She couldn't remember the first time it happened until later, but this was it. Her cells had been blossoming in the mad expansion of new life, furiously multiplying, specialized engines, the entirety of a person unfolding inside another. There hadn't even been a brain yet to have a thought, and yet the awareness had permeated her entire being. There was more, just beyond this world of darkness, warm, and rhythmic swaying, and she was to see it. At some point in time, she stretched out her fist, her feet testing the limits of the world in which she found herself, as a vision swept her away with it. Before it happened, she saw herself, shouldering through the narrow canal and towards the halo of light. That was the first thing she knew before it happened. She would forget it, of course. The awareness of that knowing would soon become less than the faintest rumor in her mind, but it would stay, imprinted into each cell of her being.
    The second thing she remembered knowing before it would happen- she didn't have the language for it then, had no idea what precognition or clairvoyance or some other polysllabic utterance to give word to what would happen- was later.
    That was when she saw a blue sky, swinging madly about her, and she felt herself head towards it.     
    Was there more, beyond that halo of light, as there had been beyond the first?
    She stretched herself, fingers and toes and steadily beating heart, in the direction of it, to find out. She opened her eyes, and all was blue.

I 

   It was a long way down from there, and she should have known it. She did know it. The thought had occurred to her as she climbed up the face of the steep incline. By the time she reached the top, her fingernails were mud-blackened and her knees skinned against jutting roots and rude rocks. Her heart had dropped to her toes and it clattered there like loose stones. There were loose stones in her shoes, so that might have been the noise that she heard.
     She stood there, and she knew that it was a long way down, from the breast of the world where she stood, the night sky swooping, covering her with black, soft-feathered winds, to the water beneath.
     She thought about a lot as she stood there, her feet kissing the edge. She ceased to think about how far down it was. For a second, she considered how far up she was, and then, once that thought had plummeted, she felt herself go down with it. First her mind tumbled over the edge, skimming the surface of the water, and then-
     it was a long way down, and she didn't remember making it from the top of the hill to the water that rested down below, but she must have, eventually. It was just a long way down, that was all, and heights had always scared her. It was a long way down, but she made it, eventually. Everyone makes it down, eventually.
    Besides, falling is a lot like flying, if you know how to do it right.
    For a few beautiful seconds, Wren Carter was flying. Seconds end, though, and, somewhere in that time, flying becomes falling. 

II

    Had everything gone Julie Carter's way, the whole thing would have ended with one nice, hot fuck in the back of that car. She'd pulled down her skirt as she clambered out onto a street corner in the middle of God knows where, exulting in the memory of fingernails down backsides, bodies moving together, hearts racing as though intent on outpacing one another. Julia Carter had gone her own way, not giving a damn what the older man's name had been. He had been a good fuck, and she had needed a good fuck to clear her mind from that week's sudden onslaught of all that was shitty.
    The night before had been Tuesday. Julia Carter was okay with Tuesdays. You'd gotten past the painful start of Monday, and, if you really applied yourself, really could start getting into the swing of living. Tuesday was a fresher day than Monday was. Monday was a false start and Tuesday, on Tuesday you really could get going, and that was something that always satisfied her. After she'd done her got going, she had decided to surprise her boyfriend Jack Donelly with a visit. He'd given her a key to his apartment- a sure sign, he'd promised, that he was ready to take it to the 'next level'.
    Julia wasn't ever sure what the next level meant, but she was sure it had nothing to do with what she'd walked in on. She'd walked in on Jack Donelly balls-deep in some other two-bit slut on the couch of his apartment.   
    He might have forgotten he'd given her the key before then, but she'd made damn sure that afterwards he wouldn't forget.
    Finding his car was easy. She knew what it looked like, knew where it'd be. She knew Jack Donelly liked to park beneath that sprawling oak in the parking lot across from his apartment. She knew Jack Donelly, and she knew that if there was one thing Jack Donelly enjoyed more than rough sex, it was the pure, primal growl of the engine of that car.
    Once Julia Carter had taken care of the windows of his car, the sad, slivered shards crunching satisfyingly beneath stiletto heels, she had drug the key's teeth along the sleek black side of Jack Donelly's vehicle. Let him forget about the key now.
    Let him forget about how Julia Carter liked to see him, sometimes. 
    Just not like that.
    After that, she'd gone to the bar. She hadn't been horny, but she had wanted to forget, and so she had, in the arms and the car of that stranger.         
    Julia Carter adjusted her skirt, yanking it down over her exposed underwear, and resolved to set about forgetting Jack Donelly and that stranger. In a fashion, the stranger became nameless, faceless, reduced to the ecstasy he'd given, to sweat and heart and breath and hands and powerful thigh muscles. His humanity became lessened, and he existed as a jumbled amalgamation of body parts and functions, at best. Jack Donelly, though, Jack Donelly might have become a ghost, but he was a ghost with all the clarity and vivacity of the living.
    It was hard to forget about Jack Donelly.
    She wanted to forget about Jack Donelly, as she watched herself swell. She became a balloon. She thought she might float to space, and she had never been sure what happened to balloons when they got there, but she supposed that they would probably pop. She supposed they popped long before they got there and then drafted down somewhere, to land forgotten and far from where they'd started out.
    She was pregnant, and she was terrified as she watched herself expand. She watched herself grow larger as the thing inside her expanded, blossomed. It was a seed implanted, nourished. It was a leech, sucking from her. It was in her, but it was not her, and that was an unnerving notion that Julia didn't know what to do with. It was growing and there was nothing she could do about it. It briefly occurred to her that it could be removed; plucked out and unrooted like a plant, excised like a tumor.
    Julia decided against it. She wanted to rip it out, abort it herself, scrape it out of her and wrap it in a plastic bag, some alien, half-formed, bloody thing.
    The vision of that haunted her even as she held the squalling bundle of pink flesh against her chest. It was only when she held the child cradled against her chest, felt the small lips against her nipples, that Julia decided what her name was. It was as though the warmth of the child's mouth told her, as though she breathed her name against her mother's breast. 
    This was her little Wren. That meant something. Julia wasn't sure, beneath the antiseptic glare of the hospital lights, quite what that was, but it was something important. That helped her weather the scowls, the drought-inducing, withering looks cast her by the prominent-browed, hook-nosed, loose-skinned Frank Carter.
    "What kind of name is Wren," Frank said, when Julia first brought the girl to meet him.
    His eyes said worse. The set of his face said worse. The way he turned his back on her said something unspeakable, and Julia knew, she just knew, that he would never stop speaking it. Frank Carter would say it, whatever it was, every time he saw her or Wren, and Julia shivered at the thought that her little girl would have to live beneath the same shadow as she had.
    She intended on never going back again.
    Had everything gone the way she'd intended on it going, she would have never laid eyes on Frank Carter again.
    There were things he wouldn't understand in her and Wren's life, things he would disapprove of, and life had always worked best for Julia when she kept him as far away as she could manage. For the next eleven years, she and Wren got by as good as could be expected. Things weren't perfect, but they never had been. Things went, and Julia Carter had settled so comfortably in the motion she and Wren had established for themselves, had become so accustomed to the rhythm of everything, that she had sworn it was a dream when she got the phone call that Frank Carter had accomplished what he had been threatening to do for as long as she could remember. Frank Carter had gone fucking nuts. 

