Alone with You in the Ether

by Olivie Blake

When Regan was younger, she had coveted the prospect of a call or a text; it meant, primarily, attention. It meant that she had filled the vacancy of someone else’s thoughts.

Eventually she would marry him, and then everything she was would vanish into his name. She’d attend parties as Mrs. Marcus Waite, and no one would ever have to know a thing about her. She could shrug him on like some kind of cloak of invisibility and vanish entirely from sight.

When you learn a new word, you suddenly see it everywhere. The mind comforts itself by believing this to be coincidence but it isn’t—it’s ignorance falling away. Your future self will always see what your present self is blind to. This is the problem with mortality, which is in fact a problem of time.

If I’d known I would meet Charlotte Regan in the morning, maybe I would have gotten some fucking sleep.

It was more like there was a sliver of space between him and the outside world and she had unassumingly filled it, less like a piece fitting into the vacancy of another and more like liquid being poured into a cup.

Aldo thought of the slope of Charlotte Regan’s hips. Her dress had an asymmetrical hem, full of sharp, neat lines. It suited her, seeing how she was also tall and full of lines. She reminded him of the buildings that had been constructed along the river. They were mirrors of the landscape, beautiful and sleek and discreetly reflective of the water itself.

Her stride was premeditated and unhurried, as if she’d mapped out a path defined by ambivalence and then followed its projection to the inch. He tucked it into a new file in his mind; one he’d opened without realizing it. REGAN, it said, and within the subsection marked LIES, he filed the sound of her footfall while she was walking away from him.

Then she was quiet as only she could be quiet, with every motion impossibly loud.

The first time they argue she is sure that she loves him.

If this is what it is to burn, he thought, then I will be worth more as scattered ash than any of my unscathed pieces.