As a way of controlling their disintegrating relationship, Morgan has begun secretly photographing her controlling, volatile older lover, Grace; “Her face would be blurred, given the slow shutter speed, because at the moment the shutter tripped, Grace had made good on her threat to slap herself.”
This is a story that bristles with coiled violence and an eerie precision. It is chilling and dangerous, a kind of ghost story. —Guest Judge Colin Barrett
For the first time since she was a child, Morgan sat backwards on the train. The momentum tipped her away from Los Angeles, away from Grace, and toward what she was leaving behind: Sedona, Laylene, an invitation to take up another life.
Beyond the passenger window, a huge variegated ridge, the same singed, smokey color as the red-talked hawk, rose from the desert floor. Parched buckbrush clustered at the base but thinned out higher up, like a surge of people climbing a wall. Wind-bitten strips of limestone, sandstone, and shale spanned the sheer faces.
With her good arm, she slid the Toko across the tray table, drawing it out of the shadow and into a slash of sun. Struck by light, the miniature camera’s boxy metallic body, like a tiny suit of armor, gleamed.
She had exposed only seven frames so far: all photographs of Grace, all taken in the last two months, all without Grace’s knowledge.
The Toko was Japanese, circa 1947, made after the war but during the occupation, when materials were scarce. Hefty, heavier than a roll of quarters but small enough to enclose in the hand, it was mostly stamped metal, made in an age before plastic was king. The lens was clear, unfogged, with a fixed aperture of 4.5, a focus range of 5 to 20 feet, and two shutter speeds: one a mystery and the other B for bulb, meaning the shutter stayed open as long as you held it open—thirty seconds, five minutes, an hour. No light meter. A band of black, flat grain leather wrapped around the body, and on the face of the lens, in thick block letters, was the brand’s trademark boast: M-I-G-H-T-Y.
More and more travelers boarded, filling the seats, warming the cabin, chattering, rustling wrappers, whipping through magazines. She felt ginger, defensive. Every new face intruded into what felt like a smaller and smaller space. Usually, trains gave her the queer, pleasant feeling that she was visiting the past. Not this time. This time she felt out of place, as if the train and the Toko and time itself were aligned, but she was an anachronism.
Rough shadows chopped the landscape into hefty chunks, and dead grass, soft swaying, dotted the desert floor. But the bushes—cat’s claw, desert broom, and crown-of-thorns—stood their green ground, resigned to thirst. In any of these places, you could be forgiven for dying.
Yet at every station—Truxton, Yucca, Fenner—came the powerful urge to disembark. Get up, lift down her suitcase, shoulder her backpack, walk along the aisle and down the stairs and into another life. At twenty-two, she could. But not Grace. Not at thirty-seven. At least Grace said so.
After a time, beyond the window of the train, slow-shifting open space gave way to warehouses and mineral processing yards, shifting from lean-to houses and construction projects to office parks and subdivisions, the landscape coming ever closer, moving ever faster, then car sales lots, fast food places, tenements, and then outdoor malls, fancy furniture stores, and angular glass hotels.
The fences cinched ever tighter along the tracks. Graffiti claimed long stretches, the dense lettering bulbous as balloon animals, urgent but inscrutable.
The train plunged into a tunnel, the car roaring and shuddering in the enclosed space, a sharp, enveloping break from brightness. She pulled the Toko close again and examined the waist-level viewfinder, a small window on the top of the body that miniaturized the train car and its florescent lights into a tiny, luminous square. The viewfinder allowed her to shoot unobtrusively, without raising the camera to her eye, but, as in all viewfinder cameras, the image in the window was not exactly identical to the image in the lens, and the closer the subject was, the more the images diverged.
Although she was at work, Grace texted several times. Where are you passing through? When will you get home? Would the conductor let you drive the train? Have you solved any murder mysteries along the way?
It was as if they had not argued over the phone the night before. Like selective hearing, Grace had selective amnesia. She was always like this when Morgan came home, all undiluted happiness and childish excitement, her effusiveness an indirect apology.
The Toko was a mea culpa, too. Back in April, after one of Grace’s meltdowns, Morgan woke to find a velvety green box tied with a polka-dotted bow on her nightstand.
And since then? Secret photographs. What kind of person does that? It was Grace’s own fault. How curiously thoughtless, how stupid even, it was for Grace to give, as an apology and an invitation to forget, a machine designed to record and remember.
