ink in the trees

short fiction

Parallax // 2017
Dream Eater // 2014, in The Legendary
Decay // 2013
The Sun Upon My Skin // 2013
You Dream of Birds // 2012, in THE2NDHAND
The Ghost // 2012

poetry

Espero // 2017
Aluminum Girl // 2012
Morning After // 2012

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Espero

Morning After

how lightly my heart tapped
to your simmering tempos.
ingots of iron and gold
paved the world at our heels.
too thick, that spice in your smile--

a cold morning,
and empty eyes.

Aluminum Girl

I haven’t taken very good care of you.
I can admit that.
It took me at least a week
To drag you, limping,
Into the garage to fit you with
A black rubber prosthetic donut.
And instead of giving you
The warm milk and bed rest you deserved,
I tugged you out on to the street.
Okay yeah, you were on crutches,
But I had places to go.

And, alright, so after the flat
It did take me a solid month
To get that leg of yours looked at.
But the Pep Boys mechanic
Made some comments about my chest
So I drove you off in a huff.
And when I finally took you back
One more month later
I spent more time worrying
About the bill than if you were scared
To have strange men examine your underside.

And when your new tire kicked up a rock
That lodged itself in the glass of your eye,
I let it fester and crack
Until the infection was so thick
It buckled in on itself and left you blinded
And your soft interior exposed.
But instead of staying to hold your hand
While you had the shards cleaned from the wound,
I left you there overnight and gave them the keys.
I mean, I’m a busy girl.
I didn’t have time to sit around
In the waiting room
To see how the surgery went.

And, admittedly, when I discovered you in the mall parking lot
With your side scratched and your ear
Hanging by just the wires
I let it dangle for days so you could
Swerve dizzily around the highway
Until a cop pulled us over
And made me bring you in
To have that mangled cochlea of yours patched up.

But when that drunk, driving at midnight
With no headlights smashed into your ribs,
Instead of screaming,
You held your breath
And clutched me in the softness of your lungs
While your body broke down around you:
Spine splintering and plastic organs punctured.
And as you lay, crumpled and quiet,
Heart too broken to turn,
You loosened your grip and let me slip out,
Unscratched and unharmed.

I listened to you wheeze quiet carburetor sighs
Until they came to take you away.

I can’t keep you.
There’s no room in the driveway for
A broken down lady like you.
But maybe remembering you
With a long life and unbroken bones
Could be good enough?
I can’t help but picture you
In a field under a flat halo of snow
And a family of raccoons nestled safely
In your polyester embrace,
Lending them your warmth, or really,
Anything else you’ve left to give.

The Ghost

The ghost’s body was never found, and thus never buried, and so it had nowhere to go. None of the others in the local cemetery wanted to share their graves. Even Mrs. Dunham, who had an entire mausoleum to herself, refused the ghost any space.

“I’m just awfully settled as is,” she told it, “You understand.”

It seemed to the ghost that just about everyone had an excuse. Whether it was a lack of space or a dislike for company, the ghost found itself turned down wherever it looked. Only Mr. Garcia, who resided beneath a flat, rose-colored marble headstone, had the nerve to be honest.

“Nobody wants to share their coffin with some no-name idiot,” he told the ghost.

“But that isn’t fair,” said the ghost, “You only know your names because they’re written down for you. I haven’t any place to find mine out.”

“Yeah, tough break,” said Mr. Garcia, who had not been a very sympathetic in life. So the ghost continued to drift with no place to rest, as wisped and lonely as a winter cloud. Eventually he came upon a graveyard in the forest. It was vine-speckled and overgrown, and the tombstones far too eroded to make out their messages. The ghost picked the one that seemed the nicest out of the bunch and wafted over, trying to look friendly.

“Excuse me,” the ghost said sheepishly.

“Who’s that!” asked its occupant. She didn’t sound as though she’d like any company, but the ghost had grown desperate.

“I haven’t anywhere to rest. Please, may I share your grave with you?” said the ghost.

“What! You’re outta your skull,” she said.

“I’m very quiet, you’ll barely even notice me there,” pleaded the ghost.

“What do you want a grave for anyway? You’re one lucky son of a bitch! Well, lucky for someone’s who’s dead, anyhow,” she said.

“What do you mean?” the ghost asked.

“I mean it’s boring in here! But you can go anywhere you like. Quit whining and travel abroad or something,” she said.

“Oh, I hadn’t thought of that,” said the ghost.

“Yeah, I’m a real fuckin’ genius. Now scram!”

So the ghost took her advice and began to travel the world. It swept across deserts and dipped into dark ocean chasms. It wandered beneath paper lanterns, under stars and city lights. It circled the Earth until there was nothing left to see, and so it went even farther. It roamed through the glow of the moon and clung to the wild tails of comets. The ghost danced through bursts of nebulae, skated across the wastelands of other worlds, and saw the final breaths of far-dying stars. It moved through sound and energy, though light, space, and time. It watched all that was beauteous and wonderful across the universe until it forgot that it had ever been lonely at all.

You Dream of Birds

Part One
In Which You Dream of Birds

Four nights before your birthday, you dream of birds. There are a thousand of them perched in a great tree, their white wings drooped elegantly down their sides and their feathers trailing behind them like wedding veils. They sing a thousand beautiful songs each night, and you know this because they are singing them to you now. But one of them has no beak, and you know that if you catch it, it will grant you a wish.

When you wake up the sky is like frosted pearls, and you know that you must have a bird.

Part Two
In Which There Are Ants in the Walls

You have no idea why you didn’t think of purchasing a bird before. It is easily the best idea you have ever had. You can hang out with the bird on your shoulder and feed it crackers and teach it foul language and you simply must have a bird.

But there is one small hurdle to leap before you can get one, and that hurdle is your roommate.

Your roommate’s name is Narandal and she is from Mongolia. You didn’t know that was even still a place that had people in it, but apparently it is because every time you come home she’s right there in your apartment being Mongolian. Narandal is a sweet girl with a round face and dark hair, but she has obsessive compulsive disorder. You think it’s a little weird, but you guess you’re okay with it. You try not to make a fuss out of anything she does. Besides, her OCD means the apartment is always clean and as far as you’re concerned that is just swell.

But it’s also why a bird may be a problem. Animals are messy. You will need to go about this proposal very delicately.

When you get home, your roommate is sitting on the living room floor, peering earnestly at the couch. It is white and spotless, as is the carpet she is sitting on. There is a length of yellow measuring tape in her hand.

“Oh! Hello,” she says, a bit startled by your arrival.

“Hey Nina,” you say. You call her Nina because you do not know how to pronounce her real name. “What’re you doing down there?”

“Oh, the couch, it needs to be two inches away from the wall.”

“Why?”

“Well! You know, there could be ants in the walls,” she says, looking at her hands.

“Oh, neat,” you say. Narandal smiles at you and continues her meticulous calculations. You pause for a few moments before continuing. “Hey, so, I was wondering, do you mind if I get a bird?”

“A bird?” she asks. Her expression does not look promising. You grapple for a way to get her to agree. You must have a bird.

“Yeah it’s uh, it’s not my bird. It’s for, um… my friend. She’s going to… Canada. She needs me to watch it.”

“Oh,” she says, “How long will your friend be in Canada?”

“Uh. A while,” you say.

Your roommate looks uncertain.

“I’ll keep it out of the way in my room! And she says it’s like really quiet.”

