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Indi hummed as she listened to queerly weighted silence before the record’s needle found music to play. Looking over her shoulder, an easy smile pulled at the edges of her mouth as she watched the woman on her couch, her hands fidgeting with one of the crocheted throw blankets Indi perpetually left atop it. “Somethin’ wrong, sug?”
Their business was concluded; her guest had what she’d come for, and Indi had several more bills to the ridiculous pile in her ‘money closet’, which had grown rampant ever since she’d finished renovating her bathroom. Despite that they were done, however, the other woman looked troubled and fidgety, her brow furrowed, lips pursed as she cut her gaze upward at the woman futzing with the record player.
“... Indi, can I talk to you about something?”
The dealer canted her head to the side, her eyes a warm hazel as she considered her guest. Regina had been coming to her for … months, now. She’d always been composed, an accountant or some shit; she liked to buy for relaxation, something Indi could provide in spades, but she’d never been interested in anything else Indi might have had on offer, and that was always fine too.
The woman’s question was unusual in contrast from how she’d always been, direct almost to the point of bluntness. This was an odd change in pattern, and patterns didn’t shift without reason; in Regina’s case, Indi had the feeling that she might not have had the type of friends one could confide in… more the sort that one competed with and tried to outdo. That was never her thing, but then, Indi had never been particularly ambitious or competitive. Weakness was blood in the water when one swam with sharks, but Indi...?
Indi was a sunfish, drifting through the ocean without a care in the world.
As the first strains of Janis Joplin’s Black Mountain Blues began to play, her voice holding that classic quaver as she reached for the notes, Indi sauntered back over to draw her overly-long stick-bug legs beneath her. The hippie settled, cross-legged, on one of the many overstuffed cushions which lay before the old, squashy couch.
“‘Course you can,” the woman staunchly decided, meeting her client’s eye with a relaxed gaze.
Regina, however, looked tense and more unsure with each passing moment, her hands fidgeting, her lips pressed together as if to keep whatever terrible thing she wanted to say from passing the prison of her teeth. Indi held her gaze her for a moment, then looked away to reach for her glass of lemonade. It was one of two which rested on the woman’s rough wooden coffee table; she took a deep draught of it, sour and sweet and bursting with citrus, the ice clinking cheerily in the glass.
It was only when Indi had looked away that Regina finally spilled her guts, everything coming out in a rush all at once as the woman’s hands twisted the crochet blanket fit to wring it to pieces.
“...IthinkImightbeAsexual.”
Indi blinked, her usual languid expression shifting briefly to surprise… and then to warmth. She sat up a bit more, and reached for the second glass of lemonade, leaning to press it into Regina’s hand. “Shit, that’s what was bothering you, sugar…? Here, have somethin’ to drink…”
Regina peered at her in a way which was wholly… vulnerable. The woman’s brow was knit in worry, but Indi returned her smile with a brief smile of her own, as Regina accepting the proffered glass with a hand that trembled ever-so-slightly.
“I found it … looking up some stuff online last night,” Regina confessed, her other hand lifting to scrub at her face. “And it just -- made me so … so happy to know that I wasn’t alone? That I’m not just made wrong. But I don’t know how to tell anybody, and … I don’t know what it’s going to mean for the future...”
Indi nodded, letting the other woman talk as she listened, intent. She didn’t have any answers, but that’s not what Regina wanted from her just then anyway.
She was under no illusions that Regina had told her because she was anyone important; quite the opposite. She had told her because they weren’t particularly close, and some things were easier to tell an all-but-stranger than someone whose opinion truly mattered.
But it was a step. A first step in the right direction, towards living a life where she could be her most authentic self… and in that confession, Indi felt a gift of honesty, touched to be a part of the other woman’s new truth.
A good day.
He’d come upon her while she was hitch-hiking, a dreamy smile on her lips as she’d idly walked down the road, thumb thrust out; she didn’t really expect anyone to pick her up. It didn’t bother her, that nobody did. No one was even out there, on a road like this.
Indi didn’t drive, and busses didn’t run the region -- cars barely did, but there was a particular tree in the forest that had a real good aura. She liked to visit, when she could. When the windowless white van pulled off to the side of the road, there wasn’t even a blush of wariness in her when she’d come jogging to greet the man who’d stopped. She flashed him a wide, easy grin as she clambered into the passenger’s side seat.
“Hey, thanks man -- you headin’ toward the Industrial district? S’just a few miles down the road, be happy to pay you for the trouble. I got… three twenties on me. That enough-?”