If the film came out, the first frame would show Grace, the subject, kneeling on the bare mattress, having pitched the covers and pillows into the hallway and ripped off the sheets. Her face would be blurred, given the slow shutter speed, because at the moment the shutter tripped, Grace had made good on her threat to slap herself.
Or the film could be blank. That happened sometimes. You do everything right and the film is still blank.
* * *
Union Station, end of the line. It was a relief that Grace—impulsive, partial to grand gestures of the kind that she herself expected—was not waiting with flowers on the platform. Grace wanted epic love, usually tragedy, all Tristan and Isolde. But after so many exhausting arguments, Morgan prized the quiet, the prosaic: to buy a sandwich, to visit a bookstore. A dry spell between tears.
There was so much to love about Grace. Every morning, she called her cat by a different name: Rolfe, Henderson, Barth, and then on other days: Starfish, Hot Pocket, Pumpernickel. She was silly, improvisational, wearing sweaters with the arms too long and waving her floppy arms like one of those blow-up men outside oil change stations. She was a great teller of dumb jokes, impersonator of accents, and animated singer of musical numbers. Eager, bright, luminous, at times younger in spirit than Morgan despite being so much older, Grace even told wacky fortunes for their friends (“you will become a cabin boy on a matriarchal pirate ship and earn the nickname Vittorio”). She made beautiful sketches, too, and soft, evocative watercolors when painted, and she knew hundreds of poems by heart. Once, Grace seemed like an inexhaustible subject.
Morgan trekked back and forth along the bus depot until she found the Northbound 52 stop. No bus. She could get on another, one going who knows where. Hot wind plucked at the waiting travelers’ clothes, whipping the loose fabric around their bodies, and snapped the straps of Morgan’s backpack against her legs. Sedona’s early summer heat had been so different, so still. It had an unexplained richness, and as Morgan hiked the trails powered by her own locomotion, she felt submerged and steeped, grateful for the hot, uncomplicated days, nothing hiding in them. At midday, the sun singed the cloudless sky, which spread above like a translucent veil, the blue thinned out at the edges as if diluted.
Ten days. Her aunt, Laylene, took her to revisit the dwellings of the ancient indigenous people, who anthropologists misnamed the Sinagua, or people “without water,” despite their sophisticated use of irrigation during an 800-year tenancy. They also stacked wide, flat rocks to build their homes, cementing the walls with clay the color of salmon flesh. They constructed their central dwellings beneath a massive, overhanging rock. The shaded settlement appeared to rest inside a gargantuan mouth. Perhaps, in their religion, God would never allow the rock to plummet and crush them. Or perhaps, whatever the risk, in that great heat, shade was the difference between surviving and succumbing.
Morgan had imagined herself bailing out on civilized life, buying a cheap desert plot, letting her teeth fall out and her hair grow long and defiant. And if people in town began to say she was a witch, what of that? She would not deny it.
The bus finally came, and, using her good arm, she blundered aboard with her belongings. In the back she bounced around, the way she had in the cab of Laylene’s pick-up. The visit to her aunt was a yearly pilgrimage she never missed. They would cook experimental recipes, watch weird movies, and hike, stopping now and then to gather honey calcites or druzy agates. Better than collecting boyfriends, Laylene would say. Now that she’s retired from nursing, Laylene is even more of a rockhound. She uses a hobby rock tumbler from National Geographic, designed for ages eight and up, which clacks away in the corner of her living room. She was a mineralogist, she says, in a past life.
One evening, on their way back from hiking, they came across a rare coral snake, its black, rounded head lifted, its large scales and bright bands of black, red, and white shifting and folding in on themselves, the movement disorienting. Always leave that one alone, Laylene said. Morgan thought of snake charming, of learning to read the signs of wild animals, and of Grace.
They talked about how Laylene used to, and still does, pull off the freeway onto the shoulder, with Morgan, kid or teenager, in the car, whenever there was a bad accident but no first responders. Morgan would punch the emergency lights and Laylene, in the florescent vest she kept under the seat, would call 911 and render first aid. Morgan, stuck in the truck, felt equal parts proud and useless.
Afterwards, days later, Laylene might say, “that’s a bad one,” as if the accident was still happening, was taking place right there in her living room. The gnarly memories, Laylene admitted, got stuck in her brain. But it was worth it, she said, to save a life, or hold someone’s hand as they lose theirs.