“Well, alright,” Narandal says. Your heart explodes into multicolored confetti.

“Okay, cool. You need any help with the couch?”

“No, no. I’m fine,” she says, eyes fixed on the couch cushions. But you barely hear her. You are already in your room looking up pet stores.

Part Three
In Which You Have Waking Dreams

That afternoon you head out to purchase your bird. The pet store you decide on is called Basically Birds, which you think is a bit silly because how could anything be Complicatedly Birds, but you are just an accounting undergrad so what the hell do you know about bird stores anyway.

You park your car in a drab shopping plaza filled with sidewalk cracks and angry mothers. Basically Birds is nestled between a thrift store and an Armenian bakery. The smell of burnt sugar wafts over you as you head inside the pet shop.

Basically Birds turns out to be a very self-explanatory name. It is basically filled with birds. Everywhere. There are cages of birds on the walls and hanging from the ceiling and standing on the floor and just about anywhere a cage could possibly go. The birds that fill them are multicolored and numerous. Tufts of their feathers wander through the air like flecks of prismatic ash. Some of these birds you immediately recognize: a fat, ruby-red macaw, a slim ivory cockatiel, a shy brown finch. Yet others seem strange to you, the patterns on their feathers complicated and alien. They regard you with wide black eyes when you draw close. You can see your face, awkward and flat, reflected in their glassy surfaces, so you stare at the floor instead. The carpet is some kind of brown, and dust puffs out from it in tiny A-Bomb clouds whenever you shift your feet.

Eventually the owner of the store shuffles sleepily through the corridor of cages to greet you. With your nose still saturated with the scent of sucrose from the bakery outside, you find yourself immediately comparing her to a cake. If cakes could be people, you feel that she is just what one might look like. She moves toward you, large and lumbering, as though she may tilt too far and topple over at any moment. Her face is framed by lazy curls of russet hair that spill out from her scalp and her clothes are candy-colored and puffy. Her eyes, deep and tired, examine you skeptically before she welcomes to the store.

“Hi! I’m, uh, I’m here to buy a bird,” you tell her. You find yourself raising your voice to compete with the squawks and chirps around you.

“Obviously,” she says, moseying over to the counter near the door. You note disappointedly that her voice is bored and gray and not very cake-like. “What kind?”

This question, though simple, catches you a little off guard. You didn’t really think about what kind of bird. You just want a bird. You are going to feed it crackers and teach it foul language and train it to bring you tiny objects that you are too lazy to fetch across the room. Who cares what kind it is?

“Well, maybe one that can talk?” you venture, “And… that’s friendly?” Your thoughts linger, for a moment, on the impressive remaining balance of your student loans. "Not too expensive."

“Parakeet,” the store owner responds before leading you over to a tall gray cage filled with small, flashy birds the color of almost ripe bananas. They flutter excitedly from perch to perch at your approach, chirping pleasantly and preening their feathers. A few of them hop closer and turn their heads to the side to view you with one eye before scampering away again. You decide that parakeets are adorable.

“Which one?” the owner asks.

You lean forward to give the flock a closer examination. They all seem pretty wonderful, but pretty identical too. How does she expect you to choose? You spend a few moments watching them quietly, trying to see if there are any personalities that stand out, but none do. They nibble at their yellow-green feathers and climb up the walls and squabble with each other for rights to the food bowl.

And then you see it.

Hidden away at the very top of the cage, above your head, is a bird the color of a pale summer sky. It is the sort of blue Aztecs wore in beaded flecks in their hair. It’s the indigo-gray that swallows up the sky after a deep storm. It’s the kind of sapphire that splashes up from the sea when it meets an ancient cliff. It is the innocent cobalt of a fresh-picked berry.

It is the brilliant cerulean of a cloudless dawn. It is all of these, and yet none of them at the same time. It is beautiful. It is perfect.

“That one!” you say, pointing up at it.

“Huh,” the owner says, “You sure?” You nod enthusiastically.

She shrugs and reaches over your head to open a small latched door at the top of the cage. Several birds scatter out of the way of her hand, but the blue bird does not seem to mind the invasion of its space. She gathers it up in her palms and, holding it gently, removes it from the cage and places it into a small box. You hand her several crumpled bills from your pocket, take the box, and head for home.

Part Four
In Which There Are Two Thousand Eyes

Three nights before your birthday, you dream of birds. They circle their great tree as a flock. Their fluttering sheds the small, fluffy feathers beneath their wings and these fall around you like snow. You call up to them, asking them to come down and sing for you, but you cannot hear your voice above the discordant ruffling of their wings. They do not land. One thousand white feathered heads turn look at you from above.

They watch you until you wake up.

Part Five
In Which You Speak to the Wings Beneath the Sun

Your roommate Narandal is not interested in seeing the bird. She is incredibly busy. When you wander out into the kitchen to give your new bird some quiet time, you find that she has removed everything from the cabinets and has set to lining them with very precisely cut lengths of cardboard. She’s good at it, and you wonder where she learned to cut cardboard for lining cabinetry. You speculate over what she did when she lived in Mongolia. Sometimes you hear her speaking in another language over the phone, and you wonder if she is talking about you.

Narandal never speaks to you about her old home, which is probably because you never ask. The one time you did, she told you that her mother had abandoned her when she was very young, and you weren’t sure what to say about that, so then she told you her real name.

“My mother chose it,” she explained to you, smiling and patient.

“How do you say it? Narndle?”

“Narandal. Roll the R,” she said gently.

“Narrrr-andle,” you said, butchering it as much as possible.

“Nina is fine,” she said.

“What does it mean?” you asked. Narandal paused a few moments before responding, looking thoughtful.

“Sort of like… a pair of great wings spread out beneath the sun.”

“That’s beautiful.”

“Yes. I think choosing it is the one thing she did right,” Narandal said with a frown, referring to her mother, and it was then you decided not to ask again. At the time you meant you’d never ask her about Mongolia, but somehow not talking about Mongolia became not talking about anything at all. You don’t ask her why she thinks there are ants in the walls, or why covering the cabinets in cardboard will keep them safe, or why she scrubs the counters even when they’re already glittering.

You leave her in her life and you stay occupied in your own.

Part Six
In Which You Wait For Silence

After sitting silently for an entire day, your new bird has begun to move. It slides slowly across its perch to examine the toy on one end, and then back to the other side, over and over. It does not seem very similar to the excitable fluttering you observed at the pet store, but you are sure that it will take up more entertaining behavior in time. It is cute with fluffy feathers and you are going to teach it foul language and feed it crackers and take it for walks in the bird park, if that is even a real thing. You just need to be patient, as the woman you bought it from suggested.

So you leave the bird to get comfortable. While it settles you work on knitting a hat for your friend’s new baby. You can’t remember if it was a boy or a girl, so you make it green. You work on a paper for your Auditing and Corporate Governance class, which is exactly as boring as it sounds. You pick up your room a little while Narandal washes the living room walls. You check your work schedule for the coming weekend. You quietly, and patiently, wait for your bird to notice you.

And that patience is rewarded with a shriek.

There is no other way for you to describe it. Suddenly, with provocation, your bird has begun to scowl and scream. The noise is high-pitched and unpleasant in every possible way. It flaps its long, beautiful wings and clicks its tiny orange beak and shouts and shouts and shouts.

This is not what you expected at all.