He didn’t answer, didn’t even look at her as he pulled back on to the road. Indi shrugged loosely, oblivious to the existence of the seatbelt as she scooted to get more comfortable in the old, worn bucket seat.
She had a bad feeling off him, becoming aware of it even through the haze of her daydreams. When he turned off the road to a beaten dirt path, Indi regarded the man with a long look.
… it was a pity. Indi didn’t hate much of anything, but Goddess, she hated violence.
“Really wish you hadn’t’ve done that, stranger,” she told him, thrusting a hand into her pockets and digging around; amidst the detritus, mostly leaves and bits of bark or stem, she found what she was looking for.
The man didn’t answer her as he pulled off the path, thrusting the van into ‘park’ and drawing a wide blade from a sheath at his belt. He pointed it at her, growling. “Take off the purse. Give it here.”
Seeming unphased, the woman pulled the purse from over her shoulder, tossing it to him. He kept the knife pointed at her as he thrust a hand into it, beginning to rumage.
It was the vine that caught him first, wrapping about his wrist as he let out a wordless shout. “What in the hell is this shi--”
He never had a chance to finish the sentence, because the moment he tried to pull his hand away, the purse exploded, plants bursting from it with a violence that couldn’t have been possible. Leaves and roots and craggly branches erupted outward in a grotesque mass, and Indi watched, utterly unphased as she listened to the wet snapping of his skull as the greenery took hold. There was a wordless scream, stifled almost instantly by more plants, roots diving, greedy, past his teeth and into the fertile wetness of his chest…
Indi made a face.
“... gonna have to do a cleansing when I get home. Guess I’m walking.”
“Oh, hey Todd,” she greeted him as she lifted the phone to her ear, feigning a conversation as she tried to avoid his eyes. “-- Just got a call from my car insurance, I have to take this,” she added in a hushed aside. “Yes, hello-? No, now is fine actually … what’s that-? You can lower my rates…?”
“It’s fine, Liz, I’ll wait,” Todd assured her, speaking louder to make sure she could hear him. Lisbet felt a spike of irritation, but what could she do-? It was as if the man was incapable of reading her polite refusals, and the one time she’d dared to be firm with him, it had gotten her nowhere. His behavior was escalating, but it wasn’t far enough to warrant intervention from Human Resources, and even if it had been -- the last thing she needed was to be known as the woman who complained, was too sensitive to cooperate with her coworkers.
He’d ended up with one of her case files -- Michael, a staff-sergeant with a kidney condition. He liked to ask her questions about the case, but always with the sort of… smirking insinuation that he would have handled it differently (better), and that he was always happy to give her pointers, never quite considering that she might not care to hear them from a man three months out of college working his first handful of cases.
God, she hated being called Liz.
With a tense sort of smile that was more a grim baring of her teeth than anything truly friendly, Lisbet waved her hand, trying to mouth that she’d ‘be a while’, but Todd paid none of that any mind as he made to lean against her prius instead of his own Suburban. “Don’t even worry about it, I can wait, no big.”
Gritting her teeth, she slipped into the car and very, very briefly considered running the man over, murmuring an “uh huh” to the imagined insurance salesman --
It was at that moment that her phone actually rang, a tinny version of the Brandenburg Concerto blaring against her ear. Lisbet froze guiltily, and Todd’s brow furrowed, his self-assured smirk fading as he stared at her.
…. Whoops.
She couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was watching her.
Dinah Markoff knew damn well that there was nobody else but Ludo and Chuck within a mile of where she lay. She held her breath and counted, eyes squeezed tightly closed -- it was a dumbass thing some idiot counselor had told her to do, once. Just keep counting, the woman had told her. All the way until you reach a hundred. Of course, she’d also said to sit still with her spine straight while she did it. Her office had smelled like spray freshener; the furniture had been second-hand, and the counselor herself had been caked in cheap drug store makeup, her hair held back by plastic chopsticks. Dinah had pegged her for an overly-sentimental milksop the moment she’d laid eyes on her, and she had been right.
She hadn’t ever bothered to go back, but … the counting had stuck with her sometimes, when she was desperate enough. Never did work, but she would’ve given most anything to rid herself of that bad feeling in those restless, maddening moments. She would’ve done just about anything to feel right, even if it made her feel stupid -- made her feel weak.
