The walls are built, reality on one side, Kimber on the other. Her heartbeat is a timpani drum, each steady thud an affirmation that she’s still alive.
“Hey.”
What?
How?
The voice is big, deep. It startles because how could it not when Kimber’s Wonderland is so quiet?
“Yes, hi. I’m here. Hellllllloooooo,” the voice says. “Eyes. You have them. Open Sesame.”
Right, she has eyes. In her face.
She does as she’s told.
There, looming above her like a mountain, is a woman with pale skin and ruddy cheeks. Her chestnut hair is short, shaved at the sides, the top spiky thanks to hair shellac that gleams in the dim lighting. She’s heavy, round all over, a double chin, broad shoulders. She stands with her legs braced apart, her hands stuffed into the pockets of her acid-washed jeans. High-top sneakers with a logo Kimber doesn’t recognize. A navy blue tank top beneath one of those retro satin jackets. This one has a logo of a pizza joint on the left breast, a pizza thumbs-upping and cheesing a smile.
It’s aggressively cheerful.
The stranger smirks.
“Telling you to focus is probably not gonna work, huh?”
“I...who?” It’s all Kimber can manage. The soft place has inflated her tongue. Is inflating her tongue. It’s cartoonishly huge, filling her cheeks, ballooning her head as it grows and grows. Words are impossible to make because they’re trapped inside by the enormous, rapidly expanding slab of flesh inside her mouth.
This is alarming.
“Renee, but Rey, please. Always been my thing.” The large woman shakes her head and looks around the eight-hundred-square-foot apartment. The furnishings are sparse: a faded plaid couch, a tiny box TV set up on stacked milk crates, a cheap, corkboard decorator’s table they used as a dining table, and some folding chairs. Rey grabs a chair, swings it around, and straddles it, her arms stretching across the top, metal rim. Her chin drops to rest upon them.
She peers at Kimber on the floor.
“How?” Kimber’s words remain strangled. Annoyed, she reaches into her mouth to wrestle her tongue, trying to shove it out of the way so her voice can be free. Immediately she regrets this; there’s something bitter on her skin. She smacks her lips, the sour taste lingering after she removes her fingers.
Hand sanitizer from the school bathroom. Chemical lemon. Yum.
“How’s less important than why, kiddo, and only you can answer that. You’re the one who brought me here.” Rey pauses. “Maybe I’m like a Fairy Butchmother. You kids still use that word?”
Kimber tries to articulate that some do, some don’t, but she can’t because POP! goes the tongue. The balloon has expanded past its limits and only flesh tatters remain. She slaps her hand over her mouth, eyes wide, staring at Rey.
She’s a miasma of feeling: fear, confusion, curiosity. Not only is she lacking a tongue, but she’s grappling with the notion of an invader in the soft place. Sure, there have been glimpses of Gram or Shyanna, but she knows those are hallucinations, her mind giving her what she wants most but usually in ways she doesn’t want them.
Rey is new.
Her mind has expanded its repertoire.
“You’re fine, Kimber,” Rey says. “Intact.”
Kimber’s eyes narrow as if to say, Are you sure?
Rey grins, revealing yellowish-brown teeth with a zillion silver fillings.
“Promise.”
Gingerly, Kimber pokes a finger between her lips. The sour taste is a small price to pay for the reassurance that your tongue is still part of your face. And it is. It’s there, slimy and wiggly and immediately retreating from the prodding digit.
We’re good.
“Thanks,” Kimber whispers.
“You bet.” Rey looks around the apartment and shakes her head. “Hasn’t changed much, has it? That blue wall in the kitchen? I did that. Meant to do the whole place but got busy. Then got lazy. Figured the landlord would cover it up at the very least, but he was a piece of shit. Harold? Graves or something. Greeves. No, it’s Greeves. He still here?”
“Yeah. Barely. It’s just tha—hold on.” Kimber realizes her heart is no longer pounding in her ears. Her fingers creep to her chest, still slimy with her own spit. She wants to be sure she’s alive, that she hasn’t died and gone to Bizarro Heaven. It probably looks like she’s fondling her own boob, but she doesn’t care. She’s located the thrum deep in her chest, pounding hard as it pumps life through her veins. Satisfied, she sucks in another deep breath.