You phone the owner of Basically Birds, and she answers in a manner that suggests a recent nap. You picture red velvet cupcakes in the place of her hair as you speak to her.

“Hi, I bought a parakeet from you the other day and it’s making this really loud, squawking kind of noise,” you tell her.

“Yup,” she says, “They do that.”

“What do you mean, they do that?” you ask.

“They do that. They make all sorts of noises. That’s one of them,” she sounds bored with you.

“Well, you didn’t say that before,” you say, confused and worried.

“Yup, well, they do that,” she says again.

“Is there a way to make them stop?”

“Just give it attention and don’t stress it out. Should shout less. But they still do that. It’s one of their sounds.”

“Okay. Thanks, I guess,” you say, before hanging up the phone.

It takes another ten minutes for your new bird to calm down. Its vocal chords exercised, it takes to sitting silently once more. You are left feeling nervous and unsure, and you do not even think about feeding it crackers.

Part Seven
In Which Something is Wrong

Two nights before your birthday, you dream of birds. They funnel into the sky like a glorious waterspout, but something is wrong. They are not beautiful and elegant. Instead, they are ragged and afraid. They flee their great tree as though it will bite. “What’s wrong?” you ask them, “Where are you going?” One of the birds lands on your shoulder.

“We have seen one thousand silver suns in the sky,” it says, “And they light the way to freedom.”

“But where?” you ask, watching the cloud of wings above you, “Where are you going?”

You turn to look at the bird and it is gone. The bird with no beak has taken its place, and it cannot speak to you. It turns its head to face you with one eye. It is wide and black and deep, like a chasm that falls down to the center of the Earth. You shiver, and find that you can wish for nothing but for it to leave.

Part Eight
In Which You Take the Bad Luck

Your roommate is too nervous to drive anywhere, so the next morning when she tells you that she needs groceries you are the one to take her. You’re happy to go this time. Your new bird is still shrieking about once an hour and you would be lying if you said it wasn’t a little annoying. You wait quietly as she examines the expiration dates on every item she selects, sometimes rifling through a shelf for several minutes to find a specific one. She blinks nervously at the shelves as though they are plotting to kill her.

When you get back to the apartment, Narandal refuses to go inside. There is a white cat lounging near the door. “We have to wait,” she tells you, grasping your upper arm, “We have to wait for someone else to go near to take the bad luck, or it will be ours.”

“That’s black cats,” you tell her.

“No,” she says, her dark eyes fixed on the animal’s fur, “No, it is white.”

You walk up to the door and shoo the cat away. You don’t think OCD makes people superstitious, so it’s probably just one of those Mongolian things. She probably has all kinds of crazy foreign ideas about bad omens and spirits and junk. Your roommate smiles cautiously at you as you walk inside together.

While Narandal spends the next hour putting her purchases away in carefully measured rows, you go to check on your new bird. It screeches at your approach.

“Hey, shh, shh, relax. It’s okay, little bird. It’s alright,” you say in a voice that could be soothing. The bird only shrieks some more. “Shhh, shhh,” you say. You promised your roommate that it wouldn’t be noisy, and you know she can hear it screaming from your room. You have to get it to quiet down, but it just won’t. The more you try to assure it, the more it yells and flutters and squawks.

“Just shut up!” you eventually hiss, but it doesn’t.

Part Nine
In Which You Dream of Nothing At All

The night before your birthday you dream of nothing at all, and this is because you do not sleep. The bird will not stop screaming. You are sure any moment Narandal will come in to confront you about it, but she does not. Why won’t it stop screaming? It seems to you that it barely even pauses to breathe. It just shouts and shrieks and screeches. You resolve the next morning to bring it back to the pet shop. Thoughts of teaching it foul language and feeding it crackers are far behind you. You barely think anything at all. It’s too loud to think.

Your fingers clutch at the quilt of your bed and the sweat of your palms rubs off on the blue-gray pattern of the fabric. Why won’t it stop screaming? You turn your head and yell back at your bird, but it is too loud to hear yourself above its shrieks. It’s too much. You leap out of bed and hurry to Narandal’s room. You need to apologize. She spends her life worrying about ants and cats and dirt and now she has to listen to your new bird and you just can’t stand it. You shove her door open and you are startled to find that she had been asleep. She sits up and asks you something. You know this because you see her mouth move, but it is too loud to hear what she is saying. She gets out of bed and clasps your hands, asking again. But you cannot hear her, and she cannot hear you when you respond. The bird isn’t just screaming now, it’s wailing and howling and squealing and roaring and you just can’t think at all.

You tear back into your room with the sun rising on your back and to your new bird’s cage. Its wings are the blue of old midnights and cold stars. You scream back at it to stop, to shut up, to keep quiet, but still you can hear nothing. Why won’t it stop screaming?

You rip open the door of the cage and seize the bird, its small beak open wide in an unholy outcry. You shake its tiny feathered form, begging it, pleading with it to be quiet, and it is only when small splotches of red begin to dye its indigo feathers do you realize that it is dead.

But its screams do not go with it. They cling to your ears and rattle at your ribcage and leap down your throat and you begin to realize that the shrieks are coming from you and it is just too loud to think, so you think of nothing at all. Every sound begins to amplify itself in your mind’s emptiness. Your heart beats staccato rolls of thunder against your chest. Your blood pulses in ocean waves, crashing and roaring on the surf of your veins. Each ear-splitting exhalation that rushes through your teeth comes as a monsoon melody, dripping down into the cavernous bellow that is boiling in your stomach. It reverberates in a harrowing cacophony of sound, jumbled together and leaping from wall to wall, breath to breath, and ear to ear. Your eyes are filling up with the red of disharmony and your hands are filled with blue feathers and hollow bones.

You sink to the floor, surrounded by the remains of your new bird.

It all stops when you run out of air. The sound dwindles into the emptiness of your lungs, shirking away like a scarlet shadow.

There is no noise, now.

And that silence, quietly deafening, is the loudest of all.

The Sun Upon My Skin

Just outside of town at the end of a thin dirt road was a tall blue house. It was old, but well-kept, and its only occupant was a girl of twenty. She sometimes went out to buy milk or to sell her quilts, but she otherwise kept to herself.

One early Spring afternoon, a man approached her home with a bundle of white lilies under his arm. He had dark, tussled hair, a handsome face, and his clothes were clean with well coordinating colors. Once he reached the front porch he knocked on the frame of the screen door, and when she opened it he seized her hands and said, “My dear, I am in love with you.”

The girl took one look at his beautiful eyes and his strong jaw and his gentle hands and said, “Well, that’s just ridiculous.”

“I adore you more than the sun upon my skin,” he insisted, pushing the lilies to her chest.

“Oh, come on, I don’t even know you,” the girl said.

“My love for you is sweeter than the scent of a hundred roses.”

“Look, I’m sure you’re in love with something,” the girl told him, “But it’s definitely not me. Maybe some idea of me, up in your head, but not me me.”

This argument struck the man as being more or less completely unreasonable, and so he left the lilies in her care and promised to return again the next day. The girl was allergic to lilies, and so she left them on the compost heap out back by the shed before going inside. She was quite sure that she didn’t want to hear his nonsense a second time, so the following afternoon when she saw him walking up the dirt road, she locked the door and drew shut the curtains and hid in the back room where there weren’t any windows.

