UNTITLED ART by Julia Maria Ortiz
PAPER TRAIL by S.M. Colgan
Of course it’s the headline. It was always going to be, whenever it happened. Splashed there across the front of the paper, black and white for the world to see.
The spoon trembles in my hand.
I’ve been tied up lately. Distracted by a whole pile of other things. This is my first morning with head above water again in weeks, or I would’ve heard before now. On the telly or the radio. On Google, Facebook, Twitter, who knows where else. The news screaming at me to make itself known.
And all at once, the memories trip back.
The moon, hanging low and luminous over the castle. The sudden thought, almost breathtaking, that it has hung that way for more than eight hundred years, over the same stone walls. An uneven sidewalk, streetlights casting the dark wet cobblestones orange-gold. Girlish laughter high in my ear, the heady must of red wine on her tongue. The pizza we shared, still hot, strands of melted cheese snapping and dangling as we pulled the slices apart, sitting together on the stone bench sunk into the wall. The heat of her thigh pressed to mine. Music thumping from inside the club, pounding through the street. The low hum of car engines as they passed by, petrol fumes wafting on the breeze, mingling with the salt and vinegar of the chipper.
The brush of her fingertips on the inside of my wrist.
Her eyes, crystal blue, shining up at me.
I cannot for the life of me remember her face. But her eyes have appeared in my dreams a thousand times.
Of course, I don’t need to be able to conjure up her face from my memory, not now. The newspaper happily provides it in its modern form, not how it was a lifetime ago and an ocean away.
I put down my spoon, the porridge suddenly clay in my mouth, and wrap my hands around my mug of tea, the heat seeping into my skin.
At once, another flicker of memory. Our fingers loosely entwined, her leading me down the street, dancing, singing a song she had heard in a Disney film as I laughed and stumbled to keep up, bad knee throbbing, but I would have stumbled anywhere with her.
Nausea coils in my stomach, and I put the mug down.
Three years. Might it only be three years? It feels so very much longer, as if cities have crumbled and whole civilizations have risen and fallen since she twined her fingers with mine. Surely a family of earls still lived in that castle when our gaze first met.
I toss the paper onto the table, stand and take my mug to the sink, pour the tea down the drain. A slow, deliberate pour so that not a drop splashes onto the steel. Then I run the cold tap and rinse out the mug, once, twice, three times. Let the water run a minute to follow the tea on its journey to the sewer.
The green in front of the castle was where the massacre took place after the castle fell. A family beheaded for supporting the losing side, and this I tried to tell her about, in great and drunken detail, thinking it some capital R Romantic fact. She lived for capital R Romantic facts, like Mary Shelley losing her virginity on her mother’s grave. That one she wheeled out to break the ice with new people and at parties, a favourite repeated ad nauseum. Like some sort of a crutch. But she did not appreciate my commentary about the murder of a household in a war four hundred years ago on the spot where we were standing, not while she was rummaging in her purse for her phone.
I can’t remember why she wanted her phone. It was too dark to take a photo. She might have had a text. Or thought she did.
I startle back to myself when cold water splashes my shirt, douses me to the skin. My hand must have slipped on the tap as I mused, turned it up to full power, and I twist it quickly now to cut it off. Damn loose tap. It needs to be replaced, but there hasn’t been time to call the plumber, though he is a good friend. A sound skin, she would say in parody of my accent, throwing a h in between the s and k so that it becomes shkin, and then she would give that little smile, as if she had just told a great joke. And I would smile back though I could not feel it, and swallow the pang of embarrassment.
If the gates hadn’t been locked, I would have turned our hands around, grasped hers and changed direction, led her down the long lane that once belonged to the big house and now stands separate from it, a testament to a different world. She would have shrieked, half in laughter half in fear, at the rustling of the trees overhead, the breeze in the long grass, the low swoop of an owl. All the innocuous things transformed, and what’s innocent by daylight is haunted in the darkness, the ghostly trundle of a long-destroyed carriage, the imagined laughter of a man blown up by a hand grenade a hundred years ago. There would be nothing there more terrifying than ourselves, but how I would have relished in the forced sarcasm of her voice. Then when we reached the other side and found the road again, the enchanted forest would be back to just a tree-lined lane, cut off from the house it once served.
But such an adventure was impossible that night. It’s the only thing I regret about us.