On the eighth day, happy, sweaty, and tired from hiking Cathedral Rock, and bouncing around in the truck on the way home, Laylene finally asked Morgan how she was doing. She was asking about Grace, about what was going on.
“I thought for a second we’d lost you, that all the radio silence meant you’d gone down in Bermuda.”
That was fair. Morgan had stopped talking to her mother completely and barely talked to Laylene. Her relationship with Grace was so intense, so all-consuming. Everything else faded the way sounds do when earplugs expand in your ears.
Grace had anticipated this conversion. Laylene’s going to ask you needling questions and give you relationship advice, like you’re still fourteen, even though her marriage failed. She’ll swear up and down that she accepts you, but her concerns about our relationship are just a cover. Neither she nor your mother want to see this queer relationship succeed. I bet Laylene will make it about my age instead of my gender. Watch.
Laylene was looking ahead, taking the curved at a smooth pace as night began to fall. “I’ve got to be careful what I say, don’t I? In her way, Grace is listening.”
She would be if she could be.
“She’s not like that.”
“Well, I have no idea what she’s like. She didn’t come.”
“She wasn’t welcome.”
“She didn’t feel welcome. She was invited.”
It was getting dark, and Laylene was taking the corners more slowly, the truck’s brights reaching far out ahead. The truck, a burgundy ‘04 Tundra, would serve them well in a war or an apocalypse.
“How many years older is she again?”
There it was. Morgan rolled up the window. “Doesn’t matter.”
“Is she happy?”
No. Not in any sense.
“She’s an artist stuck in a corporate job.”
“Does she take it out on you?”
Yes.
“No.”
“Can’t she quit?”
“No. Bills. Loans. Life.”
“You love each other.” Laylene said it matter-of-fact, not as if testing the idea.
“Yes.”
“But why, if you love each other so much, are you so miserable together?”
People in love are happy? How?
Morgan imagined, out in the twilight, two hawks, talons locked together, spiraling toward the earth.
“We aren’t.”
They were. In the worst meltdowns, Grace wielded language like a harpoon: I don’t feel safe with you and I miss my life without you and No one has ever hurt me this much. When someone loves you, you can use your suffering against them. And Grace had this habit of talking like a woman on her deathbed: I never expected to amount to anything, disappointment heavy in her voice. I was nothing special. I can understand why you fell out of love with me.
“Is she jealous because you’re so much younger?”
“No.”
“What if she can’t stand you,” Laylene said, “because you haven’t made her mistakes.”
That wasn’t it. Whatever it was, it was not that. Was it?
Morgan said: “Please talk about rocks.”
Laylene took an aquamarine calcite from the little toolbox and handed it to Morgan. It was heavy, with a beige crust, semi-opaque green inside, and semi-transparent like the face of a wave.
“Ask me why I like them.”
“Why do you like rocks?”
“Rocks are tangible history. They’re not open to interpretation or persuasion. They are pre-history. Pre-people.”
“Singente.”
“Exactly.”
* * *
Now, jolting around on the bus, headed for Grace and the apartment, Morgan shielded her arm. Beneath the loose gauze wrapped around Morgan’s bicep, the swollen skin was tender, still pink, speckled with a constellation of punctures that burned, like a lighter held too close. The day before, Morgan had been photographing an escarpment, where the mesa dropped down to the arroyo, the high midday moon a thumbprint of chalk, when she brushed against a jumping cholla, the barbed, gripping cactus, fuzzy and soft-seeming, which slipped its slender spines, finer and sharper than any needle, through her skin.
As she stepped back, the spiky orb detached, its weight yanking at the barbs. After the initial shock, shame eclipsed the pain, and Morgan grabbed a sizable rock and gave the cactus a vicious whack, intending to send it flying. That was a mistake. The spines held fast, and the cactus only dug in further, slipping more needles through her skin’s thin barrier.
The ball—maybe poisonous, maybe not—hung off her arm like an angry, oversized growth. In every direction, cholla. Walking gingerly, trying not to jiggle her arm, and dodging between the cacti, Morgan made her way back to the truck. Laylene would know what to do. What would she tell Grace?
Morgan could leave the cactus attached as a souvenir, Laylene suggested. At home, in the garage, Laylene used fire gloves and woodshop scissors to snip the stiff needles, getting pricked herself a few times, before the cactus finally dropped, separate again, into the waiting bucket.