The man stayed for an hour or two, reciting long poems with dubious rhyme schemes beneath the front second-story window. Eventually he gave up and wandered home, leaving the bouquet of daffodils he had brought on her doorstep. She was allergic to daffodil and lillies and most other flowers, so she left them to lie in the sun.

The man returned the next day, and the day after that, piling more and more flowers upon the girl’s doorstep. He stayed for hours and hours to recite his poems, calling out her name, and professing his desires, but the girl refused to come out. When the people in town began to inquire about her actions, the man told him that his love had grown too ill to set foot outside of her home, but that he still went to see her every day.

“What a loyal, sweet man,” they said. The girl began to wish he would trip on her porch steps and break his neck.

This went on for the rest of Spring, and by the time Summer was winding its way to a close, a great hedge of flowers surrounded the girl’s home on all sides. They stretched their delicate petals up toward her windows and bent beautifully with the wind. Glorious bunches of roses and chrysanthemums and orchids and pansies leaned into the walls. It was a handsome sight, and all the people in town mused that he was truly the most loyal, loving man that they had ever met.

But the girl was terribly allergic to roses and chrysanthemums and daffodils and lilies and just about every flower there ever was, so when the wind swept a great swathe of pollen up into her vents she itched and squirmed and screamed and grasped at her throat until closed itself up.

She had been dead a day or two when they found her, skin under her nails and deep scratches along her neck. Everyone said what a shame it was, and it was decided that the town would hold a funeral for her. As they laid her down on a bed of posies and orchids and just about every flower there ever was, the man stretched his arms out over her and said, “Ah, how I love her so.”

Decay

Naomi dances on her way home from school. She’s not bad. Her rain boots scrape the sidewalk as she taps out her own, strange hybrid of a quickstep mambo. Puddles get kicked up in her wake, a mixture of dead, soggy worms and decaying leaves sent flying. She twirls her umbrella like a yellow baton, throwing it up in the air and catching it after a spirited spin or two. Sometimes music accompanies her steps—“One and a two! Ratatat-tat!”—sometimes not. Her voice is tiny but excitable, and she moves like a little walking exclamation point.

It isn’t always dancing. Sometimes she rehearses little plays, dramatic retellings of how a short, curly black hair was found in someone’s mashed potatoes that day, or maybe on the discovery that one of the rats dissected in class was pregnant. Sometimes she thinks up quick jokes, or acrobatic stunts, or new ways to contort her face so that it looks both hilarious and uncomfortable at the same time. Whatever it is, Naomi practices all the way up to her doorstep. She arrives, muscles coiled and ready to spring, to launch her through the door and up the stairs.

Today, she gets through the door, and then stops.

To her left is the open entryway into the kitchen, and inside it Naomi sees something she recognizes, and does not recognize at the same time. It’s her mother, stirring a pot of soup at the stove.

“What’re you doing out of bed?” Naomi asks. Her father is leaning on the counter beside her, sniffing the contents of the soup pot. Naomi laughs, elated, and practically skips into the room, but it is then she sees that there is a fourth person in the kitchen with them, and that person is herself.

A mirror self. The girl is so perfectly identical to Naomi in every way that she’s a genuine reflection. Naomi drops her backpack, suddenly dizzy. Her mother would never be in the kitchen, let alone cooking dinner. Her father is away in the city. Not just a mirror self, she quickly decides, but a mirror family. They all turn to look at her at once, startled by her presence. Naomi drops her yellow backpack and flees up the stairs. She stumbles a few times, her rain boots still slick from the wet weather. Once she reaches the top, she rounds a corner and bursts into her mother’s room.

Her mother has been expecting her. This is something Naomi does every day. Flinging herself into the bedroom, she begins whatever performance she had been rehearsing on the way home for that afternoon.

It doesn’t usually go well.

“Not now,” her mother would say, or sometimes, “Please, sweetheart, just don’t.” Most often she just scowls. But on rare days, Naomi is rewarded with a soft smile, and even once, a light flicker of laughter. To Naomi, her mother’s laughter is the most beautiful thing in the world. Like birdsongs. Or world peace.

She could never tell what would work, though. Her wildly complicated one-person pas-de-deux complete with water gun tricks and silly-string won her a full-on grin. Yet when she attempted a similar gambit, only this time complemented by a lighter and a can of hairspray, the response was less than ideal. The only solution was to try everything and anything until a smile cracked on that tired face.

Today, Naomi has forgotten all about the dance she practiced.

“Mom!” she says, hurrying to the bedside, “There’re mirrors downstairs! Yours is making soup!”

Naomi’s mother only blinks sleepily. She thinks this is another routine.

“Please, darling. I’m trying to sleep.”

“But Mom, they’re in the kitchen! In our house!”

“Sweetie, not today,” Naomi’s mother says. She turns away and folds her pillow so that it covers both ears, and squeezes. She shuts her eyes. She becomes a forest pond in deep winter, cold and noiseless. She holds her breath like she is holding the dust of dead stars in her lungs.

Naomi shuts the door and walks back downstairs.

The mirror family is still there. The mirror mother has set the table for three, but when she sees Naomi in the doorway, she sets one place more. Naomi hesitates, then takes the fourth seat. The soup smells like summer, like a warm sun on cold skin. Like waking up and finding light in your eyes.

She watches her mirror-self sip spoonfuls of it, and finds that she isn’t hungry.

The mirror family does not speak.

The following morning, on Naomi’s walk to school, her mirror-self walks with her. The sky above looks like milk, if milk could be spread out in a thin sheet across the expanse of space. Space milk, Naomi decides. It’s cold outside, and smells like it may rain later. The mirror-self is wearing Naomi’s clothes, but no rain boots. There isn’t a second pair of those floating around.

“I don’t think you’re real,” Naomi tells the mirror girl as they walk, but even as she says it, she isn’t sure if that’s true. She can see the girl’s breath on the cool air, making tiny rainclouds. She watches her blink to wet her eyes. The mirror girl looks just as real as Naomi herself.

At school, Naomi’s friends become a hive. They buzz around her in a flurry of excitement and wonder. They reach out and touch the mirror girl’s mirror face as though it’s really made of glass.

“Where’d she come from? Is she your twin?” Naomi’s best friend, Leah, wants to know. They’re in the school cafeteria, sitting in a row at a long, rectangular table. Naomi doesn’t want to sit next to the mirror girl, but her friends insist. This novelty is too wild for them not to enjoy.

“I don’t know, she’s just in my house,” Naomi says. “Who cares, anyway?” She doesn’t want to talk about the mirror girl. This is usually when she starts planning her afternoon recitals, her friends making up the excitable first audience.

“Does she live in your room? What will happen when you move away?” Another friend asks. Naomi doesn’t want to talk about the move, either.

“Hey, I was thinking of doing a song today! Something cool, like sugar pop meets Beethoven,” Naomi says, but none of her friends are listening. They fawn over the mirror girl, playing with her braids and examining her fingernails.

“A twin, a doll!” They exclaim, delighted beyond words. Naomi feels a little sick.

By the time school is over, the sky has sighed into a soft rain. Naomi and her mirror-self walk home beneath it. There is only one umbrella between them, and Naomi does not share it. There is no dancing. Instead, she watches the mirror girl, searching for things to hate about her in the minutia of what she wears and how she moves. She imagines she is a computer scanner, taking in every pore, every hair follicle, each detail an ugly close-up. But the mirror girl isn’t just wearing Naomi’s clothes, she’s wearing her hair, her eyelashes, her arms, her neck. It’s all too familiar to revile. How could she hate her own skin?