III

    She had a name that sounded like a bird. Sparrow, Wren, some shit like that. He figured he ought to know her name, they'd been up his ass long enough, but there was a maelstrom in his mind, a veritable sandstorm of detritus, the splintered pieces of a half-remembered life washing through his conscience continuously, and past all the debris, he couldn't quite remember what it was. Wren, that was it. He was sure of it. Her name was Wren. 
    The girl's mother had been blazed when she came up with it, probably. Spent half her god damn time blazed. Sat there on the couch with her feet propped up, leeching off the god damn government for all it was worth. Turned a trick or two every now and then. He knew that for a fact- he heard them in there,  in the room next door, going at it like god damn rabbits, when she thought he was lost in a medicated stupor, all her put on moans, the bed creaking beneath their busily-moving bodies.
    He thought of them less as house guests and more as warts to be removed. A dime store slut and a daughter that would probably turn out the spitting image of the whore that spawned her. Pimples, and he longed for nothing more than to squeeze them between his overgrown thumbnail and forefinger. That was for later, though, when he could work up energy.
    Most of the time, his body refused to listen to him. He slumped listlessly in the bed.
    It was awful kind of them to give him a god damn bed. They made sure he knew that. Or at least the dime store slut did. The daughter only shivered when she saw him, kind of drew in on herself, mouse-like and skittish, whenever she brought him his medication. She didn't say anything else. Her mother, though, her mother made damn sure that he didn't forget how god damn lucky he was that she hadn't sent him to a nursing home, let someone else deal with him.
    If he'd been able to, he would have long since kicked them out on their asses.
    He was going to go crazy eventually. He might as well do it in peace. If he was going to lose his mind, he'd much rather have done it without their constant interference.
    Where was she, anyway?
    She should have been here by now. She should have been there long ago.
    He wondered, and his wondering got him nothing but a headache.    
    He knew it was night. He saw it, through the window, its grimy, tarred fingers prying at the windowsill in an eager bid to gain entry. It would get in, eventually. The night would crawl through, it would tiptoe to where he lay, and it would wrap him in its inky embrace, and what would happen to him then? What would happen, once it did?
    Where was that girl, anyway? 

