger, and sometimes it’s fat and clotted, and in some places bits of it have become unwoven and loop to the floor like a curtain. Among the crimson fabric are little blue and white and yellow threads that resemble veins and fat, which makes the whole project look like the disemboweling of a giant animal.
I don’t like this kind of art, but I find myself following the rope anyway, tracing its path through a series of exhibit rooms. The rope winds along, entrapping a dining room set, a crib, the eye sockets of a cow’s skull, all suspended as if the room were in freefall. Eventually, I hear someone calling from behind me—“Hey”—and I see the lady who looks like me, waving me down. “Hey there.”
My face sparks with panic. I worry she’s onto me, that she saw me spying on her in the courtyard all those weeks ago, that it’s weird for a girl in a patisserie to visit a customer’s place of business. But then I remember that I’m not a girl in a patisserie right now, just a visitor at an art gallery. And anyway, she seems happy to see me.
“Bonjour, madame,” I say.
“Bonjour. I almost didn’t recognize you without the apron.”
“Yeah, fortunately, when we’re not on the clock our boss lets us wear civvies.”
“Ah-ha,” she says, laughing her bright laugh. Today she’s wearing a red poncho-type-thing and earrings made of knotted thread: chunky multicolored strands that hang down to her collarbone. Two ceramic dice, studded with gold, dangle at the end of each strand.
“I like your earrings,” I say.
“Oh, thank you. We sell them at the gallery shop. The woman who makes them is one of our artists—Marian Babbage—” She gestures solicitously to the red rope. “This is her installation. I see you’ve been following it around.”
“I have. I don’t know if I get it though.”
“Do you want to see where it ends?”
I do. I can’t turn her down. She leads me into a small dark room, crisscrossed with angular track lighting. The rope ends at the left-hand sleeve of a long red coat—or rather, the rope becomes a coat, bulging and heavy-looking and bloody with loose threads. The coat hangs on a mannequin, and there it resembles an enormous, shaggy heart. In the dim light, it almost appears to be pulsing.
“Weird,” I say.
“I know, right,” the lady says. She stands close to me, close enough that I’d be able to smell if there were sweets on her breath. Nothing sweet, but something smoky: sage, incense. “The installation is over two miles of rope, all woven by hand. Dyed jute and linen, shredded silk. The coat alone took a year to assemble.” She sighs, as if taking a year to make a coat is romantic. Then she looks at me: “Would you like to wear it?”
“Wear it? Like, take it off the mannequin?”
“Sure. The artist indicated, as part of the project, that she wanted some of our visitors to wear it.”
“You just let random people try it on?”
The lady shrugs and steps around me. “It’s not random.”
With some effort, she lifts the coat off the mannequin and settles it down onto my shoulders. It feels more like a cape, even when I’ve worked my arms into the sleeves. The woven rope is absurdly, dramatically heavy, its coarse threads itchy against my skin. The lady wraps the coat tighter around me to hide my T-shirt, and I realize it smells like soil, like fertilizer.
“I feel like a giant bird,” I say, which is a lie. In fact, the coat makes me feel like a small, stuck thing, a worm in a cocoon.
“Stand over there,” the lady says.
“Where?”
She nudges me toward a sharp triangle of light. Once she has me lined up where she wants, she extracts a thin digital camera from her pocket and aims it at me. Again: a sparky panic. I hold up my arms. The coat sleeves hang on them like saddlebags.
“Wait.”
“Oh, sorry,” she says, but her apology shows a glint of impatience. “You don’t want your picture taken? I should’ve mentioned—”
“No, I—”
The trade between us, the mix-and-match of particles I’ve been feeling every time we see each other—it seems unbalanced now. I intuit that a picture will make it worse. But also, I feel stupid denying her. Ungrateful, even. What were her criteria, choosing me?
I unfreeze my face, attempting to pose.
“You don’t have to smile,” she says. “Just be natural. Maybe lower your head a little.”
She holds up the camera and I stare at her straight-on. The track lighting makes pointed shadows on her face, and she still looks like me, but she also doesn’t. She also looks like a painting, a composite of dark shapes, alive and shifting, her heavy, dangling earrings like drippage, like acetone smears. My chest burns inside the coat.
“Excellent. Thank you.”
I will think later that I should’ve flung the coat off and let it slump on the floor. I will fantasize about knives and matches. But in the moment, I allow the lady to remove it from me and return it reverently to the mannequin. I feel scraped, like a scab. I don’t know how else to describe it. I want to even us out again, the lady and me. I want to smoosh her face with my fingers until she looks like neither one of us. The lady is oblivious to this. Or not. Maybe she’s ignoring my obvious want. She looks at the camera and smiles, her hair glowing with a halo of light.
“That’s a good one,” she says. “I’m happy with that.”
