(Working TItle)

by Bambi Hudson

I've painted him over a dozen times. I guess this is what true love feels like. With each portrait I believe I get closer to him, knowing him both personally and physically. I know the exact degree his eyes turn down, and the angle at which his eyebrows arch. I know the color of his skin at the tip of his nose, and the exact shade it turns once it's dark. I understand the way his hair falls over his face and how it blows in the wind. I know how to capture his curled lip when he tells a lie, and I know the secret he hides. Each portrait I think I understand why he did it. Men get bored easily and forget what they have right in front of them. But women like me will never lose sight of that, I know this for sure because I glide my brush over the canvas to highlight the side of his cheek.

I don't think many of my first pieces captured him very well. That was before I thoroughly studied him. I started off having him pose for me, but he got restless easily and that made him hard to see. So, I took a couple of photographs and worked from those instead.

"I think you got my nose wrong," he pointed out early on. It's always the nose.

After the 10th session, I begged him to sit for one more portrait. He was hesitant, but eventually agreed.

"I don't understand why you keep doing this," he said when I was on his lips.

"Perfection,"

"You've got a ton of perfectly good ones already,"

"I'm not aiming for good. Anyone can do good."

"So what, you want to be great?"

I put my brush down and looked over at him from behind the canvas. His eyes moved to meet mine, never breaking his pose.

"I want people to see your face and know you are a man worth painting a thousand times. They should be able to count the exact number of hairs on your chin. They'll look into your eyes and see you looking right at me, and they will know our entire lives story."

In the end of course, it turned out he wasn't worth a single painting at all. And our story was one that had upped and ended, possibly doomed right from the start. In a whirl, I stopped painting him with an air of love and rather one of regret. Regret that I didn't see it coming.

"You're still making more?" He scoffed after walking in on portrait number 82.

I've come to the point where I can paint him by memory, though I still look over at him every now and again to see if I could capture a glimpse of remorse.

"I'll make as many as I need to,"

"Okay," he chuckled. "Whatever you need." He shook his head and walked out.

I don't think it's an obsession, really. It's a desire for the truth, the urge to know. It takes over and I've got to get it out somehow. There are far worse ways I could be dealing with this, I think I'm handling it in a rather healthy way. I could totally be losing my mind instead.

---

I had to see her today. Out of all the women he could've chosen, he picked one with easy access to my own home. An old college friend of ours, I don't quite remember which one of us introduced her first. I first became suspicious of them when I noticed something different in his eyes while I was painting. It wasn't anything physical, only a feeling.

"That's a very nice portrait," she said, pointing to the one I had hanging in the foyer. I only smiled.

"I could never be an artist," she continued to say. "But I'm glad you find it so... fulfilling," She walked away before she saw the look of disgust on my face.

Dinner was awful. Besides the fact that I find most of my husband's friends to be the biggest bores I've ever met, I just couldn't get it out of my head that the two of them might be playing footsie under the table. There was no real way for me to check without making a scene, so I did what artists do best- observe. I spent the rest of that dinner studying their body language, eye contact, facial expressions. I wasn't looking for any new information, it had already been confirmed the two of them were a thing. I mean I guess I was only just trying to make myself upset by watching them. There's a sort of comfort in being sad, in feeling like the only one there for you is yourself.

I don't understand what he sees in her. She makes a perfectly fine friend, but not even one I would like to spend all my time with. She's not even the type of friend I'd invite to my birthday party, a pity invite, maybe. Her looks have nothing to do with it, she's a very pretty woman. But oh, she's just so dull! Not a single piece of her it unique or genuine. And that comment about being an artist? The nerve, I played with my food while she droned on about the legacy of Pina Bausch. Everyone paid attention like she was the most interesting woman in the world, but I saw right through her. She isn't the only one who reads the New Yorker. Even her fashion is uninspired, coming straight off a store mannequin or magazine catalogue.

The proof came from a series of letters sent back and forth between them, and then eventually an eyewitness account from my sister. I found out about the letters through a postal friend of mine, who risked losing his job to bring some of the sealed envelopes to me. I never got to read any of them, but I could only imagine what they said. My sister caught them a few weeks later. She was visiting a friend two towns over when she saw them sitting close together in the park. His arm was around her while she laid her head on his shoulder. I was so upset that night I painted my first fiery landscape.

