Someday I’ll Need You

Even before the first grave opened, Sal felt like the world had left her control. She was about to enter her senior year of high school, and she was completely unprepared. At least summer was over.

Finally. She’d hated summer for as long as she could remember. Somehow, when school was out, the world’s expectations were higher than ever, and her parents loved to remind her of that. Listlessly, she stared up at that spot on the wall where the plaster peeled off, hanging there, hunched over like an eternal bow. One day she imagined it’d give up and fall the rest of the way, but then, she’d been thinking that almost since they’d moved in six years ago.

Her parents had bought the house from a friend who was moving away to what he called “greener pastures.” For some reason, despite this warning, Sal’s parents took the bait. Maybe it was the discounted price—maybe. Sal suspected there was something more to it, but so far, she didn’t have any leads. Sal hadn’t liked Boston, not particularly. She didn’t think anywhere she lived could really feel like home—she remembered it absently. Those memories had been lived by someone else, but she remembered them fondly. Uprooting had cost her more than friendships.

“Help me cut the onions,” her mom said from the kitchen, gesturing mildly with her fingers, which she painted obsessively in some kind of sad, hopeless attempt to stay young. Even after she’d given up on everything else, she still clung to that conviction. It was almost funny that it was the most hopeless one of all.

“Right now?”

“Yes, as soon as you can.” As her voice limped across the room to reach Sal’s ears, she watched as a bird flew by outside the kitchen window. Her mother had a way of speaking that made Sal feel so distant. She never raised her voice, always spoke as if the person she was talking to was right in front of her, or like she was talking to herself. Sal had to strain to hear at the best of times. She probably missed a lot. If you didn’t hear her the first time, she wouldn’t try again. Instead, she’d sulk—quietly, softly, unassumingly—for the rest of the day like a whipped dog.

Sal walked to the kitchen sullenly. With each step, she made sure she was even. Not too fast, not too slow. Seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. With careful precision, she dodged each spot where the floor squeaked, each fleck of water, each dead stink bug flipped on its carapace, legs locked against its body like it had known it was going to die that way. She took the knife from the drawer—the small, sharp one that she always used, regardless of the victim—and took a big yellow onion from the basket on the counter.

“Diced?”

“Sliced,” her mom muttered.

“Sliced,” Sal repeated under her breath. Sliced.

She cut off the ends, first the apex, then the stem, because it was better that way, and put them in the compost. She split the onion in half vertically, then split the onion neatly in horizontal thirds—one for each of them. Tears leapt to her eyes, and she let them sting, holding them open as long as she could until they blinked against her will. There was a kind of serenity in letting those emotionless tears fall. She fancied herself a monk—the flames couldn’t move her, no matter how much they stung. She was beyond such things.

Three-millimeter slices. She let them fall off the knife haphazardly, however they liked. Sometimes they fell when they were cut, a nice, clean plate of concentric semicircles. Sometimes they stuck to the knife, and when the next slice came, they all tumbled down to the cutting board where they quivered in a disgruntled mound until the next cut fell. She relished that small slice of chaos, savoring the way they left her control. They knew what they wanted; they didn’t need her steering them around. It was something benign she could let go of. But every time she thought that way, she cursed herself. When you’re aware of yourself, everything you do is false. A tear hit the cutting board with a soft tap, and reluctantly she blinked the rest away.

“Finished, mom,” she said, placing the knife on the counter next to the cutting board, softly so it wouldn’t make a sound. Her mother took the slices and added them to a bowl with similarly sliced tomatoes and ripped leaves of lettuce.

“Burgers?” Sal inquired. Her mother nodded. Shrugging, Sal left the kitchen and sidled up to the front door, standing on tip-toes to see through the small, square window three-quarters of the way up. Late summer—it wasn’t yet dark outside. The sky was a tenuous gradient from violet to washed out, sunken blue. Large clouds, saturated like lungs, hung somewhere between the ground and the stars that could already be seen poking out of the darkest parts of the eastern sky.

Sal preferred when it got dark early. Then, it seemed like the whole world had become nocturnal. Coffee shops still open in utter blackness, the bus ride back after school under the stars. In August, the days seemed to stretch on forever. By the time the sun set, her eyes felt like they’d been open for years, and everyone had already gone to sleep. She had an image of her cheeks sinking into themselves, arid and cracked from sitting awake for so long, from all that time spent smiling whenever her parents looked in her direction. Her cheekbones and brow protruded, her forehead wrinkled, and her hair turned thin like webs. She wanted to rip at the skin of her face, tear off that awful visage, but she knew it was only a dream. It couldn’t be touched.

She fell back onto the couch. Two more days. That was easy. Counting seconds, counting minutes, she’d make it two more days. Sal understood school. School made sense, at least more than being at home did. It was bullshit, she knew that, but it was the kind of bullshit that held real power. The kind of bullshit that didn’t bother to hate her back.

She stared at the wall until, in her imagination, it began to crumble, plaster coming off in puffs of dust and debris, wood splintering, lights flickering. It all happened in silence. In her mind, there was no sound. Only pictures, and words, and pictures of words. Sometimes there would be pictures and words, superimposed on each other so that you couldn’t tell them apart. Right now, the words were large block letters, squashed together with the mortar between the bricks. The words had borders, they had layers, they had rats skittering around inside of them, eating them away bit by bit until at some unidentifiable point they ceased to exist. Sometimes she could make them out. She took note mentally of each one and pretended they meant something.

