Allie is a young woman dating two men—the depressed and somewhat lost former classmate Kellen, and an older married politician named Pat. Meanwhile her roommate, the fragile Maria “a small girl, thin and saintly” appears to be losing her mind. “Creeks” is a memorably biting and measured, and finally powerfully mournful, story about the beginning of the end of youth, where, amid the thousand small, almost pleasurable, calamities of youth, something turns bad for good and time seals its locks shut.
“Life was like a trick, Allie thought, with avenues presenting themselves as suitors, only to turn into desolation, a desert in the middle of the sea.” —Guest Judge Colin Barrett
When she was twenty-one and living in Brooklyn, Allie had two boyfriends, meaning she’d been seeing two men at once. This was an endeavor that required a lot of laundry, a phone that always went straight to voicemail and plenty of dark, solo trips in rideshare cars.
The first boyfriend was Pat, whom she’d met at the dog park. Pat had a golden retriever and Allie a shepherd of sorts, something brindled and mixed. Pat was older than Allie by fifteen years. His townhome in Bed Stuy was large and expensive, very warm in the winters.
The second boyfriend was Kellen, whom she’d met in literature class. Kellen was younger—Allie’s age—and they had mutual friends. But Kellen lived far away, uptown, in a small studio that had been built above a butcher’s shop, so whenever Allie visited, she had to divert her eyes, avoid the pale, fatty carcasses that hung in the storefront, hooked and naked. She tried not to let the refrigerated smell of it follow her through the door, up the stairs, into Kellen’s bed, though it sometimes did.
“Where have you been?” Pat asked on the phone one evening. Allie was leaving Kellen’s apartment, distracting herself from a delivery happening: men unloading meat into the butcher’s shop. She kept her eyes on the pavement, tried not to step in the blood that ran off the sidewalk, collected in the gutter, dark and alive.
“Where have I been?” Allie echoed. She searched deep in her soul. “I’ve been reading, walking the dog.”
“I miss you. I wish I could see you.” But Pat could not see Allie because he was running for a local congressional seat, which required a good amount of time holed away in an office, answering phones. Sometimes he gave Allie fliers to distribute around her university campus, fliers that consisted of huge, handsome portraits, a QR code in the corner: Take Action! Scan Now! She’d staple them to bulletin boards or to the trunks of trees, usually stapling him through the tie, so that it looked like a clip, but whenever she felt tired, or whenever Pat talked too much about his wife, she’d staple him right through the eyes, like a corpse. Pat claimed to be separating, but Allie knew what separating meant: the head and the body no longer in consult; the wife wakes alone, video-chats with a shrink; arguments ensue, anguished then ignored; the fat of their marriage rises to the top. Pat was dismantling his life. Slowly, he said. Kindly. What Allie only needed to have was patience.
“Hm,” said Allie into the phone. She’d been feeling languid, sleepy. A headache was coming on. Perhaps she would turn around, pass the butcher’s shop again, return into bed with Kellen who’d rub her back with gentle hands, coax the pounding from her temples. “How’s your wife?” she asked instead.
“Um, I’m not sure. She’s away for the weekend.”
“You know, what if I were sleeping with someone else, too?” Allie asked. “Wouldn’t that be better? Wouldn’t that be even?” This was her penchant for algebra. She wasn’t vengeful. She didn’t want to get even. She wanted to be even already.
“Even?” Pat hooted. “We’d be more than even. We’d both be ahead! Imagine it, the two of us—what players!—fucking everybody, running the goddamn world. That’s sexy, Allie.” Pat was the funny one. After they slept together, he liked to sigh, open his eyes, say, Pleasure doing business with ya! Kellen was not so hilarious. Kellen was tall and depressed and steady as rain. Ask him, What if we both saw other people? and he’d stare out the window, towering and morose. He’d say nothing, or he’d say, Do what you want. Sometimes Allie worried about his health.
“You have everything,” Allie said to Pat. She kept walking down the street. “You have money. You have power. You have women.” It was absurd, she knew, to talk about these things in a place like Brooklyn, where Pat was no anomaly. But to Allie, the world was small no matter where she went, and sometimes she just had to go ahead and say things about it. “Your life is too crowded,” she said. “That’s what I think.”
“It is a bit bottlenecked; I’ll admit.”
“You’ve got a queue so long it’s attracting mimes and jugglers! Bucket boys!”