“He’s got cancer. His son has kinda taken over,” she says.
“He always did smoke like a chimney, but who am I to judge? Didn’t get these bad boys by being good to myself.” Rey taps her stained teeth. “Anyway, don’t smoke, it’s bad for you. Drugs are, too, but Nancy’s ‘Just Say No,’ yeah?”
Kimber has no idea who Nancy is. Rey figures that out real quick. She grunts and streaks her hand over her hair.
“Never mind. Just be careful with that stuff. I get it, though—the why. You’re missing your girl real bad.”
Kimber wants to know how she knows that, but then she remembers the picture on the phone. It’d been in her palm, but at some point during her high, she must have dropped it. She cranes her neck. The phone is close by still—but far, but close, but far, but close—and she stretches her arm both inches (miles?) to retrieve it. There she is. Shyanna and her bright white smile.
The freckles still kill her every time.
“May I?” Rey reaches out her hand. Kimber doesn’t think twice, though she knows she probably should. That phone was her last Christmas gift from her grandmother. It’s the only one she’s got or will ever get ’til she’s on her own, and she babysits three times a week for some of the most obnoxious kids on the planet to pay for the service.
Rey runs a calloused finger over Shyanna’s face on the screen. “She’s gorgeous. Good for you. You happy?”
“No.” Kimber’s answer is immediate. When Rey glances at her, cocking her head to the side with expectation, Kimber reaches for words that again refuse to come. Her tongue is fine, she’s fairly certain. It’s just that the feelings are so big. “We can’t. Our parents. My mom’s a mess. Her parents are religious. I miss her so much.”
“Okay. Yeah, I get you. That’s probably why I’m back here.”
It’s this phrasing that clues Kimber into something her addled mind glossed over before: this is not Rey’s first time in this apartment.
“That blue wall in the kitchen? I did that.”
“Back,” Kimber repeats, more to herself than to Rey.
“Yep. I dunno how long it’s been, but probably a long time.” She returns Kimber’s phone. Kimber expects a smear of oil from Rey’s finger to mar the screen over Shyanna’s face, but no, it’s pristine save for Kimber’s own thumbprint on the bottom button.
“I’ve never seen you before, though.” Kimber pushes herself up so she can sit. The world spins. She feels like Wile E. Coyote right after he’s crushed beneath his own Acme anvil. No tiny birds dance around her head yet, but in the soft place, anything can appear without a moment’s hesitation.
She blinks and narrows her eyes. It’s helped mitigate the illusions in the past. Perhaps it’ll prevent them altogether now.
“Like I said, you brought me here,” Rey says.
“Are you a ghost then?”
Rey hesitates. “What’s a ghost, really? Casper, sure. A spook in an attic, okay. Or, maybe it’s bigger than that. A concept—something from the past we don’t want to look at but should. A reminder given shape.”
That’s deep, deeper than Kimber is prepared to handle in the soft place, and so she points at the blue wall instead, letting the gesture say what she cannot.
Rey shrugs her shoulders.
“I don’t have the
answer you’re looking for, kid. All I know is I’m here because of you. I’m kinda liking my Fairy Butchmother theory. How many others you think can claim that one?” Rey’s thick fingers swipe at the corners of her mouth. “Or, maybe you’re just on drugs and this is where your brain went. Id gone wild. Damn, I want a cigarette. Should have never brought it up earlier.”
“Don’t have one, sorry.”
Kimber is comfortable with her almost lie. Mama has cigarettes, a carton in the kitchen, but Kimber hates the smell and so she won’t give away what doesn’t belong to her. It’s like Rey knows, though; her eyes drift to the stove. To the cheap, white cabinet above with the old brown splatters across the front.
“Don’t worry about it. I get it,” she says.
Kimber frowns.
I don’t get anything right now.
I don’t like being confused.
“It’s okay, Kimber. You’re going to be fine. I’m not here to hurt you.”