The lock on the door clicked, and it swung open, whining raggedly. Sal heard shoes removed and tossed haphazardly to the side and she felt her chest tighten. He didn’t say anything as he walked through the kitchen to his office.

“Welcome home, honey,” Sal’s mother intoned monotonously in her high, quiet voice. All of a sudden that voice made her angry. It wasn’t enough, she had to be louder, or not say anything at all. Sal clenched her fists, imagining her fingers melding in one. She breathed as deeply as she could, focusing on the way the air moved through her nose and how her stomach expanded and contracted. The lights were suddenly too bright for her eyes, and she had to close them for a moment. The air that left her lungs was strained and heavy. Things felt different when he was home.

Sal’s mother took the burgers off the frying pan and the buns out of the toaster, assembling them quickly and neatly on three plates. “Dinner’s ready,” she called, only somewhat louder than usual. Sal obediently sat down at the dining table, in her chair closest to the wall facing the front door. The fabric was frayed and unwinding in the corner of the cushion, where she would pick at it with her fingers as they ate. It was a few more minutes until her father emerged from his office and sat down across from Sal. Sal’s mother was in the seat closest to the kitchen, presumably, Sal thought, so she was right there if anyone needed anything fetched.

The food was good. Sal was careful with hers; she made sure to squish the burger flat enough that it wouldn’t make a mess when she bit into it, and she dabbed the excess ketchup and mustard off with a towel. She’d done it this way for as long as she could remember.

“Well?” her father said, a few minutes after they’d all started eating. “Aren’t you going to thank your mom for this meal she worked very hard on?” Sal couldn’t help but distrust the way he said it, even though she knew he was genuine.

“Thanks, mom, it’s really good,” she said between bites. She didn’t look at her father, and she said it like it’d been her idea all along. This was the dance they always did. They were both tired of it, but surrender was never an option. It was common courtesy.

Her mother nodded and shot Sal a quick, rare smile.

“So? How was your day?” Sal’s father asked, feigned cheer and interest stuffed into his words until they swelled. In Sal’s ears, it was almost like an accusation.

“Good,” Sal said.

“Have you still been looking for jobs?” he asked. 

She nodded.

“And? Nothing?”

She shook her head. It was true, she had been looking for jobs. Not as diligently as she was supposed to, but when she was bored, she’d spend time scrolling through job sites, emailing local businesses and chains, and exploring what others in her life liked to call ‘opportunities’. But she hadn’t had much luck; without even a high-school diploma, the response was chilly, even from those places her parents considered beneath her.

“I mean it’s not great, you’re eighteen already. You’re an adult, heaven forbid.” He chuckled humorlessly. “Seems like you should have a job by now. I can’t take care of you forever, you know.”

“Well, honey, he’s still got a few years. He hasn’t even gotten into college yet,” Sal’s mother snuck in, as if she were saying it to herself. She’d cut her burger into quarters and was now nibbling on the third. Her hands dripped with a beige mixture of ketchup and mustard, and her napkin sat untouched beside her plate.

“He’s eighteen, Dorothy! When I was eighteen, I already had a full-time job. He’s not applying himself. Have you seen his grades lately?” A line of tomato juice dripped down his gray-speckled chin, and Sal shuddered.

That shut her mother up. She never was good at putting up a fight, even before she’d married him, even before she went quiet. If she was feeling confident, she’d voice her opinion once, and let any subsequent opinion stampede it into oblivion. Sal wondered how she handled never getting her way.

“I just remembered,” Sal said quietly, suppressing her frustration, pushing it down like she did everything, “I need to finish an application by tomorrow. I should work on it.”

“What? You’ve hardly touched your dinner.” He got up to get a beer from the fridge. “What was he doing all afternoon?” he shot at Dorothy, his volume rising dangerously.

“I’ll bring it up with me.”

Sal fled upstairs, plate in hand, before he could threaten her with another word. He didn’t follow her. They never entered her room. That was a mercy, at least.

Sal’s room was in the attic, which also happened to be the second floor. The stairs lead to a banistered walkway that doubled back, past the bathroom, to her room at the end of the hall. Her room was a bulky rectangle with a slanted ceiling, with a dresser next to the door on the left, desk on the right, and her bed pressed up against the far left corner, facing the door. On her bedside table sat a lamp she never used, a pack of gum, a book about photography, and her dream journal. She kept the visible parts of her room tidy, but the cabinets, drawers, and closet were crammed haphazardly with the rest of her belongings, all those things she would never use but hadn’t the heart to throw away. Someday, someday I’ll need them, her mind would scream whenever she thought of tidying up. But she knew that wasn’t the reason either. In reality, she was afraid. Afraid that, deep down, if she ever disposed of anything, a section of her life would go with it. It would be an admission that a part of her didn’t matter, that she’d wasted time on something she’d forgotten. It was an embarrassment—an accusatory reminder that she hadn’t always known what she was doing, that her control had slipped—and a dreadful token of her mortality, wrapped into the unassuming bite-size packages of bolts, screws, hood ornaments, empty lighters, foreign currency, unidentified keys, and slips of miscellaneous papers, all stuffed together in a jumbled mess.

The window opposite her door looked out onto the street—or it would if she ever chose to raise the blinds. There was no window on the left wall above her bed, just a wall adorned with a Pixies poster and a picture of Han Solo, and a string of multicolored Christmas lights that loped along the wall from her dresser, across nails plunged into the wall at seemingly random intervals, over the far window, and ended slumped over the back of a tattered armchair she’d convinced her parents to drag in off the street.

