Leia Weathington

Let me tell you how it came to this:

I didn’t know her in life, but from the moment we were born under that fading star, we were bound together tighter than the knots in a fisherman’s net. I could have hated her, the reverse of my coin, but she was, is, beloved to me.

I’m only told fables of the day we were born. The heavens were turbulent in the dark pitch of middle night and the old men in the temple watched the Anchor star flare and fall, like a nail scraped through sooty glass, a stark white slash against the black sky. Those old men knew then the fates of two children, born at the same moment, one of us hunched and disfigured of face and the other perfect and beautiful in every way. Before our eyes opened to the world our roles within it were set, were carved, were inevitable.

God bestows gifts, bestows purpose. We may not understand what we were given, but know it was given with purpose in mind.

The old men from the temple took me from whoever my mother was and gave me over to pig farmers to keep. My mother was paid with a branch of cedar from the temple courtyard and the pig farmers with a gold coin and the respect that comes with keeping a rotten piece of fruit like me. At least until my purpose was fulfilled.

I do not remember being held or cherished. When I was fed it was only with peelings from the farmers table and those I had to squabble over with the pigs. I learned to speak from eavesdropping as no one spoke to me. It would be some time before I understood the reason other children spit on me.

I do not tell you of my difficulties to illicit pity. In many ways I was fortunate if not pampered as she was. I was given the understanding of my place by the temple men when I was sent to sit silent at their sermons in the first hour of morning. She was protected from the truth of it until the last moments and even now I find this powerfully cruel.

Still, when I rose from my uneven bed in the pens it was to see mist rising in the cedar branches, the last lanterns of the cities night watch blown out, one by one in the golden pull of dawn. The hogs devoured feed around my ankles while I stood unmolested, to take in the growing clamor from the streets below. It was a place fascinating and forbidden. If I went there on my labors I veiled my face like the women in the desert but only to hide the split ruin of my mouth.

We, and I can only think of myself as one half of a whole, were born into a magnificent city. It was strung like a diadem over a mountain range that over looked a fast white river. Our city was home to the oldest temples, renowned for its thick cedar forests, it’s culture, it’s fashion, it’s scholarship. So many things I knew of but did not know. Yet I watched and I listened and I found a love of the things I was kept apart from.

Every year before the grain was harvested our glorious city held a procession. My distant twin came first wearing fine white linen and a wreath of wheat. Young men would bow, women would kiss her cheeks, children followed in a column banging drums and playing flutes.

And last of all was me, the shadow thrown behind her.

I could not hide my face on these occasions. I was dressed in coarse rags and wore my hair loose and rubbed with ash. As I came the citizens spat, threw stones, kicked filth on me. If I wasn’t woken so harshly to care for the hogs every morning I could have slept another year after these celebrations. The sun turned in it’s bed over and over again and I heard about her, dancing and fed and held and beloved. She slept on a bed stuffed with cotton where I slept on wet straw. She was kissed where I was struck. She was also taken from her mother but was given to another woman who had a husband and they spoke to her, taught her the meaning of words she did not know instead of having to puzzle their meanings alone in a muddy pen.

She wore fine clothes, ate from gold plates, got to go to the theater. I served pigs and shoveled their piss and shit.

I’m sorry. That doesn’t matter now. There is no purpose to holding any of that bitterness in my mouth.

It was a relief for me when the day came for our existence to end.

How wonderful for me who only bore our peoples hardships and spite for my whole life. How terrible for her to have known only adoration and have all of it revoked in a handful of hours. People were unkind to me but she would hear from all of them the root of their unkindnesses. Looking back with eyes cleared by time and age I find this the cruelest of all things.

What I was told in the temple every morning was this: We have made a covenant. Corrupt and ill formed as we are we cannot help but sin. God will always love us but sin has a cost and it must be borne. Someone must carry that weight and something precious must be given to balance His scales. When the balance is to be paid He will deliver his couriers under the sign of a terrible star.

Us.

This is how it happens:

I’d been allowed to sleep into the early morning and when the pig wife woke me, it was with a bowl of eggs, bread, and shredded chicken. When she placed the bowl in my hand she smoothed the hair from my brow like mothers did in stories I’d overheard. For this one day I would be held to the chest of our people like some beloved token. I was carried from the mud pits and bathed. The marble pools were near the town pavilion and through the columns I glimpsed her in the throng of her people, my people, as she was whipped with reeds, debased and brought low. I only caught a glance of their violence but her screams carried on the wind as I soaked in my bath.

I did not see the people who dipped close to whisper their worst secrets in her ear, forced to listen with thick fingers twisted in her hair to tip her head back and receive every awful thing.

But I know it happened because she told me it did and I trust her word.

After my bath I was rubbed with oils and dressed in fine red wool. Gold was hung on my neck, my ears, my wrists. A woman who may even have been my unknown mother led me to a palanquin made from lithe new saplings and strewn with fragrant summer flowers to sit on silks. Strong handsome men lifted my vessal. I was carried on it through all the wending streets I had loved to look on though they were not for me until this day. Everywhere those youths carried me, people threw flowers and blessed me. My joy at these expressions of love were tempered with dread that sat heavy in my guts. I understood in my simple way that as there were two sides to a coin there were two sides of a knife and that the cutting edge was somehow poised to cut and cut deep.

When the streets widened and I was lofted before the temple steps I truly saw her for the first time. Her hair was dark and rich like the river’s soil, her eyes wide like a fawn that saw the shaft right as it’s loosed. Her mouth was full and unmarred, her skin smooth and cheekbones high. Despite the blood on her lush mouth, the weltering bruises coming up on her perfect flesh, her ripped and tangled hair, she was everything I wasn’t and would never be. Her terror was a terrible blemish on her lovely face and all I wanted to scrub it away. I did not deserve my life before that day. She did not deserve this day. We were only the culmination of a purpose and we had had no hand in the making of it. If I had resented her distantly before I couldn’t now. How could I? How could I after seeing the grief and betrayal knotting her brow? I was taught that suffering was my birthright from the time I could understand what that meant and she was taught the reverse. What a ferocious glinting edge.

I hated the finery on my body, the perfume on my skin. I wanted to wear ash and filth again for this girl who was my twin, who didn’t deserve this.

The temple man spoke his words, none of which I could hear or would have borne to remember if I could.

But from where I sat, raised in my carriage of branches, I could see perfectly well when the temple man raised the bronze blade and drew it across her throat. I could not have stopped it and I wouldn’t have tried if I was able. There is no point for one soul to swing their fists at the flood. Water will spill where it wants regardless and blood is the same.

This is how we survive- but we can’t all survive. Some precious things must be forfeit for others to prosper.

Her blood poured hot and steaming into a copper bowl held beneath her neck and her wide fawn eyes stared upwards to our sun, to our god, to something unnamed. The temple men pressed their hands together and shut their eyes as the head temple man poured my twin’s lifeblood on the roots of the ancient cedar that grew in the courtyard. I was lifted from my seat and gently led to kneel before her corpse. Her eyes were so big. I still see them.

I will always see them.

Her corpse was bound to my back, like a mother would her child. Water jugs were strung about us to to last me long enough in the waste to know the rot had been carried far enough away. The process was long and heavy with ritual and I refuse to recount it in great detail. I will only say it marred my spirit greatly.

If the din of the city folk was terrible during the procession to the temple was horrible then the silence on the walk away from it was a hundred, thousand times worse. All of them clustered around the main road that led to the city’s terminus, watching, breath held. When I had to shift her on my back to avoid stumbling down a rough flight of stairs I heard a whimper from somewhere in the crowd. They thought I might some how drop her, they thought of her as some costly pitcher in the hands of an incompetent serving girl.

I would never let her bloodied feet touch the ground. But that was for her sake and not for the safe keeping of what they had filled her with.