The dinner was over after what seemed like hours, and I excused myself to the kitchen to do the dishes. One by one our guests began filing out, saying goodbye on their way past the kitchen and to the front door. Once I put away the last plate, I walked into the living room where the two of them were whispering over the fireplace. She was holding a book who's title I couldn't read.

"OH darling," my husband said when he saw me. "We were just talking about possibly setting up a book club with the rest of the group, is that something you'd be interest ed in?"

"Sounds nice," I forced a smile.

"You're so smart and well read, I bet you'd add a lot of unique insight to our conversations." She giggled.

She might as well just call me stupid.

---

I resorted back to some of my older portraits and photographs of him so I could paint those instead. it hurt too much painting him in his present state, the nose that smells her hair, the eyes that have seen her whole, and the lips that say nothing but sweetness and light to her. I wonder how many of the jokes he used on me he's now telling her. And I wonder if he looks at her the same way he looked at me when I was fresh and new. Days went by and I locked myself away for hours, painting portrait after portrait after portrait. Of course, it only drove him further away, the time spend in confinement was time permissible for him to be with her. I just wanted him back. Eventually I switched to drawing, and I tore from page to page, making dozens of portraits at a time. In my frenzy I ripped one out too hard and tore right through his face. Even as my creation I had ruined him. With my own hands, I had ruined him. Maybe I was driving myself to madness. Maybe my madness is what drove him away. The portraits started to pile up against each other, they surrounded me and I was in a sea of him. After another long day of painting I collapsed. 

He found me later that night and for the first time in a while, rushed to my side.

"Darling, this needs to stop," he begged.

We looked around in horror at the hundreds, if not thousands, of portraits filling up the space around us. As much as I've tried, I can't bring myself to stop. Because in these portraits, he still loves me. And in these portraits, I find that I still love myself.

Untitled

Zoe Byszynski

I want the person I love to love me. If he is, however, totally devoted to me he does not exist any longer and I cease to love him. And as long as he is not totally devoted to me he does not love me enough. Hunger and repletion. - Simone Weil

        Only a bookshop in the East Village has enough room for an author to sign copies with the ashes of his cigarette.

        And for readers to worship at his feet.

        With the rage of her inability to clichely slam the door open, a short woman forces her heels to click loudly on the linoleum as she approaches the god. The God in question, newest New York Times BestSeller (not like it's a dying breed...) for his book of poetry Cupid Shoots Everyone But Himself. The short woman is his ex-wife. The second he sees her, he's mortal again.

        "Why are my poems in here?"

        "I don't recall you being a writer."

        "They're about me."

        "They're about love."

        "There's no love in them."

        She hands him a manila folder. Crumpled napkins, coffee stained looseleaf, and a couple post-its fall out. They look like wrung out sponges.

        "How do you explain that? What happened to that love? What happened to it, is what I'd like to know."

        Though she had long since been out of love with the god, she knew that his verse hadn't. The folder was seldom opened for fear that the young love would age in the modern air. And to bind and sell it? Well, then they're just more words on a page.

        "Why are you here?"

        "You."

        The god was as smart as she was tall. He found that she was a persistent itch on the empty side of his bed, in the depth of silence in his apartment, and his writing.

        "The lover wants what he does not have. It is by definition impossible for him to have what he wants if, as soon as it had, it is no longer wanting."

        A few disciples snap their fingers.

        He can't speak in prose. The short woman has heard all she needs to, nothing about them was ever special. Her heels click away, noticeably softer.

        He stands up, to the surprise of everyone on their knees. His heart bleeds over the folder.

        "So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, so long lives this, and this gives life to thee," he regurgitates.

        She smiles, There is no love in book, only scripture.

The Styx and the Rubicon

Steven Scricca

Originally Published in Inkspots-GCHS 2023

It has taken me some time to realize that I am you. John Cole*. An american child, raised by images and legends to realize his calling and talents, and just as his chest brims with light and energy, enraptured by a crystalline vocation, he finds his dreams are a century overripe. Yes I was nursed by Chomsky and not Gary Cooper, but we are, both of us, men out of time. ​

​

You dream of Wyatt Earp, I of Lenin, but who is more ridiculous? And what do we inherit? You are off to Mexico, I to the capitol; romantics in nature, eyes turned skywards and forwards with snakes afoot. We embark with unconvicted comrades, meet with enmity and violence, and we return alone, and we never return. Our past? We have no past. We have our fictions, and we have everyone else's to weigh them against. we must learn that it is not for us to inhabit the cameras and clamoring eyes, that we are of the few who race against the spirit of history and cannot break from its current. Yes, you fly backwards and I strain to drag sinister the rushing waters of the present, but neither of us have hopes for the quiet life ashore. We both of us know more than we seem to; but it is not for us to delight in knowledge. What is left? Bodies of fathers. The Styx and the Rubicon.