IV

    It was Tuesday and it was November. The sky had been winter-blue all, the air shivering. The day had dragged on, its feet dull, shuffling minute after minute. Julia Carter had shown up to work and passed the day in the dull, cloudy haze of the nine-to-five, cubicled, and unsatisfied. She remained, for the duration of that day, firmly ensconced in that haze. Occasionally, she would realize there was a world surrounding her and blink in surprise, taking in the four walls that rose around her as though they had newly appeared.
    Five o'clock came, and it rushed past her. She swept outside the building on its wings, and into the shadowy, concrete confines of the parking lot. A day of staring mindlessly at the artificial glow of a computer screen, scrolling up and down, typing in incomprehensible bits of data while some high-pitched, frantic customer did their best imitation of a banshee right in her ear left her, understandably, a little numb. Hers was the zombie-shuffle of the half-awake, of the dull and the nerve-deadened and the overworked and under-appreciated.
    Julia Carter liked Tuesday and she liked November and she liked five o'clock. She liked the feel of the car stirring to life beneath her. It was an old, cranky machine. If it was powerful, its power was that of the rugged, the dogged, the I'll-be-damned-if-I'm-letting-you-go-so-easily. It possessed a weary, rusted determination, and it felt familiar beneath her hands. The steering wheel seemed to curve into her hands, memorizing the feel of her. There was an intimacy there, a rewarding connectedness.
    She fought for dominance amongst the surge of five o'clockers, all seeking to be the first to leave.
    The day Julia drove out into was a little gray, the sky set into a frown. Beneath it, the assortment of skyscrapers seemed hellbent on doing just that- their steely tops appeared to be engaged in an attempt to peel back the layer of sky and reveal the dazzling darkness of space. Solemn clouds marched over them. The sun struggled to make its way through, protesting feebly. It tapped idly on the grimy windshield of the car. Julia ignored it, turned up the radio, and began chasing the white lines down the street and into the distant sky.
    That was the thing about the sky, though. It was everywhere, exerting its quiet, seductive influence over a world that, for the most part, took it for granted. I mean, who just stops anymore, looks up and allows themselves to be enraptured by the sheer hugeness and thereness of the heavens? Who stops and allows wonder to burst out of the seams of their soul? Who feels wonder anymore? Wonder has been mechanized, industrialized, analyzed, laid out on the table and dissected. And what's left for us? A shriveled corpse?
    That line of thinking, though, made Julia Carter uncomfortable. It was too big of a thought for her, and so she swept it away beneath the radio station- there was a back-and-forth dialogue, its subject sufficiently vague and abstract enough to not demand her attention- and lost herself in the road and the car.
     Wren would be home now. She hoped the girl remembered to check in on Frank. He was an intolerable curmudgeon. He had, as of late, developed a rather unfortunate tendency to hurl the nearest item he could lay his cramped, arthritic hands on at anyone who dared enter his room. Still, he needed to be checked on, taken care of.
    He didn't deserve much, as far as she was concerned, but that was the least she could for him. It was more than she wanted to do, truthfully, but Wren had a way about her.
    "There's darkness in him, Mama," Wren had said to her once. They were sitting down to a dinner, made late both by Julia's hour-long commute as well as a wreck that evening that had blocked the arteries of the road up. "There always has been. That's why he lashed out at you. That's why he lashes out now. He feels it, getting stronger and stronger, and he can't hardly control it no more. He doesn't know how to process it, or how to love, or how to feel grateful or wonder. He just sees the darkness, coming for him and coming out of him, and it scares him shitless."
    "Wren! Mind your language," Julia had said, but the rest of what Wren had said had been stored away later, for rumination in those moments when her thoughts got away from her and she let herself follow them.
    Julia reckoned she knew more about that darkness than Wren did, anyhow.
    Julia let the November, Tuesday road eat away the thoughts that crept their way in as evening sunk around the edges of the world. By the time she arrived at Frank's home- it wasn't hers or Wren's, she reminded herself, at least not yet- evening had set in fully in all its starless, black chill splendor. She was later than she should have been, but it happened. The headlights of the car bathed the tangled weeds and overgrown yard in a deceptively warm wash of illumination. Just past the headlights, the side of the house loomed, dark gray, the porch matching it in color and grim, surly attitude.
    A yawn came unbidden, creaking her jaws as it forced its entry out.
    She made her way from the car and up to the porch, another yawn following it. This one hung in the air around her.
    The light in the living room was on. This room, too, was dark-colored. Julia thought frequently of lightening it up- painting the walls a lighter color, maybe peach, doing away with the blinds, getting rid of that furniture- but then she remembered Frank Carter was still alive and it was his house and he would know if anything was changed, somehow, even though he never left the room now. Somehow, if she did anything to make the house actually live-able, he would know.
    "Wren?" Julia said.
    Her call echoed, unreturned and, apparently, unheard. She repeated it, louder. It echoed in her ears.
    "You got dinner out yet?" 
    She entered the kitchen. The light was on here, too, a dull, yellow glow. It revealed an emptiness that surprised her. There was the chair where Wren should have been. Her work was spread out already, waiting for her, the pencil lying across it.
    "Wren?"
    Julia wandered through the hallway. The light here was off.
    Behind the first door, she could hear a storm brewing, and its name was Frank. She ignored Frank, his incomprehensible words falling unheeded on the hallway carpet. It muffled the sound of her walking, luckily. He had no reason to know she was here, not yet. She'd let Wren deal with him. Wren usually did.
    The door at the end of the hallway was up. It was this door that Julia wandered towards, pausing at the threshold. She raised her hand, knocking.
    "Wren?" she said.
    There was no answer.
    "Wren?"
    The door pushed open. It had been entirely unintentional, but now-
    Julia poked her head in through the crack of the doorway, peering into the unlit interior of Wren Carter's room. The walls were lavender. The bedspread was lavender. It was a soft color, a warm color. It was the only room in the house that wasn't entirely unpalatable to Julia, but that might have been the influence of Wren.
    There, splayed out on the bed, already in her pajamas, was Wren Carter. Her clothes were discarded in the middle of the floor. The night light sent out a soft, blue glow. Julia walked through that glow, bent down over the pile. They were wet. That stuck out as absurd to her, but it was not so absurd or out of place that she let it bother her for long. This was, after all, Wren Carter.
    Julia sighed. That left her alone, with dinner to heat and a brewing storm to take care of. It was dark outside, darker than it should have been, and she felt dark, too, the same darkness that Wren had said beat in Frank Carter's veins.
    Speaking of Frank Carter- she'd rather not, but speaking of him- she really ought to check on him.
    God damn him.
    God damn everything.              
    
           

