I’d like to imagine this is all some random guy’s fault.
Of course, it’s probably not. Probably a lot of people’s fault. But it’s the image I’m going with, the one I’m playing up in my head while the nearly empty bus (just me and the driver) drone westward to a coast I’ve only ever seen on the internet and in rare, but fierce, dreams.
Yeah, there he is: sub baked dirty brow glistened with sweat, tired eyes and cracked hands as he continues his arduous task in those deep desert ruins the people in the city miles away told him never to go to. But of course he didn’t—simply couldn’t—listen and now he’s there, working so hard until, gloriously, his hands swipe across what he’s been looking for these last several weeks. It’s sheer luck he knows that he’s found it, the blistering sandy winds bluster and carry the brittle bits of the world, and just so happened to give him this. He’s excited and his energy doubles and he gets deep in that dull tangerine land until the final rest of this very special dead lays thick and black in the merciless sun. The man, dry lips, drier water bottle, pries off the lid, maybe a bit too hastily as the stone chips and a crack sprints across the stone, and beholds the cereclothed image of manmade immortality in Her glory. And there, on Her neck, almost like part of the wrappings amidst the other glyphs and gifts—
Me.
/
Jen thought I needed some oomph for my Halloween costume.
She told me this while we sat on the edge of town, where the rocks mash up against each other, sharpening their skins. The place smells of stone and ocean filtered through a suburban haze until lighters laugh, then it’s swept away by gas station advertised smokes.
“Your costume’s alright, but don’t you want to impress? Show them up and all.”
“Not really into that, you know that.”
“Yeah, but it’d be pretty funny to see you try.”
I thought about that. “Yeah. Yeah it would be.”
We tried the big stores and beyond; went through parental jewelry boxes and yard sale discards. Nothing. Then—whimsically, almost by design (I guess how these things work, right?)—the pawn shop materialized before us as we stalked the streets, cigarettes giving spice to our young breath. Jen and I went in, the rest went on. We let the chill of Fall into the dusty world of pre-owned lives. The owner was somewhere in the back but we didn’t wait up. And if you believe this sudden establishment was cobweb coated, eerie in an unexplainable way, be disappointed. It was just a pawn shop: marked up baseball memorabilia; paintings and postcards I couldn’t understand the value of; stamps, statues, wood carvings, jewels and rings and silly trinkets; then, finally, the owner came in with a logo imprinted shirt and a face too well shaved. A big sniff of our smoke scent flushed worry over his beady eyes. We’d crushed our sticks outside, andhI guess that was enough for him.
“Looking for anything specific?” Straight to the point; how I like my men.
“She needs something for a costume: a brooch or necklace or…,” Jen waved her hands about like it was all the Seller needed. “Anything cheap?”
“Nothing cheap here. All quality.”
So began the tryouts of the century old, high quality tokens to give soul to a seasonal store bought costume. None met our wallets challenge.
Until Her Necklace.
“Man who sold me it seemed to want to get rid of it. Took only twenty for it.”
“It cursed?”
He smiled, even laughed leaning in, slow-spoke, “maybe. Seller said he found it in his father’s stuff after he died suddenly. In a box labeled ‘do not open.’”
“Sure. Give it here.”
He looked me over, then it, maybe doing calculations in his head. Maybe figuring if it truly was cursed.
“I’ll do fifty.”
We agreed to forty. Just in time for Halloween.
//
An emerald forest heart encased in onyx, even the chain that midnight black. If you looked long enough the green seemed to swirl, pulse in a still living power. It could’ve burrowed into the skin below my collarbone and looked peaceful, right at home. On the backside, in a gleaming shadow, you could feel less than see markings of some sort. Hieroglyphics my fingers decided as they traced them. Looking in the mirror, the costume was less an empress and more the necklace itself—I was the add-on to this ebonic thing.
I was smiling though, so something had to be right.
The time was soon and the place was a few miles away and so I tore my image from the mirror, grabbed my earbuds, and went down the stairs to the front door. Hand on the cold knob, I let the evening filled with the laughter of early trick-or-treaters in and stepped out; called back to Mom I’d be back before midnight.