​

Bodies of fathers. Fathers which come apart inside, fathers which shrink in sunlight. The mother was never your own. It seems, though, that no one's mother is their own. The mother contains all the evil desperation of a whole life, and must choose to protect the child or herself. She always fails.

​

No one is known to us. Nothing is alien to us- how could it be? We are what is alien. There must be of course pass a chance, a single chance to know another soul, but the train doesn't stop at that station, and Jesus Christ is not walking through that door. What gets darker the more it's lit?

​

So we cross our rivers. They are not the same river, for you return empty handed, and I can cross mine but once. But for all we do, we will only ever serve to remind people of the better men before us.

​

​

*Of Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses

Little Stranger

Katie Flynn

I've been living with him without him forever,  but as of this week, the light in my apartment felt wrong. Recurring dreams were the first sign something had to give. Airport dreams, in which I get the feeling I've been living in the terminal for quite some time, then wake up feeling apocalyptic to the early morning sound of someone picking through recyclables out front. Multiplied enough times over, five cents become more than pocket change. After a certain number of years, carrying a number of recurring dreams, it becomes difficult to ignore the fact that part of you is alive, and part is not. 

​

I opened the window that morning to the first smell of summer in March. to the ice cream shop air of the Baskin Robbins two doors down and to the smoke pouring from Halal carts. There was something fresh but old, some memory of all the springs before, and a memory of the last time we stood face to face. Eyes to mirror. That first smell of the season to come was the final blow. Still in the dead center of my youth, I've forced myself to act on the long-standing fact that I have to find him if I ever want to live a normal life. It might be impossible, but it couldn't hurt to try, it can only help, in any event.

​

When I left home, I had the foresight to bring enough for two to three days. Although, I was pretty sure it would be longer. It hadn't rained in twenty-five years, and drought ends, at least in movies, with a torrential downpour. but I figured there was no harm in pretending it was only a short trip. No matter how long I was away, it was probably only necessary to bring enough to look presentable through the weekend. After that, things would be different. He and I would hav finished with a hopefully brief, if tense reunion, and I would have decided where I could possibly go next, if anywhere. 

​

Having sorted out what happened among us all, I could finally be completely by myself. By Monday I might be standing along on a small patch of grass overlooking the river, overlooking the old house. I could be perfectly alright if not entirely absolved. However things went, I would be across the country after a few days spent driving. I was just old enough to rent a car. I had just enough money. So I took the train to the airport, and from there I went west, like an old pioneer. That same kind of terrified hope for a new life and some degree of dread at leaving behind the old. Because I knew as I walked through the park to the station that the jazz musicians and street side cafes would feel different when I returned to the city.

​

I've saved, then blown my savings, for a road trip to nowhere so many times. But for all the daydreaming, so many forgotten nights and long weekends in a number of cities, lost in carefully tuned dialogues with strangers and made-up people- I was inevitably left disappointed time and time again. My enduring inability to be satiated was the death of me, once upon atime. I could never decided if it was his fault or mine. Best to return to the spot where he killed us both. It was all I could think of to do.

​

First stop was Chicago, after twelve straight hours of driving, in a decent hotel full of middle-class families on vacation and people traveling for business. and I spent two days here, the city where we first met in a little synagogue. I couldn't find my way back if I tried for the rest of my life. This was where we began, amidst the scuit of dirty snow still underfoot in April, rats weaving beneath the third rail at clark & Division, and the legacy of Jon Burge lingering in the way people hold their bodies against the howl of police sirens. It was the last place things were good between us. Where he taught me to be patient and promised me I would find moments of it all worthwhile.