The sun scorched my face as I made my way down to the final terrace of our city. I could see the abyssal stretch of wilderness clearly now, just an empty place with out end. A single temple man robed in black waited at the ancient arched gate. I’d heard a story once that God had placed the pile of smooth perfect stones for our city founders to make this gate from, a sign that they had arrived home. The temple man watched me pass through it. I did not look at his eyes, it was not my place. This was not our home any more.

My sandals slipped on dust and rock and I knew the temple man was waiting for me to pass the pillar of limestone they called Fharrah’s Wife. I was walking into the sweltering eye of the sun and so could not see it for the brightness, but I heard the temple man raise the call that we were away, I heard the city explode in jubilation. Then I could hear nothing but my heaving breath and the dry sound of her hair rustling on my shoulder.

We were gone from the city and neither of us would every see it again.

“Is it over?” She whispered in my ear. It was the first time I had ever truly heard her voice.

“Yes.” I said.
“Good. I’m glad it’s just the two of us now.” I said, “Me too.” And I meant it.

The rocky plain stretched endlessly ahead and I walked with no destination in mind. I just obeyed the susurration in my bones that said, forward, forward, forward. I wanted to push as hard as I could before the light was gone, I wanted to get as far from the mountains at our back as possible so that when night fell we wouldn’t have to see the lanterns of the city flicker to life. I wanted to drown them in dark and distance. That first day I did not even stop to rest or drink until it became so dark I nearly broke my leg tripping on a rock. Then I simply sat down on the still warm ground to wait for the dawn. When I settled myself I noticed that her knee was bent at an odd angle so I adjusted to pull it around to rest in my lap.

A sigh in my ear. “Ah, thank you, that’s much better.”

“Of course,” I said and placed my hand on her soft, unblemished foot, dug my thumb into the arch as if she had been the one carrying me for so long. After a moment of silence we began to speak. Our lives had run parallel to each other until this violent intersection. We had a lot to tell each other. Our secret wants, our hidden thoughts, the places we slept, the wheel of our days and nights. All of the important moments that made us were examined like a jeweler would examine a stone with his loupe to find flaws.

A covenant had been made between us by what others decided our place in life was to be. That first night in the wild we made a new one between only the two of us, with our own tongues and tears. That is one I will never break. What we spoke of that first night is between us and I hold her confidence as tightly as I know she holds mine.

When the sun rose I struggled to my feet and continued, forward, forward, forward.

I counted days by the moon for a while, until time had no meaning to me.

“It has no meaning to me at all anymore.” She whispered when I told her I had lost track. It made me laugh.

She whispered to me all of the confessions the people in the city had told her in the course of her life, venal sins and cardinal ones. I told her about the times a hand had been raised to me in anger instead of a wife or child. Two vessels filled to the brim with the fury and guilt of an entire people.

“The baker murdered his wife.” She said.

“I saw him carry her body from his house four summers ago.” I replied. “From up on the hill where I tended the pigs.”

“Oh, you knew before I did then. It was his final confession to me, on the steps that last day.”

Her skin had withered in the heat by that time. Her lips shrunk, and her eyes sunk and rotted away. Her tongue was just a strip of dried meat in her skull but still her voice was clear and calm in my ear. Flies dogged us both. When one flew in my open mouth, I ground it between my teeth and swallowed.

On one of the unnumbered days I had come over the rise of a dune and found a caravan of the nomads. She saw them before me as I only kept my eyes down as I trudged.

“Look, there.” She said.

I stopped and looked down, to a dark line of figures and their strange horses. We watched as they passed without calling to them until a solitary figure swathed in billowing black paused and looked up to where we stood on the blowing dune. I could see the bare slash of her eyes in all that black. She looked up at us for a bare moment, then turned and called harshly to the rest of the caravan, voice rippling up the chain until the man leading them halted and turned back. An organized riot of movement began as the people below began to unfasten packs from the back of their snorting steads and started to make an encampment. I was so tired I thought it was a hallucination when a younger woman wrapped in black and wearing the red veil of a new bride came up the dune and pressed a waterskin to my cracked lips. It was only when she took my hand with a soft word that I came to my senses.

“I can’t. I can’t stop.” I said. The young woman’s brow wrinkled. “I have to-“

My desiccated twin said gently, “Who is left to punish us? And I’ve always wanted to see a caravan camp at night.”

There was no argument in me and so I let us be led down the dune and into the women’s camp.

I had never been in such a flurry of humanity where a rock wasn’t thrown or a hand raised to strike. When a pair of women lifted their hands to the bindings that held her body to my back I flinched reflexively. One of them gently cupped my gritted jaw and murmured something in her own language while the other undid the bindings. When I felt her slide from my back I cried out in panic and wheeled to reach for her, to save her from touching the ground, to keep her blistering skin from the grit, but when I turned I saw her held in the hands of four veiled women. Tender, loving, no fear of defilement in their eyes.

“We will put her to bed until you are ready to continue your journey. Sit with us, eat with us, rest with us.” A woman, the same woman who had halted the caravan, her bearing unmistakeable, said to me. “We are all children of God in this country. Let us show you hospitality.”

They led me into the big tent all of the women and children shared and combed the snarls from my hair and washed my bleeding feet. I did not weep, I had never learned how, but at these genuine and unasked for kindnesses water poured from my eyes harder than ever had before, stinging my cracked lips. The water fountained like the ground after the Prophet struck it with his staff to bring for the spring in the desert and I could not make it stop flowing. When the new bride in her red veil wiped my mottled cheeks and murmured something in her mother tongue and then flowing wellspring of my eyes became the fast white river that lay in the valley under the city that had given and taken from us. I could not stop it.

My twin lay on a fine pallet of silk, still in death. Someone had shut her ruined eyes and wrapped her in fine dark linen. A bowl of dates and milk were set at her head. As I watched women came to her and tuck dried blossoms and silver charms into her shroud. One very old woman bent and kissed her brow. The woman who had stopped the caravan bathed the caked dust from around my eyes with a gentleness that terrified me. I would have closed my eyes against it but I didn’t want to look away from my precious burden. I still feared for her not being tied to me.

In the privacy of the women’s tent they took down their veils and unbound their hair. I was fed a stew of tender goat meat, regarded well but not forced to speak. A cup of water was always full in my hand and I listened to these strangers chatter and sing and ate and drank like someone deprived, which I suppose I was.

The old woman who had brought me into their home told me her name and told my twin her name. She kissed both of our hands and smiled at me the way I had heard of mothers smiling at their children. I wished I had a mother. I wished it so badly in that moment that the fast white river poured down my terrible face again.

From the first fall of them she wrapped me in her arms and crooned some song. I broke apart completely and clutched her and wept. I understood now that this was what weeping was. I felt hands on my back, my ribs. Somewhere in the gathering a lullaby began and was picked up by the rest. The water cleared from my eyes for just a moment, and I saw a girl ten years my junior holding the hand of my dead other half and singing along, smiling down at her gaunt face. Then I bawled like an infant until there was nothing left in me.

I was coddled and held in such a way I never thought I would experience. No one recoiled at the split of my mouth, so remarkable to me. I fell into an empty sleep in the lap of one of these women, a hand smoothing the hair from my face. I had never slept so well.

In the morning I woke to the smell of roasting coffee beans and yams. When I glanced to one side I saw the water jugs that were all I’d had from the city refilled and corked. My body was sluggish but my mind alert and so I over heard them talking as they worked.

“…God doesn’t ask for such things from us,” A young woman said as she fanned the coals under a pan of roasting beans. “Jars of honey at the crossroad shrines, yes, but never that. How terrible.”