It’s Friday again and Luke isn’t here. He hasn’t been to work in four days. In the kitchen, Ray gets off the phone with someone, Luke himself, or maybe his mom or dad, and Ray, in his fury, flings his KitchenAid paddle into the sink. A spume of cake batter erupts across the counter.
“Krista, call Dee to see if she can fill in. That twerpy little college shit is leaving us high and dry again. God damn it.”
Some of the cake batter has splattered on me, beading in my arm hair like whiteheads.
“He’s having a hard time,” I say.
“Wah, wah,” says Ray, marching past me. “Cry me a river.”
I call after his retreating back: “Jesus, Ray, would you stop being bigdick boss man for one second and be a human and have some compassion for a person who’s going through a hard time? We’re all doing our best here, Ray. We’re all trying not to screw up. We don’t wake up in the morning and think, ‘Gee, I hope I can screw up today and let Ray down. That’s my favorite thing to do.’ For God’s sake, you think people think like that?”
Ray turns and looks at me. For a moment, he stands red-faced and blinking over a tray of madeleines. “I am human,” he mumbles, like he’s testing how that sounds. Then, louder: “I am human. Just because I’m not your dad or your preacher or your guidance counselor doesn’t mean I’m not human. I’m trying to run a fucking business here.”
He shoves the madeleines into the oven and goes on muttering to himself.
“Be a human. You be a goddamn human and show up to work like an adult.”
This week, the mille-feuille theme is Murder, spiky chocolate tuiles so dark they’re nearly black, glazes of pomegranate and blood orange, the cutting board like a crime scene. It signals that Ray might be going through a hard time himself, but I know better than to ask questions.
Dee comes in to take over Luke’s shift. She is a butch fifty-three-year-old woman with a huge, serious face. She has several jobs like this across town and has been working all of them for too long. When we work together, we stand tensely behind the bakery case like soldiers on watch, arms behind our backs. Customers come and go, same faces, same clothes, voices blurring like the warm hum of an engine. The confections in the case glow with witchery, a sugar glamor. Kids smudge their pale hands against the glass and weep with longing. Wah wah.
At 11:00am, the lady who looks like me comes in wearing a white lace blouse and a peasant skirt, and she has on those same earrings, the dice dangling goldly on their ropes. She grins at me—“Bonjour”—and I try my best to grin back. A jolt of heat leaps into my throat.
“These look exquisite,” she says, examining Ray’s mille-feuilles.
“Yeah,” I say. “Our boss puts special effort into them.”
“I don’t even know if I could eat them. They’re too perfect.”
“We have madeleines,” Dee announces sternly, as if the lady and I are wasting time. True, the shop is busy today. The line is pressing up against the door. “Lavender. Also, orange.”
The lady gives Dee a close-mouthed smile and turns back to me.
“Full disclosure,” she whispers, “I’m actually good on sweets today. I came by to tell you that we’ve hung the pictures from Marian’s installation. You should come see yours. I think the outcome will be interesting.”
She’s close enough that I can smell her incense breath. The pearly crescent on her bottom lip stretches as she speaks.
“You hung everyone’s picture in the gallery?”
“Sure,” she says. “But yours is good. I mean, it’s an exceptionally good picture. You’ll have to see if you can find yourself.”
“Find myself where?”
Dee leans forward, her enormous breasts flattening against the bakery case. “Could you step to the side, please, ma’am, until you know what you want? That way we can keep the line moving.”
The lady glares noticeably at Dee. We step to the side.
“Well, that wasn’t subtle,” she says, laughing. “Seriously though, I wanted to thank you again for participating. I know I kind of sprang it on you, but you were a good sport about it, and it’s just so cool, what Marian is doing.”
“Oh yeah,” I say. “Anytime.”
“I’ll let you get back to work, what with the line police over there.” She tilts her head toward Dee, and her eyes get wide and jokey. They’re my eyes—same color, same shape, same dark lashes. Her eyes slide into mine and out again, and I have no idea how she’s doing it.
“Dee’s not so bad,” I say.
The lady says, “Of course, I’m just kidding. À bientôt.”
Back in high school, my girlfriends and I used to play a game called “Ghosting,” which involved breaking into houses. Or, as my one friend called it, “making opportune entries.” Our parents’ houses were in the old, grubby part of the neighborhood, but the houses we targeted were always new, the air inside them still rubbery with fresh-paint smell, cheaply made but expensive-looking. You would be shocked how many people keep their spare keys under their mats, or on the lintel inside the garage, or in those fake rocks, tucked inside flowerbeds. The simple imaginations of the trusting.
We never took anything. We weren’t vandals. We moved chairs around, swapped picture frames, arranged ceramic figurines into obscene positions, hid bananas in couch cushions, organized books so that their spines read out messages. I liked being a ghost, though back then it was on my own terms.
