The Guest

by Emma Cline

What were people seeing in her aura, what stink was emanating?

And Alex would ask questions and egg him on and he’d flash her a smile, his pleasure suddenly so boyish.

his sunburned nose, his knee-length swim trunks. The soft push of his belly, like he was practicing for middle age.

attending to whatever shadowy errands made up his life.

Nothing from Alex’s phone. It was a dead rectangle, useless, but somehow still comforting to palm, slim as a prayer book.

She did another round of breathing, and then did it again. Better? Maybe.

Men who insisted on her coming first, as if this was proof of their fundamental goodness. It wasn’t bad, it was just annoying. Because actually it required more energy from her, required more fake emotion scrounged up to match theirs.

A memoir by a woman whose mother had loved her too much. Whose brothers had loved her even more. A problem of emotional excess, psychological gout.

So much of getting away with things was the outward insistence of normalcy.

She passed a cemetery, crowded with headstones and plinths, knocked into one another like bad teeth.

Everyone’s faces were made similar by sunglasses, a kind of Easter Island stare.

The man winked as he filled another plastic cup, but it was like vaudeville, a hollow flirtation that lacked any real feeling. Alex had worked enough restaurant jobs to be familiar with this flavor of exchange.

Under the thin skin of Margaret’s closed lids, Alex saw the tiny snakes of blue veins, the faint animal twitch of the girl’s eyeballs.

Jack looked younger than Alex remembered—a child!—but maybe it was because his car was so oversized.

She took the last sip. A vodka soda. It had an ascetic taste, like water gone sick. All the girls had ordered this, the drink of the female martyr.

Jack’s eyes were heavy. Up close, she could smell the baking soda of his deodorant.

“People are pretty much the same, you know? If you think, where would I hide a key, then probably other people think that, too.”

“Good night,” Alex said, her hand resting on his shoulder for a brief second. He turned over, his face squished from the cushions, pink looking and damp.

She would just lie here for a second, she thought, that’s what she told herself, but when she opened her eyes next, the room was bright and Jack was still sleeping soundly beside her, the untouched glass of water on the coffee table filling with sunlight.

She couldn’t summon the proper energy to massage this situation.

But maybe some things could never be erased. Maybe they tinted some cellular level of your experience, and even if you scraped away whatever part was on the surface, the rot had already gotten beneath.

So many people with open, gnashing mouths and glasses in their hands, their private moons of alcohol.