I

       The night was succulent, a fresh black raspberry in its depth. The stars had only just begun to emerge, shy and half-sure that they really belonged. Over the parking lot- Alice Wolfe could just see the parking lot, empty except for her rusted-out Ford, and the vast, unconquerable expanse of blackness that marched proudly over the gravel- a slice of a moon hung. A few streetlights attempted to shine, but their illumination was feeble. It was a sham of a light for a sham of a night, for a sham of a restaurant.
     Alice Wolfe readjusted her elbows on the well-worn table. These were elbow-grooves. They had to be elbow grooves- her rough, calloused elbows, used to this rough treatment- fit too perfectly in those small, circular holes for them to be anything but. They were the elbow grooves of the forlorn, of the late-night, sorrow-sodden souls, seeking relief in greasy hamburgers and coffee, stiff, black, and piping hot.
     She had come here to write, and after an hour and a half of furtive scowling she hadn't written a damn thing. She should have known, of course. It had been like that for a year and a half, and why the hell she had expected something as asinine as a 'change of scenery' to evoke in her that familiar tingle-rush-gasp-aah sensation of words pouring out, or even the slow, scraggy, pecking scramble of uncertainty, was beyond her.
     Not entirely. It was her editor Dorothy Quail who had hatched that hair-brained scheme.
     The exchange had gone something like this:
     DQ: Are you nearly complete with the manuscript? I'm not sure how much longer we can hold out for it. It's slightly overdue.
     Slightly overdue was an understatement, and the infuriating woman knew that. Alice couldn't read it without hearing her high-pitched, nasal-y voice, without seeing her, squinting out at the world behind absurdly affected monocles, in all her vintage, vague glory.     
    AW: Nearly there. I just need a little while to tie up some loose ends. 
     DQ: A change of scenery might do you some good, you know.
      Well, the damn page was still blank, surveying her with an accusatory grimace. Like hell I'll do what you want me to, it said, which just went to show how good that particular piece of advice had been. It was, like every other morsel of advice given by the sagacious Dorothy Quail, utterly and painfully useless.
    Of course, it wasn't her fault the words were shy lately. They had tucked themselves away into some dark crevice of her mind, beneath some creaking floorboard of her conscience. She could hear them there, breathing. The silence was no good. They were there even in the silence, a great, teeming cauldronful of words- double, double, toil, and trouble, and all that, but how to pry them out of their premature retirement and into the brightly-illuminated realty of this desperate restaurant was another story entirely.
    Alice Wolfe remembered the first time she had heard someone tell an honest-to-God story. Not the idle, barbershop chatter that passed for conversation, the kind that went something like, "I went to the store, right? And oh my God, you should have seen the price they were charging for a gallon of milk." It was more than that. It was a vivid thing, a moving thing, a thing with wings and blood, and it had come from some sacred place inside of the man that told it, some holy, burning-bush ground in his wizened chest.
    The greatest disappointment in her life was that she couldn't remember what the damn thing had been about. She only remembered how he told it. 
    He told it wearing a green beret and holding a cigar between his dark, withered fingertips, and every now and then, his raspy voice would break a little and he would tug with his free hand on the suspenders he wore. He had crawled from another period in time, and he blinked as he looked around himself, surprised at where and when he was. He blinked and he told the story, and Alice had listened raptly as he did so.
     It was winter outside, late evening, and the sky reminded her of a frozen raspberry. If ever there was a time for stories, it was then and if ever there was a man to tell a story, any story, it was this man. He told it like a lover whispers the lines of a poem, his tongue making loving to each syllable, pulling out his veins with the words and laying out on the floor a bloody map to his heart. He told it, and he told it, and he told it.
     She listened as he told it, and it worked its way into her life. She always remembered how he told it, but she never could remember what that story had been. She was okay with that. It fluttered around inside her, like the cold finger’s wind on the shuttered windowpanes. Every now and then, the door would creak open as someone rushed in, and the wind sneaked in behind them and lit on her shoulder. The story was like that, except nothing had to carry it in, and nothing could carry it out.  
     She was six, then, and after that Alice reckoned she’d tried her hand and spinning a yarn or two of her own. She discovered that the world itself was one big blue, spinning story. There was a story to be found in every moment, if you only went looking for it. There was a story behind everyone's eyes, on everyone's lips. They were stories brushing against the shoulders of other stories, and the more she told their stories, the more she found herself needing them.  
    She surprised herself by discovering that she wasn’t half-bad. She surprised herself again by discovering that she could make a little money doing it.
    That was before the stories hid themselves away.
    That was before Pop's and Ellie Tribalt.
    Eleanor Tribalt, or, "Just Ellie, if you don't mind," was reducible to a pair of long, tan legs and brilliant white teeth. With those long tan, legs, brilliant white teeth, and deep, sultry tones thrown in for good measure, Ellie made her living. Strictly speaking, her job description was not, "Will provide the service of long tan legs and dazzling teeth. Occasionally, will speak for you in tones reminiscent of some buxom jazz singer in a speakeasy." 
    Alice met Ellie at Pop's, a run-down establishment. On the outside, it was all peeling yellow plaster and two scowling, yellowed windows and a door set like a frown. There was a parking lot, all gravel, small and scrunched between the building and the dark street. Cars rested in it, scrunched together, waiting for their owners to stumble back. On the inside, it was dim-lighting and dusty concrete floors. The bar itself was long, its surface scarred from age and burnt by the end of cigarettes. A dim halo of cigarette smoke hung in the air; at the end were two green doors, one marked "Gents" and the other, "Gals." The place smelled of smoke and piss and beer, of body sweat and extinguished dreams, and from the first Wednesday night Alice had found herself on the threshold of Pop's, the stories excused were gone, snuffed out like the used-up cigarettes that rested in their graves, those chipped glass ash-trays placed at regular intervals.  
    Now, the small hope that had blossomed inside her- a pathetic little thing, wilted and all, with its green finding its way somehow between the cracks of a concrete- was snuffed out like a cigarette in one of those ash trays. Not for the first time, Alice considered going to Pop's. Even if she didn't find a story waiting for her there, she would find Ellie. It was Wednesday, after all.
    She found herself wishing into her half-drunk cup of coffee- no cream, thanks, I take it black- that it was always Wednesday.
    A headache had developed. Little tendrils of pain crept behind eyeballs, expanding to the front of her skull.
    The restaurant was brightly-lit, filled with the constant hum of the air conditioner. It was cold. Alice watched the goose-bumps develop and travel, up and down her arm, like sojourners on some strange journey.
   God damn editors with their god damn change of scenery.
   It was the headache that made up her mind.
    Wednesdays weren't for this place. She should have never come here. She should have never listened to Dorothy Quail. It was a mistake. Ellie Tribalt had nothing to do with it. It was the story. There was no story, and, after the customary exchange of money, she slipped out into the night's yawning mouth.