Chuck lay leaned up against her, his head resting atop black paws, ears pushed forward… but eyes closed, breathing low and even. He was asleep, and Chuck was nothing if not vigilant; if Chuck didn’t hear it, then it wasn’t there, full stop. She would have given just about anything, to be as sure in her heart as she was in her head that nothing was wrong, that nobody could possibly have been there, could possibly be watching her.
Everything was quiet, was -- safe as it was gonna be, given who she was, where she was. She never could shake it, though. No matter how she counted, or how she swore, no matter how many cigarettes she smoked or cans of cheap beer she drank, it was always there, as much a part of her as her scars or her guns.
There was no escaping it. Most of the time, she could accept that. It was just those odd minutes, when she got to thinking it didn’t have to be like that. Stupid thing to do, ‘hope’. Hope was for the naive.
She damn well knew better than that.
Chimera
She swayed to the rhythm of a song only she could hear, hips tracing the shape of a figure eight above the rough wooden floor. Her hair was down, an oilslick of vibrant color; her eyes were closed as she hummed tunelessly along, hands turning -- fingers splaying in the air as though caressing something silk before the gesture ended in a beckon, only to begin a new rotation a moment later. She was effortless as a leaf caught in a breeze. She was alive, and the sheer joy of living seemed captured in motion, in every breath, in every heartbeat.
A woman like Maggie should have been impossible. Tangible as a veil spun of spidersilk, real as a feverdream, he never stopped thinking about her, never stopped wondering what had become of her.
One day, she had been there, his wife, his soulmate.
The next, she was gone.
The little traces of her presence had faded, bit by bit. The smell of lemon and herbs that had always clung to her skin had faded from their bedsheets first, even in those initial days as he’d spent hours and hours talking to the police, trying to find any trace of where she’d gone. The peculiar habit she’d had of leaving things where they had absolutely no hint of belonging had dissipated, too -- it had been years since he’d found a pen idly secreted in the back of the cheese drawer, or an unopened tin of almonds, discovered hidden amongst the tools he hadn’t touched since she’d vanished.
It seemed impossible, how few photos he had of her, of them. How could he have been so foolish, not to capture those memories, not to bind them to him forever-? She’d sometimes doodled things on napkins, when they’d gone out to eat; little abstract designs made up of leaves and flowers, jotted out as they’d talked and laughed, though about what he was hard-pressed to try to remember anymore. Those napkins, though -- he remembered those. They were gone, now; irretrievably absent, no longer a part of his life. And so was she.
He hadn’t given up, though it had been a decade since he’d seen her, touched her, heard her voice whisper in his ear.
But he still had this -- an old VHS tape, grainy with use. A few tarnished memories, played out across a dusty television screen.
They told him to move on, that she was either dead or had left because she’d wanted to. That their marriage had been doomed from the start, a whirlwind but untenable love affair between two people who couldn’t possibly have been more different. Still… there had never been anyone but her, for him. It didn’t matter if she was a chimera, imagined from the very beginning -- the alternative was that she’d never existed at all, and that was far worse than merely losing her.
So long as he still had her memory, he would never stop searching.
Lisbet Wheeler had seventeen dollars and fourty three cents to get her through till her next paycheck.
It wasn’t much, but it was what she had to work with; the student loans were insatiable, and she’d learned long ago that her food budget could be whittled down to near nothing, with some care.
Of course, that had been a lesson learned when she was still a grad student, and if she hadn’t exactly had time to spare, what time she did have was flexible... after a fashion. The mountains of homework that were required needed to be done, but there was some freedom to be had there. Pausing to stir a pot or chop an onion had, in the comfort of her sparsely furnished apartment, had fit naturally with the flow of her studies.
Now… she was left to cook her meals after a harrowing fourteen hour work day, of which she was actually paid for … seven and a half, at best. She came home exhausted, finding nothing but near empty cupboards and a sense of dread which seemed to build within her bones, until her whole body felt like lead and hunger.
… it wasn’t quite the bright future she’d dreamed of.
Lisbet had known damn well that her career path wasn’t going to be lucrative, but she hadn’t counted on how much of her paycheck would be consumed by paying back those loans. The debt hung like a millstone about her neck, making her shoulders sag, and the specter of it was all-consuming -- she felt it every morning when she ate her salted oatmeal, seventeen cents a serving if she made it with water, not milk. She felt it when she drove her car -- insurance and gas took an obscene portion of her biweekly salary. That was money she could have used to stymie the debt.