​

"You'll be walking down Devon one day with the wind making you want to die," he said, or something along those lines, "but then you'll step into a restaurant or a bar and feel the humid air, see the windows all fogged over like a car that some teenagers have been fucking in. You will take off your coat. You will take a short and it will burn your throat all the way down. Then you'll start to find good things everywhere the orange glow of the apartment windows off Lake Short against the bitter dark in January, the lots of snap peas at the Peterson Community Garden, fifty-cent pool and two-fifty Schiltz, and the rattle-stomp of the Aragon with its absurd ceiling painted with stars. You'll notice, every room in winter has the same scent that wooly, long-haired dogs do, the same damp mix of sweat and slush, which wafts off the necks of women when they unwinf scarves from around their throats after stepping in from the cold." These are good things. But he also taught me, without meaning to, that you can squint across the lake from Montrose or Hollywood and look and look and it just doesn't give you anyhting, refuses to end, refuses to show you the glimpse of Michigan that you know lives on the other side but you just can't quite believe is there.

​

Chicago was where I found him, but also where I began to slowly lose him. After two days there, on my way to the west coast, I had come up empty. Because I already understood why and where we intersected. Just because. All over. I was driving with the hope of coming to some realization as to why things ended the way they did. Who killed who, if blame could be placed at all? And I would only find that in San Francisco, in the dark, in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge.

​

Having spent nearly a third of my money in Chicago, I stayed in cheap motels for the rest of the trip. All cigarette burns on the biege carpet, last renovated somewhere in the early nineties. The dirt and gloom kept me up all night. when I got to my final destination it would be different. I wouldn't mind sleeping in my car, if things went as planned. That was how at peace I would be. Unafraid of perverted truckers of the night. I could rest easy, parked in a Walmart parking lot after stopovers in Kansas City and rEno, where I would watch people meet and kiss in the lobby of a hotel I couldn't afford. I felt almost ready to look him in the eye, which were once my eyes too.

​

Now San Francisco draws closer. Just outside the city limits, I drive without thinking and page through lost memoreis, recalled sporadically adn sparsley, just enough to confirm there was a time we were the same person. Not brothe rand sister, or father and daughter, although it sometimes feels that way. His guilt is my own, and my undue sense of loss was his fault.

​

I stop at a diner and order coffee, black and scalding hot. There's a nostalgic sort of comfort in the empty coffee cups and wine glasses on tables. I watch old friends meeting under syrupy hald-darkness, and ask, Were we here, at some point? Did we pass through? This would be so much easier if I could remember you as mroe than a memory. the waitress is young but looks worn out, in a mint green apron and striped paper hat. She asks if I feel okay, because I don't look too good. I tell her I've been driving forever. I do not specify how long forever is or will be.

​

"Where you going?" she asks, making conversation as she sets her notepad down on the table. I can't tell if she's just curious or wants to reassure me. I can't decide what I want from her, or if I want to burden her with the truth, not fully knowing what the truth is. I'm unable to describe the part of me long since melted into a puddle like the Wicked Witch of the West, and certainly unable to describe him, and who he is to me. There's really nothing to say except that I've been permanently cast as the villain of my own story. But of course, I don't actually say this. I just tell the waitress where I came from and wehre I'm headed. She tells me, as if I don't know, that it's a long trip to take alone, at which point I finish my cofee as quickly as possible. Tip her very well, then get back to the final leg of my trip. Nearly there now.

​

We're not together anymore, but I can almost (almost) remember when we were. Together is the wrong word, but I don't think there's a right one. I was once trapped inside his broken body. Now, a few decades gone by and come back around, I think I may be stuck forever in the town where we lived. He was nobody special, but I believe that the dead are permanently embedded in the land that bore them. Never fully gone, even after they're forgotten. I'll probably find him and have nothing to say. I've already talked to myself about everything that matters and even more that does not. I am chasing someone lost to an inhospitable world, And I've decided I will not be going back to where I've been.

How to Rule the Underworld // Without Dying

Katie Flynn

July 2023

I was born with an urge to move south, triggered every winter by the heartland painted white. White is pure. White is the color of a bride, and of a funeral shroud. Of sheet ghosts with holes for eyes. It's the color of new beginnings, which come from endings. I don't know which scares me more; going in, or getting out. I prefer to be smack dab in the middle of everything, with the exception of the place that raised me. Ohio isn't somewhere people dream of living. l I hate being sandwiched in between two coasts, pretending lakes are oceans and getting lost in cornfields for the sake of being alone in a way that feels good. Last month, I caught myself hoping that aliens would leave a crop circle in our backyard. Beyond where green grass turns to rows of harvest to come, where I've spent whole days which add up into years so quickly. I had never left the state for more than a week.  