At times, this was how they spoke.
“Yeah, well it’s those caricature artists I’m most worried about,” said Pat. “Aggressive, untalented bastards!” A tone beeped over the line; he had another call waiting.
“It’s so unfair,” Allie continued. “I bet everyone wants to sit next to you on the train.”
“I’ve got to go,” Pat said. “I’ve got to get off the phone.” He was afraid maybe of how the conversation might go. It might go and go. He said, “Let’s get drinks soon. Let’s get dinner, okay?”
“Okay,” said Allie. Because she liked having dinner with Pat. Pat, who ate at restaurants where the food—the chicken, the steak, the veal—was always described as being young and tender, like a Tony Bennett song. With Kellen, she only went to coffee shops and ate things that were soft and warm, with sugar and oats and lacy crusts. It was food that could enter you, yeasty and sticking, like a bad dream. When Kellen ate, he took small, careful bites and offered commentary on the quality, the flavor, leaving tidy portions on his plate, which he’d tilt toward Allie, saying, “Try some,” saying, “Take a bite.”
This was why she liked Kellen: He was quiet and kind, like someone she’d known for a long time. But often there was nothing to discuss between them, so they could only have sex, sex that went for a while, with him sweating all over her, the smell of him lingering, catching up in her hair. Afterward, he’d turn on the television, say, “What should we watch?” and he’d give her long back rubs while they stared at the screen. He’d laugh to himself. He’d mumble. Kellen was full of sounds. Words that came few and slow. They were never what he meant, he said. He had a hard time explaining. But Allie had learned to watch his eyes, the light in them, sapphire and uxorious, though on occasion there was something else driving through, a scary flash.
* * *
She lived with her roommate, Maria, in Greenpoint. Their neighborhood was small and winding; it seemed to sprawl beyond their fire escape, unfurling to reveal all the single-family rowhomes, the pizza joints and factories. Maria performed as an acrobat in an Off-Broadway production. She balanced on her hands for entire musical numbers, was tossed around by burley Russian gymnasts with names like Boris and Oleg. Maria was from the lower part of New Jersey and, since arriving from to the city, she’d not once had sex with anyone at all. It was a refrainment, she’d called it, a devotion to abstinence. Phone numbers had been blocked. Dating apps deleted. Sometimes Allie would come home and find Maria in the bathtub, listening to sad arias and scrubbing herself with a loofah on a stick.
The previous summer, Maria had suffered an assault while riding to work on the M train. Or rather Maria called it an assault. What happened was, there was a magazine, dropped and open on the floor, and within that magazine was a photograph of a naked hip. Maria had not noticed the magazine or the hip until a man walked by and picked it up.
The man said, “Is this your hip?”
Maria answered, “No,” then she turned and looked out the window.
But the man was unconvinced. He held the magazine out toward her, said, “Hip. Hip. Looks like your hip.”
Allie would have told the man to screw off, to get lost, but Maria was sweet, from a coastal town. She wore charm-bracelets and called her mother every day. Maria said, “Sorry, no. That’s not my hip.”
“Oh, habeas corpus!” the man shouted, and he threw the magazine at Maria’s lap. She got off quickly at the next stop.
“What a weirdo,” she’d said later, when she’d returned to Greenpoint and was re-enacting the encounter for Allie and Kellen and the rest of their friends.
“A weirdo, yes,” they all agreed. “This city is so full of weirdos! Of crazies!”
The conversation moved on, onto jobs and relationships, group outings; weekend plans were made, then changed, then forgotten. But Maria could not forget about the hip. She started to see it everywhere she went. She saw it on lampposts outside her theater, on billboards in Times Square, in magazines at the grocery store, the laundromat, the hair salon. It could have, she realized, been her hip. The skin tone was hers, as were the shadows, the indents. It was a hip so queasy with pornography, so eroticized and perfectly posed. When she looked at herself, at her own naked hip, she could find no distinction. What she saw instead was a dairy product, there and available as lunch whenever, displayed on a stage, appealing to the masses. It would only make sense, she thought, for someone, somewhere, at any time, to have snuck up on her, to have caught her unclothed, to have captured that photograph, unleashed to the city, to the world!