The window on the right cut into the side of the slanting roof so that it formed a small cubby outside, perfect for sitting in with her legs bent toward her chest. She squeezed through the window and sat snugly in the corner, looking out beyond town, toward the mountain range in the distance. The moon was only just rising over the peaks.

She still remembered the first time she’d gone out on the roof. It was so long ago, but it felt closer than most of her life did. It was so real. Her mother had been quiet all day. It was almost six months since she had remarried, and the silence was new for her, at the time. The day before the wedding was the happiest Sal would ever see her mother. After they said their vows, Sal’s memory of her darkened, even though it wasn’t until several months later that Sal had realized that she’d changed. Fewer tender words, fewer outings, fewer smiles. She’d always had the most beautiful smile, one that was faint and ghostly, but clung to you like cobwebs. But it all faded, and Sal seemed to be the only one who ever noticed something was amiss. Everyone else was content to watch her mother’s words, once so profuse and impassioned, vanish into puffs of bitter smoke as if they’d never been. Relatives, friends, colleagues all seemed to accept, unhesitant, those solemn changes; they seemed almost happy with it, as if this was the way things were meant to be, the natural order correcting what had gone astray.

The loss of her mother’s voice sank Sal into silence as well. On her father, it had the opposite effect. He filled the space she left as if it had been his all along. He came home that night the way he always did. His shoes clattered against the edges of Sal’s skull, and she watched her mother’s movements stutter for just a moment before she continued on her work, watering the plants at the windowsill. The plants that were no longer there.

The memory always slipped here, something unknown bridging the gap. As the dirt in the pots grew dark with water, so did the sky, and Sal was in her room, homework open on her desk, mirror inches from her face. She picked at a scab on her forehead that had been there for ages, knowing she was prolonging the healing process, relishing it somehow anyway. When she finally got her nails around it, she ripped, and her face twitched in pain. At the same time, a shout came from the other room.

This again, she thought, as she dabbed the pooling blood with the back of her hand. It was nothing new, nothing old, just something that always was, for as long as she could remember. Not every night, and not consistently either—sometimes, they could go weeks without a fight (if you could even call it that when she never fought back)—and that almost made it worse. She focused on her face. The scab was reforming, larger now than it had been a week ago, and she grimaced, pulling her short hair down to cover it up. 

Her father continued to speak, getting more and more agitated. His voice began to crack, as it only did when he got really worked up. This was usually around when he began to lose steam. Sometimes, it could go on for hours, but most of the time he’d lose interest, chalk his tantrums up to a bad day, or that it was all just the way things were. Sometimes, he would just complain that he was tired and slump into bed as if it were a trifle they could both let go and it would fade out of sight like a helium balloon.

But this time was different. As her father reached his finale, Sal heard her mother scream back, and her blood ran cold. No other words pierced the fog of reminiscence, but her mother’s voice, virtually nonexistent for weeks, cut through her mind like a pithing needle: “Take it back!” The words reverberated in her head, magnified and contorted like a caricature by the caverns of remembrance. They’d scream in her head every time it got a little too quiet, that meaningless phrase shouted into a vacuum to keep her awake.

The ensuing silence didn’t last, and soon her father had regained momentum, and even surpassed it, continuing to speak with an almost manic energy. As his shouts dragged on, Sal looked around her room, at her homework on the table, and at her unmade bed. She snatched her headphones from where they lay on the floor outside her closet, and slipped them on, taking care that they didn’t disrupt her hair. Suddenly, the room felt crowded. The walls were shorter, the floor smaller, her desk filled half the room and the overhead light stretched out cruelly to crush her beneath its weight. It was like the room had shrunk, or maybe everything in it had grown.

She pulled the blinds and opened the window, just enough to let a gust of air into her room, lifting the papers on her desks and making her eyes run dry. She didn’t blink but stared out her window at the driveway of the next house over. A broad evergreen tree loomed over it, wiggling lazily in the mild summer wind and filling the air with its delicate scent. Her breath came easier, the heartbeat echoing in her headphones calmed. She eyed that space outside on the other side of the glass, where the window left a cutout in the roof. Almost without thinking, she opened the window as far as it could go and squeezed through, head first, until she was sitting facing outward, legs resting on the slanting tiles below.

She could still feel the sharp cold of the window in winter, the way the height made her wheeze like a chimney sweep, her lungs all knotted in her throat and her eyes wide. She took her headphones off. Her parents’ voices still carried through the walls, but they didn’t wreck the silence. They just oozed through the gaps in the plaster and flew out into the sky, dissipating and turning to nothing.

The memory wasn’t a pleasant one, but it was relaxing, in a strange way. Sometimes, she even treasured it. It would run through her head, over and over for hours, consuming her. She hated herself for that moment, and that hate was like a warm bath that she could immerse herself in; so deep and still was the water that it was almost like she wasn’t wet at all.

It was just earlier that day, she realized, that something else had happened. Her mother had been gone part of the day, running errands while dad was at work. When she arrived home, in the late afternoon, Sal was at the coffee table working on her geometry homework. Her father sat next to her on the couch, watching a recorded soccer match on his laptop. On days that he stayed home, he often insisted she spend time with him, at least in the same room. “It’s important to spend time with your family,” he always said, “we’re the only ones you’re stuck with forever, the only people who will never leave you.” Sal thought the real reason was to keep her busy, keep her in his sights. Or maybe he was lonely, lost in the world with no friends and a silent wife.