But that was not the end of it. Laylene plucked thirty-one barbed spines from Morgan’s arm. It felt like getting a tattoo, Morgan guessed, but in reverse and with nothing to show for it. Unable to hide it from Grace, Morgan would have to explain.
While Laylene rubbed Morgan’s angry skin with old-school brown antiseptic, Morgan asked: “Why kill whatever touches you?”
“Not kill, warn. You aren’t dead, are you? Now, if you venture out among the cholla again—that’s on you.”
* * *
The bus, one of those two-car behemoths, dragged itself along against friction and gravity, like a beast of burden, carrying Morgan and her paralyzed, slow-motion panic toward a place labeled “home.”
The sun struck a passing windshield, momentarily blinding Morgan, and she closed her eyes. When Grace first gave Morgan the Toko, Morgan had opened the back, fired the shutter, and marveled at the tiny disc of light, which winked with the smooth, near silent operation of an internal spring. So compact, so clever.
Morgan had also discovered, on the underside of the camera, the half-worn, off-kilter words that Grace had missed: MADE IN OCCUPIED JAPAN. After the second world war, the allies ordered Japanese manufacturers to stamp the message on exported goods to advertise the country’s ongoing state of complete subjugation. To humiliate. That was the purpose of that project. From shame, democracy.
Originally Grace had not wanted Morgan to go. The daily calls had been icy—you know abandonment is one of my biggest triggers—but only one devolved into a total meltdown. This, like other tantrums, was a “moment of disconnection.” They were an involuntary survival mechanism, Grace explained, from childhood. To avoid them, Morgan must maintain a loving and close connection with Grace at all times so that Grace always felt held.
Usually, awareness of what was going on—Grace’s anxiety slipping into the gear of panic, her fear of being unlovable taking over—would neutralize the pain of Grace’s angry explosions.
Other times, being with Grace was like standing under a waterfall, open-mouthed, trying to breathe. But it was the post-fight, mandatory absolution, the necessity that Morgan convince Grace, at length, that her tantrums were justified, even provoked, that siphoned Morgan’s mood like a vampire.
On that same call, after Grace had suggested that Morgan’s close relationship with her aunt was unhealthy, even romantic, Morgan, for her part, surprised herself: she came dangerously close to hanging up.
Now, getting close to Silver Lake, the bus passed St. Thomas Catholic Church. Grace had spent her twenties hating herself, twisting herself into knots over how to be gay and Christian at the same time. Once, during an argument in the car down the street from their church, Grace said:
“God is using you to punish me.”
Morgan was offended. Is that what she was to Grace?
“Don’t give me that look,” said Grace. “Yes, punish me. For being gay. What else?”
She didn’t mean that, Grace clarified the next morning. Her lesbianism was a gift. They frequented a small, all-wooden church, which was always too warm. Cozy, Grace said, as a birdhouse. Grace could read music, and she sung at church and at home. How could you not love someone who sings beautifully in the shower? Sometimes, Morgan stopped to listen, her heart lifting, registering the timbre of her own weakness.
In church, the stained glass would cast geometries of color onto the burgundy carpet and, over the course of the service, they would creep toward the altar. When Grace took communion, the papery white wafer, dipped in wine sweet as sherry and placed intimately in the waiting mouth, the priest said, “Take, eat, this is my body which is given for you.”
But at church, they did not touch. Grace did not want their relationship, which might not be understood by all, to distract the other parishioners from communing with God. It was loving, she said, to keep their relationship to themselves. Afterwards, during the refreshments in the church hall, Grace would explain that they were roommates.
* * *
Morgan’s bus stop came, but she was not ready. Her bags were too heavy, impossible to lift. It took her two more stops, all the way to the reservoir, before she managed to get off.
The reservoir shined, glossy. That was Los Angeles for you, a man-made lake sparkling through a chain-link fence. This is nice, she told herself. This is pretty. She yanked the suitcase along in the dirt.
The jacaranda trees lining the path around the lake were in bloom, and their pastel purple blossoms, like antique lampshades, hung in lush, downward bunches. But the wind, which had intensified in the early afternoon, raked them from the branches.