She felt the need to cover her hip, to disguise its sex and vulnerabilities. So she wore only loose things and only in white: white sweaters, white skirts, white bands in her hair; she bought new shoes, white as boat sails, and new bedding for her room. In the winter, she found a peacoat in eggshell at a nearby thrift exchange, and she wore it often: to the train, to the stores, to the park where she walked sometimes with Allie. Allie—who was not so approving of this virginal transformation and Maria’s sudden whiteness—dubbed her “the ghost-girl,” the haunting spirit of their neighborhood park. “Like a Wordsworth poem,” she said one day. “A Maria-Gray!” They were on the trail of the park; Allie frolicked ahead, the shepherd pulling at his leash.
“Funny,” Maria said. “If only I had your insouciance, then maybe I’d achieve some kind of eternal virtue.” Maria had been reading Bible poetry: Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord? … He who has clean hands … and all that.
“Come on,” said Allie. “It was only a picture of some person’s hip.”
Maria was stoic. She drew her arms into the peacoat. “No, it was a message. A warning from above. I’m selling myself away, and at much too low a price.”
“Oh.” The shepherd stopped to nose a fallen leaf. “All right.”
* * *
“I love you.”
Allie said this to Pat once when they were alone together in his bedroom. Pat’s retriever chewed a bone at the foot of the bed. Allie wanted to disrupt the sound of it, the licking, the gnawing. “I love you,” she said, though she didn’t really; she was just curious to hear his response.
“You’re very special,” Pat replied.
“You, too,” said Allie. “I mean you would be special. If you were single.”
“That would make me more than special,” Pat said. “That would make me rare. We’re talking unicorn.” Pat could be mean sometimes. Rich and cruel.
Allie got up, out of the bed. She put on her sweater, sat down on the rug, next to the dog. She took the bone from its mouth. The dog stared, licked her hand. Pat laid back. He didn’t move. He said, “Sorry, Allie. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“I’m not upset,” she said. She twirled the bone around. The retriever pricked its ears. “I’m confused. My life is very confusing.”
“You know, you’re not the only woman who has ever been involved with a married man. Or, I should say, a man with marital entanglements.” Usually, Pat referred to their romance as a deal. He’d say, “This deal that we have. You and me.” He’d point at himself, then he’d point at Allie. Sometimes it made her laugh. Sometimes it didn’t.
“Not the only woman?” said Allie. “And here I thought I was blazing new trails.” When Allie was little, her mother had asked, “Would you jump off a cliff just because everyone else did?”
“Yes,” Allie had said.
“Would you?” said her mother.
She’d tried again. “No,” she said. There were only two answers. Which could it be?
“I love you, okay?” said Pat. “Come back to bed. For Christ’s sake, Allie, just come back to bed.”
So Allie relinquished the bone. The retriever sniffed it then laid down its head.
* * *
“I love you.”
Allie said it to Kellen then, the following night. Cartoons played on the television. There was sweat on the bedsheets, and Allie was feeling warm, a little withered; moisture pricked the backs of her knees.
Kellen did not look at her. He looked at the screen. “I love you, too.” He said it back. This shocked Allie. Because how many lovers could she really have? Perhaps, she thought, she could open her arms and have so many lovers that she would achieve some greater understanding, that she would stumble upon an undiscovered spiritual plane, full of uncharted relations, new territory. She would be like Maria but inverted, taking everybody in, being so unafraid. This was what she imagined; she imagined that her mind would expand, become stacked and layered, like a shelf in a store or a pine tree, mystically inert, life barking at the bottom like a dog.
“Do you really love me?” Kellen asked. His voice was flat. He glanced around, avoiding her, and Allie felt swallowed, suddenly caught, the warmth building up in her, pushing her down, through the bed, the floor, toward the butcher’s shop beneath them, where she would melt into meat, her skin peeled off; she’d hang raw and naked in the window front, stinking. “Really?” Kellen rolled toward her, slowly, wanting to know only this.
* * *
It was in February that Maria quit her off-Broadway show. She took a job instead at a Catholic church helping with funerals, singing recessional hymns, wearing white and soliciting big, pious grins. Allie learned of the career change not from Maria but from Oleg—one of the Russian gymnasts—whom she collided with one afternoon while crossing a street in Tompkins Square.
“Allie!” Oleg took her by the elbows, held her out before him, assessing and breathless. “What are you doing in my neighborhood?”
Oleg was stout and very handsome, with hair that fell over his face. “Just walking around,” Allie said. “Taking in views.” She had dinner plans with Pat, who felt more comfortable west of the river, removed from the sanctity of Brooklyn and his marriage. It was six o’clock and growing dark. Pat was running late.