Her mother arrived home just as she finished the last problem on the worksheet. As she came through the door, Sal handed her father the page so that he could look it over. He sighed and paused the game, removing one earbud. Bringing the paper up close to his face, he removed his glasses and tapped them steadily against the edge of the page. Sal winced at the creases produced by the pinch of his fingers. “Welcome back,” he called absently to the doorway. “Should you get started on dinner soon?”

Sal’s gaze darted to her mother, who nodded to him and drifted into the kitchen.

“You’ve got mistakes on questions five and six.” He set the worksheet firmly down in front of her and returned to his game. She stared at problem five for a few seconds before noticing her mistake and cursing herself for it.

Her father yelled and Sal leapt in her seat, her right ear whining. A faint cheering sound came from his earbuds, and she glanced at his computer. Tottenham had just scored, in the final minute. He ripped out his earbuds and shut the laptop, storming off into the bathroom. Sal let out a long breath.

“I’m almost done with my homework, mom. When’s dinner?”

She didn’t reply, but slinked out of the kitchen and sat down primly on Sal’s left. Sal could smell her perfume—the thick lavender scent with which she adorned herself every day, even though she never left the house.

“I found you something at the store,” she said, holding out a small, pastel-green cardboard box with flowers printed along the edges. “I thought it might look nice on you, if you like that kind of thing.”

“Oh,” Sal said, shifting in her seat and taking the box. “What is it?”

“Open it.”

Sal slid open the box and removed the necklace from the foam stage inside. It was a simple silver chain with a small rose pendant. “Thanks.” She closed the necklace in her hand.

“Won’t you put it on?” If Sal didn’t know better, she’d have thought her voice was petulant.

Hesitantly, Sal latched the necklace around her neck, feeling the sharp cold on her skin like a collar of electric shocks.

“Thanks,” she managed.

“Sometimes your father is hard on you. But I know you’ll do great things.” She smiled, and Sal desperately pushed back the ache that seeped into her chest from somewhere beyond the world.

“Okay.”

The toilet flushed, and her mother was gone, as if flushed right down along with her husband’s excrement. As he sat down next to Sal again on the couch, the sound of carrots being chopped tethered her heartbeat to a cutting rhythm. The air hummed in her ears and if her father weren’t leaning over her she would have cried.

When she finally finished her homework, she bounded upstairs and into the bathroom. She ripped the charm from her neck, and flipped on the shower. The hot water burned where it touched the welts, quickly multiplying along the line where half an hour before she’d felt that biting metallic cold. She imagined them like eggs—soon, they would hatch and burrow into her body, growing inside her esophagus until she could no longer breathe. As she rubbed soap into the rash, the air rushed from her lungs and wouldn’t return, and she closed her eyes and imagined, for the first and thousandth time, her own demise.

She’d never know what her mother wanted him to take back. She’d searched for clues buried in that bruised and crippled memory and found nothing. A million theories perched precariously at the edges of the scene, each worse than the last, and all of them were true for her at once. She hated her father for them as if he’d shouted each and every one. Somehow, she was positive, no matter what it was, she’d rather know it for sure. Otherwise, it—something so vile it had brought a broken woman from her resignation—was out there somewhere, waiting for the right moment to come crashing down on top of her.

The sun had finally set—the sky yawned a deep purple, mottled with clouds, electrical lines strung across it like inverted tinsel. She listened to the roar of cicadas, imagined them singing in the pine trees that lined the street. She leaned back, resting her head heavily against the hardy board siding, and let her eyes close. It was just cool enough now that it felt like she was wrapped loosely in a thin sheet. She felt the wall warm slowly beneath her cheek. Something about its closeness always gave her grounding. Even with her eyes closed, she could feel the darkness around her, giving her space by taking it away. Because there was less to feel, her feeling broadened, flowering, even to the point that she could admit it to herself. The air against her neck, the smell of pine needles simmering around her. The way the imperfections in the wall dug into her cheeks, imprinting marks she’d stroke tenderly in the morning, she could only feel it when the lights were out. This was one of the few things she thought she understood completely. She fell asleep once she finally had no thoughts at all.

——–

She woke to someone speaking her name. It was a whisper, loud and uneven like it was spoken on a stage. Her eyes, heavy with sleep, creaked open. It didn’t take much to wake her; she woke up several times a night, to a bird call or the far-off revving of engines, and sometimes to nothing at all. It was staying awake that took all of her willpower. 

“Hey, Sal!” She found where the voice was coming from, still struggling out of sleep. Smiling at her from where he stood on a ladder, hands gripping the edge of the roof for stability, was a boy, tall and gangly, with a sharp smile and even sharper eyes. He wore an orange Hatsune Miku t-shirt beneath a stained gray jacket he left partially unzipped, with dirty black jeans and a dark red Hundreds beanie.

“Eli!” Sal whispered the greeting enthusiastically. “Just a sec.” She pulled her window open just a crack and reached inside. After feeling around in the darkness, she took her phone and her mace from where they sat at the corner of her desk.

From the edge of the roof, it was a fifteen foot drop to the concrete of their driveway, and the stairs to the first floor began right in front of her parents’ bedroom. She’d tried it once, when she was much younger, and they’d woken with a start and accused her of trying to sneak candy from where they kept and guarded it staunchly in the kitchen. She never tried again after that. The only way down was out. For a while, she left through the tree that loomed over the back of the house. One large branch hung just within reach, and Sal would walk her hands forward along it like monkey bars until she reached the next branch down. From there, it was only a few more steps until she could safely jump to the ground and leave through the gate at the side of the house. If she had friends, there was a simpler way. Sal’s father kept a ladder under the porch, which he used to work on the gutter. He rarely got it out anymore, and the gutter was overflowing with muck.