​

Contrary to my neighbors' hometown pride, I've grown embarrassed of the smallness of the world I inhibit. Unease over my American Gothic has turned to fear, of empty highways and gas stations haunted by lonely truckers trying to sleep beneath flickering lights. Pretending there's a woman in the seat next to them, and that they're driving somewhere good. Even the early autumn bonfires of my recently relinquished youth have ceased to warm me. Now they feel more like sacrifices, bargaining with the devil for abundance to carry us through the winter. I've dealt with the devil in my own way, acknowledging at every possible moment that he was once an angel. He just wasn't very good at it. Neither am I/

​

Twenty-two years after falling to earth, I'm struggling for air. Not to breathe, but to keep myself lit. Desperation for escape has sent memories bursting from my chest, cracking my ribcage open for flowers to bloom from my heart like a parasite from outer space. Some monsters only want to be seen. So I've flown south, and I don't know if I'll come back. I don't know if I still have a home. My mother is a lighthouse in the dark, but New Orleans is blinding. I want to be blinded. I wanted to be seen, and now that I have been, I can't go back into hiding. 

​

My mother didn't want me wandering Bourbon Street alone in the early morning. This is what she told me, as if she knew what it was like, not only the danger by the shape and probability of it. I promised to be careful. But sometimes caution is more dangerous than throwing it to the wind. The air is swollen down here. It's warm, not like a temperate Midwestern summer, but a steam room. Like the inside of a mouth with too many teeth. I left with one carryon suitcase, no purse. Money tucked into my pocket with an unused passport. I needed it to imagine I was landing in another country. Then comes the horror and ecstasy at arriving, unexpected, in another world. Beginning in a flower shop, which was once a voodoo store. When the cashier told me this, I said I wished I had a voodoo doll of myself, without explaining why. To force myself to choose risk over resignation sounded grandiose.

​

Behind me, the only other customer laughed. Peonies in hand, I turn to face him. Our first moments together exist only in the present tense. Like a legend, told time and time again until it becomes part of history, which repeats itself long after the heroes have died. It wasn't love at first sight. Love at first sight is too sought after to be real. But I wanted him so much I felt the ground split beneath my feet. Yielding to me, and swallowing me whole. I've made peace with being consumed. I've been driven crazy by the crown jewel of the Delta, which exists fully embodied in a man, just as a man is (supposedly) made in the image of God. my mother wants me back, but it doesn't feel like the right season for return. I want him. He's half devil and half tragedy, and I love him. 

​

We spent the first night in a dive two blocks and a world away from the French Quarter. Where tourists fear to tread. But the underworld never felt scary to me, It felt like somewhere I could live, and I told him this as he carried me back to my hotel before sunrise. He placed me in my bed, and slept in it with me. We didn't touch until morning, at which point he undressed me, and I still felt naked at the continental breakfast. I never felt pretty beneath my clothes until he took them off and looked at me for a full minute without saying a thing. My eyes are blue. His are black. Together we're a bruise. Darkness is defined by light, and the underworld is only the underworld if there's a life on top of it. He's two things at once, and so am I. He's medicine, and a street drug of unknown purity. No suggestion of violence in his eyes, but plenty of potential for destruction, which is also potential for rebirth.

​

My mother called a few days ago, calling me home. I had planned on ten days in Louisiana, and rescheduled every new flight home I booked. I told her I could afford to stay. I told her I was falling in love, and she said love shouldn't leave anybody mourning. She said I had been swallowed up. Come home, she pleaded. The snow is starting to melt. I changed my mind. I have been swallowed up. A Priest once told me that heaven isn't a place, but a change in state of being. It's an embrace that breaks you down. I don't know if I'll go home. I don't know if I can. But I know I like being enveloped. I wished for him on flowers, stars, eyelashes so many times without knowing it, and I know I want to stay like this. To be surrounded by love, and let it soak me to the home until it's all I am.

​

I cancelled another flight this morning, and this time I didn't reschedule. I've checked out of my hotel. I've moved into his life and his home, which means I've eaten the pomegranate seeds, which means no going back. Today I saw a flyer with the face of a lost child. A lost little girl, last seen a month before. I started to cry. Hope of recovering the missing isn't only hope, but lack of closure. And I miss my mother, but if I go home, I'll miss myself more. Hurricane season is ending. When summer comes, I'll take a trip north. It will be a vacation. It will be a brief reckoning, to be repeated many times over when the heat down here becomes oppressive.