II

     The world outside was just starting to wake up from its idle daytime existence. As the respectable people, the nine-to-fivers comfortably hemmed in with a lifestyle of white picket-fences and two-and-a-half-children, were beginning to call it quits, this side of town came alive with a vengeance. The streetlights opened their eyes, popping yellow and frenzied, and urged the lecherous and untoward to creep from the corners of the world where they tucked themselves in, biding their time. A goodly portion of those found their way into Pop’s. After nine o’clock, they would begin to straggle in, one by own until they clustered around the counter. They reminded her a little of cockroaches, but damned if they weren’t fascinating and easily manipulatable cockroaches.
    Take, for instance, the mustachioed gentleman- she used that  term lightly on the best of days, even lighter after downing a few shots- that leaned against the end of the bar. He had been nursing the same glass of beer for a few minutes now, fiddling with something in his pocket. The white t-shirt he wore was v-necked, revealing a rather startling display of chest hair. She could just see, on his left ring finger, a tan line.
    His eyes, heavily-lidded, kept running to her, down the length of the bar, caressing first her face and then down the curves of her body. For a few obvious, long seconds, he settled his attention on Eleanor Tribalt's rather impressive chest. Her blouse was scoop-necked and low, plunging daringly as though it sought to reach her navel. Revealed beneath the fabric were her breasts, hanging heavy and remarkably available for the attention of horny, harried adulterers.
    Ellie knew his kind. They were so easy. They were easier than she was.
    If it hadn't been for the cut of the clothes- she could spot the more expensive brands- and the crisp, clean line of the shirt and the khakis, she might have ignored him. Rich, mustachioed, and wanting nothing more than a fuck. If that wasn't a good deal, she didn't know what was.  
    Ellie tipped her head back, finished the shot, then approached him.
    He watched, his wandering eyes slipping across the wonderland that was Ellie Tribalt.
    She had nearly succeeded in sidling up to him, too, when the front door to Pop's opened. Every time it was opened, it let out a merry tinkle into the full-throated roar of the bar, a gentle noise that just registered at the threshold of hearable. Ellie glanced behind her shoulder in the direction of the door.
    A particularly bedraggled young woman had just stumbled over the threshold, nearly tripping, as she was wont to do. She forgot every time, it seemed, that the step-up was there, and so her step-across resulted in a stumble that she managed to control only by grasping the side of the door. She was wearing- also as she was wont to do- a a pair of jeans and a gray T-shirt. It hung loosely, revealing the long lines of her neck, her collarbone, a small mole on the top curve of one breast.
    Alice Wolfe pulled up the T-shirt, concealing the mole and the half-revealed breast, and straightened up, her eyes lighting instantly on Ellie.
    The light caught her momentarily as she walked. It was a trick of some kind, something to do with shadows and the door she'd come through just know shutting behind her, lazily and with no little amount of protest, and the light overhead having to straggle its way through grime and filth. It pooled around her, still, and for a second it seemed to follow Alice Wolfe across the floor and towards the bar where Ellie leaned, half-way towards the now-bemused mustachioed man. A trick of the light; a trick of the mind. It had nothing whatsoever to do with even the light in the room favoring Alice.
    "Hey, babe," Ellie said, slipping into the nearest stool. "Thought you weren't coming."
    For a second, Alice looked over Ellie's shoulder towards the gentlemen. The question formed in her eye. Ellie thought she saw the soft-faced brunette woman playing with the question on the tip of her tongue. She let it go, though, and Ellie let the breath she'd been holding go as well.
    "I thought a change of scenery might help me on what I've been working on," Alice said.
    "And did it?"
    The answer was in the slump of her shoulders, the way the light in her eyes seemed dimmer. The way she looked at the table, studied a long scar that ran across its surface, tracing it with an absent-minded fingertip. The set of her shoulders, the down-turn of her face, slim lips drawn back a little. There was a heavy weight sitting on her shoulders, and it said, "No." Alice said it too eventually, looking at Ellie as she did so.    
    "I'm sorry babe," Ellie said.
    To her surprise, she was. 
    Ellie got the attention of the bar-tender, Sara Jane. A sappy, sentimental woman in her early fifties, her hair was pulled up into a frizzy pony-tail away from a face that carried generous wrinkles, smelled vaguely of peppermints, and wore a black skirt that always advertised that she owed at least one gray cat. Actually, there were three of them, and Sara Jane didn't mind showing the pictures to anyone that would listen to her talk about them. Poor thing- those damn cats were about all she had left since her husband left her for a younger, prettier- that part certainly wasn't a challenge, God knows the woman was, in addition to being so wrinkled, horrendously overweight- woman.
    "She'll take a Miller Lite, if you don't mind," Ellie said to her.
    Alice, moping against the counter, didn't seem in much of a position to do it herself.      
    "I don't know what I'm going to do now," Alice said. "I'm surprised they've extended the deadline this much- and I seriously doubt they'll keep pushing it back."
    Ellie doubted it too. Deadlines meant something. Deadlines were those beautiful, honey-soaked lines, written in concrete, that gave an amorphous world, a world constantly in flux and teeming with uncertainty and unkindness and a thousand other unpleasantries, a little bit of form, a little bit of constancy. 
    "I don't know," Alice said again, into the rim of the glass a passing Sara Jane slipped in front of her. "I just don't know."    
    "I do babe," Ellie said.
    She slipped an arm around the other woman's shoulder, massaging it with her slim, adept fingers. There was no reason to do it, of course. No reason to make the offer. It would have been easy enough to leave it there, to leave poor Alice Wolfe alone to sulk in her story-less, wordless state of existence, alone with her Miller Lite, while Ellie Tribalt took the mustachioed gentlemen to a hotel room for a quick, therapeutic fuck. She did like mustachioed gentlemen. And she especially liked therapeutic fucks. Miller Lites and the mopey women drinking she was less fond of, though she supposed for Alice, she might make an exception.
    She hadn't meant to take it as far as she did, though. There was no reason for it. Not really.     
    "I have a proposition for you," Ellie said.  She tried to choke back the words, even as they emerged. She certainly didn't mean to speak them, but they forced themselves out, and they lingered in the air thicker than smoke. There were so many of them and they emerged from her, and she couldn't retract them. They were living things. Maybe that was why Alice liked them so much. Well, Ellie didn't- even if she made her living with them too, after a fashion.
    Alice's arched eyebrows asked, "What?", though her lips were too preoccupied with sipping daintily from the glass- an odd way to drink a beer, but Alice was, Ellie had always maintained, odd as hell, though likeable enough- to form that word.
    "I have this vacation home I've just bought. In this small, hole-in-the wall little town, name of Haven. Haven my ass, but still- it's an okay place. I'm taking some time off. For my peace of mind, you know. Being a realtor is a hell of a job, you know. Anyway, babe- you're welcome to stay with me. For a little while. See if that gets the juices flowing, you know. Creatively, I mean. Don't answer, just yet-"
    Alice had opened her mouth, and Ellie saw the, "No" already there, brimming to the surface.