The mirror girl is making her queasy again, and so she thinks about the move instead. The lesser of two evils. It’s in a few days. Naomi is supposed to be putting her things away in boxes to get ready, but she doesn’t want to, just as much as she doesn’t want to go.

“I like it here,” she had told her father when it was first brought up. “Can’t we stay?”

“The doctor in the city is much better than the one out here,” her father said. “It’ll be good for your mother.”

“Well what’s wrong with her?” Naomi had demanded, not for the first time. “Why is she sick?”

“I wish you wouldn’t ask so many questions,” her father said. Her mother entered the room, drifting. She was a single tuft of cloud wandering over a field. She was the moon on a black lake.

“It’ll be fun, you’ll be a chic city girl,” her father had said, trying to smile.

Her mother had not said much of anything.

Naomi doesn’t know where the mirror mother and the mirror father sleep, but her mirror-self sleeps in her room. They crunch into the bed together, side by side. No amount of arguing made the mirror girl leave, and so Naomi just makes do. She feels the heat of the mirror girl’s body and the gentle pulse of her veins as they lay next to one another. Instead of a mirror girl, Naomi imagines that the body next to her holds a tiny sun. It is broiling just under the surface of her skin. Maybe one day molten cracks will appear and it will all spill out like lava, burning wood, hissing steam.

“Why don’t you say anything?” Naomi asks. “Is your mom sick too?” She pictures dark coals in the place of the mirror girl’s eyes, which are watching the ceiling. She wonders how long it would take to go blind from staring into the sun.

When she wakes up the next morning, her mouth feels hot.

Naomi avoids the mirror girl in school that day, which is hard because they have the same schedule. She grasps for tiny moments away from her, taking the long ways to class. The hallway she detours through is wide and cool, lit by white fluorescent bulbs. Her rain boots squeak on the patterned tile floor.

“Hey!” A voice behind Naomi makes her jump. She feels like she’s being hunted, but it’s only Leah. “Why didn’t you sit with us at lunch today?” She asks.

“I don’t like that girl,” Naomi tells her. She can feel herself pouting, but she can’t help it. She realizes, in this moment, that she hates the mirror girl.

“She’s really nice! And great at listening,” Leah says. Naomi huffs.

“I’m great at listening!”

“No you’re not,” Leah says, “You’re always singing and dancing, 24/7 it’s the Naomi Show, Starring Naomi!” Naomi balks, angry and embarrassed. Leah takes her arm, offering a smile. “Which is, you know, that’s fun!” She adds quickly. “But sometimes, I don’t know, I wish you could quiet down and really pay attention to me for a change.”

“I’m sorry,” Naomi says, face red like a sunburn, but even as she says it, she’s not sure if it’s true.

“It’s okay. I guess I’ve got another you to do the listening now anyway, huh? Is she going to stay when you move?” Leah asks.

“I don’t know,” Naomi says.

Naomi spends more time with the mirror family than her real one. Her father is getting their new apartment ready in the city. Her mother stays in her bedroom. The two of them feel far away, inert. But the mirror family is lively. When Naomi comes home from school that day, mirror girl in tow, the mirror mother is already cooking dinner. As Naomi enters the kitchen she hears an egg being cracked on the side of a sauce pan. The mirror mother drops it into the pan and it sizzles loudly, steam rising from the stove. Naomi can see the space between the pan and the stovetop distort with heat, flames wavering.

As usual, when dinner is ready, there is a fourth place set for Naomi. As usual, she doesn’t eat.

“When did your voices go away?” she asks them as they quietly make short work of their meals. They notice her, but don’t at the same time. “Can you write it down or something?” Naomi persists. No answer.

“Hey!” She says, waving her arms. The mirror father gets some egg in his mustache, and the mirror mother’s mouth opens in silent laughter. Frustrated, Naomi leaves and heads up the stairs. They creak gently under the pressure of her feet. She goes up slowly, listening to each squeak and groan the old boards produce. She pictures the silence that will be the new apartment, modern and updated. Sterilized.

Upstairs, Naomi creeps into the darkness of her mother’s room. She is sleeping with her back to the door. Naomi closes it gently, takes off her rain boots, and climbs into the bed beside her. Beneath the blankets, the fabric feels cold, as though the two of them are lying in their own winter. Time, no, everything is frozen here. They are suspended, like snowflakes sighing down to Earth. Naomi listens to her mother’s quiet breathing and pictures lungs made of ice. She wonders what would happen if they cracked. She wonders if talking heats them up. She listens to her own soft breaths and wanders into sleep. This is the longest amount of time they have ever spent together.

Her mother’s blackout curtains keep the sun away, but Naomi can tell when it’s morning. She sneaks from the room once again and closes the door quickly, sealing in the frost. At school, she tries to talk less, listen more, but there’s nothing to listen to. Her friends ignore her. They are still delighted with the otherworldly strangeness of the mirror girl. “She’s not even paying attention!” Naomi wants to shout, but she doesn’t. They talk and talk and the mirror girl listens, listens.

In an act of rebellion toward her friends, Naomi begins to pack up her things when she gets home. She puts together the collapsed cardboard boxes her father left for her and starts to throw her things inside. Her belongings pile up within them, haphazard, unfolded, and splayed out. While she packs, the mirror girl unpacks, removing identical items from identical boxes. When Naomi is finished she stomps downstairs and finds the mirror mother serving scrambled eggs. She practically dances as she does it, nimble-toed and bright-eyed. Naomi sits down and devours them, still hot, letting them singe her throat on the way down. Her eyes tear, but she keeps swallowing until the plate is empty.

Spitting heat, she runs back to her room. She curls up in the mirror girl’s unpacked sheets and simmers until the sun crawls onto her skin.

It’s moving day. Naomi’s house is in boxes, yet not in boxes. She is leaving, and yet not leaving. She stands outside of her mother’s room, staring into the darkness. The air that wafts out the crack in the door is arctic, ice-age, prehistoric. She wonders if when she disappears from her old life, she will disappear completely. Is she going wink in, and wink out, like a star snuffed by a passing cloud?

There is something golden glowing beneath her skin, and she wonders how she knew that the other girl was the mirror. She feels like something dead, forgotten, and she wants to shout herself into being, she wants to shriek, to scream, to tear down whole worlds and rip galaxies to pieces. But her breath has grown too hot. It’s charring her insides, searing her lungs, and melting her teeth. Her heart is an engine, a furnace, bursting white heat. Her skin crackles and blackens and she is burning, burning, burning.

A pile of ashes. Melted rain boots.

In the kitchen, a bead of sweat drips off the mirror girl’s brow onto her forearm. It sizzles, like an egg.

Dream Eater

Kit keeps her nightmares in a jar on the floor next to her bed. The jar used to have peanut butter in it—SKIPPY® Reduced Fat Super Chunk!—but she washed it out and took off the label and wrote her name on its rust-colored top and now, there they are. They aren’t too happy about it, all squeezed together in that little plastic cylinder, but Kit is pretty sure nightmares don’t have any civil rights or anything so whatever.

For a while she tried a dream catcher to give them some sass instead, one her sister Jenny got her at a thrift store for fifty cents, but it turned out to be kind of a crock. Kit hung it over her bed and it let its ruffled, dirty feathers dangle right over her face, like the dreams of an indigenous people trampled into the dirt, but if anything it just attracted more nightmares. She imagined them at their nightmare meetings laughing, Hey, would you get a load of this moron? Actually thinks those things work! and then swooping down on her house in droves just out of spite. But Kit doesn’t mind because now they’re the chumps all caught up in a peanut butter jar and they can just fucking rot in there forever for all she cares.