“We’re all so worried,” said Oleg of Maria. A car honked, and he led Allie out of the street, onto the sidewalk, where they leaned into each other, talking close, their shoulders propped on the long metal legs of a scaffolding. Oleg said, “This isn’t the Maria I know.”
It was true. Maria’s nervous collapse had not been subtle, but Allie could only make sense of so much. Maria’s panic, her keenness on retribution, her desire to present herself as somehow consecrated, canonized, only felt cosmetic and unnecessary. Maria was a small girl, thin and saintly, with high cheeks and round black eyes, hair that shone dark in the sun. Appearances worked in her favor, unlike Allie who pictured herself more caliginous, red all the time and a little vague. Her eyes were muddy; they gave nothing away. But there was concern in Oleg, composed through a stitch in his brow. He wanted something, and maybe it was Maria, though maybe it was not. Allie humored him. She said, “Yes, poor Maria. She’s losing her mind.”
“I think that, too,” said Oleg. He hooked a hand on his shoulder. He rubbed it. He turned. He looked around. “We should get a drink,” he said. “Are you free?”
“Um,” Allie said. She looked around, too.
There were times, in her mind, when she concocted a third one—a third boyfriend—contrived from only the best features of each: Pat’s humor running in tandem with Kellen’s ease and attainability. Alone, Pat could be flakey and insincere. Kellen could be sighing and repetitive, going on forever. It was inevitable that she splice and add, assemble something better, something more. Oleg might do. He was clever. He cared for things deeply—Allie could tell. Pat and Kellen were not as such. Pat and Kellen were missing parts. She could picture them, respectively, roaming the emerald parks of New York City, shaking hands with voters, or stooping moodily over a churro.
Now here was Oleg, presenting himself in her mind, like an escort, bearing gifts. “Yes, Oleg,” Allie imagined herself saying. “Of course, I’ll get drinks with you!” But her phone was buzzing in her coat pocket: a message from Pat, who’d arrived finally and was waiting one block over, probably discreetly, probably in an alley, in a baseball cap.
“I can’t,” she said. “I have to go.”
And she turned, went up the block, across the street.
* * *
The next morning, it rained.
Allie sat in the park, legs crossed on the paint-flaked slats of a bench, the shepherd running laps on an open lawn. There were no other dogs, but he was content, just hurtling alone.
“Manhattan is sinking,” Maria was saying. She sat beside Allie on the bench in a long white skirt.
“Like, literally? Or are you talking about global warming?” Allie snarked.
“Don’t make fun of me,” said Maria. “And yes, it is literally sinking. Brooklyn’s next. We’re casting our lots living here.”
“Well,” said Allie, “you could leave.”
“So could you. You could leave, too.” Maria glared. The rain fell harder. Maria had a white shoulder bag with a long strap, and she hoisted it up over her head, taking cover. Allie called for the shepherd to come.
Allie said, “I won’t leave. I like living here.”
Maria retracted with what, on someone else, might have been indignation, but on her it was an injured sort of flinch.
Allie tread carefully. “The city is good for me,” she said, “with all the opportunities. But it’s not good for everyone. Maybe it’s not good for you.”
Dinner with Pat, the night before, had been in a dark, expensive restaurant. They’d sat in a tall booth near the back, where no one let their eyes go. Allie had been right about the baseball cap: Pat was wearing one. He kept it on when the food came out, a shadow drawn over his face.
“You’re quiet,” Pat had said. “What’s going on?”
So Allie told him about Oleg, the conversation they’d had on the street, so quick and intimate. She said, “I think he was trying to pick me up. He wanted to get drinks.”
Pat lifted his fork. He chewed, swallowed. “Sounds to me,” he said at last, “that this guy is worried about your friend. Maria, is it? She’s young and having a hard time?”
Allie considered this. “No. Maria’s religious. She’s just wearing white. Saving herself.”
“From what?” Pat asked.
“From men like you, probably.”
“Men like me?” Pat started to say, but there wasn’t enough room for both of them, there at that table. They were arriving at the punch line together these days, doing imitations, all violent and satisfying, disguising their cruelty in humor. Pat was restraining, Allie knew. He was being the adult. Instead, he said, “Maybe she should leave the city. Go home for a bit.”