    "Take some time to think about it, babe." 
    Although, come to think of it, nothing would have been wrong with no. 
    "Just think about it," Ellie said. "It'd do you some good."
    "I'll think about it," Alice said.
    She meant it, too, god damn her. She really meant it.
    "Good," Ellie said. "Now, if you're okay-" 
    Ellie looked behind her shoulder. He wasn't there anymore. She wasn't sure where he'd gone- whether he had gone into the bath room to relieve himself, or to expel that night's excesses into the filth-encrusted, piss- reeking toilet seat in those small, dinky stalls, or else out into the night and back home to whatever miserable, hellish, dish-rag of a woman waited for him- except that he wasn't there. The moment had passed, anyway, and the alcohol-drenched nerves had left her, and now she desperately needed a cigarette.
    Ellie reached for the black clutch she carried in her hand, unlatching it and digging through it. There was a wallet; a key; and a box that, as soon as her fingers closed around it, she could tell was obviously empty. Still, a small blossom of hope grew in her chest, and she fiddled with that wilting, sad thing by pulling the box out of the depths. Ellie opened it, peeked inside. Of course there was nothing. That was the story of her life, the same thing on repeat. You think it's there, so you don't think about it much, and then you realize it's not, and you can't dislodge it. It's the same way with a missing tooth. When it's there, you don't think about the tooth all that much, and then- wham! bam!- somehow, the damn thing chips, its existence snuffed out in one painful, bloody moment, and your tongue finds that spot, and won't quit finding it. You play with it, and you play with, and the absence stands out painfully.
    Ellie stuffed the empty box back into the clutch, latching it and depositing the damn traitorous thing on the table in front of her.
    "Haven, huh?" Alice said.
    "Haven," Ellie said, tasting the name of the town on her lips.
    When had she first heard about Haven? It was hard to remember. Far back as she could tell, that small, pipsqueak, one-streetlight town had always just sort of been there in her mind, an assortment of trailers and bird-house mansions and wide, sprawling lawns, both unchecked with weeds and groomed into a careful, antiseptic glory. She knew about Haven the same way that she knew her name was Eleanor Elizabeth Tribalt and that she liked the color blue.
    Blue was everywhere, even in Haven. The sky over Haven was a vast, uninterrupted banner of blue. The sky there seemed to eschew clouds in favor of the grand promenade of the sunshine. There was a hill, there, a daring, magnificent incline that chased the sky, and at its foot resting peacefully was a body of water that God himself had poured out into the hollow of the land. At least, that was if you listened to the people that lived there. To hear them tell it, the feet of Jesus had blessed every square inch of the place, and if you weren't born there, if you didn't have roots sunk in deep into that earth and branches reaching up into those same blessed blue skies, you were half-human at best.
    She liked the color blue, and, despite herself, she liked Haven, so, once the chance had finally presented itself- and it had taken a while, because no one seemed willing to get rid of land in Haven, and no one seemed willing to give so much as a blade of grass to outsiders- she had bought the first house she could find.    
    The first conscious memory she had of hearing about Haven was when she met her aunt that lived there. Aunt Corlith was from Haven, and she hated leaving there. She came for Ellie's fifth birthday, bringing with her a refined mannerism, her neck elegant, the pearls around her throat seeming to be blessed by being present on her neck and her heavily-lashed eyes sweeping over everything and, judging by the wrinkle of her nose, obviously detecting something less-than savory. She also brought a pair of socks for Ellie- Ellie accepted these, putting them on in a show of gratitude at the whispered prompting of her mother- making a remark about the place.
    She heard about Haven on the news, once. A little boy went missing from Haven. They found him later in their beloved lake; he was a little bobbing, bloated corpse, shrouded in mystery and a plastic trash bag, and no one ever found out who the hell had killed him, or, for that matter, who the hell would want too. She thought it didn't seem nearly so beautiful as the people there thought it was, you asked her.
    The first time she'd visited Haven herself had been two years ago, when Aunt Corlith had died. She had taken a few too many Xanax, downed it with a nice Vodka chaser, and curled up in the sofa to watch soap operas until, at last, she kicked it. By the time anyone thought to look for her, maggots had taken up residence in her rotting flesh. It had been the smell that attracted them, truthfully. No one had noticed or given a damn about Aunt Corlith until that god damn stench started wafting into their yards, and then they decided to march up to her door, knock on it, and demand to know just what the hell she was getting up to. In retrospect, they felt at least mildly remorseful about their attitude. Remorseful enough, at least, that there had been a few of them there to watch her laid to rest. Aunt Corlith rested a lot, but, to the best of Haven's knowledge, never so peacefully as she did then. That was something, at least.
    And, when the opportunity to buy a house there had come up, Ellie Tribalt had thought, "Fuck it," and went through with it.
    Haven would do her good. Haven would do Alice Wolfe good too.
    "Haven," Ellie Tribalt said into the air of Pop's.
    "Haven," the creaking, worn timbers of Pop's said back to her, and Ellie Tribalt wasn't sure what else to say, so she didn't say anything. She ordered another drink for herself and Alice Wolfe, figured if she wasn't going to get a good fuck off the man- he was still nowhere to been, so the night must have swallowed him up, as all nights are prone to doing, eventually, to all men, everywhere- she might as well get piss drunk. 
    Ellie set about to doing that, as faithfully as possible, thinking about Haven and blue skies and just why the hell she'd had to go and make that offer, anyway, when she knew it was bound to end awkwardly and messily. Come to think of it, Ellie realized, that was probably how this night was going to end as well.     
    Ellie ruminated into the deep, dark belly of the night. Occasionally, she ruminated over her glass for a while and, realizing it was empty, got it refilled again. The inevitable happened and Sara Jane refused with a curt, matronly shake of her head. She pressed a warm, maternal hand against her shoulder, pointing towards the door with the other.
    "Isn't it about time you went home, Ellie?" the woman said.
    Ellie jerked a finger in Alice's direction. To her surprise, the words ran into one another. It was hard to tell where one ended and another began. She wasn't slurring them, by any means. Ellie Tribalt wasn't drunk. Ellie Tribalt never got drunk. It was just that her words were overeager, that was all.
    "She's still here," Ellie said.
    "She's not piss drunk and pensive," Sara Jane countered.
    She had a point, Ellie supposed. Was she piss drunk and pensive?
    Ellie stood from the stool, preparing herself to leave. It was late. The night had plunged into depths of daring darkness. She didn't know what time it was- a good indication as any that it might be a good time to call it a night. She'd have to show up to work again, tomorrow, and her smile and sobriety would have to show up with her, god damn those pesky little things, and-
    It was a long way down, and Ellie wasn't aware of making it there.
    She was only aware that the world had become defined in loose, slippery terms, and the ground looked an awful lot closer than it ought to have. Also, someone had- rather thoughtfully, it occurred to her- turned the lights off, God bless them.
    It was a long way down, anyway.       
 