She wasn’t there—never was when I left—instead at another place in the city for the next three hours, probably four the way she worked. Even on holidays: it became the expected. But I always call out anyway, letting my voice bounce around the house. Maybe it keeps going until she’s home, slips into her head as she lays crashed on the couch. I like to think so. Wouldn’t know. Won’t now.
I put the bowl of candy out and don’t bother locking the front door.
///
Jen’s boyfriend would have driven us, but he and cars never saw eye to eye. Car-less, again—Jen says he finds more lemons than a farmer. I don’t mind walking.
Costume heels in hand, the concrete kind of hurts. The chill is worse though, it’s cold tonight and I can hear the littler kids scamper through it complaining between giggling house runs.
I pass the time looking up at the empty spots in space, wondering if stars used to be there and have lost since expired. Everything must die, I supposed, but the stars are sad because they can never leave where they form—will always be stuck there at where they’re born. There’s something about the arms of galaxies technically moving them, and I guess that means we’re always moving too, in a way. Logicing away the romanticism fills my head as I relax at the red light: the one with no cars nearby. I decide to wait anyway, go against the anti-status quo.
I twirl my arms, whistle and hum, think about how vulnerable I am. The usual. Some elementaries join me; a second later, their parents. They don’t wait for the green light. A pretty pink princess in a North Face jacket smiles at me and says I “look correct,” as her father whisks her away.
I’ll think about that more than the stars.
The sounds of children seem to disappear, get picked up but the ghostlike wind and carried far off to the forest surrounding Suburbia. The full moon reigns over, but the winds attack it too, blowing gray clouds over its silver body until the neighborhood lays cloaked and cold.
And, just like that pawn shop, on cue, a shape begins to emerge from the distance, coming down the sidewalk I just traversed in an awkward almost-gait.
At first I think it’s a child, hunched as it is; then, no, too long of limbs: a lithe teenager really playing the part as their chosen holiday spook. They’re coming, oh yeah, they’re coming, I kind of sing to myself. A kind of humanoid shadow: makeup caked in a grey rot, enough eye shadow to create sibling black holes. They’ve done good. Really good. I’m actually a bit stunned watching them approach. Part of me wants to stick around, check out their details, another, the winner, forces me to keep walking with the sudden green light and white walking person in their box.
I’m going, sometimes looking back at my company. They’ve ignored the instruction of Do Not Cross too, but they’re in no haste for candy. I somehow know this individual should stay away, too dedicated to their role, I admit. Eventually my bare feet outpaces their weird commitment to the part.
They don’t appear on the horizon as I linger transfixed outside school, but I sure expected them to.
////
Neon colored haze pouring over the floor like the rise of the dead; classic Halloween beats and rhythms to steal away the silence from the ghoulish procession about the dance floor. Those who steer clear of the dancers are chatting with colorful soft drinks standing alone in corners, wandering the border of the gymnasium like unfulfilled predators. There’s laughter and some screams and maybe a teacher yelling, unable to be heard amidst the revel of high spirits.
I put my earbuds in.
Somewhere in the cacophony of colors a few compliments come in the form of muted pointing and smiling. Thank you, thank you; I know they’re talking about the jewel. But gift horses and mouths, however it goes. I flash a smile that’s probably purple in the prismatic chaos. I can’t help myself, I’m enthralled in my own reckless abandon—a battle of being too cool to dance versus too cool to not dance—that I let myself drift away from my friends, let the bouncing sides and backs and hips of students carry me further into the tide of youth as the adults watch on, more lax than they probably could be.
Something makes me stop.