She worked against her own photographic eye. She walked around the lake, sweating with her luggage, and filled the Toko’s viewfinder with squares of uniform texture: blank white sky, rectangle of grey sidewalk, formless black panel of a parked van. She wanted not dullness, but absence. She framed shots worth taking, composing them carefully, but refused to trip the shutter. She liked the violence of seeing, framing, and then capturing nothing—a deliberate forgetting.
Erratic motion drew her eye off the path, where a pigeon lay on the ground beneath a bush, flapping one wing. She crouched down. The animal was on its side, jerking its head and flapping its free wing unevenly. The bird turned onto its back then, its thin limbs shot out without control, its claws tightening and untightening in the air. It eyed Morgan, panicked, but could do nothing to protect itself. It coughed up white bits onto the dusty earth.
Morgan was not the only witness. A young woman, maybe early twenties, stopped. She was freckled, small and elegant, but in shorts and a threadbare t-shirt, slathered with sunscreen. She pulled down her oversized headphones. She crouched down next to Morgan and pressed four fingers to her lower lip.
“I’m a vet tech,” she said. She reached her hand out to the bird, which flapped even more frantically. She withdrew it.
Morgan knew nothing. “Seizure?”
Helpless, stupid, like a child, Morgan trembled. The bird trembled, too, shook and jerked with bizarre, uncoordinated movements as if possessed, its eyes bulging in and out like a Panic Pete.
The girl picked up the white bits and squinted at them. “Poison,” she said, definitive. “Supposed to act as a warning, to scare the other birds away, supposed to be humane. You can see how fucking humane it is.”
Take, thought Morgan. Eat.
The pigeon flipped over again, as if stretched out and inflated to extremes from inside.
“All our science and technology,” she said, lifting the back of her wrist to wipe her forehead. “And this is what we do with it.” There was no hope in her voice.
Morgan couldn’t bear to watch. She felt gripped by a great despair. “I’ll take it,” she said. She would get a taxi to the vet. Grace would or wouldn’t understand. Morgan scooped up the bird in her sweatshirt, holding it upright, with its wings closed. The head poked out and bobbed. It was warm and moving under the fabric. It jerked around, but not as badly as before.
The girl looked down at the small, smooth head. The beak opened, then closed. Then the bird’s movements, once jerky, slowed. Its head drooped and lay sideways, eyes open. The girl made a small sound, a sound of anguish, one the pigeon could not itself make. “This was deliberate,” she said.
One living creature, one nearby, had done this to another. People were the cruelest beings in the world. The girl touched Morgan’s shoulder. “You can’t bury her,” she said. “Not filled with poison. And you can’t leave her.” They stood together. People walking or running slowed their pace but did not stop.
She gave Morgan an awkward hug and her number. She said her name was Lacey and that they weren’t strangers anymore.
* * *
After dropping her backpack and rolling the suitcase, with its dirty wheels, into the hallway and onto the rug, Morgan registered Grace’s offerings on the little folding table: sweet peas in a porcelain vase, two boxes of T-Max 100, a green satin card, and a monumental tome, a special edition of Robert Frank’s The Americans, which Morgan had coveted for an eternity. Morgan kept her distance, afraid to touch the card, to open it and hear Grace’s melodious voice even in writing.
Instead, Morgan cradled the bird in her sweatshirt, its body still warm, still pliant. It was unendurable, the persistent warmth. Morgan was dizzy. She would throw up, possibly. She sat on the sofa and put the sweatshirt bundle on the coffee table.
Grace was everywhere. Morgan had not realized, living in their shared apartment for a year, just how much Grace there was. On the mantlepiece, on the fridge at an angle under a magnet in the shape of Oregon, image after image in funky frames, in stacked black and white shots from a photo booth. Some were of the two of them together, or else Grace with friends, taken before she met Morgan. There were no photos of Morgan alone, or of Morgan with anyone but Grace. The furniture was Grace’s, the books, Grace’s. The sunlight streaming in the sliding glass doors, which wavered on the warped wood floor, might as well have been Grace’s, too.
Morgan felt perverse, like an intruder. She wanted to ride the Honda, to move through space in a powerful way, but she had promised Grace she would sell the bike. Did she want Grace to spend her life caring for a quadriplegic? No. For Grace to get a horrifying phone call in the middle of the night? No again. Compromise, Grace counseled, was part of adult relationships.
Once, Grace said she imagined God peeling off the lid of a sardine can and finding them living their minuscule lives inside. And then he eats one of us, Morgan said. Yes, Grace said. You.
