Passing Strange

by Ellen Klages

On the last Monday of her life, Helen Young returned from the doctor’s and made herself a cup of tea.

From the windows of her apartment high atop Nob Hill, San Francisco’s staggered terraces lay like a child’s blocks, stacked higgledy-piggledy, the setting sun turning glass and steel into orange neon, old stone and stucco walls glowing with a peach patina. The fog coiled though the hills like a white serpent.

was an odd negotiation. Neither said much, but each heard what she needed.

“I thought you came from money.” “I did. Before I was thrown from the nest and cut out of the will.” “Black sheep?” “Baaa,” Emily mumbled through a mouthful of pastry.

know how that feels. Holding my breath. Making no sound. Sweating, heart racing, guts liquid—waiting for her to find me, knowing she was coming.” She tapped the ghastly cover. “But look at that girl. She hasn’t given up. The men who buy this won’t see it, but I know. Because I got away.” Haskel’s jaw was set, her eyes fierce and bright. “That fear is on the paper now, not eating away inside me. Bit by bit, scream by scream. Like emptying a bucket with a teaspoon.”

The hill behind them blocked the sun. What had been a golden summer evening was transforming, moment by moment, into a world of shadows, a thousand shades of gray punctuated by the white globes of streetlights, a few piercing streaks of neon. The lights of the city winked on around them, reflecting out onto the water, a flat, dark void with the man-made paradise of Treasure Island in its center. San Francisco was a beautiful city, but it was a city—brick and stone, grays and browns, vertical lines, right angles, and uniform patterns of windows repeated building by building, block by block, rectangular and regular. Directly in front of them, two miles out, they watched as another city, made of lath and plaster, changed into its evening clothes. By day, it was a transient chimera of palaces and minarets, curving courts, and colonnaded temples. Now, bursting through the

dusk, searchlights fanned out toward the stars like the hand of God, and ten thousand colored floodlights turned the stucco castles into glowing, glittering jewels.

They retraced their steps through the patches of yellow lamplight from the houses that lined the moon-shadowed stairs.

His protruding eyes twinkled behind round gold-framed glasses, like an avuncular bullfrog.