In that collage of characters, the intricate face paints and macabre masks and foam cutouts, in all the illusion of fun horror and cheeky screams—something real. Heads bobbing and rolling to a raucous beat and smiles flashing with neon lips and markings, and between the lines of green and red and purple there is a shadow, and almost immediately I know who—what—it is. And it’s no teenager playing mummy, oh no. The knowledge comes as real and sudden as an eclipse. A sepulchral stare with sunken skull, dipped out of the pools of eternity and fate. Though I only knew the fraction of this realization, the fear was no less great—fear like a wrong way in the woods; fear like following footsteps on pavement late at night; fear like falling, falling, falling into the unseen depths of a fresh cavern that’s opened up miles below our fragile lives. Yes, this face was such fear: worm yellow teeth and skin layered and frayed like burnt papers, inked in age. Now, ever believing it to be something less—a child, a teenager—seemed comical, illogical, trivial. Stupid. And to confirm this new truth, the necklace seemed to shiver in exaltation for its Mother. She had come and found. She was here to reclaim her metallic and earthly child.
She slipped through the dancers who, somehow, some way, paid Her no mind, and enchanted in the terror I remained still. Her neck and shoulders, clad in the neclacke’s siblings became visible. Her mouth opened to release the voice of an epoch’s end, a sound of black hole cores and the space outside life and death. Somehow that was the releasing factor and I ran, tripper, scrambled through the laughing joys around me, unaware or indifferent to my coming end. As a child I often wondered how victims of fairy tales knew innately of consequences. I understood then as the babe knows how to scream. The knowledge simply was. The truth simply was. Yet, something deeper stirred, under the fear and primal understanding—something specific, subconscious, strange.
Excitement.
And so, my feet slammed the polished floors to the tune of my hammering heart, ignoring the cries of my friends who saw my terror but not my terrorizer and broke through the double doors of the gym into the hallway and ran, tumbling on bent ankles and running once more, leaving shining thrift store heels behind as an unneeded clue to my pursuer in her path, the entire time my indifferent playlist continuing as it always should.
/////
Mom still wasn’t home yet.
The phone’s cicada-like shaking never ceased in my pocket.
Pantry guts scooped in armfuls into a backpack. A piggy bank, all of mom’s hard work, now broken on the floor. The price of tuition at a school I hardly thought about, now in my pocket, rolled firmly and carefully like you’d imagine they’d be. I took a few clothes, plenty of snacks. Said goodbye to the pictures on the wall (none of them were taken by me); paid respect to a house’s old bones that saw plenty in me and Mom.
There wasn’t any confusion here. I’d seen the movies, read enough stories, knew inside my heart what was to come. No time to weep or beg or try and double-cross. That’s the fate of the Marked afterall. Somewhere a voice told me to take what still clung to my neck back to where it began, to the crimson sands under the sun’s bloodshot eye, the bleached bloodstained bones of a culture buried. Give it back to Her in a way we’d both be satisfied. But I hate being on water and flying? She’d catch me in custom’s line. Couldn’t help but laugh at the latter.
I didn’t gasp when I opened the front door to a face.
“What’s going on?” Jen stood alone before me.
“Gotta go, can’t waste time.”
“You’re not making sense.”
“This necklace is cursed and now I’m going to die if She catches me. Can’t throw it away because that doesn’t work. Usually doesn’t anyway.”
“What?”
“Gotta go.”
I passed by and didn’t bother turning around when Jen kept asking me what I was doing. She followed me through swathes of kiddies and preteens who had come out for the real big candy bars, employing logic where there was none, even began to cry at points much to the glances of the sugar stalkers. I just smiled at her and tell her I’d be fine. Eventually she stopped and so did I seeing her shadow in the moonlight abruptly go still. She let a couple heart beats pass by. For some reason I remained still, watching her. I knew she’d reach for the necklace, but my reaction time simply sucked. Only way to say it, really.
“You idiot,” I told her.
“God, what’s wrong with you? Is this some kind of messed up joke? Trying to scare me? Halloween, yeah I get it. Not funny. Rickie pulls this crap, not you.”
I thought about leaving her there, looking stupid holding the necklace, an equally dumb face of faux triumph mixed with concern. But no. I liked Jen. She was right, it didn’t make sense. Maybe one day she’ll learn things sometimes never do.
“Are you going to say something?” Then, quietly, almost a whisper. “You’re really scaring me.”
What could I say that waiting for Her wouldn’t?