At the gallery, I’m a ghost all over again. A crowd has come to see the pictures associated with the Marian Babbage installation, mostly older women dressed in shawls and slacks and elaborate art gallery jewelry. Sometimes, they’re with husbands who are dressed simply and say little. And there are young women, too, almost all taller than me. They flow around me like water over a stone. There’s a table with charcuterie and fruit and champagne served in plastic cups. I take two cups, smiling at the attendant so that he knows I’m grabbing one for a friend. In the next room, I throw back both.
The lady who looks like me is talking in a knot of people. They’re discussing the exhibit with remarkable intensity. I hear verbs and conjunctions and transitional phrases, but the substance of what they’re saying is like a stream of sand in my ears. “And asks that ffshhhhhhhh with how to engages fsshhhhh this juxtaposing ffshhhHHHhhhhhhhhh articulates evoking while fhsssSSSs in same sssfFFFhhsss of other and.”
I catch the lady’s eye past someone’s shoulder. She mouths, Hi, but averts her gaze and carries on talking.
The pictures are framed and hung in a grid on the far wall, and people are lined up to look at them. There are sixty-five total. Each is the size of a postcard, and each features a girl, a woman, encased in the red heart of the coat, staring blankly at the camera.
But I can’t find my picture. I start at one end of the grid and work my way along. Other women are doing the same around me. I turn to one and say, “She got you too, huh?” but the woman gives me an incredulous look.
“You’re up here?”
“Somewhere,” I say. Now I’m not so sure though. Maybe my picture was defective and didn’t make it to the wall.
Again, I try to approach the lady who looks like me, standing at the edge of her group, waiting for a break in the conversation. My eyes swell hotly in their sockets. A stone forms in my throat.
“’Scuse me,” I whisper. “Sorry—where am I?”
The lady offers me a distracted smile, whispers back: “Fifty-two. You’re fifty-two. Did you see the numbers?”
I return to the wall. The numbers are small ghostly printings at the bottom of each picture. I am fifty-two, but all the women look the same. Fifty-two looks like a copy of fifty-one, and fifty-three a copy of that, my face blending with every other face, everybody obscured and weighed down by the coat. I can only assume that the effect is intentional, that the pictures are staged and arranged to create the illusion of sameness. How though? I want someone to explain it. At least, I want to see that the other women here are as disturbed as I am. But no one’s noticing me, no one’s speaking to me, and eventually the women wander away, expressing awe or indifference, and if they’re disturbed, they share it with someone who’s not me, a partner or a husband, or the exclusive groups they came here with. These groups cluster and drift like galaxies. The crowd begins to thin. I try to occupy myself with the other exhibits, the psychotically priced jewelry for sale in the shop, the crown of bright fruits on the refreshment table, but my mind is buzzing; I can’t make sense of what I’m looking at. Behind me, a loud laugh spears the air, a drunken joke, a swarm of glee.
I go to the mannequin room where the coat is kept.
There it hangs, a drape of red flesh, and I know the hour is late, and I know that outside folks are filtering out to their cars, or they’re walking to other galleries, maybe nicer galleries than this one, or nicer restaurants, dance clubs, wine bars, houses filled with glass and light. No one sees me with my pocketknife. No one sees me, with one hand, folding the attached rope into a loop, and, with the other, slicing it. When I pull the coat off the mannequin, it drops into my arms like a swooning girl.
I’m running through a hallway, through an exit, down a landing, down an alley. My arms ache, but I heave up the coat to keep its hem from dragging the pavement. I throw it into the passenger seat of my car. There it sits, defenseless. Tamed.
I’m thinking about the length of a day. I’m thinking about the time when Luke’s car caught fire, and I had to drive him to work, and how, like me, he felt compelled to leave the house before his parents got up in the morning and return when they’d gone to bed at night. We don’t hate our parents; they love us too much, and we admit that to hate them now would make us feel like teenagers. But sometimes it’s easier not to see their faces, their deepening worry and age, and the suburbs are a blessing when you can disappear into them, when you can drive around with the windows rolled down, filling your car with an eau-de-cologne of cow manure and paper mill and wisteria, and when you can park under the night sky where no one will find you. I liked it so much, riding with Luke until dark, sitting with him at the edge of the world. I tried to teach him to smoke with me. I wanted to be his cannabis mentor. But he said no, weed makes him anxious. He only drinks clear liquor. Who taught him to drink, his grandma? And one time, he got drunk on Gordon’s gin and told me that in elementary school the teachers took his parents aside to say that he was a smart kid, he was going places, and his mom made him play violin because someone told her it was the hardest instrument to play and was associated with high IQs. And then someone else said, “No, that’s French horn,” and she tried to get him to switch, but his dad said they’d already sunk money into the violin. That’s the thing. Every time his parents came to watch him play, Luke could see in their eyes that they were disappointed about it, him being okay at violin when he probably could’ve been great at French horn. He didn’t know then, but he knows now, that this says something about his parents. That’s a thing, too. When you get old enough to realize that your parents have disappointed you.