“I think that’s a little mean,” Jenny tells her sometimes, usually whenever Kit shakes the jar up to make them fight. They get all rattled and riled and start biting one another. “Maybe you should just let them go.”

“Maybe you’re just jealous that you haven’t got a jar too,” Kit says, tossing it up in the air like she’s playing catch with herself. She drops it on purpose and lets it roll under the bed. Jenny pouts, because Kit knows that her sister gets the worst nightmares of all, and that Jenny’s own crummy dream catcher isn’t doing shit.

Eventually, though, the nightmares stop coming, because they like being terrible and wild and free and word had got around about the peanut butter jar under the bed in the room with the indigo curtains. Kit waits and waits under her thrift store dream catcher like a predator, a tiger stalking the underbrush, but even after a few nights nothing shows up. She takes her nightmare jar and shakes it like crazy, and they start hissing and clawing and scratching each other to pieces, but they’re still the same old nightmares and she just isn’t feeling it.

At school, Kit’s friends aren’t really that sympathetic to her sudden loss of nightmares. They pull their orange, hard-plastic chairs together in the minutes before American History to listen to her whine under the fluorescent lights.

“Just find something else to do,” Lizzie tells her, but Kit thinks Lizzie has weird teeth so she never listens to anything that comes out of them. Everyone more or less agrees when it comes to the jar thing, though.

"Isn't that what you wanted in the first place? To get rid of them?" Kelly asks. She's wearing a headband that she thinks is cool, but isn't.

“Yeah, okay, whatever. I was tired of it anyway,” Kit says, trying to sound aloof.

But back at home just looking at the jar full of nightmares is driving her up the wall. They’re not even scary anymore. If anything they’re afraid of her, just a little bundle of bruised shadows all tangled up in themselves. Their eyes crescent into red half-moons whenever she comes near, furious and frightened all at once.

So Kit takes the jar and puts on her poofy slippers to muffle the squeaky floorboards in the hallway and she sneaks into Jenny’s room. It’s always kind of cluttered, full of fairy figurines and feathers and all that new age junk. It lines the walls like she’s nested in it, cocooned in a shell of garage sale garbage. And then there’s Jenny all asleep under her shitty dream catcher with a haze of nightmares flowering like nuclear clouds over her head.

At first, Kit wasn’t that great at catching nightmares. They were sly and quick and didn’t think the peanut butter jar looked particularly inviting. Now she’s an expert. One minute they’re terrorizing an eleven-year-old and the next: imprisoned. Kit holds the jar close to her eyes and shakes. The nightmares tumble around, horrified and confused, and she laughs—but not too loud, because like hell she’ll let Jenny know she was doing her a solid.

“I think maybe my dream catcher is working,” Jenny tells her the next day on the bus to school. Normally the sisters avoid each other outside of the house, so Kit is already irritated to see her.

“Well thank God, I thought you were getting ripped off. Like, do they not have Indian shamans to bless them at the factory in China? What’s the deal?”

“Shut up, I’m serious. I was having a really bad one last night and then it just, I don’t know, it went away.”

“Yeah that’s definitely a sign. I think we, as a culture, were just like, forgiven for the Trail of Tears.”

Jenny folds her arms up and pouts. Jenny has, by now, refined pouting into an exotic art. She becomes a portrait of scowls—one you could sell for millions. “Whatever, just forget it, Kitty.”

But Kit doesn’t just forget it. She comes back every night to snare Jenny’s nightmares, squeezing more and more into the tiny prison. They fill every space, every crevice, although occasionally one or two of them escape when she opens up the jar to add more. They slither up her wrists like eels before vanishing into the ceiling.

Kit wakes up one morning with her arms throbbing. The escaped nightmares have left behind strange rashes and dark, scabbed lesions that make her skin look bubbled and sick. She itches one of the blisters and it stings in a way that she didn’t know she liked. She thinks of letting more of the nightmares out, but it’s too fun to kick them around and listen to their wailing.

Less and less of them have been coming to Jenny’s room. Kit supposes they don’t feel so fierce once they hear about the peanut butter jar. But nightmares are haughty and bitter things and Kit thinks there might be just one more lurking around in the corners. But that night when she suits up with her jar and her furry slippers and creeps in through the bedroom door, she finds no nightmares.

She sees dreams.

They fill the room in a symphony of colored lights, wondrous and ethereal. They float around her sister in clusters of rainbow clouds, flickering like purple-red bursts of nebulae. They glow faraway moons, beautiful and alien all at once. A white-gold radiance encompasses the room and the air is filled with a nameless harmony. They waterfall down the walls in cascades of light, energy, and sound and Kit takes her jar and unscrews the lid and stuffs one of them inside.

The dreams flee the room like a flock of startled birds, bursting into the night sky outside, but Kit already has her prize. She sits on the floor and presses her forehead to the jar's clear plastic side. The captured dream is drowning in the weight of the nightmares, shoved into cylindrical corners and beat against the walls, but she can still spot its wraithlike glow through the plastic and it is the most beautiful thing that she has ever seen. She begins to laugh, elated, overflowing, and it wakes Jenny up.

“What’re you doing in my room?” she asks, squinting through the darkness. Kit has her back to her but she can see something gleaming in her lap.

“Everything,” Kit says.

“Whatever.”

The next night, Kit knows she shouldn’t try for more dreams, but her fingers itch to hold them. She imagines rainbows in her hands, her jar like stained glass, casting prismatic warmth across the walls. She wonders how many dreams she can take before Jenny begins to notice. She wonders why she’s never had any herself.

It’s hot as shit outside but Kit wears a sweater to school anyway. She doesn’t want to hear any crap about the marks on her arms, and besides, the prickly wool rubbing against the abrasions makes her feel giddy. She’s wondering how to find more nightmares to bump into and more dreams to ensnare when Lizzie with the dumb teeth invites her to a sleepover after school. She sees colored lights in the back of her eyes and feels her skin aching.

“Just don’t bring that stupid jar,” Lizzie warns.

“I’m so done with that,” Kit says. She flutters her eyelashes with all the faux-boredom she can muster.

“What’re you into now?” Kelly asks her. Kelly is kind of boring, but easy to impress.

“Stealing,” Kit says. Kelly gasps while Lizzie rolls her eyes.

“Oh my God, like shoplifting? What do you take?”

Kit leans back in her hard-plastic seat, preening. “Anything that shines.”

On the way home, on the school bus, Jenny slides into the seat next to Kit. She looks wary and Kit shoves her shoulder. “What is it now?”

“Remember what I was telling you about my dream catcher?”

Kit shrugs.

“I think maybe, I don’t know, it’s working too well? I haven’t been getting even regular dreams lately. I go to sleep and it’s just kind of dark.”

“So, what?”

“So, what about you? Is yours working?”

“Oh my God, Jen, don’t be so ungrateful. The slaughter of a native people is being absolved like right before our very eyes and you’re whining about it. Take that dream catcher and frame it.” Jenny switches seats in a huff at that one, but Kit isn’t feeling as smug as she wants to.