The young woman passed the pan to a woman old enough to have had children, who pounded the coffee in a heavy mortar and pestle. “It’s their way. An old honoring though I don’t know if it serves them well. Or correctly.” Said the matron who handed the coffee to the old woman who had called the caravan to stop.

“We are all beloved in His eye, “The old woman said as she rolled the grounds into balls of butter and set them aside one by one. “Who here can know His designs? Maybe there is some writ in their high city that God gave them with those instructions. We can only be faithful in our own ways, and besides, “ The old woman tied the rounds of butter and coffee together into a linen bundle. “None of us can divine the path we are set on. We can only go forward upon it.”

I sat up from my bedding then and they stopped talking to greet me and invite me to breakfast with them.

They placed her on my back again on my insistence.
“You could bury her here,” The old woman said. “And come with us. I have grandsons who are handsome and strong and kind. Perhaps you would like one of them for a husband. You don’t have to go out into the harsh country alone.”

On my back her thinning jaw moved slightly. “I like them, but I want to see more. I want to continue.”

“I have to go.” I said. “I have to.” I finished helplessly. The old woman touched my brow with a single dry finger and said: “I know.”

We watched them go in the rising sun, zigzagging serpent-like through the pale sand. My twin was wrapped securely on my back, around my hips were slung more water jugs than I had set off with and the bundles of coffee and butter along with it. A generous treasury that would take us farther than expected.

I turned us back to face the hot sun and the empty spread of earth.
“Are you ready?” I asked.
“Yes, let’s see how far we can go.” She husked from her withered mouth. So we went.

More turns of the heavens, more private conversations between the two of us. Her body shrunk down into itself like a leaf curling in the cold of winter. Sand stung my eyes when the winds whipped up, and my bare feet grew hard on the jagged rocks underfoot. My twin, the exquisite other part of my soul who is so beloved to me, described the faces she saw in the shifting landscape. She told me stories about them and all of their secrets. I embellished them with postulations on their relatives who where kind, or cruel, or both at the same time. Always we walked into the horizon and I rested only when I had to.

Bones were strewn along our way. Whole skeletons or scattered piles that sand fox or hyena had picked apart.

“They were like us.” She said.

“I’m going to go further than them,” I said, trying to be gallant. “I’m going to walk further than all of them and I’m going to show you something incredible. Then I’m going to build you a cairn that lasts for thousands of years.”

“You’re so sweet.” She sighed.

In one of our final unnumbered days a wall of sandy rock rose before us. The sun had been at my back for hours so the sand was scorching hot. I set my jaw and began to climb.

“We can wait,” She husked urgently into my ear. The flies has grown their children in her flesh, come into adulthood and flown off in their mindless search for new meat. She was a dry bundle of bones at this point. It may seem repellent to you, but the stink of her body had comforted me through all it’s stages of decay. Now she perfumed my world with the scent of leather and pine. I climbed higher and higher. Rock split my nails and scraped my flesh, sand fell into my eyes and made them water.

“No,” I said. “I want the perfect place for you to rest.”

“I’m sorry you’ve had to do this for me.” She said mournfully, quietly, once we were halfway up.

“It’s not your fault,” I said. “It’s someones fault, but it’s not yours.” I hauled myself higher. I was thirsty and her shriveled fingers pulled the cork from one of

When I crested the crooked spine of the cliff the whole world unfolded like a the illuminated scrolls the temple men kept in their archives. Thick forest and red clay dotted with settlements letting up their chimney smoke and beyond that some expanse of blue waves we did not know the name of.

“Is that the sea?” She breathed on my neck. “I’ve wanted to see that since I was little.”

I had never heard stories about the sea. I thought the world had just stopped here.

“Here,” She said. “Set me down here so I can look at this forever and let all of the bad things I was told go back into the air.”

I did what I was asked and built a pile of stones around her with a chink in the seams so she could see out. I heard a last breath from her withered lungs when I was finished, a final sigh.

“Oh, my beloved. My sister.” The words were carried away on the wind. “Thank you.”

And then I heard her voice no more.

I sat beside the cairn I’d built empty of feeling or thought and watched the slow draw and release of the water in the distance. I looked at the villages below like I had when I tended the pigs above our city and saw the little figures go about their day with kindness and violence. I felt so horribly devoid of purpose and so awfully free to do what I wanted. It was paralyzing, this ending to my understanding of the world.

“You’ve come a long way.” I startled at the woman that stood near me on the precipice. Where did she come from? I scrubbed the salt from my dried tears from my face with the back of my wrist.

“Who are you?” I asked. She smiled from under the red hood of her cloak. Her eyes burned in her skull like the sparks from a struck flint.

“I’m the empty place where you pour your secrets.” She said. “I’m the cistern that it’s all held in. I am the abyss, the hungry pit.”

“Are you-“ I began but she cut my question with a slash of her hand.

“I’m not your god. Who knows if he sits on a throne like you all think. Who knows what governs your lives? It’s not me in any case.” She paused and considered me. “Why don’t you climb down and see what’s there?” She asked.

I”m afraid.” I answered truthfully.

“Because of this?” She reached out and ran her thumb over the split in my lip. It was disconcerting, that sensation, my flesh moved like wet clay and when I reached up I felt that my skin was smoothed over, just a dimple of a scar.

“I’m afraid of much more than my face.” I said.

“Do you have a name for that fear?” She asked me, grinning.

“No.” The truth from me again.

“Hm,” She turned and gazed out over the strange expanse of this land so unknown to me. “I suppose you should start learning the name of it then. You’ve fulfilled the covenant of your people and now there is nothing for the two of you to do but rest,” Her burning eyes cut towards me. “And live.”

Her body began to splinter and glow like a dying log in a hearth. Ash wisped from her shoulders and drifted from her face. Her teeth showed white. When she spoke her words rumbled in the ground under my feet.

“You gave everything unwanted and avoided to me, my child.” She said. “You brought me a feast of mistakes and sin and you lived to do so. Your life is yours now,” She rested a hand on the cairn stones. “And hers is mine.”

“Care for her.” I said with a vehemence that I’d never shown to any soul before then. “Keep her well or I swear I’ll find you and I’ll end you. No matter what it takes-“

The red woman laughed and it sounded like a thousand boulders plummeting down the mountainside.

“I keep all unwanted things as my beloved children. She will watch the sea and I will keep her company until you return to her.” She smiled and I saw that her mouth was split like a cats now, as mine had been. “And you will return. After all- you’ve made a covenant.”

The heavens split then in a terrible bolt of lightning and I had to hide my face from it. When I lowered my arm they were gone, the cairn I’d built just a tumble of stones. Every breath I drew scraped my lungs, I was aware of every inch of my beaten skin. I was alone. I was only one soul standing here on the ground.

And the entirety of the world was spread before me.

I reached down and picked up a small stone from my twins ruined grave, looked briefly into the empty sky, and made my way down the incline to learn the names of everything.

• 

Matthew Richmond was a northern boy so the August air in Louisiana was like having a huge hot soaking towel slapped across his entire body when the airport doors whooshed open and puked him onto the sidewalk for in search of a taxi. A listless breeze blew over his face driven only by the swooping cars that passed under Louie Armstrong International Airport. Matthew stood blinking in the weltering southern sun lancing through concrete pillars, his carryon luggage gripped in a damp hand.  

He had never in his life begun to sweat so fast. It crawled around the collar of his polo and prickled down his spine. He had packed light for this trip but every second under the concrete structure made the bag feel heavy. Finally an empty taxi pulled up to the curb and he threw him self at the door with the desperation of a drowning rat sighting a scrap of wood in the churn.