“I’m going back, Ray. This, I don’t know what this is. But prank’s over. Can’t believe I wasted forty dollars on this.” She tossed the necklace to me, though not high enough to catch. It hit the concrete and I wondered briefly if it could crack. I left it there, instead watching as Jen walked away, away. A few houses down she abruptly stopped, seemed to see something further off and straightened up. It gave me goosebumps too. I reached down and picked up the jewel. No cracks to be seen, just that subtle swirl in encased green. When I looked up Jen was staring at me, her mouth slightly open and the glossed eyes of one not quite sure what’s going on. I wondered if she’d come back to me. She didn’t. She wandered off with the crowds of children, all of them eventually melding with the evergrowing night and its harbinging wind.
How long did I stand there in that Hallow chill?
I put the earbuds back in and walked away.
//////
If the pawn shop was part of this lethal prophecy, I’m not sure what this Uber is.
They didn’t even have to come to me, I apparently was walking towards it the whole time. It’s there, lonely and brights wide alive, at the cusp of suburb and city construction, and at first I figure the driver just up and left after answering the app, decided it was a holiday after all, no time for a quick buck. In reality he was slumped over the wheel, battling phlegm in his throat with a bottle shaped paper bag at his feet and a picture of a woman not at all like me taped to the dashboard.
I don’t bother looking around as I step into my future.
The man turns to me. “Where you going, Cleopatra?”
“However far this car goes.”
“Goes pretty far.”
“I’ll probably need further than that.”
I give him several thousand. He goes wide eyed then smiles in a way that reminds me of that little pink princess.
“Runnin’ from home?”
“Something like that.”
He starts the engine, a ramshackle sound I only ever heard from Jen’s boyfriend’s cars. I ask myself if this is all one bad idea, I answer matter of fact, even a bit chipper: of course it is. But Jen’s called me the Queen of Bad Ideas before and people don’t give titles just like that, logic be damned. You wouldn’t, couldn’t, logic out the millennium old pursuer, who’s crossed sand and sea and suburban concrete to kill this teenager. The least I can do is be just as difficult. As the engine coughs and wheels shriek, She slips forth from her shadow down the toad. I give her a middle finger, but I’m glad She’s there. So go, Weirdo Driver, go.
And we go. Far longer than ought to have gone honestly. The Driver (Ted, if you care) tells me his life story and I tell him mine; we only break for sleep and he never asks why I wake him up so quickly, why we have to leave to get to the other side of the country. There I don’t know what I’ll do. Maybe I’ll get lucky and hobo-hop on a boat or something as it leaves the coast, watch Her stare off from the coast until I melt with the sunlit horizon or steel point stars. Not that oceans would save me for long, I mean, she crossed them somehow. But the chase, Her lumbering, that’s the point really. She could catch me whenever She wanted—that fact I’ve decided upon. Teleport or simply exist somewhere, grab me when I finally give up and sleep longer than I should. Sometimes I’ll see her on the brink of a hilltop or the end of some old, long road. In a top window of a house where the family laughs and dines downstairs. But honestly, she could get me at any time. I won’t dispute that. Yeah, I realize, it’s about the chase—that we’re in this contract together. An acknowledgement that I’m doing this because I can and She’s doing it because she can too. There’s no obligation to play. I don’t want to see it that way. I’ve since ignored the messages from Jen, the voicemails from Mom, the ever growing list of things my old life tried to build. It’s Me and Her now.
She’ll chase and I’ll run. It’ll go on forever and ever, Her thinking one day the amulet will be Her’s and she’ll rest once more in that dry, deflate place where her people whistled away with wind, where their lonely voices call out from the rocks that still sit about the sand; where the birds no longer go and the scorpions and sun spiders and lizards have abandoned out of a feeling they know so intimately but could never explain. She’ll chase because her alternative is to be forever thrown into the thoughts of the dead, the epoch of the end. She has chosen this. She’ll chase because she wants to. She’ll kill me because she wants to. And if life wasn’t such a fucking game, maybe I wouldn’t want to play.
But what this bitch doesn’t know is I’ve been running from my problems my whole life.
And I’ve gotten pretty good at it.