​

I've sent him off to our flower shop with instructions to surprise me with whatever reminds him of me. Something that feels like a promise of spring, made every night beneath Egyptian cotton. When he gets home, I'll ask him to come to Ohio with me next summer, to make sure that I don't stay. When June rolls around, I expect the hometown bonfires will stop feeling like a mundane manifestation of the occult. I'm no longer afraid of being burnt. If anything, they'll remind me I was never meant to live up there, and that I'll never get lost in the cornfield again.

My Best Friend

Sloan

June 12, 2023

When I was younger, my best friend was a boy I went to preschool with. He lived about a block away from me, and his parents would always throw pool parties and barbeques in his backyard. It seemed like all the kids in the neighborhood were there for birthdays, July 4th, and just a good time. He had a seesaw that looked like an airplane and sat four people, some sort of symbol of the possibility of the future.

Our other friend was a girl named Victoria. They were both a year older than me, but that never mattered. The way we spent our time in school and the things we talked about are lost to me, but the way the inside of his home looked is still fresh in my mind. I remember his mother marking my height on their living room doorframe, making me a part of their home despite not being a part of their family. They had cactus plants lined up along their windowsill, each of them tempting me to touch their spines to see if they'd prick. I remember when my nose bled on their kitchen floor and how his dad taught me to stuff a tissue up my nostril to absorb the blood. I remember hopping the fence into his neighbor's backyard so we could run to the front, where the path leading up to his door had his name carved into the concrete. Sometimes we would sit on his stoop and watch the ants go by. I remember Halloween spent with him in the neighborhood, especially the one after the hurricane when we had to jump over fallen trees to knock on doors instead of ringing their bells. When I would go over to his house, we would play a game where we jumped from the top of his bunk bed down onto a mattress below. I was definitely scared at first, but after seeing him do it a couple of times I got over it.

It was the three of us for a while. We spent time in school, then went home and waited for the day to start again. Eventually summer came. We had moved on to different schools, but the pool parties and playdates never stopped. Preschool turned into afterschool and a new girl arrived to break the peace. I don't remember her name, but I remember every adult thought she was great. Victoria slowly started to spend less and less time with me, choosing to be with someone her own age. No first grader would want to play games with a kindergartener. The presence of the new girl at my best friend's backyard parties seemed to completely overshadow mine. I guess I was jealous, although I'm not sure I really knew what jealousy was.

One day I was washing my hands in the afterschool bathroom with Victoria.

"He said if he wasn't friends with her, he was going to marry you."

I don't recall what my response was, but it was probably something along the lines of "Oh."

I still remember exactly how I felt in that moment. It was a weird and confusing feeling, like I was aware I was officially demoted to the second choice without being aware of the concept. The only married people I knew were my parents, and marriage wasn't even a thing I'd thought of for myself. But yet again, my place was overshadowed by another, and I never even got the chance to defend myself. Such a big decision had already been decided for me.

Eventually life moved on as it does. I don't remember the last time I saw him; I just remember realizing years later that it had been a while. My mom told me later that his parents had gotten divorced, and he moved to a different neighborhood. And no one thought to tell me. He had been removed from my life without any goodbye or even a warning. They let me forget about him and our time together, and I didn't even realize it until I saw him one night in a dream. He came to my door with Victoria, they were going back to his old house and wanted me to come with them. We walked the short walk back to the house and found the house abandoned and broken down, covered in vines and moss. We went straight into the backyard and had to skip across lily pads left in the inflatable pools we once played in. The airplane in the back was broken and rusted and would never take us anywhere again. We went inside the house, and everything was still the way I remembered it. The colors were the same, the furniture was the same, the only detail I couldn't pick up was the smell. I can't remember the smell. I pricked my fingers on the cacti, I ran my hands along the pencil marks on the doorframe. We went to the kitchen and danced; I wish we could stay here forever. I woke up and that was the last time I saw him.

The next morning, I questioned my mom, and she told me his father still lived in that house, although no one had seen him lately.

"He's sort of a hermit," she said. "I wonder how he's doing."

I'd seen Victoria and her mother a few times walking in our neighborhood, but other than those few passing waves hello, those parts of my childhood were gone. Over a decade later and I'm about to leave for college. Going through my old stuff, I find a box full of old pictures. I sat at the kitchen table and sifted through them, feeling for the little girl I'll never get to meet. Among these photos are ones of me and my childhood friends, as well as one of me on the airplane. I smile as I recognize people and places I'd almost forgotten. I reach the last photo in the box and look over at the time. I have to do the dishes.