Matthew made only the barest offerings of conversation to the driver. He was too tired to do more. Matthew was young, fresh out of college with a degree in finance. A medical supply firm, Hippacorp, had liked his resume alright and the low number he’d asked for his starting salary even more, enough to give him a chance at least. This was his first big boy business trip but the layovers and delays coming out of Minneapolis sucked every ounce of his nervous excitement from him. It was all soaked into the back of his shirt now. He had been dozing against the window so he jolted when the car pulled into the lot of the high-rise hotel on Canal Street.

“35.00 dollars, sir.” The driver said.

Matthew handed the man a fifty dollar bill and waved off the drivers half hearted attempt at change. His phone buzzed as he approached the front desk. He murmured his name to the beautiful young woman at the counter and glanced at his phone while scrawling his name on the check in form. Big dumb Brian had been in the same cohort as Matthew when he was hired at the firm. Matthew liked big dumb Brian.

“You here bro?”  

“Yea” He texted back.

“Fuck yeah we going to bourbon sonnnnn” Came the instant reply.

“Alright, sir, room 308, you’ll use the elevator over to my left…”

He muttered a series of Mhm’s and thank you’s as he scraped the contents of his wallet and keycards off of the desk and typed a reply with his free hand. A handful of change that was crammed in the folds of the wallet spilled off the edge of the counter and cascaded noisily to the floor. Matthew’s face went hot as he scrambled for the rolling coins. It felt like the entire lobby was staring at him fumbling around like an idiot. A woman’s high heeled foot snapped down on a rolling quarter. He crammed his wallet into a pocket and struggled upright with his luggage and papers to try casually strolling to the row of elevators. He punched the up button harder than necessary.

“Excuse me,” A silky voice said from behind. “I think you dropped this.” 

A slender hand held a quarter in his face. Prominent veins and a perfect manicure. Matthew glanced to the woman face. “Thanks.” As he fumbled with his phone to take the coin between thumb and forefinger an incoming buzz of a text message had him dropping both to the marble floor. “Oh, fuck me…” He muttered in despair and let go of the handle of his roll on luggage, which promptly tipped over with a clatter. “Fuck!”

The woman bent at the knees with astonishing grace for someone wearing a pencil skirt that tight and plucked both phone and quarter before he could do it himself. She glanced at the faceplate of his brand-new smartphone and the corner of her mouth quirked, bows high in amusement.

“Looks, like you have a text message from ‘Cuddlebear’? Girlfriend?” She asked.

Matthew took the phone from her hand quickly. “My fiancé.” He said sheepishly, pressing the lock button and sliding his phone into a jacket pocket. “Uh, she put that in there…as a joke.” He finished weakly.

“Congratulations! Are you two here to celebrate?”

“Um, no. I’m just here for the convention this weekend. She’s back home.” Matthew said, righting his luggage and hitting the up button again, desperate to be in his room where he could get his shit together in privacy. 

“Well, then you should get her a nice gift while you’re here.” The woman stood near to his shoulder. He glanced sideways at her, not meeting her eyes. Her lipstick was the color of old blood which made the tracery of blue veins around her mouth more prominent in her pale face. “My friend has a wonderful boutique off of Royal. Here,” She flicked a business card from a delicate sliver case and offered it to him. He took it with an off hand, ‘Thanks, I’ll check it out.” and stuffed it into his jacket along side his phone. 

The elevator dinged at the lobby floor and he grappled with his luggage again with a few more muttered thank you’s as the doors slid open. “Great, Great, thank you, okay bye…” He looked up to offer her a wry smile as he stepped inside and pressed the button for his floor. 

Before it could slide shut her thin white wrist jutted forward and held the quarter out to him. “Don’t forget this.” The woman said, and Matthew reached out to take it, finally looking up to take in the whole of the woman’s face. The lipstick on her thin mouth drew most of his attention, but for the briefest moment he looked at her eyes. They were impossibly small and dark, like black glass beads. Matthew startled for a second, then the doors slid shut and he stood alone in the center of the elevator as it began to rise, holding the tarnished quarter before himself. 

He was tired from the flight. He needed a nap before he did anything else. Matthew still held the coin in his fist when he slipped his keycard into the lock, dropped his suitcase at the door and plunged face first into the queen bed the company had booked him in. He was asleep within a moment, still dressed in his suit.

Katie’s ringtone woke him about an hour later. 

Matthew jerked his face up from where he’d been drooling into the bend of his arm and licked his mossy teeth with a scowl. The first few bars of Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” started up again, muffled by his jacket pocket. He rolled onto his back and fished it out one handed, his other hand had clenched so tightly as he slept that it had gone numb.

He hit accept on the call and greeted his fiancé with a bleary, “Hey baby.”

“Where have you been? Oh my god, I’ve been texting you!” Her voice came high, tinny and way too loud through the speaker. Matthew winced and jerked it away from his ear. “Sweetie? Hello? Can you hear me?” Katie asked as he fumbled to take it off of speaker phone.

“Hey, yeah, I’m here. Sorry, had it on speaker.” He said. “Holy shit, I feel asleep hard.”

“Aw, was the flight bad?” 

“Sucked.” Matthew said shortly. “Had a layover in Chicago for two hours.”

Katie made a sympathetic noise. He could hear the even chop, chop, chop of a knife on a cutting board. “You making dinner?” He asked. 

“Mm, slaw for a catering gig tomorrow.”

“Your favorite.” He teased.

“Do not get me started.” She said, exasperated. “Overrated fucking side dish.” Matthew heard the clatter of a knife being chucked into their sink. She always mistreated her knives when making food for a pain in the ass client.

“The Brownstien wedding I take it?”

Her laugh was abrupt and with little humor. “How’d you guess?”

Mathew smiled. “Because you’ve been bitching about that menu for the past month?”

“Yeah, but only because I hate them and I hate the food they want me to make.” She scoffed. He heard her flop down with a soft whoosh, the living room sofa probably. “How’s the Big Easy?”

“Haven’t really seen it yet. Fell asleep in the taxi actually.” He answered honestly. “How was your day?”  He unclenched his fist. In his palm lay a coin, a little bigger than a quarter but certainly not a quarter. Even as covered in grime as it was he could see that. Matthew squinted at the words minted on it’s face.

He realized Katie had been talking all the while. 

“I miss you,” He said, to cover that he hadn’t heard any of her chatter. He turned the coin over in his hand. The stamp was worn from years of being handled, but he could make out a small relief of a birds wing and a date; 1780. Matthew frowned.

“I miss you, too, “She was saying. “Are you going out with the coworkers tonight?”

Matthew slid the weird coin back into his jacket pocket and shrugged it off his shoulders as he ambled into the bathroom to check the state of himself. He could hold off on shaving until tomorrow morning. 

“Yeah, Brian’s in town already. He wants to hit Bourbon Street tonight.” 

Katie made a weary hum into the phone.

“What?” Matthew asked. 

“Nothing. I want you to go have fun.” She said evenly. “Just don’t have so much fun you overdo it.” 

“And?” He prompted.

“And don’t have too much fun. I know how you get with a bunch of other boys.” 

Matthew was grateful she wasn’t there to see him roll his eyes, it would have turned into an actual argument if she had been.

“I’ll be good,” His phone buzzed and he glanced at the incoming message from Brian, which was just a series of cocktail emojis. “I promise.” He said into the mouthpiece.

“I love you,” Katie sighed into the phone. “Bring me a nice souvenir. Like a whole shrimp po’ boy, okay?”

Matthew laughed. “Alright, I’ll see what I can get through TSA.”

“Love you.”

“Love you too.” He made a kissing noise and she returned it.

As he hung up Brian texted him a string of firework emojis interspersed with clinking beer steins and ending with a single question mark.

“Alright, assholes,” He texted back. “Where are we going?”