It was sad enough to waste nature’s virtuosic design, to kill a flying machine whole and perfect in its particularity, but to make it suffer like that? Morgan went to the closet, picked up a box of Grace’s work pumps, and dumped them on the floor. She padded the box with a hand towel, one Grace would miss, and laid the pigeon on its back in the cardboard coffin, its rich wings curved around its body like an evening cloak.
The light began to fade.
Morgan found herself in the bathroom, mixing chemicals she had pulled out from under the sink. She checked the temperature of the water, diluted the developer, mixed the stop bath and fix in the right ratios, and poured liquids from one jug to the other. She checked the timing chart.
She felt herself at a remove. It was like when Morgan had the Toko hidden and ready, poking through the hole in her black sweatshirt pocket, and saw Grace as pure subject. Was the figure centered or off-centered? Was she in focus? How deep was the depth of field? Was the composition fresh? Was the figure moving too fast for the shutter speed? Was there enough light to capture detail in the shadows without blowing out the whites? What expression was held in the subject’s face?
It took her several minutes—too long—to wrestle the tiny film onto the mini-reel inside the dark bag which went up to her elbows. Under the elastic, her arm ached and burned, which felt good. She had taught herself to cut and punch 35mm film into 17.5mm, small enough to load into the Toko, but that meant small film, which was hard to feed onto the reel.
She was too impatient, too eager, too upset to be gentle. Finally, she dragged the film onto the reel and locked it in the light-tight development tank. She took everything out of the dark bag, poured the clear liquid developer into the tank, and set the timer. Carrying the tank with her, she agitated the central plastic rod every thirty seconds or so, clunking it one way and then the other against the swishing weight of the liquid.
An editor for a real estate company, Grace hated her job—she told people she played Tetris with words—and hated their dated junior one bedroom apartment even more, saying that the popcorn ceiling, gold brown accent glass, and tan carpet were proof of her professional and artistic failure. Grace would be home soon. Would want to know why exactly her texts had gone unanswered.
The timer went off.
Morgan drained the developer into the waste jug and poured in the yellow stop bath. She reset the timer and agitated the reel, bathing the film, dislodging bubbles, making space for the chemical reaction. Every thirty seconds, she agitated the rod again, tapping the bottom edge of the tank against the corner of a table, harder than necessary. Hard tap. Hard tap.
Right before Morgan left for Sedona, as she and Grace were arguing about it, Grace made direct contact between the hard, fleshy base of her fist, brought down like a percussion mallet, and Morgan’s upper arm, where the cactus would one day latch. It did not hurt or leave a bruise, and it was not meant to. It was just frustration made material. Light hits us all the time, Morgan thought, and we let it.
The timer went off again, and Morgan poured the yellow stop bath into another jug. She poured the fix, the final step, into the tank and set the timer one last time.
Every thirty seconds, she agitated the reel using the plastic rod. Hiding the Toko that first night had been all instinct. Grace smashed a frame of them on Catalina Island, said I’m a monster, and then threatened to slap herself. In the next moment, with one hand holding the camera steady, and the lens snugged into the hole, Morgan triggered the shutter. Just one picture. It would come out or it wouldn’t.
The timer went off again. Impatient, Morgan opened the tank, pulled out the film, and dried it with a microfiber cloth. Grace would be home in half an hour, less. Morgan cut the film into sections and loaded the first piece into the folding metal holder. In her makeshift darkroom in the closet, she slipped the holder under the head of the lamp and snapped on the light.
Projected below onto the white mounting board, the first inverted image glowed black and white, terrifying and factual. In the tilted frame, Grace kneeled on the bed, her hand and face blurred as if connected, the tendons in her neck flexed, her body taut and angular, twisted, but small, still, on the big bare mattress.
There were more. Grace in the living room, having tipped over the couch. Grace in the parked corolla, shouting and pounding the horn. The back of Grace as she threw Morgan’s clothes off the balcony. Ugly, all of them. Grace in every ugly flavor. Morgan had forgotten to advance the film once, so in one frame there were two angry Graces, one on the trail and one at the park, one-bodied, two-headed, a hydra.
In the last frame, Grace was throwing something at the camera, but what? A plastic trash can. Was it empty? Did it matter? Without intending to, and even though the camera was aimed at Grace, Morgan’s face appeared in the mirror behind. She was smiling. She had the self-satisfied face of a photographer getting a good picture.