She’d spied it tucked off to the side in the cured meats, the lemon yellow of the Manager’s Sale sticker catching her eye as she eyed the display of meats; there had been a time in her life when she wouldn’t have thought twice about picking anything she liked from that display, but it had been so long ago that it felt like a stranger’s memory. Still… on discount, perhaps…
Lisbet reached to pull the package from where it had been forgotten, eyebrows raising as she realized it was marked down by over fifty percent -- ninety seven cents, from two dollars and fourty nine. It must have been to expire soon, but that didn’t matter in the slightest. A ham steak, bright pink, the bone left in its center with greying marrow; a feast fit for kings, at a price she could justify, could afford for once-?
Glancing about herself as though she expected to be called a thief for taking it, Lisbet dropped the ham steak into her basket and took a deep breath, a wide smile beginning at the corners of her mouth. The ham would become a -- soup, perhaps. She could dice it into pieces and portion it into eggs for a fast meal. She could slice a piece off of it that very night, and cook it, by itself, in a pan, savoring the salty sweetness of the cured meat…
Lisbet glanced up at the ceiling tiles and thanked God for her good fortune. It was the little things that truly helped to keep one’s spirits up.
She made for an odd sight, crouched there in the parking lot of the Food Lion grocery store; but then, there were few enough places where a woman like Indi wasn’t an odd sight. Her hair alone, dyed a rainbow of discordant shades, was enough to make her stand out -- and the fact that she was wearing next to nothing in
Indi didn’t have
...or legal.
But that was never something she’d concerned herself with much, either. Indi drifted from whim to whim like a rootless tumbleweed, and she’d landed in Pennsylvania without ever particularly intending to, the same way she’d ended up in the Food Lion parking lot in a tube top in the middle of December, her hands cupped about a tiny, scraggly weed growing between the cracks in the pavement. There she lurked at three am, her eyes half closed, bare arms seemingly untouched by the bitter cold as she hummed to herself in the synthetic orange lamplight, completely at peace with the world.
And the plant was growing.
From between the ragged edges of the crack, it was visibly rising, pale green leaves -- thin as tissue paper -- unfurling to become wide and vivid; little bumps of buds reached
There stood a fruited bean plant, right there in the parking lot, inexplicable -- there was snow on the ground, it had no business whatsoever being there, thriving.
The odd woman rose, looking satisfied with her work. Wordless, she reached to gently break a bean pod from the plant, tucking it into a pocket in the odd patchwork skirt she wore.
Leather sandals slapping as she went, Indi wandered off into the darkness, leaving behind a plant that would continue to fruit throughout the winter, a surreality that went unnoticed until the spring, when it was lost.
It was always like
She’d picked up a sleeping bag rated for some five degrees below zero, few years back. She never could bring herself to use it. Hated the way it zipped around her, made her feel trapped, like she couldn’t breathe; still, least she knew she wouldn’t freeze to death, worst come to worst. It’s what she told herself, when the nights got colder and colder, and not even Chuck’s shaggy black warmth could keep the poorly-insulated van from feeling like more like a meat-locker than a home on the road.
The deep ache of her old injuries pissed her off. It made her feel old and weak, like she was losing some integral part of herself when she couldn’t walk right on account of the scar tissue knotting up like frayed old rope, gone purple from the chill. Sometimes she wondered if she’d get too stiff to move -- if she’d freeze to death in the van from being unable to force her limbs to straighten, too much in pain to give a damn whether she lived or died anymore. Those kind of thoughts were like a filthy seed planted deep in her head, and she had to get up, had to move right then and there, just to prove she wasn’t gonna give up or give in. Not yet. Not any time soon.
Hours spent tramping through the deep woods, nothing but the stars and the reflection of the moonlight in the snow. That, and Chuck, her faithful shadow, nose low to the ground as he sniffed. By the time dawn came, she’d still be tired, but at least she’d prove to herself that the bastards hadn’t gotten her yet, chin thrust out, jaw grit to hold back a shiver. She’d keep on living just to be a pain in the ass, spite as good a motivation as any when despair gripped her, hard and fast.
Spring would come, eventually. And with it would be the rain. The snow would melt off, raising the river to threaten her camp, but she’d still be there, by God. Never let the bastards win.
She sat on the floor of someone’s crappy apartment, cards in one hand and a bottle of cheap beer in the other as she watched the half-clad people around her with a raised brow, expression hidden behind a hand of cards. She was good at poker. She had a knack for figuring out when people weren’t telling the truth… and for deception, she’d found.