A clean shirt and twenty minutes later found Matthew outside of the Pat O’Brien’s bar on St. Peter Street among a throng of other tourists who had started drinking well before he had. A woman holding a garish green plastic cup shaped like a grenade yanked her top up one handed and whooped into the crowd. A few camera flashes went off and the number doubled when the woman stumbled and fell to the cobblestones, laughing and wallowing in her spilled drink and stagnant puddles in the potholes. Something about the display made him flinch.

“My dude!” A hand fell heavily on his shoulder and Matthew jerked around to fold the owner of the voice into a bear hug.

“Holy shit, man,” Matthew said clapping his coworker on the back. “It’s fuckin’ wild here!”

Brian grinned. “I know, isn’t it awesome?” Four other men were gathered behind him, the youngest of which was already eagerly extending his hand to Matthew.

“Anthony, from the Boston territory.” Brian introduced him. “Fresh meat in the company.” He gesture to the other three. “And you already know John, Eli, and Brian number two, from the west coast meetings.”

“Why do I have to be Brian number two?” Asked a man with an over done crest of ginger hair.

“Cuz’ I was the first at Hippacorp, and thus the only Brian that matters.” Brian said, flippantly. Brian was a big man, the breadth of his chest straining in his sweat soaked polo. He slapped Matthew on the back of the neck, hard and brotherly. “Now let’s go get drunk!” He crowed and began pushing his way through the chipped entrance of the bar.

They managed to commandeer a table in the courtyard and clustered around it with their drinks, five “Muthafuckin’ Hurricanes!” As Brian had crowed at the outside bartender. Goblets of liquor in hand they spoke as colleagues about the best selling catheters and speculums and numbers and top selling districts for as long as the first cocktail lasted. Brian lit cigarette after cigarette with delight.

“Man, once you have kids you can’t do this shit anymore.” Brian dragged deeply from his smoke. “Tina would beat my fuckin’ balls off if she knew I was getting to smoke without her.”

Matthew put down a third hurricane and a Sazerac, barking lewd jokes alongside Brian until one of his younger coworkers demanded they go out and walk Bourbon Street. Matthew followed on unsteady legs. They purchased electric green drinks from an open bar in the same sort of cup the woman he’d seen take a spill had carried. It was grotesquely sweet but he was too drunk to do anything save take long deep pulls from his yellow bendy straw.

Strip clubs dotted their path and all of them stopped to gawk at the scantily clad women clapping their asscheeks to the fuzzy bass pumped down from the upstairs clubs. Barkers called out to them to come inside and enjoy delights on their company cards, all of them away from home and family and such easy marks.

Brian weaved to a stop outside of a club called Shudderbug and watched slack jawed as a dancer lifted her muscled leg over her head to stretch on the doorframe, her eyes painted with kohl and body rippling in a mesh stocking. 

“We gotta go in here.” Brian said. The younger men slapped the back of their hands on each others chests and jostled each other trying to get a better glimpse of the woman spreading herself along the doorframe. 

The burly man posted up as both barker and bouncer waved his hand at them, beckoning. “Yea, boys get in here! Come get that big easy!”

“Nah, I can’t.” Matthew held back from the press of his fellows who jeered and booed” No, look Katie won’t like it!” He said in explanation. Anthony chucked his empty grenade at his head and he ducked. The novelty cup bounced and clattered the uneven street to roll into a sunken sewer grate.

“Hey, dick!” Matthew shouted. The boys only laughed and pushed in and up the stairs to the strip club floor. Brian pumped his fists in the air and led the charge, leaving Matthew alone on the street, swaying and well past drunk.

“I’ll see you assholes tomorrow!” He yelled at the last retreating back.

It was close to midnight and the sounds of revelry were a distant roar in his ears. Another walk up window was next to the strip club that had claimed his friends and he stumbled up to it and ordered some sort of daiquiri.  Way down Bourbon Street was dark and lonely and he was pulled toward the solitude. Drink in hand he began to wander.

The gaslights that fronted houses cast a tremulous light across plaster and stone. Matthew wandered alleyways redolent with the smell of piss, vomit and garbage that sweltered even in the dead air of evening. Iron work fences led him in a confounded route over and around streets that weren’t clear on the tourist map in his hotel room. Inebriated and still exhausted from his travels, Matthew thought of laying down on a narrow sidewalk and never getting up. 

Actually, he had no fucking idea where his hotel was at this point. His head swiveled right and left, which only left him more disoriented and sick. Matthew lowered himself to sit heavily on the uneven curb. He sat in the dark, elbows propped on his knees, solo cup dangling from his fingers, and glanced up. The street sign showed him at the intersection of Ursulines and Royal. He stared at the weird flicker on the sign reading “Calle Royal” for a moment before realizing the light wasn’t thrown from a car’s head light, but from a point behind him somewhere.

Matthew turned. A few businesses had signs hanging from iron balconies, their windows dark, but a little ways down a pair of gas lanterns illuminated a sandwich board painted with the weathered, chipped image of a hummingbird. There were two lit neon signs in the window, one that simply flashed ‘open’ and a looping cursive of glass over the lintel that said “Colibri”.

The sign twigged his memory and he pulled a card from his pocket, the one the weird woman had given him at the hotel. He screwed one eye shut to read the script without the letters doubling up.

“COLIBRI: Evocative and unique scents for all. 

EST 1784

C. Royal, New Orleans

M. Espinosa, proprietor. “

He had wanted to get Katie something special. If this place was open so late it had to be some sort of fancy, bespoke shit that would get him the sort of intense, high suction praise he loved from scoring a meaningful gift. 

He rose unsteadily, sloshing the dregs of his melted daiquiri over his knuckles, as he stumbled to the heavy door. When he reached for the handle the door swung inward, startling him. 

“Mr. Richmond, I’m so glad you came to see us.” Said the woman from his hotel’s lobby. Had he told her his name? Her face was a handful of features now, even more difficult to focus on than when he had glance at it through the elevators closing doors. 

God, he hadn’t been this drunk since he had gotten with Katie. And now he was wasted in someone’s fancy shop.

Matthew tried to cover his stumble over the threshold. A thin white hand took his plastic cup from him.

“Oh, that seems to be empty.” Said the blood red smile. “Let’s get you another. Why don’t you settle down over there while I get it for you?” Her sharp nails flicked to a velvet settee. Matthew plopped down, blowing up a welter of dust and coughed. He looked around the shop. Bottles, grimy and new, round, and small, and large and square, corked with ornate blossoms of glass or eroded cork lined shelves from knee height to well over his head. 

“A nice whiskey.” The pale hand pressed a tumbler into his own. He tried to look up, to see the woman’s face, and found he couldn’t take it in. “On the house.”

“Madame will be with you shortly.” She said as she departed, heels clicking on the old cypress floor, leaving him alone.

 His head lolled against the aged velvet back of the settee. His eyes were bleary and he blinked against the inebriation and squinted up at the ceiling which was hung with an intricate chandelier. Hummingbirds were painted around the crown molding, seeming to shudder and dance. For a disjointed moment he thought he saw one of them dart towards a tulip shaped sconce on the light fixture and dip its beak inside. Matthew tilted forward to rest his elbows on his knees and squint upwards willing it to happen again. 

“Mr. Richmond?” A voice queried, deep and rich and accented. He jolted upright.

Another woman, this one aged in the elegant, beautiful fashion few women managed. Her figure was trim and somber in a tailored grey cotton suit. Her hair was long, black steamed with silver, and pulled into a simple elegant bun atop her head. Silver baubles dangled from her ears and a choker of rubies adorned her neck and spilled down her narrow chest. She was so upright and beautiful with that bright spill of gems running down her narrow chest, so poised and refined that Matthew felt like a little boy again, like he had when he saw his aging aunt Mary for the last time, before she took her own life with pills to spare herself the indignity of cancer’s withering death. 

He straightened instantly.