“Yeah,” Allie said. She was staring past him, toward a large, tinted window. There were women who leaped through such windows in such moments. Just got a running start and did it. “Maybe I’ll go with her.”
Pat raised his head in triumph. “Travel! You should! You’ve always been such an adventuress!”
“That almost sounds like you want me to go.”
“Well, you know the saying. If you love… set her free.” This was what happened at the end of relationships. One person cried while the other grew sarcastic. “I’m kidding,” Pat said. He flagged the waiter, who brought the check.
A trip was right. A trip was practical, but there was nowhere to go.
In the park, she followed Maria off the trail, through the trees, taking a shortcut to the street. Rain fell around them. Mud splattered up, blackened the hem of Maria’s white skirt.
They stomped through mulch, through shrubs and dead perennials. They stopped at a crosswalk, their building ahead, shrouded with umbrellas, parading by.
Maria was sobbing, clutching her skirt. The shepherd barked.
“They can see!” she said. “They can see right through!” Her skirt was drenched, clinging to her hips. Her legs dark, like pins, underneath.
The shepherd kept barking. Allie yanked on his leash. “Stop it,” she said, to the dog or to Maria.
* * *
Allie made plans to leave New York. She’d called Maria’s mother in New Jersey, and they’d talked for a while, discussed the white clothes and nervous episodes. Anxiety, probably, Allie explained. Or some kind of break. “She needs to get home,” Allie had said. “Let me help her get home.”
Kellen offered to watch the shepherd. He showed up at her apartment, later in the night, dripping from the rain. Allie was surprised to see him. She stepped to the side, let him in through the door. She gestured to Maria’s room, closed and dark, the lights turned out. Allie said, “I have to go. I have to make this trip.”
Kellen held Allie around the waist. “You should marry me,” he said. “Or something.”
“Yeah, something,” Allie said. She always wanted the thing not proposed. The other thing. “Maybe in two or three years,” she mumbled, trying to step back. Maybe they’d buy a car together, a little apartment somewhere nice, like Bushwick or Williamsburg. Together they’d grow sullen and overweight. Together they’d raise lazy children. Allie could see it. Her mouth went dry. She touched Kellen’s arm.
“I need a break,” she said. “I need to get away.”
He let go of her and went to the window, his knuckles hard on the sill.
* * *
They went for a week, and it rained the whole time. Mostly, they sat around inside Maria’s house, which was small and single-story, on the straight part of a cul-de-sac. Maria’s mother was a schoolteacher; she wore loafers and cardigans, her hair buzzed short.
“She’s hiding my clothes,” Maria said on their first afternoon. She dug through her closet and found nothing white.
Allie pretended not to have heard. “So?” she asked. “What is there to do?”
“There’s nothing to do,” said Maria. “It’s New Jersey.”
But there was a café at the end of the block that they walked to in the mornings. The barista worked alone behind the counter; she regarded them kindly, indicating the window at random times, saying, “This rain! It’s scaring everybody off!”
“Can’t imagine why!” Maria said as a joke.
They sat at Formica tables and sipped their hot drinks. Whenever they left, the barista called after them, saying, “Be safe out there!”
They wore ponchos and walked to the beach, stopped in a museum along the way: an old red house, preserved from the eighteenth century, lined with bollards and plaques and wooden furniture, the faded walls adorned with photographs of the original occupants, all their beards and sepia children. An historian worked in the small front room, and he looked at them wearily, said, “Don’t touch anything.” The ceiling dripped.
They went to the church where Maria had been baptized. It was clean and lit like a library. Maria knelt and prayed. Allie stared at her phone.
Beautiful here in New Jersey! She messaged it to Kellen first and then to Pat.
Kellen responded: Still raining.
Pat responded: Sorry about dinner. Let’s talk soon.
They sat in the living room with Maria’s mother. They played Yahtzee and watched the news. The rain was developing, the weatherman said, into something new and unprecedented, something no one could have foreseen. Maria laid on the couch; she said, “I’m never going back.” Allie bought an early ticket on the two o’clock train.
She slept fitfully on the way back to Brooklyn, the train rumbling beneath her, urging her to dream and occasionally to wonder whether anyone would be there at the station to greet her. Kellen probably would not. Kellen was poor and careless, busy with the shepherd. Perhaps Pat, she thought, would dash from his office, characteristically rash, and be standing at the stairwell, maybe with flowers. It wasn’t entirely a long shot.