The ladder was only twelve feet, so it came about three feet short. Eli hopped down from the ladder and watched her as she eased herself off the roof. Sal was still light enough to hold onto the gutter as she eased her feet down onto the ladder, her hands half submerged in the slop of decomposing leaves and bird shit. For a moment, it felt as if her entire body were drowned in mush and grime; it plunged down her throat and filled her lungs, filled her veins, filled her brain—and then she was wiping her hands on Eli’s pants, and her brain stopped suffocating. She exhaled a sigh of relief and smiled brightly and tiredly at him.

He returned a smile of his own and reached his hand out for hers. She took his hand lightly, making sure not to grip too hard. They trotted out into the street and walked down the hill, just right of center, how Sal liked it. They passed the corner store, which emanated buzzing multicolor fluorescence like a TV left on in the dark with no one watching. The old man who ran the shop crouched on the curb outside with a beer in his hand. He watched them silently as they walked past.

The still noiselessness held Sal’s mind like a vice, and she tried to look at anything but Eli. He didn’t like eyes on him, she knew, they made him cower. So, she sent her gaze elsewhere. At the street (a mess of potholes, one looked like a heart), at the streetlights (the one closest to them was flickering and green-tinted, and from it hung cobwebs which glittered softly), at the houses they passed (single-story duplexes, most of them younger than Sal was)—until at last they settled on her own shoes. They were old Teva Highsides, scuffed and tinted with green mold. When she focused on her steps, her balance wobbled, and her shoulder brushed Eli’s.

“Sorry,” she mumbled, mostly to fill the silence.

“School starts in two days,” he offered.

“Tomorrow,” Sal remarked.

“Shit, yeah. Maybe this wasn’t the best night to do this.”

“It was the perfect night.” She grabbed his hand, squeezed, and let go. “We’ll get to sleep on time tomor—tonight,” she said, knowing full well she wouldn’t. Eli would; he was more of a student than she was. She made fun of him often for it, but deep down she envied him. Envied his ability to commit to something he was forced to do. She’d never been able to decide whether Eli was letting go of control—rolling over and letting someone else tell him what to do—or whether he was actually grasping on a little tighter, telling himself that he could make the state’s mandate his own. Either way, it seemed like a simpler life.

But she couldn’t bring herself to be like him. She knew she’d be up late at night, wandering the street or scribbling in her notebook or scrolling on her phone, pushing away the sullen tiredness that came seeping in through her arms, across her cheeks, around the edges of her eyes. She couldn’t give in, not yet. At night, her time was her own, and she clung to every second of it until her knuckles turned white against the corners of her desk as her head bobbed in and out of consciousness.

Someone—perhaps her father—had told her once that it wasn’t possible to go forever without enough sleep. She held onto that conviction like it was the last scrap of earth, that someday she’d make up for all the hours she’d missed. Someday, she’d simply be unable to hold on to consciousness any longer, and then she’d sleep forever.

They turned down 5th street, which was steep enough that they were forced to lean into each step. When they reached the top, they could see the silhouette of the mountains against that eerie glow that the dead of night sometimes has. The road plateaued here and continued on from this point in a nearly straight line until it tapered away in the hills outside the town and eventually joined the highway near Weymouth, the next town over. They were almost there; the way was so familiar that she barely noticed it anymore. The streetlights hardly worked around here, so the road was illuminated only in inconsistent patches.

She looked at Eli, and could tell he was trying not to look at her. She could almost see the cogwheels turning as he thought about what he could say.

“So,” Sal said, trying not to giggle at his awkwardness, “What’s new with you?”

His face relaxed in relief. He lost his rigidity, and his shoulders finally sank below the base of his neck. His walk slowed, almost imperceptibly, but Sal was used to keeping track of things like that.

“Well, Hugh and Em are back together. I found out from Til.”

Sal scoffed. “When will they stop trying?”

“I don’t know, I think they’re cute.”

“They’re cute until they fight, and it blows up in everyone’s faces.”

“Yeah, they’re a mess.” Eli grinned.

They continued to talk about all sorts of things that neither of them really cared about. It was enough to hear each other’s voices, proof that they were still here, still together. About video games Eli was playing, parents, Eli’s piano lessons, Sal’s photography. Eli talked about the job he’d gotten as a referee for the children’s soccer league.

After a while, their conversation grew blurred and patchy. They’d regressed to conjuring topics out of nowhere, half-hearted snippets of conversation that disappeared as fast as they could come up with them. Then, finally, they stopped talking altogether. They weren’t far, now. She could almost see it. She could see Eli out of the corner of her eye searching for it between the trees. She knew it’d still be a few more minutes until it finally came into view.

Their walks had become monthly. The same day every month, the same place, for five months now. They’d never discussed it, it had just happened. They both knew why, but neither wanted to ruin their time together—which both of them considered fleeting—by dredging up the past. It was over now. There was nothing to discuss. They were here now; that was all that mattered. Why then, Sal always wondered, was it the same day, the same place, that same encroaching silence?

The first month, Eli had shown up at her house, calling her name in hoarse whispers until she woke.

When her eyes finally opened, she looked down at him in confusion. “Eli? What are you doing here?” She rubbed her eyes as he laughed sheepishly. They’d only known each other a few months—she’d met him through Noah.

“I couldn’t sleep.”

“Take a melatonin.”

“Want to walk around?”