“Yes, uh, call me Matt.” He said, pulling himself upright from the sinking seat. His knees wobbled a bit when he extended his hand. 

“And you can call me Marietta.” She smiled. Welcome to my little boutique.”

She took it gracefully. Her nails were lacquered the same shade as her ruby necklace.  An uneasiness tolled in his chest like a bell, one heard from a distance more felt than heard. He wanted to leave and he put his discomfort down to not wanting to make an ass of himself.

“Ma’am, I’m um, christ, I’m sorry, I was out with some coworkers it’s my first time here and I’m sorry, I’m sorry I think I drank a little too much to be shopping. Can I sit for a second and get a cab? I’m sorry.” The words jumbled and collided. He offered her his signature smile, the sheepish lopsided one that typically worked on women. The one that insinuated that he was just a sweet overgrown schoolboy who just didn’t know any better shucks and golly. 

She waved off his excuses with a pshaw. “Nonsense! You’re fine. I love having visitors from far away in my perfumery.”

“I didn’t think a shop like this would be open so late.”

“I like to keep unusual hours,” The woman said with a small smile. “It brings me unusual clients.”

He didn’t know what to say to such an enigmatic thing so he kept his smile frozen and nervously squeezed her hand harder than he meant before letting it go. She gestured for him to take his seat.

“Now,” She smoothed her skirt over her knees and sat on the cushion next to him. “What can we make for you? Something for yourself? A gift for someone special?” 

“My fiancé.” Matthew said and took a longer sip from his tumbler, too long for something that tasted so expensive.

“Oh, congratulations!” Marietta cooed. “What’s her name?”

“Katie.”

“Katie! And what’s Katie like?”

Matthew let his head roll back in a way he hoped looked wistful and not shithoused. “She’s… a chef…uh, she grew up in Kansas. We met when she did the catering for my friends wedding…”

Marietta cut him off with a laugh. “That’s what she does and where she lived, not who she is. What sort of a woman is she though? To you?” She reached over his shoulder, fingers lingering over a row of bottles before selecting one and plucking off the cork.

“Huh?” He drained the rest of his whiskey in a gulp.

Marietta withdrew a strip of paper from an inner pocket of her jacket, dipped one end in to the bottle and gave it an airy wave. “Katie isn’t her job and she’s not Kansas,” She said. “What’s her personality like?” 

She handed the strip to Matthew, who gamely took it and waved it under his nose as he figured he was expected to. It was aggressively floral with an impression of institutional chemicals burning through the first impression. It was too much, too intentionally cloying as if it was meant to cover years of of use, and sweat, and life. 

It smelled like the first apartment he and Katie had rented together in northern Idaho. The thing had been a shithole, truth be told, but there had been a bright bubble of glee and terror of his future in his chest when they signed the lease. The two of them laid on the old carpeted floor together the night before before moving their things in, empty beer bottles ringed around them like a summoning circle while they picked out faces in the water stains and cracks that marred the ceiling. Katie had insisted the outline of one looked just like a Hirschfeld drawing of Peter Lorre. He didn’t know who either of those people were and she had grabbed a note book from her purse to try to draw what she meant to show him. The drawing was incomprehensible and she pinched his side every time he said it looked like an eggplant, a flounder, a Chicago skyline, an increasingly absurd array of things until their clothes were gone and she was riding him, both of them laughing and breathing the blistering fumes from the carpet cleaner. 

He still didn’t know who Hirschfeld was.

“She’s amazing.” He said simply. Marietta hummed in a way that meant ‘go on’. The tumbler was full again on the small table in front of him and he reached for it to take another drink and to buy his thoughts some time.

“She’s….funny.” He said. “She’s ferocious and funny and always knows what she wants…” He paused, embarrassed by how opaque that sounded. “Uh,” He stuttered. Marietta hummed again and screwed the cap off of another bottle. The smell of something like a wet bar rag hit him with a violence.

In one of the dives he used to go to with Jake, a month after he and Katie started seeing one another, he told his friend: “She makes me feel like everything is possible, you know? Like I don’t have to be alone?” He had said to Jake, bleary eyed and close to last call, the third pitcher of cheap beer empty between them. “I wanna be with her, man. But she scares the shit out of me.  She’s like a, like a big flower on a tree and I’m a little bud next to her but my little bud is just gonna rot off the branch?” Matthew had pitched his voice into a question for the sake of his friend who had started to smirk. In hind sight he knew there was no question in his words. Ill defined as they were, he meant them. 

“We keep peeling layers off of each other and every one of them is better than the last. I fuckin’…fucking love this girl, man.”

His old friend Jake laughed in his face and picked up the pitcher to drain the dregs. When Jake plonked the pitcher back on the table he only said: “Gay.”

Matthew didn’t answer questions from his friends about Katie in any meaningful way after that. Some unnamed fear had crawled cold inside of him and he had felt its wriggle before. He would do anything to avoid it. As stung as his ego had felt, he was more appalled at the thought his openness had permanently tarnished what he felt for her. He was embarrassed.  

In the claustrophobic air of the shop Matthew began to sweat again. The gentle churn of the overhead fan did nothing to cool him.

“You know, I think I could create the perfect thing for you.” Marietta patted his hand. “Why don’t I make a scent for you that will perfectly compliment you?”

“It’s not for me, it’s for Katie. I told you I was here to get a gift for Katie.” Came the muzzy thought. 

“That, um, yeah, that would be nice? As long as I think Katie will like it…” He said. “Uh, um…” He reached into his back pocket for his wallet. “I don’t know if I have the money…” He flipped it open and rifled through his cards. If there was one thing he knew about salesmen it was that the suggestion of poverty was a conversation ender. He wanted to leave. He was drunk and tired. 

Marietta placed a gentle hand over his fumbling fingers. Matthew glanced up and squinted. The jewels on her neck flashed in the flickering light and hurt his eyes. The touch of her fingers was so kind.

“I think you know what to give me.” She said.

And Matthew only slid his hand into his pocket and pulled out the worn coin. She held out her hand and he placed it into her palm.

When she smiled, it was a smile hungry and youthful.

“Wonderful, Matthew. Let’s retire to the courtyard.” She said, rising from her seat. No dust clung to her clothes. “I find that selecting scents works best in the open air. You can get so much more from the experience of it.”

He followed her through a side door, glass in hand and full again. She steadied him with a hand on his elbow. 

“Just through here.” She said. “I’ll be with you shortly.”

The courtyard was small, two iron chairs sat opposite each other with a low glass topped table between them. Matthew dropped heavily into one of the chairs and his head lolled a heavy circuit to take in his surroundings. Flowering vines twined up the old brick, bushes clustered in the garden divots which also were in blossom, heavy and white and reeking their perfume around him. In each corner of the little square a tree grew, branches twining to form a natural canopy of leaves and fruit. A hum buzzed all around, so deep Matthew could feel it in his spine.

He sat in one of the chairs and drank. The blossoms around him put out such an intoxicating, soothing scent that he dozed for a moment.

“Let’s begin, Mr Richmond.”

Matthew jerked upright. When he glanced down he saw an array of bottles in front of the Madame and another full glass of whisky. He reached for it, because he knew he was meant to do so.

“Alright.” He slurred.

Marietta drew another strip of paper from her jacket and dipped it into an open bottle. 

“If I were to make a scent for you,” She said, offering the strip. “Would something like this this appeal?”

Matthew lurched forward and inhaled. 

Cut grass. Summer sun overhead. His uncle shouting; “Don’t be a fucking girl!”  A shovel poised over the twitching body of a snake. “Come on, come on!”  Matthew bringing the shovel down. 

“There you go,” Marietta said. “Now this.” 

When she held another strip  of paper up to him and he took it and inhaled. Musk and close quarters, the smell animal thick.