I dry my hands on a tea towel, set it back on the draining board and return to the table. The half-eaten porridge has congealed and become inedible in my neglect. It’s a terrible sin to waste food. My grandmother drilled that fact into me from a young age. Think of all the children starving in Africa, she’d say. What would they give to have what you throw away? But surely the children starving in Africa would not want someone else’s congealed mass of inedible porridge, changed on a molecular level by the addition of milk and two minutes in the microwave. Besides, even if they did want it, there is no way to send it to them. Not from here.
This half-bowl will not cure world hunger. Half a bowl has no hope against something systemic, and I scrape it in the compost bin. It will do some good to something this way.
She whose face is splashed on the front of the paper would not touch this half-bowl either, even if it were fresh out of the microwave again, time turned back. By the end of our acquaintance she had become concerned about the effects of dairy on her figure. I warned her of brittle bones in her forties and tried to convince her to take supplements, but she gave me that look of you poor fool and said, don’t you know they cause cancer, it’s all in this article here… and scrolled through her newsfeed to show me something from some publication called Healthy Living or some such thing, with that indescribable look of being aimed at hipsters, or suburban dwellers who’ve lost all sense of the real world. Probably short of a few critical thinking skills too.
I put the milk back into the fridge, return to the sink and wash out the remains of my discarded breakfast from the edge of the bowl. It would not do to let it set. Washing it will only be a bigger job later.
She was baffled at my lack of a dishwasher, once upon a time. Then she saw the cramped square of my kitchen and understood. God, how much simpler things were in those days. When I could have a night like that, of drinking and dancing down the street holding the hand of a pretty girl, feeling a queen half-caught on the cusp of history between the castle and the big house, without worrying about the coming morning, about anything beyond not falling asleep in a lecture. The solution for that did double duty of solving the hangover too. Drink all the water I could take so the urge to pee became unbearable, and it was impossible to fall asleep while the most boring man in the university droned on down the front.
She never subscribed to such overwhelmingly simple solutions. But she never had a nine o’clock lecture either, always preferred to sleep in and chose her modules on the basis of not starting before eleven. Gender and sexuality in history started at ten, and was the only exception she ever made. Then she spent that whole semester complaining about how lectures before noon were ungodly.
It was around that time that she told me how she hated the fact I could enjoy the company of both men and women in the same way. That I did not have some inherent issue with intimacy with either set of body parts. As if it were all about the parts and not the person, and she were superior in her lesbianism. She considered my ability for attraction disgusting and told me this even as she kissed me.
Once upon a time, the memory of that would make my teeth grind. But the fire of bitterness has long since died, and the embers cooled to ash.
I return to the paper and pick it up, consider the portrait of the happy couple. She, the smiling bride, proved a hypocrite on her wedding day, posing for the camera, and he the groom with an expression of equal parts bemusement and abashment, as if he had no idea the media circus he was letting himself in for.
What a moron. They will probably be very happy together.
I throw the paper down on the table. Then I return to the sink and fill a glass of water. Out in the hall I hear Corinne’s shuffling footsteps, finally waking after the drain of opening night. Her feet will need another massage. I take a sip of the water to clear my throat, and turn to face her.
“Anything good in the paper, Izzy?” she asks as she reaches the table, voice sleep-roughened and my heart throbs. “Or is it just more of the same?” She is still in her pyjamas, has not yet brushed her hair, and the beauty of her is enough that my breath catches.
I swallow.
“More of the same.” And my voice is nonchalant, as if a piece of my ancient history is not the headline.
She picks up the paper and makes a face. “Must be a slow news day.” Then with a flick of her wrist she tosses it away and turns her smile on me, and the memory of that one night of magic on Main Street fades, and is lost in the softness of her kiss.
SM Colgan (she/her) is a bi writer somewhere in Ireland. Her work focuses on emotion, history, sexuality, and relationships, romantic and otherwise. She writes to understand people who are and have been, and to ease the yearning in her chest. Twitter: @burnpyregorse burningpyresofgorse.tumblr.com.
Julia Maria Ortiz is a Best of the Net Nominated Poet, artist, and a day-dreamer from Philadelphia. Her poetry has appeared in Honey & Lime Lit, Teen Belle Magazine, and Pussy Magic Magazine, and her photography has appeared in Firefly Magazine. She loves fairy tales, warm cocoa, learning new languages, and watching old films.