“What makes you think you can just wake me up and drag me on a walk at…” she checked her phone, squinting into the bright screen. “Three in the morning? Dude. Go away.”

“It’s the twenty-sixth of the month,” Eli said quietly. “Well, now it’s the twenty-seventh, but you know what I mean.” The whine in his voice told her to listen. The number was like a hand clenched around her throat. “Sorry,” he said, but she dismissed the word with a wave of her hand.

“There’s a ladder under the porch. Can you set it up under the edge so I can climb down?”

He did as he was told, brushing off the cobwebs that clung to every step. She descended with a heavy weight in her chest and a rapidly accumulating headache, and they wandered up the street side by side, thumbs clinging to the edges of their pockets and their shoulders locked in permanent shrugs. She already knew where they were going.

——–

The silo finally came into view. Its once-vibrant silver hue had weathered to a dark, mossy gray, and the ladder that clung to the side was an orange, rusted skeleton ascending to a fenced ledge that surrounded its domed peak. It stood forty yards from the road, next to a ranch house in the later stages of decay. It had been abandoned long enough that a generation of trees had sprung up in the cleared vicinity, joining the mature trees that had already constituted the former inhabitants’ backyard.

Every step closer brought a new tightness to Sal’s chest. It had hardly lessened since that first time. It was violating in a way that nothing else was, as if that building were trying to force her to reach into her chest and rip her soul from her body, tear it into shreds until it stopped quivering.

They eventually reached the base of the silo. They sat, solemnly, on the wide stack of cinder blocks which, on their second walk, they’d dragged from the farmhouse and set up in a makeshift bench against the side of the silo, facing the road. Over the summer, grass had sprung up through the holes in the blocks, and scattered asters adorned the base. A few yards away, nestled in the grass, was a pile of stones, about half a foot tall, with an oyster shell perched atop it.

Sal sat down.

“Five months.” Eli sighed. Before he sat, he removed a partially flattened box of cigarettes from his back pocket and set it on the block beside him. “It feels like it’s been years.”

Memories were like air here. Everywhere she looked, she was reminded of something. The old barn, where she and her friends had camped overnight in a tent she had stolen from her father. The tree next to it, an old sycamore she and Noah used to climb on. She could still see the stump where the branch they had been sitting on split, and they tumbled to the ground. She’d had to get ten stitches on her hand, and she’d been in a boot for a month. She remembered clearly how Noah had hardly made a sound when they landed, their right leg crumpled awkwardly beneath them. “Shit!” Sal yelled, clutching their hand and groaning. Nothing but a small grunt escaped Noah. They simply picked themself up raggedly and took the fallen branch in their arms. They took a deep breath.

“What are you doing? Are you okay?” Sal asked through gritted teeth, pain coursing up her leg and through her chest, clashing miserably with the anxious ball in her throat.

Noah heaved the branch, as hard as they possibly could, into the side of the farmhouse shed. Only then did they scream, but more in anger than in pain, a dry, ragged shriek that echoed against the silo and through the trees, reverberating through Sal’s mind for much longer than it was sustained. The branch went clear through the rotten wall, and the roof came down with a deafening crash, sending the scent of wet mildew and wood chips into the air and filling Sal’s eyes with dust. The tumult angered a wasp nest—all she remembered was an ominous buzz rising from the rubble—and they ran as fast as their injured legs could carry them back into town.

She stared at the tower of stones, and tried to forget why they were there. Tried to forget why it had been her who’d built it. Tried to push away every memory of toppling it, kicking it over, and scattering the stones as far as she could. Tried to forget how she’d always put it back together, no matter how much she didn’t want to. She forced the memories down, out of sight, until she couldn’t recall their face—couldn’t even remember why it was that they didn’t go up the ladder anymore.

“Five months,” Eli repeated, like a mantra. He let out a sigh so heavy that it looked out of the corner of Sal’s eye like he was shrinking.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he said.

“Okay.” She reached over him and grabbed the cigarette box from where he’d set it aside. There were three left; she took out two. Eli waved away the one she offered him like it was already smoke, and took his own, half smoked, from the pocket of his jacket. He flicked his lighter, and they both held their sticks to the open flame.

“Do you remember Ian?” The words pushed the smoke from his mouth in languid eddies.

“Ian Forest?”

“No, the one that dated Chloe for a while.”

“He was a year ahead, right?”

“Yeah, I met him when I was a sophomore.”

“Callum. Ian Callum.”

“Right.” He scratched behind his ear as he brought the cigarette to his lips. He didn’t breathe in, just held it there as he spoke. “I talked to him the other day. He texted me out of the blue. Said he just wanted to check in, see how I was doing. He’s in college now, at Western. Economics.”

“Good for him.”

“Sure.”

“What’d you tell him?”

“That I was fine.”

“Okay. And?” Sal didn’t know why Eli was bringing it up, and she knew she’d have to coax it out of him. He never liked to let go of things too easily.

“And nothing. He never texted me back. Maybe he was just feeling nostalgic for a moment.”

“Maybe. Why you?” She sucked greedily on her cigarette and shivered.

“I don’t know. We didn’t exactly part on good terms.” He removed his jacket and draped it gently over her shoulders. He used some kind of stock cologne to cover the smell of smoke.

“Why not?” Eli didn’t talk as often about his life anymore, except when it pertained to the two of them. Sometimes, it seemed like he felt he was treading on sacred ground. Sal hated that; he had made her into something deep and private, separate from the rest of his life. His real life. Almost like he was trying to live two lives, one of them conspicuously without her in it.

“He killed my dog.”