All this to say, there are always hours to kill when you’re as wide awake as we are.
I show up at Luke’s place around midnight and ring the doorbell. I’m sweating and breathless, probably look strung out. Luke’s dad answers the door in his pajamas, squinting against the buggy porchlight.
“What the hell is that?” he asks, looking at the coat in my arms.
“Can I see Luke?”
Luke’s dad rubs his face drowsily. “Is this work related?”
“Yes,” I say. “It’s work related.”
Luke’s dad waves his hand and steps back from the doorway. “Down them stairs. He’s been hiding down there all day.”
I’m confused about what he means by stairs because there are no stairs, just a hallway, though at the end of the hallway I find a door affixed with a banner from Luke’s college and a flaking patchwork of Pokémon stickers. I press my ear to it and hold my breath.
Luke’s voice spirals out of the room like smoke: “I can hear you standing there.”
“It’s me, Luke,” I say. I try to sound cheery.
A stiff shuffling of cloth, like bedsheets. “Krista? What are you doing here?”
“Your dad let me in. He said you were down the stairs. I think maybe he was dreaming.”
Silence. I crouch to the floor, the coat sinking me against the carpet with its weight. Somewhere in the house, a window unit kicks on. I’ve never been in Luke’s house before. It smells like dust and cedar.
“Luke?”
“I’m here.”
“Could you let me in? I’ve been worried. It’s not the same at the shop without you.”
“It’s late.”
“I have something I want to show you.”
Luke stirs inside his room. A beat passes, and he opens the door, and boy smell spills out, hits me in the face, boy smell like high school, like gyms and basements and video games and beanbag chairs, so tender it makes me want to cry. Luke stands before me in a thin, stretched T-shirt, his eyes shadowed, his mouth pale. He gestures for me to come in and I do, into his room, a time-capsule of child-Luke and teenage-Luke, movie posters, plastic trophies, Star Wars duvet, blue lava lamp sleepy-dancing. I lay the coat over the back of a desk chair. In the blue light, its redness looks black, and the texture of the rope disappears.
“What is that?” he asks. “A costume?”
“A coat. Some artist made it.”
“Where’d you get it?”
I stroke the coat along the length of its sleeve and look at him over my shoulder.
“What did you do, Krista?” he asks.
He can tell that I stole it, and I did, but even so it doesn’t feel that way. I only want it a little while. I’ll return it to the gallery, somehow, and they can put it back on the mannequin and retie the rope, knowing that for a few hours it was mine. Luke doesn’t need to know that. Luke is dealing with his own shit. When I don’t answer him, he slumps onto his bed and falls back, his chest deflating with a sigh.
“Who am I to judge?”
I run my fingers through the grooves of the rope, little threads springing up like cilia. “You can judge if you want.”
“No,” he says. “I’m sorry I worried you. I didn’t want to worry anyone, I’m just embarrassed.”
“About what?”
“It’s no one specific thing. I’m embarrassed all the time.”
I lift the coat and put it on, slowly. Luke lies on the bed with his hands over his face.
“Luke,” I whisper.
“Like, existing,” he says, “it’s just so embarrassing.”
“Luke?”
He uncovers his face, props himself up on his elbows. At first, he looks at me annoyed, like here he is trying to be sad and say sad things and here I am interrupting. But then he sees the coat, folded blackly around me, its heart shape pulsing, its shaggy threads dancing and alive, and I can tell from the way his eyes fall on my face that he sees me clearly.
“How?” he says.
I say, “How not?”
I slide onto the bed, put my hand over his. I look like her, the lady, so purely and completely that even Luke can see it now. He is shocked, terrified, in love. He wants to kiss me. He does kiss me. He wants to undress me. He will undress me and feel the heat of me, my belly, my thighs, with his parents sleeping down the hall, and my love and sweetness will flow into him and help him come alive again. I will return the discarded coat when I feel like it. That will be the end of that. I will yell at Ray. I will quit my job. I will feel sorry for myself and burst into tears at my sister’s wedding reception. I will drive around at night, past farms and factories and golf courses and strip malls, until my car runs out of gas. The person I call for help will ride like a knight through the darkness, and I will smile when they arrive, so happy, so grateful.
Jen Julian's recent work has appeared in swamp pink, Third Coast Magazine, Monkeybicycle, hex, and Bourbon Penn, among other places. Her first short story collection, Earthly Delights and Other Apocalypses, was awarded Press 53’s Short Fiction Prize and was released in 2018. She currently teaches creative writing at Young Harris College in the rural mountains of north Georgia.
2025