Allie struggled off the train with her bag. She was groggy from sleep, and this aspect of life—of getting on and off things—which had always seemed so tiring. Someone spoke her name. She looked to one side and heard it again.
“Allie.”
She looked up and there he was: Kellen in a holey sweater, wet from the rain, the shepherd on a leash, straining toward her.
“An announcement,” called the PA system. “All trains will be delayed on account of the weather\
“Hi!” said Allie. That peculiar mix of gratitude and disappointment she always felt with Kellen settled in her joints like the beginning of a flu. He kissed her cheek. He took her bag.
They walked through the terminal, trying to talk but then not trying. The station had turned into a piazza of refuge, bodies seeking cover from the onslaught outdoors. A man approached them, asking for a dollar. “For food!” he assured. “For food!”
Kellen pulled a dollar from his pocket. “There you go, my man,” he said. She would have to choose, Allie realized then; it was important that she choose.
Kellen had an umbrella. He opened it, hooked his arm through Allie’s, and they made their way across the city like that, being pelted with rain. He held her tightly, pressed against her side, so that her shoulders curved forward and their hips bumped together. Allie longed to wriggle away.
At her door, she thanked him. She took the shepherd’s leash. “You don’t want me to come upstairs with you?” Kellen asked. “This rain is so crazy. You aren’t worried?”
Allie had not really considered the rain. “I’m so tired,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
Kellen stepped back, away from her. He set her suitcase on the ground. “See ya,” he said. He walked off, gum stuck to one shoe.
Allie went upstairs. She had missed a call from Pat. He’d left a message. “I’ve forgotten,” it said, “what time you’re getting in. Is it today?”
She called him back. He answered.
“Hey,” said Pat. “It’s you. Did you have a good trip?”
“Fine. I was hoping you might be there to meet me. Especially with all this rain.”
“That’s the thing with the rain, Allie. It’s hard to maneuver.”
“That’s okay. A friend picked me up. This guy, Kellen. He watched the dog while I was gone. But we’re not even that close, as friends go. It wasn’t ideal.”
Pat sighed. “Ah, I see. What happened was, Kellen and I flipped a coin and he lost. I thought he was a good sport about it.” She was supposed to laugh. The line fell still. “You could’ve asked me to watch your dog. I would’ve made it work.”
Allie lay back on her bed, cradling the phone. “Yes, well, New Jersey was great. Oh, and my friend Maria’s all resolved. You were right. Leaving the city did a number for her sanity.”
“That’s great,” Pat said. “But hey, I wanted to talk to you about something. It’s about me. I may not be able to see you anymore. I wanted to let you know and maybe explain.”
“Explain,” said Allie. She lifted one leg into the air, for exercise.
“My wife,” he said. “She’s been suffering. I didn’t know how much. We’ve been talking a lot. We’ve been working through. And that’s the thing: we’re working through.”
The shepherd was barking. He stood at the window, pawed at the glass. The rain drummed. The wind blew.
“You don’t know what it’s like, Allie, to be in a marriage with someone. It’s long and complicated. You just don’t know.”
“I don’t,” said Allie. Then she hung up the phone.
* * *
It was still evening when he came over. It was safer in her part of Brooklyn, up on the hill of Greenpoint. Manhattan had flooded; it was flooding still. She buzzed him in, listened to his footfalls echoing up the stairs and through the hallway as if treading a bridge that might give way.
Allie waited a moment before she opened the door.
“Where’s Maria?” Oleg said. He was wearing a nice shirt, button-down plaid, needled with rain.
“She went home,” Allie said. “She’s in New Jersey. Sorry I didn’t mention that before.”
Oleg placed a pair of tidy pecks on each side of Allie’s face. “Where do I put this?” he asked, hoisting a trash bag, soaked and plastic; it held all his clothes, his records, his books. He said, “My place is pooling. It’s filling with water.” And now he was here, seeking refuge, refuge in Allie.
Allie shrugged. “Put it wherever you want.”
He set it on the floor, beside the narrow couch. He sat down on a cushion. Allie had her laptop open on the coffee table. Oleg reached over and took it, pulled it onto his lap. “What are you looking at?” he asked, scrolling on the mousepad. “What is all this?”
She’d been surfing Twitter, finding pictures of the East Village partly underwater, Broadway lined with rescue boats, the rivers rising up, swallowing marquees. The financial district was wiped out, tipped over an edge.