“What?”

“He fed my antidepressants to my dog.”

Sal burst out laughing before she could stop herself. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. For real?”

Eli nodded, a grin tugging at his cheeks.

“Wow. Fuck that guy.”

“It’s alright. He was just a bit drunk.”

Sal gaped at him. “Are you serious?” She remembered Eli talking about his dog. His name was Theo, and he was a tiny Boston terrier with a stub leg. They’d taken him from a shelter when Eli was still in elementary school. His parents didn’t bother to take care of him, so it fell on Eli to feed and walk him. Eli didn’t talk about him often, but when he did, his voice tended to slow and soften, like it always did when something really mattered to him. Sal had learned quickly that Eli’s boisterously expressed interests were a performance. 

When Noah had first introduced them, the three of them visited a park near Eli’s place. The park had a small, flaking skatepark in the corner, overgrown with graffiti, a slide and swing set, and a field dotted sparsely with young maples. Sal vaguely remembered having been there once before with her parents, but she couldn’t place what for. They sat on the ground underneath one of the younger trees in the corner of the park, near a barbed chain link fence that surrounded the backyard of a car dealership next door. Sal distinctly remembered the brown button up Eli wore that day; the top two buttons were missing, so he had it opened almost to the base of his sternum.

“I’m Sal,” she remembered saying. “Nice to meet you. I like your shirt.”

That was how she always did it. Whenever she met someone new, she’d pick something to compliment—their clothes, their hairstyle, their smile. She never said anything untrue; she found it worked better that way. When people felt better about themselves, they felt better about the people around them. It made for an effective first impression. Of course, half the time it made them think she was trying to flirt with them, but she’d never had a problem with that. As long as they didn’t push her away.

With Noah, she remembered with a mix of fondness and despair, it was the color of their eyes. That was always a dangerous way to start, but she didn’t mind. Noah made them do dangerous things, and they had beautiful eyes.

“Thanks! Eli,” he’d said happily. “What do you do for fun?”

Apparently, he had his own script to follow.

“Oh. Uh, I like to take pictures of things.”

“Photography, huh?” She nodded. “My uncle used to do photography for a living, mostly wedding photographs, but once he was hired to shoot models. That was before he went to grad school.”

Sal glanced at Noah, who had a smirk perched unsteadily on their lips as they played absentmindedly with the grass.

“After that, he worked at a research library, exploring medieval texts. He’s the reason I’m interested in medieval history. He died when I was twelve years old, but he left me his books, since he never had any kids. He was my dad’s only sibling; my mom never had any either. It’s a small family.”

He went on like that for some time, his voice raised almost hysterically. Noah was content to watch—unusual for them—and when they parted, Sal remembered almost nothing from the conversation, only a vague sense that she hadn’t really been there at all.

Eli took some getting used to. At first, she really didn’t know what Noah liked about him, except that they were prone to latching onto those who pretended to know what they were doing. It wasn’t until they’d met again (Eli invited her over to watch a movie) that she saw the other side of him.

“There’s something about it that’s just special,” he said, after the credits had been rolling for a few quiet seconds. It should have sounded obnoxious, but for the way he said it, like it was more than belief, it was some subdued certainty that he was here on earth for a reason, and part of that reason was to watch that movie for himself.

Sal wasn’t sure she understood the movie, not completely, but she liked the cinematography, and something in the way Eli talked about it made her think he must be right. “You can’t take it seriously, but at the same time, you have to,” he had said, earnestly, before he pressed play. “You know what I mean?”

“No.”

He laughed quietly. “Me neither. It’s fine.”

She smiled shyly, and her stomach buzzed a sweet note. Something in his voice made her feel safe, and she let her shoulder touch his. She’d already made it clear to him that any physical contact they might have was made purely from friendship, and she trusted him to keep an emotional distance. Even so, her stomach turned bitter and her smile faded as she thought of what Noah would say if they knew she was here. It was always when she started to relax when her thoughts would come hauntingly to the front of her mind, unbidden, to make sure she was ready for anything. She straightened up, adjusted her shirt, and brought her hands awkwardly to her lap as she watched Eli’s posture readjust, imagining some disappointment there. She cursed herself for ruining this moment, wanted to curl into a ball, to gouge out her eyes and plunge a knife into her skull, again and again and again until her prefrontal cortex was a harmless slurry. She envisioned herself crushing her head into Eli’s painted brick basement wall until stars encrusted the edges of her vision, until she heard her scalp rip; she pictured the ceiling coming down on top of her, her body crushed and the air forced violently from her lungs. She didn’t want the thoughts to come, but they did anyway, like biting hail, of Eli ripping off her shirt and seeing the scars underneath; she could see it almost as clearly as if it were happening in front of her: the horror in his eyes, the hatred, and she could only watch as he clutched her by the throat and pulled down his pants, and she could feel the pain already.

“Are you alright?” His voice made her jump. She looked up, and wished she could dash out his eyes to smother the worried look that lingered there.

“I’m fine.” She smiled sheepishly. “Where’s your bathroom?”

“Oh. It’s upstairs. Go right down the hallway, and it’s the first door on your left. Do you want me to show you?”

“It’s alright. Thanks.” She hurried upstairs before either of them could say another word.