When he was a teenager, Matthew was a good track runner, not the best, but good. He helped win games and everyone adored him for it. Wet soil soaked his nose in the rising sun as his legs pumped. The drifts of mist billowing off the spongy asphalt looked so good and magical as he pounded the track. Matthew loved running. Nothing to think about, just go fast, follow the track, no choices. The damp of the morning clung to him. In the showers after practice he had glanced up to see the track coach watching, rubbing himself and looked away quickly and silently. He ran for one more year and then quit for weed and girls and basement parties.

Matthews face felt hot. His stomach roiled. Whiskey sloshed over his fingers and it was the only thing that made him understand how badly his hands were shaking.

“Now this.” Marietta held another strip to his face. He inhaled and it was the closet when he was eight. The carpet always had a weird smell to it. Strawberry candy on his cousins breath.

“It’s fine.”  His cousin said ”Everyone does it.” 

 Matthew struggled to sit up. Marietta was holding up another piece of paper to his nose and he pushed it away.

“I don’t want anymore.” He said. 

“Oh, sweetheart,” Marietta said. “We still have such a long way to go.” She snapped her fingers and her immaculate assistant came into view. “But lets have a little break while I pick out the next samples.”

A jar of something was held under his nose and he reared back enough for the contents to come into focus. 

“Coffee beans are a wonderful way to cleanse the nasal palate.” She gestured for him to lean over and inhale and he took a shaky breath.  At his elbow the assistant with the empty face poured another glut of liquor into his tumbler.

“I think…I think I’m done.” He said.

“Just a courtesy.” Marietta said, sweeping the bottles off of the table and clicking away. “It’s there if you want it.”

Left alone again Matthew had nothing to do. He blinked around the courtyard, looking for the exit, thinking he could quietly, politely leave, but he couldn’t seem to locate the door they had come through. Nothing but the flowing vines covering the high brick walls and the chirp of hidden frogs, the gurgling of a fountain set into the western wall. He sipped and looked, sipped and looked, tried to look sober and unbothered. There was a glass of water on the table to his left. He stared at it, then drained his tumbler in one gulp, the water in three.

The greenery seemed to spin around him.  He buried his face in his hands. The rough, raw scent of his own palms hadn’t changed from when he was young, his posture the same all hunched and still listening to his parents raised voices flaying one another through the heat register of his second floor bedroom. 

“Do you even give a fuck, Geoff?”

“I clearly give a fuck, Karen, or I wouldn’t go into work every day while you sit around the fucking house-“

“You think I just sit around the fucking house? I just watch tv and eat chips while poor fucking you suffers through your fucking day!? Who takes care of Matt and Tim? Who feeds them and makes sure they do their homework and washes their clothes? It’s not you!”

A door slamming. An engine starting in the driveway. 

Clink, clink, clink, clink. 

“It’s also good to smell your own skin.” Matthew pulled his face out of his hands to see Marietta placing bottles in a neat row along the glass table top. “Even better than coffee beans. It truly restores the senses and makes you remember who you are.”

He could only stare at her.

“Now,” She unscrewed the cap to the first bottle and he screwed his eyes shut. “Let’s continue.”

Acetone burned his nostrils. Tom and he spent most of eighth grade face down in paper bags full of glue before earth sciences. Acrid urine from the boys restroom. The unnatural lavender scented cleaner that never masked it, that only made the stink heavier, worse.

“This one now.”

Sweet and cheap, bottom shelf wine that came in two liter bottles and his mother in the recliner his father usually sat in like a desposed queen watching her country burn all around her. The cloying stench of her untoward body and the rot on her breath when she said: “You can go skateboard with your friends until ten at night but you can’t pass a goddamned english class?”

There was a beating in his ears, more felt than heard. His eyes couldn’t focus. It was how drunk he was, that was the only reason his scattered mind could supply for how the air around him seemed to judder and shake.

“Now this.”  Marietta uncorked an amber bottle no bigger than her thumb. She didn’t offer it to him on a strip of paper or hold out the bottle itself but the smell hit him like a bullet right in the center of his face.

Earthy and fungal. The girl’s name was Abigail and she had started as a freshman along with Matthew. She plodded the halls carrying stacks of 17 magazines and a binder covered in stickers of cartoon tigers. Stacked on top were two VHS cassette tapes of 007 movies. She carried them everywhere and never spoke. Her hair was always a rats nest and the other students curled their lip when she scuttled by. 

“Why does she always smell like cold cream of mushroom soup?” Beth, the hot sophomore asked no one, but garnering the laughter of everyone not Abigail in the hall one day in late winter. Matthew laughed the loudest and was rewarded for it. Normally Beth shrugged his arm off when he threw it around her shoulder when she said something mean and funny but she didn’t this time. He had a bet with his friends that he could definitely at the very least finger her before the end of semester. 

Abigail scuffed her shoe on the ground, pulled her math book from her locker, and scurried away clutching her binder and tapes to her chest. 

In Matthew’s chest a festering boil of contempt and hate grew. She didn’t even seem embarrassed that her hair looked like shit or that she wore the same raggedy sweatshirt everyday. She painted flowers on her face sometimes like a little kid. It wasn’t like she was weird and smart like the scrawny pieces of shit the teachers fawned over. She was just weird and useless. And she just walked around everyday like it was her fucking right. Like she could just be like that and not understand what a little worm she was. The pathetic bitch.

A little pop sounded in the courtyard. Another bottle, the smell hot and gushing and reeking copper tang. The smell of a weaker animal in fear and pain.

Matthew and Tom and their other best friend Aaron had the best time barking “HI ABIGAIL” right into her face when they passed her between classes, just to watch her jerk away and scuttle faster down the hall in her cheap, worn Keds. One time she even tripped and tipped her armload of magazines and tapes all over the ground. The surge of glee Matthew felt while watching her cry and scramble to gather them all up had to be how lions felt when they ripped into a gazelle. 

 The taste of her dismay was delicious on the back of his tongue and he had felt so triumphant he kicked one of her magazines across the floor and sent it skittering away from her snatching fingers. Everyone thought it was hilarious watching Abigail dive after it except for Ms. Reese, who hauled him into the principles office and had him suspended for three days.

“What am I supposed to do with you?” His mother had hissed, hands braced on the kitchen sink. His father hand’t been living there for about a year, though he dropped in to fuck his mom and give his little brother legos sometimes. “Like, what am I supposed to do?”

Matthew leaned over the arm of his chair and vomited onto the paving stones. His nose ran and he scrubbed his arm across it. 

“I don’t want anymore.” He choked, begged in a child’s timid voice.

“I want more.” Marietta said hungrily.

When Matthew looked up, her eyes had shrunk into little black beads. The rubies around her neck bled and spread a stain on her skin. Her arms blurred with motion and her face seemed to melt into a vicious point. Behind her a blurred green figure darted back and forth.

“I want more.” Marietta whispered and matthew watched appalled and frozen as a long pointed tongue darted out across the low glass table and touched his face.

Another bottle was placed before him and it fell with awful finality.

Clink.

“Don’t.” Matthew begged.

Marietta pulled the stopper from it with relish and the whole day came back. Wet mulch, cold air, tobacco, fresh blood, secret marrow from the bone, layer after layer of smell so visceral and close at hand. 

It had always lived inside of him as a fact of his life but he had managed to look away from it for years, to cordon it off from his everyday existence and deny how it leaked into how he lived in the world.

The road that ran between his childhood house and the high school was mostly park. In early autumn the Idaho air was crisp with frost and heavy with the scent of pine. Matthew, Aaron, James, and Tom used to meander through it’s back trails, smoking cheap cigarettes and garbage weed and fucking around before going to watch porn back at Matthew’s. They always stopped at this one particular bend in the bark dust path to swing off of a low branch and bullshit for a while. Every day after school they had done this and no one had never intruded on their boyish solitude. 