At home, she sees Jenny taking down her grubby second-hand dream catcher. She wants to give her some crap about it, but can’t think of anything to say, and so she just goes back to her own room instead. Kit sits on her bed with the peanut butter jar. The nightmares and the dreams can’t stand being in it together. Whenever Kit shakes it, it looks like worlds ending and galaxies burning up, and it’s just so fucking rad she can barely handle it. But Jenny’s dreams have all dried up. They, too, are afraid of what will happen if they come into the house. The jar is bursting with shadows and sunlight, but Kit wants more.

She packs the jar away in her Hello Kitty tote. Eventually, her mom calls from downstairs and the two drive off to Lizzie’s house.

Despite Lizzie’s sister who also has weird teeth bugging them all night and the unbuttered popcorn during a seriously lame showing of Love Actually, Kit thinks is this more or less best sleepover she’s ever been to. She’s imagining the kind of dreams she can steal here, a buffet of bright foreign baubles laid out for an opportunistic traveler like herself. The sores on her skin have started to ooze with something dark. But then Kelly is saying something about how she wants to be a vet when she grows up or whatever and Kit spots a spark of ultraviolet. It crackles across the tip of Kelly’s ear, sizzling down the lobe like lightning, and it is the most beautiful thing she has ever seen.

“What was that?” Kit asks. She feels a stab of hunger, but not from her stomach.

“Oh, well, I was just saying it would be really cool. I mean, I love animals, and I’d get to help them all day.” More sparks, falling like fireworks, bloom from the back of Kelly’s head. Kit grabs the jar from her bag, unscrews the lid, and clamps it shut over Kelly’s dreams.

The jar bursts color. Light reflects around the room like food coloring spilled into a supernova. The jar's plastic walls sizzle with fever and heat and Kit’s eyes fill with stars. Kelly stares at nothing and Lizzie is screaming “What was that, what did you do?!” with her mouth wide open and those stupid teeth on full display. But now that Kit’s seen it, she knows where to look and off comes the lid of the jar and soon Lizzie’s dreams are gone too. The jar vibrates in her hands, erupting with an energy it can’t release, spewing starlight from its rim, but Kit needs more.

She springs through the suburban streets outside, snatching up delusions and daydreams, thieving every fantasy she can get her hands on. She steals through windows and ransacks idling cars while her arms drip black pus. She grabs wishes and hopes and passions and crams them inside the jar, stuffing it to its limits. She rips her mother’s yearning from her chest and claws Jenny’s ambitions from the back of her skull. Kit holds everything that is beauteous and terrible ever imagined in her hands, and her world goes quiet. The people around her collapse, drained and listless without the things she’s taken. They fall as silent and still as a blackout, empty husks with unseeing eyes. They breathe and blink and wander into sleepless stupors.

Kit lays on her bed, incandescent, the white heat of a star in a dark expanse. The jar pulses against her chest, radiating time and space. She stays alone in the glowing silence and thinks that, maybe later, she’ll open up the jar and let everything out again. The whole town will thank her and give her the key to the city, whatever that is, and she’ll listen to everyone talk about how wonderful she is. But she supposes she’ll hold onto it for now, maybe until she can find some dreams of her own, or at least until she feels something at all.

Parallax

Parallax Passage - the finest in inter-dimensional travel! read a faded ad on the far wall of the bus. You've seen it many times, but it never fails to inspire a frown. You've come to regard that tagline with incredible loathing. Parallax is decidedly the worst gate provider in the city. But it's also the cheapest, and since you go every week, their $140 round-trip fee is all that really works with your budget. Sometimes you consider splurging on a more comfortable luxury transference, with Dual Transit or maybe even Binary Inc., but they cost a fortune.

The bus ride to the Parallax building is long, but quiet. You always buy the earliest time slot available for a Saturday, 6:30 AM. The only other rider is an older man clutching a mass of re-usable shopping bags, and he gets off long before your destination. There hasn't been a manually driven public transit vehicle in your city for years, so when he disembarks, you're left alone with your thoughts. You spend the fifty minute ride watching the swirls of morning fog outside the window. Every once in a while you spy a shadowed shape on the sidewalk through it, and you wonder if it's someone you know. One silhouette reminds you of your brother and you grimace, turning away from the window to stare at the ceiling instead.

You had a fight with your brother last night, but it was only the most recent of many. He stopped by your apartment after work on pretense of borrowing some old CDs, but it was really just to check up on you, as usual. Of course, his checkups always ended the same way.

"So, you got any plans tomorrow?" he asked, pausing before he headed out the door. His voice was casual, but the question was a challenge.

"Yeah, same as usual," you said. Your brother shook his head, sighed. Leaned away from the door, rounding on you.

"Look, we all agree this is unhealthy," he said. "Even Dad thinks you need to get some help."

"I am getting help," you said.

"Real help. You need to talk to a professional. Nothing about what you're doing is normal."

"You don't know what it's like. Ever since she died, I..." You began, but your brother's expression had already changed from one of exasperation to pity. Just like everyone else's did when you brought her up. It made you want to vomit. You hated that look. It was infuriating, and you felt your face grow hot. "Hey, how about you stop pretending like you understand anything about this and just fuck off?"

After he was gone, you couldn't settle down. You'd been getting that look for three months straight. Even your friends, who were supportive at first, go quiet when you remind them you're busy on Saturday mornings. They just look at you sadly, their eyes shadowed with pity, and you feel like wringing your own god damn neck just so you don't have to see it anymore.

But once a week, when you take the bus downtown to the Parallax Passage inter-dimensional travel office, you actually look forward to going out. When the parallel universe was first discovered, it was all anyone could talk about. After all, crossing over to a parallel universe sounded like something out of a science fiction novel. And yet it was real. Initial expeditions between worlds were covered heavily by the media, and everyone couldn't wait to be the next person to travel over to meet their other self. The technology was swiftly commercialized. Companies were quick to cash in and facilities like Parallax and its more expensive counterparts sprung up all over.

But the novelty wore off just as quickly as it had started. After all, there was nothing to see that you couldn't already find at home. Parallel universe really meant parallel--everything was more or less identical to the universe everyone already lived in, and gate companies these days were struggling. Even giants like Binary Inc. had lowered their prices to try and boost what was now the industry of a dying fad. You don't mind--after all, it's made traveling every week actually affordable for you. But it's also made your frequent trips look strange to everyone else in your life, who got bored of crossing the inter-dimensional divide ages ago.

The sun is up but there's still a morning chill in the air when the bus finally reaches your stop, Parallax Passage headquarters. It's a short, concrete block of a building located so far downtown you've never bothered to come here for any other reason. Unlike Binary Inc., which has a sprawling, modern campus uptown bursting with extraneous amenities, Parallax Passage is hardly the picture of state-of-the-art technology. It's crammed between a deli and a partially boarded up storefront that, judging by the faded signs in the window, used to be a nail salon. The neighborhood is quiet, unfriendly. The short walk from the bus stop to the Parallax building makes you a little nervous.

Inside it's all ancient linoleum tile and fluorescent lighting, but the woman at the desk always greets you with a sly smile. "Right on time, as usual!" she says, amused by your dedication to your schedule. She's never actually asked what you do on the other side. You sign the waiver at the desk and pass her your credit chip. A minute later, and $140 poorer, she points to a door on your left. "You're gonna be at gate seven today, sweetie."