Again, Rey looks like she understands things she shouldn’t—like she can read Kimber’s mind, and maybe in the soft place she can. There are no rules here, only that anything is possible and that the good stuff is ecstatic and the bad stuff is excruciating. Kimber’s been lucky to this point. There’s been far more good than bad in Wonderland.
But is Rey bad?
Or is Rey just Rey, a thing, neither good nor bad?
Is she just a ghost?
A reminder given shape.
Who badly wants a smoke.
“Yeah, that. Now you’re getting it,” Rey says.
“I am?”
“Sure, as much as anyone can get anything when they’re tripping balls.” Rey shakes her head. “It’s about the girl, though. Isn’t it always about the girl?”
Shyanna.
Kimber hugs the phone to her chest, the flat screen touching the sweatshirt fabric above her heart. Seeing this, a flash of pain distorts Rey’s face, worry lines creasing her brow, her mouth pinched. She smacks her lips and motions vaguely over her shoulder, though at what exactly, Kimber can’t say.
“My girl was Tammy. Met her in the club. See, back then—I don’t know when, really, just...in my time—” Rey pauses “—we were club scene kids. We had to be. No one else wanted us around, so we made our own spaces. She worked there.”
Rey takes a moment, looking like she’s sorting her memories, before she speaks again. “I liked her immediately. She talked so much shit, you know? Made me laugh. We hooked up quick, were living together in a month. Had a cat ’cause clichés sometimes exist for a reason. It wasn’t easy, but we made it. She waitressed in three places, I drove a taxi. Things were good for a couple of years, but back then people were getting sick. Our people were getting sick. You get what I’m saying?”
Not at first she doesn’t, no. Kimber stares at Rey, wanting the answer fed to her, but Rey’s quiet forces Kimber to do those mental calisthenics. Kimber thinks about the story, thinks about the things Rey’s said. She grunts, frustrated, still not grokking it, her drug-laced mind building bridges that go nowhere and venturing off onto paths totally unrelated, but then Rey’s fingers glide over the cartoon face of the pizza guy on the jacket.
The gear’s thirty, maybe forty, years out of date.
The eighties.
Rey nods slowly. “There you go. Now you’re with me.” She reaches out like she’ll clap Kimber on the shoulder, but just before contact, she recoils, peeling away and running her fingers over those too-glossy spikes on top of her head.
Kimber is fascinated by how quickly they spring back into shape.
“Come to find out, Tammy had it when I met her. Got it from her ex-boyfriend who got it from his ex-boyfriend. By the time she was diagnosed, most of our friends were already half-dead and no one outside of the folks in our scene seemed to care.” Rey is looking not at Kimber, but through her. Her eyes are fixed, intense, and she is very much elsewhere when she talks.
“It’s strange. You complain your whole life about no one seeing you, and when they finally do, it’s almost worse, because they accuse you of killing them. It wasn’t just our problem anymore, but theirs, too, and they were mad about it. You won’t have to contend with that, thank God, but in my time...wow. Wow. I sound like my parents. Look at me with this, ‘In my time’ shit. Sorry. I just—sorry.”
Rey chuckles, but it’s humorless and dry and devolves into a cough.
Rey is so apparently sad, and Kimber is sad for her, too. She doesn’t know Rey, doesn’t know if Rey is even real, and if she is real, is she a Casper ghost or a memory given form or a manifestation of Kimber’s high, but does that matter? Kimber cares about her and her story. It’s also familiar—Kimber feels it every day when she thinks about Shyanna. People call loss poignant but Kimber calls it bullshit.
No one should have to feel that way. She shouldn’t, nor should her Fairy Butchmother-ghost-hallucination person.
“I’m super sorry,” she says, wincing at how inadequate that sounds in the wake of Rey’s confession.
Rey rolls her head around on her shoulders. “Thanks. It’s old news now, but grief doesn’t go away. Not really. It’s just that the world we live in gets bigger as we gain more experiences so the grief seems smaller by comparison. Sometimes, something will hit it right on the bull’s-eye, though, and you get walloped like it’s fresh. I feel like I just punched myself in the face.”