III

         Alice was aware of a sun, beckoning to her, exploding to life, dim and vaguely distant. It was a cold sun, a mere halo of illumination hung up in watery depths, and it burnt cold and dejected, leaving a swathe of morose, sodden dissolution everywhere it touched. The sun, Alice supposed as she woke up a little more and opened her eyes was not as real as it had seemed. There was a sun, to be sure, and it battered its fists against the sheer tan curtains, insistent on gaining entrance. The warmth steamed against her eyelids, still half-closed and holding in the memory of the other sun- the dream one. 
    There was a warm body curled next to her, tucked in beneath the mound of blue blankets.
    Alice was sure there had not been one there next to her went to sleep, and so she was understandably perplexed.
    Alice, still fuzzy and picking off the lint of sleep, looked at the person that lay in the bed with her. It was Ellie. She was curled beneath Alice’s dark blue sheets. They clung tight to her skin, highlighting the woman’s hills and valleys, and Alice wondered with a queer, curious flutter why she was there and what- probably nothing, God let it be nothing- had happened to have that woman in her bed like this. Alice remembered bringing Ellie home with her- the woman had hardly been any shape to get herself home, and she hadn't been able to understand the address the woman had stammered out- but, as far as she could remember, she had left Ellie downstairs on the couch in the living room.
    She hadn't been drunk, had she?
    Alice's mind stumbled through the last hang-ons of sleep. She sat on the edge of the bed, working up the first vestiges of energy to move. She felt the last of a piece of dream shuffle out of her soul- she had been flying, or falling, into the diminishing halo of a sun, it was hard to tell which, the two could be so similar- but, now that she was awake, she felt the firm, wooden floor beneath her bare feet and knew better.
    Alice thought about waking the other woman up and asking her what the hell she was doing in her bed. She turned around, one foot still on the ground and another tucked beneath her, and set her hand. It was a curve, and she hoped the curve was a shoulder and not something else. Alice nudged her; the woman remained log-still. She would have made another attempt, but the hearty snores emitting from the woman convinced her otherwise. When Ellie did wake up, she would feel half-human at best, even if that waking up happened at her own pace. She would be up, sooner or later, and then Alice could drag an explanation from the woman. Until then, let her sleep and leave her to the mercy of her own dreams, whatever those might be.
    Moving across the room, Alice passed from the bed, graced by its twin bedside tables, handles burnished and dully gleaming in the newly-risen sun, and towards the door. The ground was still cold beneath her feet, but the onslaught of the new day warmed the floor beneath her. The shadow of the sweater, draped loosely on the coat hanger, on the knob of the walk-in closet door seemed like arms, struggling to reach the passing woman. She ignored its advance.
    Alice reached for the door knob, pushing the door open, the flat of her palm against the door, when there was the sound of a soft stirring from the bed. It was the noise of awakening.
    Alice looked behind her shoulder as the woman surfaced from the realm of her own sleep. Her eyes were half-open, blood-shot and watery, and she rubbed at them with her fist. Ellie's normally impeccable hair was standing up.
    "G'mornin'," Ellie mumbled.
    "Morning," Alice said. "What the hell are you doing in my bed, if you don't mind me asking?"
    "Well," she said, disentangling herself from the cocoon of dark blue covers, "that couch was hard as a rock, and I wasn't about to stay there. Especially not when I felt how comfortable your bed was."
    "You can't just- you can't just crawl into someone's bed."
    Alice's protest didn't sound particularly feeble, but it also didn't seem to bother Ellie, if what the woman said next was of any indication.
    "Clearly, I can."
    Ellie Tribalt climbed out of the bed. Alice felt a sunset coloring her cheeks; it rested inside of her, blossoming out. She felt warm, from head to toe. Alice was not in the habit of blushing, but there was circumstances that made it an acceptable thing to do. One of those circumstances, she was sure, was at finding your beautiful, voluptuous drinking companion in your bed. What Ellie was wearing only intensified that reaction. In addition to climbing into her bed, Ellie had done so wearing a borrowed slip.
    It might as well have not been there, really. Alice wore it when summer was ravaging the world, and the room was doing its best imitation of a sauna. Modesty kept her from sleeping entirely in the nude. The slip, at least, was something, and such a light something that it might as well have not been.
    Alice averted her eyes. There might as well have been nothing, and Ellie didn’t seem to care at all.
    It clung to her as she moved about, rustling softly.
    "I needed something to wear," Ellie said. "And I wasn't about to stay asleep in those clothes. Damn uncomfortable."
    "Okay," Alice said. "You want some breakfast?"
    "I could use something to eat, I guess. And Ibuprofen. I've got a hell of a headache. I swear, it's like there's someone in there pounding on my skull with a hammer, trying to get out or something. Last time I overdo it like that, that's for damn sure."
    "You going to put something on?" Alice said, studying the door.
    Her hand was still pressed against it. She pushed it open, half in the room and half in the darkened hallway. It stretched in front of her gaze, long, empty, white, and bedecked with shadows. Alice searched along the wall beside the door for the light switch, finding it after a few moments. The faint shadows fled from the illumination. The longness and emptiness and whiteness of the hallway, however, stayed, seeming to grow stronger beneath the hallway's light.
    There was another door, beside her, and one past that; the upstairs bathroom, a place of peach linoleum and fuzzy cream-colored towels, and the spare bedroom, empty except for the curtains hanging on the window. They hung there, shifting restlessly, thinking they were more than the needless, obligatory bits of fabric that they were. Occasionally, when she needed a quiet place to write- when she still could write- she would sit in the middle of the floor, or lay, stretched out, with a notebook in front of her and the pen in her hand scratching out a frantic tattoo. Since the paper had stopped filling up with words, though, the room went empty. She was sure if she did go in there, the door would have creaks she didn't remember, and the floor would have gathered a layer of dust.
    Past that, the mouth of the hallway and the flight of stairs. They were white, to match the plastered walls, flanked by a rickety bannister.
       Ellie trailed behind Alice, studying her surroundings.
    "Walls are kind of blank," she said. "No pictures."
    Alice wasn't sure what to say, so she said nothing.
    "A pretty place," the other woman was saying, "could use some sprucing up here and there, mind you, but it's a really good place you got here. Shame you have to live her all alone though, babe. Know what that's like, don't I? Gets a little-"
    Ellie paused, searching for the right word. Alice thought the obvious one might be 'lonely' and wondered why she had to look for it after all.
    "Boring," the other woman said instead.
    The rest of the walk was spent in relative silence, punctuated by breathing and by their feet against the steps. The bannister swayed beneath Alice's hand. She'd meant to get it fixed long before now. The money to do that had run out, though, and now, it was condemned to sway, uncertain of Alice and uncertain of Ellie and uncertain of its own existence.
    Alice understood how that felt. It must be how a wind would feel, if it were to be kept in a cardboard box, rattling unhappily. It must be how a bird would feel, caged up. Its voice could rise, but its small, feathered body could not, and so the wings might as well have not been there.
    She let the silence spread over them, and rested inside of it. Next time, the woman could find her own god damn way home, especially if she was going to do something as inappropriate as climb into her bed, wearing her own night gown. The woman's body had been remarkably warm next to hers, the outline of her body pressing against her. That line of thinking, however, was bringing another blush to the forefront. Thankfully, all the woman had a view of was her back.
    By the time she reached the last step, the color was gone out of her cheeks.
    By the time Alice reached the kitchen, everything was gone except the pressing hunger. Not all of it could be filled. Not all of it ever was.