Lisbet had lost all of three hands at the game, forced to remove … both of her socks and her blouse, though beneath it she wore a camisole. Everybody else was close to naked, and the man who’d invited her sat across the coffee table, squirming in just his boxers, his features flushed with the several beers he’d drunk in addition to his own obvious embarrassment. He kept looking at her, though he’d have been better off looking at his own cards instead, given how badly he was losing.
Beside him was his friend, only marginally more dressed than he was. He kept nudging the man with his elbow, and she had the feeling he might have been egging him on in some way. Lisbet took another sip of her drink, and wondered why she’d come in the first place.
It wasn’t as though Marco was a bad sort. He was majoring in social work, too; anyone who kept to that sure-to-be-rough course of work had to have something driving them along, and more often than not, she’d found her classmates to be as hopelessly idealistic as she was, in her heart of hearts. Every one of them wanted to change the world, to find a way to make a difference in the lives of others. It was easier for Lisbet than it was for most, to figure out which of them was sincere and which were just bullshitting along, and Marco was entirely the former.
She wasn’t stupid. He’d asked her to join the party because he was interested in her romantically, and…
If she’d felt something, anything, in return -- she would have gone for it. He was attractive enough, with dark hair and expressive blue eyes, clean cut; his near-nudity showed that he clearly hit the gym from time to time, nothing to be ashamed of there. He dressed well, he worked hard, and she knew that if she’d declined his invitation, he wouldn’t have bothered her about it, taking it as the rejection it was without being offended. That was just the sort of man he was, and by all rights, she should have liked him.
And… she did, but more in an abstract sort of way. In the way that she’d often imagined her life when she’d been younger, that sort of picture-perfect dream life -- she’d find a husband, a nice man like Marco who worked hard and treated those around him well. They’d adopt two point five children. They’d live in a house with a white picket fence and have a dog and attend pot-lucks at church …
Lisbet, so caught in her musings, looked startled when the hand was called. She blinked back to attention, laying down her four-of-a-kind without saying anything, eyebrow lofted as she regarded the other two players.
...there was a look on Marco’s friend’s face that she found she didn’t like, the man’s eyes a little hazy as his smile grew wide and triumphant. She felt her heart sink and she knew she’d misjudged as he laid out his cards -- a straight flush, the high card a Queen.
An eruption of noise greeted her, and she felt her cheeks darken, her eyes shifting back to stare at her own cards. Shit. She had to act, she was obliged by the rules of the game… Lisbet’s eyes darted about the room - three other women, four men, and she was the only one with a shirt still on. Nobody looked perfect, no airbrushed models from magazines there -- one of the girls was larger, another had acne all across her back. Nobody had cared. It wasn’t like it was high school.
It wasn’t as if anyone was going to notice, right-?
Lisbet tried for a smile, though the expression faltered a little, a knot of upset growing in her stomach. She didn’t want to anymore. She didn’t want to make herself vulnerable for these strangers -- these classmates of hers. She didn’t owe them anything. They didn’t need to know her story, they didn’t need to anything about her --
“Come on Wheeler, you lost fair and square,” Marco’s drunk friend teased, elbowing Marco again. She was being ridiculous. Just get it over with, she told herself, taking a deep breath and shrugging her shoulders as she turned away from the table and stripped off her camisole.
Beneath it, she wore a plain sports bra, nothing scandalous, nothing revealing… but when she turned back to the table, composing herself with a serious look, she could feel them staring.
Because beneath the camisole, beneath the four point oh grade average and the studious, focused academic, there she was: Lisbet Wheeler, who should have died, with the scar from the time she’d been run through by a damn car door, with the surgical marks that screamed hysterectomy.
Marco was staring, and not at her chest.
There was no playful jeering, no laughter or whistling. The room had gone quiet. She could hear her heart beating, louder and louder, and after a few seconds it was all too much. Snatching her phone from her pants pocket, she had the presence of mind to feign as though something had happened -- some urgent text, she explained in a mumble, quickly throwing her blouse over the top of herself, forgetting about her socks entirely as she hastily left the table.
She felt tipsy from the beer, so she walked home. Her own shitty apartment was a half hour walk away, through the bad parts of town, but she didn’t care. She had to get out, couldn’t stand to be in there for even a minute longer with them staring.
… Marco never did get up the courage to ask her out, after that. Funny, how things went.