Kimber knows this feeling, too, as it’s the one that sends her seeking the soft place knowing it’s not good for her. She extends a comforting hand to pat Rey on the knee, but Rey’s too far. It’s that inches and miles problem she had with the phone, where all space is the same space, but unlike the phone, no matter how hard she stretches, she’s never quite close enough. She is lunging and grasping at nothing.
If Rey finds her futile maneuverings ridiculous, she’s good enough not to say so.
“Thanks, Kimber.”
Kimber acknowledges her with a nod.
Silence.
Forever silence.
Until it’s too much to take.
Kimber looks down at her picture of Shyanna, her chin touching her chest.
“You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to, but what happened with you and Tammy?” Her voice is soft. Reverent. She’s asking a lot and she knows it. It’s not Rey’s duty to perform her pain for her, but if she’s willing to finish the story, Kimber is an active audience.
Rey’s brow arches up, high enough it nearly kisses the deep V of her hairline. “Exactly what you think happened. Because people who should care didn’t, until they absolutely had to. Until their inhumanity was so big, they crumbled under its weight. And the sad truth is, some folks still didn’t care after that, but enough did that things got done eventually.”
Kimber is tempted to ask if Rey got sick, too, but even drugged to high heaven, she knows it’s inappropriate. Rey’s sharp side-eye suggests the same, and so she silently considers Tammy and Rey, drawing her own, sad conclusions that do little to alleviate her loneliness about Shyanna.
More quiet. Too much quiet. Kimber is wistful for the trumpeting pulse from earlier. She rocks on the floor, back and forth, to soothe herself. Her fingers fidget with the phone. The soft place is a little less soft now, and the cold has begun to seep in from below. She shudders and pulls her hoodie sweatshirt until it covers her knees.
Rey stands from her seat and stretches. Her arms extend so far out, she looks like she’ll take flight.
“It’s time for me to go, kiddo, but—hey, look. It’s not all bad. It sometimes looks that way, and it sometimes is that way, but—” Rey rubs her chin, thoughtful. She glances from Kimber on the floor back to the kitchen cabinet.
Without asking permission, she crosses to the cupboard and reaches inside for a pack of Mama’s smokes. She pulls off the cellophane and tosses it aside before helping herself. One cove
ted cigarette is tucked behind her ear. The other is slipped between her lips. The rest of the pack is returned to its rightful place.
“—the thing is, us club kids always had each other, even on the worst days of our lives, sometimes on the last days of our lives. The world is full of people like your mom. It’s the same brand of person who ignored sick queers til our bones littered their doorsteps. But the world’s also full of good people—folks who just want to live and let live. Like your grandmother. They’re out there, I promise.
“And the beautiful part about you being so young is you can blow this fish fry soon. You can get out in the world and form your own family just like me and Tammy did, with Shyanna at your side. You’re separated now, but not forever. It’ll seem that way awhile, but you just gotta hold out a little longer, ’cause soon your doors will burst open and you can fly high, kiddo. And I don’t mean literally. You do what you gotta do, but everything in moderation. Don’t break your brain with that bad candy, you hear?”
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Kimber replies. “It just helps when I’m so down, you know?”
“I said what I said. That shit ain’t good for you.”
Kimber peers up at Rey’s face, the big woman standing before her with her contraband cigarette clenched between her teeth, she blinks, and Rey isn’t there anymore. The space she’d filled so clearly in Kimber’s mind is empty. Behind that space is a robin’s-egg blue wall with a crack near the cheap molding. Kimber whispers Rey’s name, but there is no answer beyond the baleful winter wind rattling her windowpanes.
Kimber forces herself onto her feet. She’s wobbly, like a colt on new legs, but that doesn’t stop her from walking to the wall and touching it, her fingers tracing over the textured bumps in the paint. It was real before and it’s real now, and the cold beneath her finger pads lets her know it’s not part of a grand hallucination. Kimber glances behind her at the dining table with the chair Rey sat in. It’s no longer propped mid floor and turned around, but back in its rightful place.
Out Now Page 19