IV  
 

    There was a blank space inside of her mind. It stretched from one corner to the next; malleable, perforated so that, occasionally, some stray object would squirm its way through, it draped over the entirety of her consciousness, soft in its firmness, inciting every inch it touched- and that was every inch- to tickle and tingle in response. There was a blank space inside of her mind, and Alice filled it up with words and stories, until they were gone. Then, she was left alone with the blank space.
    And, at this point in time, Alice amended thoughtfully, Ellie.
    The woman rested on a stool behind the long, white L-shaped counter, her elbows resting on the surface. It had been cleaned recently and the smell of bleach still lingered in the air. There was lemon, too, from some other cleaner, and now, bacon and eggs. They were all mixed up together. That was something Alice was familiar with- things being mixed up together.
    The words were mixed up with the canvas in her mind and that was mixed up with-
    The bacon was half-burnt by the time she extricated it from the pan; the eggs brown-flecked, looked too-yellow, sticking together almost fearfully. She supposed it would stick the same way, when it went down, but that was fine by her. She hoped it was fine by Ellie.    
    "Here y'go," Alice said, slipping the plate in front of the other woman.
    She sat on the stool beside her with her own plate, staring at it.
    "God damn this headache," Ellie said. 
    "You're the one that drank so much."
    "Don't remind me," Ellie said. "Don't remind me."
    So Alice didn't. And, for a while, there were no words spoken in that kitchen. The blankness of her mind stretched from corner to corner of the room, but, as she woke up- at last- it became filled. She sighed, said something- the words weren't important to her, it was the saying, the half-hearted attempt at striking up a conversation with the voluptuous, nearly-nude woman that shared her kitchen and had, until recently, shared her bed-  and hoped, as she did so, that she would find the story that day.    
    Ellie stayed with her that day, a soft, slippery presence she only half-understood. Ellie ordered them plane tickets. Likewise, Alice only half-understood the progress in that direction. She listened intently, however, as Ellie told her the plans- they would leave the following morning, Thursday at 6:00 a.m.., and they would drive. They would drive until the miles had slipped past them, chasing the blue sky, never quite getting there, until, at last, they were there.  She listened as Ellie told her stories, and wished she had some of her own to tell. All she could do was listen, and half-understand, and become fuller as she did so.
    That night, the other woman lay on the couch downstairs, and Alice's frantic insistence, still in the night-gown.
    Alice lay upstairs, sure she could hear her breathing, and fell asleep. She thought she dreamed. She thought she dreamed she was drowning. 
    Morning brought an end to that, as morning does, and Alice woke up, bottled the dreams away inside of her mind, and prepared herself for God-knew-what.