* * *
A door opened. A twinge of adrenaline. No, someone across the hall. Grace would be home soon. Morgan could not say for sure whether, if Grace was allowed to return home, to open her mouth, the negatives would dissolve.
Moving quickly, leaving the enlarger on and the film in the holder, she slid the remaining negatives into a plastic sheet, folded it up, and then put them in her backpack in the pocket of her negatives binder. She checked that the Toko, talismanic, was still in the padded pocket. She tore her moto jacket out of the closet, breaking the plastic hanger, feeling the leather burning tight across her enflamed bicep, threw on her old moto boots, and snatched the helmet from its shelf. After sliding the shoebox into her backpack, she walked out, pausing on the threshold for only a second. She left the suitcase. In the garage, she yanked off the trickle charger, mounted, fired up the engine, put in earplugs, geared up, and clicked her phone into the mount. It was dark already and she flipped on the high beams. Before the bike was fully warm, she roared out of the garage.
She rode east. Even in her agitation, motorcycling hierarchized her thoughts. Blind corners, in particular, shoved everything else out, even Grace. She coached herself: Follow your lines, stay outside, keep your nerve no matter what comes around the corner, roll the throttle smoothly, pick up power from beneath the clutch, press alternately down the handlebars, look through the turns, counterweight on hairpins, keep your head up. She accelerated at the lights, aggressive, the bike pulling her forward, wind resistance against her head and chest. She swam through traffic, dodging and slipping between cars like a fugitive.
But even splitting lanes, she was not going fast enough. She got on the freeway.
Her phone lit up, and there was Grace’s face on the screen, the photograph Grace had insisted on, self-serious, her good side, not smiling but dramatic.
Morgan could always crash, always opt out of this hunched defensive position of being alive. Did kamikaze pilots even eject? Or did they dive-bomb, serene, immune to humiliation, right into their targets?
Rush hour. Cars and trucks. A second call from Grace. Should she answer? Suddenly, traffic. Morgan grabbed the brakes, smooth but hard, pressing the foot brake, forcing them to a quick stop, shifting her weight, swallowing her own spit. The front tire stopped just short of the bumper of a pick-up, and her back wheel lifted gently, but entirely, off the ground. It dropped, making contact with the pavement, and she flexed her legs and managed to keep the bike upright.
Jesus.
She was not actually interested in dying.
Shaken, she flipped her visor up. Cold rushed into her helmet, around her eyes and over the curves of her face. She gulped cool air, and then glided gingerly between cars, slow, watching for lane changes. A major back-up pushed the cars to the right, but she kept to the left to get around.
Text messages appeared on her phone, one after another, replacing each other: cruel, then abandoned, unlovable, a moment, and then come home, let’s talk, before where is your compassion and then, after a longer pause, hurt myself.
Morgan reached the wreck. In the far-left lane, against the concrete divider and beyond three burning red flares, a firefighter leaned over a smashed sedan, which had spun around and faced oncoming traffic. The front was foreshortened, layers of metal pleated like bellows. Plexiglass on the pavement glowed, as if light itself had chipped and broken. Beyond, a fire truck flashed red yellow, red yellow, red yellow. Standing there, the firefighter’s whole body was reflective, sending back the light it received. A cable ran from the firefighter’s shoulder down to a generator on the ground. Morgan rode by, her vision clear, and recognized the shape of more-than-human power. Held steady by the firefighter, the machine—a hydraulic, flat, two-fingered claw—did its holy work: opening, inch by inch, the damaged driver’s door. There they are, Laylene once said, the jaws of life.
Blaire Baily is a queer writer, lawyer, and literary critic based in Los Angeles. Her poetry has appeared in Inverted Syntax and her criticism has appeared in The Lambda Literary Review. Her essay on Jeanette Winterson’s novel Art & Lies won a £300 prize from the Marlborough Literary Festival. She holds a Bachelor’s in English from the University of California, Berkeley and a law degree from Georgetown. She practiced law first at a private firm and then at a government agency before shifting to the non-profit sector. A recipient of the Claire Carmichael Scholarship, she is currently writing a collection of stories about life in a domestic violence shelter. The stories are based on her ongoing work as a Legal Advocate at a shelter in Southern California. When not writing or advocating, she motorcycles with the East Side Moto Babes.