Magic for Liars

by Sarah Gailey

If you need to hurry, her oft-repeated saying went, you’re already too late.

Nobody decides to become the kind of person who will stab a stranger in order to get at what’s inside her pockets. That’s a choice life makes for you.

A twenty-five-cent word sprang unbidden into my mind: “noctilucent.” The word described the glow of a cat’s eyes at night, but it also seemed right for the woman in the photograph. She was a moonbeam turned flesh, pale with white-blond hair and wide-set light green eyes. Beautiful was not an appropriate word; she looked otherworldly. She looked impossible.

Across the bay, San Francisco bled money like an unzipped artery. Those who had been privileged enough to have their buckets out to catch the spray drove back over the water to Oakland—from The City to The Town. They bumped aside people who had been living in these neighborhoods for generations, and they tore down storefronts, and they built brunch pubs with wood reclaimed from the houses they were remodeling.

His face had gone still. The lie was as obvious as if it were a tarantula perched astride his wide, thin-lipped mouth. It struck me that he might not be sure if I was talking about the graffiti or the murder. I let his lie—and his uncertainty—linger for a moment before brushing it to the floor to scurry back into the shadows for another time.

remembered what it was like, walking through my high school and feeling like everyone else’s lives had already started. There was the girl who was an amazing singer and played guitar outside at lunch, the academic kid who won an award at the national level for some kind of algae farm, the young artists who sat and moodily sketched their friends. I remembered looking at them, and then looking at myself, and wondering when the hell my thing would turn up.