You thank her, tuck your credit chip back into your wallet, and go through the door into a long hallway. It's a little more updated than the front office, better lit and freshly painted, with rows of thick metal doors lining its left side. You navigate your way to the one with a black vinyl "7" stuck on the front and open it. Inside is a short, dark-haired man with a lethargic expression sitting at a desk, a few monitors spread out in front of him. Across from him, in the center of the room is the gate. It is a thick half-circle of tarnished metal, tall enough for you to walk beneath without bending down. Like most of the gates at Parallax, it's criss-crossed with solder lines and punctuated with bolts in varying stages of wear. The facilities probably hadn't been truly updated in years, settling instead for cheaper patch jobs on older machinery, but Parallax Passage always passed safety inspections, as you read on the many posters in the front office.

"I'm Niles, I'll be your technician for today," the man at the desk says, putting in a commendable effort to sound awake. "Can you step on the calibrator for me?" He gestures to the pressure plate installed just in front of the gate. Getting an accurate read of your weight was important to successfully pass through, though you've never read up on the science of it to find out why. You step onto the plate and Niles taps away at his keyboard for a few minutes.

"Alright, we're all set," he says, and you hear the quiet flick of the gate switch being turned on. "Have a good trip."

In front of you, the dark metal hums softly, sparks of green energy crackling across its surface. They snap and hiss like snakes made of lightning. The hum grows into a steady whine and the air around you feels charged, tense, like the hour before a thunderstorm. The ribbons of electricity grow brighter, smoother, until the empty space within the half-circle explodes into life. Waves of green-white light pulse and shudder within the frame as though the surface is alive. As you breathe in, the air tastes metallic. You take a step forward toward the gate, slowly, because it is exuding a pressure, like the push when you try to force two magnets with the same polarity together. But the force pressing against you is slight, and with a final breath you step past it and through the gate.

You have never traveled using the state-of-the-art facilities of Binary Inc., but you've heard about how smoothly its gates operate. "Just blink--and you're there!" was the tagline on its many subway ads, and you've heard that that is true. You step through and arrive on the other side, just like that.

Budget travel between parallel dimensions is not quite so effortless. As you step through the gate, you feel as though you're being pushed and pulled in every direction--and no direction--all at once. Reality claws at your skin, furious that you're defying all logic, somehow avoiding paradoxes and dimensional disasters. Your head fills with memories that you're not entirely sure are yours, and the headache that accompanies them is white-hot and searing. Your muscles tense and relax, reacting to stimuli that is there, and not there. All of this is against a backdrop of a loud, piercing whine, a sound that makes your teeth ache. The transport between dimensions takes only a moment, but you arrive, as usual, feeling nauseous and exhausted. The gate technician on the other side gives you a sympathetic smile before quickly ushering you away from the threshold of the exit gate.

There's at least ten of them in a long row, all of the unoccupied, but it's protocol to move away as quickly as possible. Why, exactly, you're not sure, because the gates are carefully monitored to ensure one exit at a time. Then again, you think, still dizzy from the trip, you know all too well that accidents can happen to anyone.

"Thanks for traveling with us this morning," the technician says, still smiling. It's a scripted line, but her expression is gentle. You thank her and hurry out the door and onto the street, eager for some fresh air.

You only have a few minutes until your bus arrives, so you jog to the bus stop. The route is the same as the one you took to get here, only in reverse. You pass the same boarded-up nail salon and dodge the same potholes as you cross the street. The two universes are, as they say, practically identical.

The bus is packed and instead of searching for a seat, you reach up to grasp one of the overhead bars, only to have a man sitting nearby offer you his. You accept, sliding into it, and turn your face to the glass window beside you. By now the sun has burnt away the morning fog, and you can see the city--recognizable, yet not--speed past you. Everything about this dimension is the same as yours, but somehow, subconsciously, people can tell the difference. Just as the man who offered you his seat recognized you were a guest in his universe, you know that the familiar parks and street signs and corner stores you are passing are not truly your own. Nothing about it feels malevolent. In fact, people tended to treat visitors to their dimension with a certain amount of hospitality and decorum. But until you go back through the gate to your own dimension, you will feel a small pull, almost imperceptible, drawing you away. You're welcome here, it seems to say, but there is a place that misses you. You can already imagine the comfortable relief you will feel later today, back in your home dimension.

The bus ride is the same length as the one you took to get here, a little under an hour, and you pass the time watching the world sweep by through the window. You used to make a game of trying to pick out any subtle differences you could find, but ultimately there were none. If someone dented  a road sign in your dimension, you'd find it equally battered on your next trip here. Sometimes you wonder if one dimension was the catalyst of every event, and the other simply reacting to keep the two the same. But even if that was true, how could you tell which dimension was the cause, and which was the reaction?

It's mid-morning when you finally arrive at your stop, and the air has warmed enough for you to shed your jacket. You carry it under your arm as you head over to the apartment building across the street from the bus stop. You press a button to be buzzed in, and after a few moments a voice invites you up.

Three flights of stairs later, you are standing at the threshold of a door you've stood before many times before. Your brother's criticisms from the night before flicker through your head, and you hesitate a few moments, before finally knocking.

A familiar face greets you when you open the door. An identical face. Your face.

"Hey, come on in," you other self says, pulling the door open wide and stepping aside to usher you in. You make yourself comfortable at your little kitchen table, while your other self pours out some tea, already prepared. The mug it's given to you in is one you also have in your own, identical home.

The two of you are silent for a small while, sipping black tea. Your two universes are practically indistinguishable, but when it comes to who starts, it's always different. But you do always talk. It makes you feel a little better, after all, talking with yourself. Your friends and family have been trying, are trying, so hard to understand. But how could they? Only you know what you've been through. What it means to live in a world without her. You say as much, and your other self nods across the table. Your hands clutch weakly at the cup of tea. Whenever you say her name out loud, the same muscles tighten in both of you. A mirror image.

You talk about the day it happened. It's something you both do often. Somehow, rehashing the details makes the pain in your chest dull. Like outlining the facts makes it less real. The way she turned and smiled at you, the green of the traffic light reflecting off the lens of her glasses. How her eyes widened when she saw the truck speeding forward through the window behind you, running the red light. Self-driving cars were the standard, but it wasn't illegal to drive older manual vehicles, so long as you were licensed. Accidents were so rare, anyway. So rare, you still have trouble imagining how one happened to you. But you can still feel the shock of the two cars colliding. You remember how the impact sent your car flipping, spinning, off the road. You remember watching her crumple, crushed between jagged layers of metal and glass. You can still feel yourself pressing your ear to her chest, and hearing nothing. Remembering the dissonance between the warmth of her skin, and the silence of her heart, still makes you feel like you're choking.

Your other self nods. "Like I can't breathe. Like I'll never be able to breathe again."

You both go quiet. A few sips of tea. One of you coughs. Then,

"My brother thinks we shouldn't meet anymore. He says it's not normal."

"Yeah. Mine too."

"But it means a lot to me," you say, "To have someone to talk to that understands. Really understands. It... it helps." You can feel your voice cracking. "You help."

Across the table your other self offers a nod of agreement, and a small smile that doesn't reach the eyes.

"But she's still gone."

You both look down. An echo of each other, repeating the same grief, the same moment, in infinity.

"She's still gone."

Elements

i = 0;

while (!deck.isInOrder()) {
    print 'Iteration ' + i;
    deck.shuffle();
    i++;
}

print 'It took ' + i + ' iterations to sort the deck.';