The light in the bathroom was brighter than the one downstairs or in the hall, and it hurt her head. She stared at herself in the mirror, wide eyed, trying to look at it like she was someone else, like her face was something she didn’t know. She counted the zits that lay scattered like constellations across her forehead, and at the sporadic aberrations along her hairline. Almost instinctively, her fingers traced the darkened grooves beneath her eyes, and then down across her chin, where she could feel the stubble creeping in. She took a deep breath and pulled her knife from her left pocket. It was a miniscule black folding knife, the type made for camping or opening clamshells. She’d carved a star into the plastic hilt with a needle.

She flipped open the blade with practiced ease and slashed the blade across the inside of her left forearm, about halfway between her wrist and elbow. As the blood welled, she cut again, further down. About two inches each, just deep enough to make her wince, but not enough to scar. She focused intently on the pain and let her unwelcome thoughts fade back into where they belonged. She stowed the knife and took the hand sanitizer from where it sat on the counter by the door, pumping just a bit onto each cut. She rubbed it in and sighed in relief, even as her breath caught at the sudden burst of pain.

After wrapping toilet paper around her arm to keep it from bleeding into her shirt, Sal flushed the toilet and returned downstairs. Eli smiled when he saw her descending, and she forced her lips to curl in return. A note of Noah’s laughter burned along her arm as the blood pooled in her makeshift bandage before knotting itself into a wide scab. Her stomach growled out a misshapen warning.

Eli was already talking again, in that soft, earnest way. “I used to have a dog, you know, his name was Theo.”

“That’s a nice name.” Sal sat down next to him on the couch, with some space between them.

“Yeah. I always thought so too. It was my grandpa’s name. We’ve had him since I was eight. I didn’t have many friends back then, so I spent most of my time with him. The dog in the movie always reminded me of him.” He paused, his brow tightening. “He always howled when I played the violin. My parents hated that.” His subsequent smile looked so forlorn that Sal had to fight to keep from shedding a tear. When she went home that night, she watched the movie again. The dog could have been anyone’s, she realized, and somehow, he’d made it his, and his alone.

——–

Eli took another long breath from his cigarette, and then tapped it on the edge of the block. He watched the ashes fall unsteadily to the ground, and then he shrugged. “Life happens, Sal.”

“That doesn’t mean you have to just roll over and accept it. How can you forgive people so easily?” She was almost yelling. “He killed your dog. You loved that dog; you can’t tell me he wasn’t important to you.”

“I won’t. But it’s okay. You’re what’s important to me now, Sal.”

“Oh, gee, I’m like your dog?”

Sal giggled, and Eli nodded exasperatedly, rolling his eyes. “That’s not what I mean.”

“Whatever you say.”

He sighed heavily. And then he looked her dead in the eyes, for just a moment, blinked, and let his eyes fall.

“Are you okay?” Sal asked, drawing her finger down the smoothness of his arm.

“Anyway,” he said as if she hadn’t spoken, “I brought up Ian because it made me think about how many people have come and gone from my life, and they all keep growing, with or without me. Meanwhile, here I am, and it’s like I’m shrinking all the time. And the world is shrinking with me.” He smiled sadly, the same way he had all those months ago, thinking of Theo. “I just feel like something’s slipping away from me, Sally.” Sal winced at her mother’s old nickname for her, but she liked it out of his mouth. She ejected her mother from her mind.

“What’s slipping away from you?” He sometimes got himself into moods like this, wrapped in reverie, and the best thing to do was to draw it all out of him like plasma.

“See, that’s what’s bugging me. I don’t know what it is. But more of it is gone every day. Maybe it’s sanity.”

“Who’s sane?” Sal lit a second cigarette on the lighter Eli offered.

“I guess. I know it’s not time. People are always saying ‘oh, you know, time’s really slipping away from me’, but that’s not true. Sometimes it feels like I have too much of that left.”

Sal smiled and hugged him tightly. How did she become a person that hugged?

“It’s everything, Sal. There’s less of all of it. Less family, less friends, less trees, less birds, less clouds. Less me. It’s all smaller, weaker.” He raised his hands as if in an offering. He looked at them and didn’t seem to understand them. They dropped back into his lap. He was silent for a moment. Sal had never seen him like this before, and it felt almost as if the air were sagging around them. When Eli drooped, so did the world.

“Hey, at least I have you, though, right?”

She kissed him in answer.

“There’s always more of you,” he said as they parted, his face close to hers.

“Always.”

He hugged her again, suddenly, and the breath she had been taking leapt back out of her.

“Sally, Sal,” he said, his voice trembling. “I want you, mine.”

“I am yours.” She slipped out of his grasp, or he let her go.

“No, no,” he said, shaking his head. There were no tears in his eyes, but for some reason she imagined them there. Were they tears of sadness or frustration?

“What’s wrong?”

“We’re separate, Sal. Always separate, no matter how close I hold you.”

She stared at him, not understanding. He stared back, his eyes pleading. Then they dropped, and he sighed. “Forget it,” he said.

And she tried to.

“It’s okay, Eli,” she said, forcing it to sound genuine. 

He nodded as if her words meant something, and then lit another cigarette. He took a long drag and held it on his tongue for several seconds. He never swallowed; he thought it was unhealthy for him. He didn’t blow, just parted his lips and let the smoke fall from his mouth.

They returned home. Eli said he wanted to get some sleep, and Sal didn’t argue. She didn’t know how Eli could sleep on nights like these, but he never seemed to have any trouble. The walk back was sullen and slow, and Eli seemed ready to pass out in the middle of the street. The man outside the corner store was still there; he hadn’t moved an inch; he was like a statue with trick eyes that seemed to watch as you moved across its point of view.

Sal stayed up to photograph the sunrise, like she did every month, and then fell asleep to the morning birdsong.