Until one day in September the sound of footsteps came shuffling around the path.

Aaron dropped his cigarette in the mulch and stomped on it as Matthew dropped down from the tree he’d been climbing.

“Dude, hide the joint! No, just throw it away!”

“I just fucking bought this!”

“Shhh! Someone’s coming!”

They were expecting the footfalls to come from some older couple out for a walk, at worst a park security guard. But it was just Abigail, holding her pile of magazines to her chest and walking down the middle of the path like- Like it was her fucking right. To just be walking around not knowing what she was, what she looked like.

Tom snorted when he saw her and relit his joint. 

“Thank god.” He said. James waggled his tongue at her as she approached but she didn’t look up, just maintained her pace, eyes on the ground. 

“Hi, Abigaaaail.” Aaron sang to no response. 

She pretended not to register their presence at all and that set Mathews blood boiling.

“Aaron said, ‘Hi, Abigail”.” Matthew stalked to cut her off. “Hi Abigail. You don’t want to say Hi?” She moved to go around him and he butted his face into her downcast one. “You can’t say fuckin’ Hi? Are you too retarded to say Hi?”

Pop. Another cork. Another bottle. Matthew squirmed in his iron seat and tried not to inhale, but the body breathes in regardless. Fetid earth, mold, rotting pine needles.

A ravine had run alongside the path. When Matthew was little, all the kids called it a creek. It usually had a sluggish spill of water flowing down it’s center, except in the driest summers. It wasn’t until he was older he found out it was just a sewage runoff from the suburbs. They had played in shit water as kids like it was some natural spring from a fairy tail. He always smelled the water pooling in the hollows of the trench as a teen and knew it’s reek for what it was.

Aaron’s hand was on his arm at one point. Matthew caged Abigail off from her attempts to duck by and his voice was rising:

“You don’t say Hi? Huh? You don’t know how to say Hi to some one trying to be nice, huh?”

She made a sharp motion to dip around his left side and he shoved her with all of his strength. 

He had blazed with satisfaction when she pitched backward over a fallen branch, his friend’s call of alarm distant in his ears. She was going to fall right on her stupid fat ass and ruin all of her stupid magazines in the shit water. 

That certainly happened, but more than that. Her momentum carried her back over a flat rock and over the drop into the ravine. She landed badly on a boulder sticking out of the mud and they all heard the bone snap. Matthew and Aaron and James and Tom froze. Matthew was the only one standing directly over her when she rolled onto her back with a confused, pained whine and brought her arm up to cradle against her chest. Her forearm bent unnaturally and in a wash of blood he saw the white gleam of her ulna poking though. She looked at it with the same bewilderment he did, then looked up at him with wide wet eyes.

Then she began to howl and Matthew was out of there, back towards his house at a dead run. When he got inside he went straight to his room and laid down. He laid there for days, somehow came down with the flu which kept him out of school and in his mother’s rare consideration. He waited for the call to come, from the police or Abigail’s mother or maybe the school. 

It never did. It wasn’t until he graduated that he realized it wouldn’t. No one was coming to punish him. He could do things and get away with it. The mantle of a coward fit him like a tailored suit. Just like his aw shucks smile that got him out of trouble with women who weren’t Katie or his mother.

Pop. A medicinal smell, the smell of damp skin in plaster, old glossy paper. Matthew smelled it when he passed her in the halls when he went back to school. It was easy. He didn’t have to change, didn’t have to say anything, just follow the track, run, not think. He could slide around anything if he just stayed on the track.

“And that’s what I wanted.” Marietta whispered with delight. 

Matthew cracked his eyelids open and saw tufts of moss blanketing a cracked brick. He had fallen from his chair and lay with his cheek pressed to the ground. He couldn’t move. His stomach roiled and all around a tremendous thrumming consumed him. Under it a thin laugh burbled up. 

“It’s so good.” The voice of her assistant moaned.

“It’s a good one.” Marietta said, her voice hushed and excited. “I know, this is a very good one…”

 A stiletto clad foot kicked at his shoulder, rolling him onto his back. Two pairs of black eyes and two long needle beaks regarded his prone form. There was no way it was close to sunrise but the figures that bent over him were wreathed in a terrible glow, the air around them seizured. He tried to move his limbs and found he could not.

He couldn’t even find the strength to scream when the beaks dipped down and began to drink, the thrum and pulse held him to the ground.

He lost consciousness.

Matthew smelled coffee first, heard a voice second.

“Hey, man, Can’t have you sleeping here, okay?”

Matthew coughed and opened his eyes. He lay with his cheek pressed to a welter of old moss covered brick, a liberal handful of coffee beans scattered across the ground. His head ached and his shirt stuck to his back in the heat of the August morning.

“Hey,” The voice came above him and a ways off. “Tell me you aren’t dead because seriously I can’t deal with another dead tourist.”

He sat up abruptly and sent the young man with the push broom jerking back and dropping the cigarette he held in his other hand. 

“Jesus.”

“Yeah,” Matthew scrubbed a hand over his face and looked around. “Sorry…”

Casting his eyes around he saw he had woken in the ruins of a courtyard. Half fallen walls bordered the square, pulled down by age and climbing weeds. A pipe dripped fetid water into a neglected pond over on the western wall. A vine covered in orange trumpet shaped blossoms curled around the eroded masonry at the base of the ruined spout. He knew he was Matthew and nothing else.

“Cool, you’re not dead. Awesome. You gotta go though.” The young man absently pushed his broom through a layer of dirt on the sidewalk. “Uh, you need the number for a cab…or…”

Two hummingbirds darted back and forth among the blossoms, their wings beating, beating, beating.

Matthew gained his feet with a quickness that sent his guts topsy turvy.

“No, thank you,” He said. “I’m sorry, I guess I can’t hold my booze like I used to.” He offered an apologetic look to the street sweeper. “Thanks for not calling the cops on me. I’ll get out of your way.” 

Matthew moved to flee through an opening in the tumbled down walls and was halted by the boy’s voice again. 

“Don’t forget your package!”

Matthew turned and looked down at the space he had laid in. There was a small red paper bag sprouting a froth of yellow tissue paper sitting neatly on the cobblestone. He lunged to snatch it up and nodded to the street sweeper and made a smile that was more of a wince. He plunged into the narrow streets at a clip that was not quite a run and didn’t stop until he hit the paving stones of Riverfront Park. The river had a dark, spicy odor to it, and while the humidity made him feel claustrophobic, the scant air off of the Mississippi River cleared his lungs. He looked into the open blue sky and inhaled.

The bag still dangled from his fingers. 

In his pocket his phone trilled with a weird ringtone. He let it go until it stopped, staring into the mass of tissue paper. Another chirp from his phone, then another tinny ringtone, its notes unfamiliar. Matthew raised the bag to his face and hesitantly inhaled.

Laying in his bed in his childhood home, his comforter still smelled the same. That seemed unfair considering his Grandmother was gone and he was only back for the funeral. Every thing should have looked and smelled different-

Matthew swung the bag overhead like a sling and hurled it as far as he could out into the slow slide of the Mississippi River.  A few birds dipped to investigate the bobbing red paper and veered off abruptly.

Matthew turned away and walked towards what he thought was a street he should walk down and thus his hotel. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and called the first number back, the one that said “Cuddlebear”.

“Sweetie? Hey, how was your night?” A voice answered on the first ring. “Are you ready for the convention?”

He was Matthew, he knew that. He knew he liked women. He knew he had a hotel to stay in. He knew those things and he knew his nose was full of a thousand scents and none of them meant anything to him. He knew his body was sweating and his head pounded. He knew nothing else aside from that.

“Um, yeah,” Matthew said to the woman on the phone. “Sorry, who is this?”