Oleg shook his head. “It’s all fake. These pictures are fake.”
“How do you know?”
“Because look at them!” Oleg shouted. He was upset. He shut the laptop, set it down on the table again. Somewhere outside, a car alarm started. Allie sat beside Oleg on the couch. He slung an arm around her back. His embrace felt familiar, like something she’d had all along. She listened to the sound of their breaths together, the intensity of the rain coming in and out of tempo, bursting up in hateful waves, attacking the glass. Oleg kissed her quietly.
“She’s lucky,” said Oleg afterward, his eyes searching, taking Allie in.
“Who’s lucky?” Allie asked, though she knew he meant Maria.
On the table, Allie’s phone buzzed. Kellen was sending messages.
Call me.
I know you’re home.
Call me.
I know you’re home.
Please call me.
I know you’re home.
Later there were texts that said nothing. Texts with periods and blank spaces. In the morning, he called again. Oleg laid asleep on Allie’s bed. She answered. “Hello?”
“You slept with someone last night, didn’t you?”
The silence stretched. “The rain got bad,” Allie said.
“Oh, God,” Kellen whispered—a curse or was it love?—before the phone crashed, then hummed, like the last verse of something long.
* * *
The parks were windy and busy as always, and though the flooding did dissipate, the grass remained wet in the following weeks. The dog park was chained; the gates barred and locked.
Allie found a bench and let the shepherd run. He raced up the hills, along the muddy trail. Allie leaned back and watched.
A man walked by. He sat on the far end of the bench. He looked at Allie. “I know you,” he said. “I’ve seen you before.”
“You’re mistaken,” said Allie. The shepherd returned to her; he’d fetched her a stick. She brushed it off, threw it for him.
The man was staring. “No, I know you,” he said. “I’ve seen your picture.”
“Where?” Allie asked. When the shepherd came back again, she leashed him, stood up.
The man was thinking. “Somewhere. Somewhere. A magazine.”
“No, I was never in a magazine.”
“You were.”
Allie looked at him, saw that his face was too red, as though sunburned. His body was wiry, withering away. Life was like a trick, Allie thought, with avenues presenting themselves as suitors, only to turn into desolation, a desertion in the middle of a sea. She was there now, and so was this man.
The man slid closer to her, like an animal—a squirrel, a rat—investigating. He pointed. “You live over there, right? That is the building where you live?”
“No,” Allie said. Though it was. She pulled the shepherd on his leash. They walked the other way.
The man got up and followed. “I think,” he said, “it was a tabloid. That’s where I saw your picture.”
Allie kept walking.
“I saw it in a grocery store. No, I saw it on the train.” The man kept walking, too. “Hey, where are you going? You don’t live this way.” He followed Allie in a kind of traipse, block after block. Allie just walked. The shepherd led the way.
Finally, they reached a sign. Putnam Meat Company. A butcher’s shop. Allie stopped. She clutched the leash. The man pulled up beside her, perspiring slightly. It was spring, but too warm. The meat stank. The man stared at the display in the window, the phallic harangue of sausages, marbled, desiccated, strung up for sale.
“You’re the mistress,” he said. “It was some politician. I remember now.”
Sometimes Allie’s phone rang, but she never answered it. For, if she picked up, she feared it would be someone she knew only vaguely. Oleg maybe. A random friend. Maria. Maria’s mother. Or a neighbor. Someone who’d known Kellen. “I’m sorry,” they’d say, “I have some bad news.” She knew it already, but no one had told her.
“A nasty business,” the man was saying. Tabloids, he meant, but he was looking at the meat.
Allie looked too. She held the leash more tightly, held her stomach. Something was fluttering there: a worry.
“You should leave,” Allie said. She fumbled with her words. “You should leave me alone.”
“All right,” said the man. He held his hands up, then he turned and loped away, the bones in his back working hard. Sweat was coming off him, through the cotton of his shirt, glimmering like crystals on the sides of his arms, the red of his skin spinning out. He must’ve done something, Allie thought, to have wound up in such a state, exposing himself for too long in the sun.
She thought for a moment about what he’d done, though when he was gone, cleared from sight, she turned around and walked home.
Devon Ross is a writer from Chicago, Illinois. Her work has been published in Boulevard, New Letters, The Lascaux Review and Mikrokosmos Journal.