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She knew alone a little too well. Alone carved out a canyon in her chest, deep grooves of a river run dry. She didn’t know how to fill it back up. She wasn’t sure she even wanted to, just for it to empty again.
She was a human golden retriever. Este was a crab, all pinchers and an exoskeleton shell.
The Fades looked like sorority girls at alpha pi ohmygod.
The only thing standing between her and certain death was a semicorporeal asshole of a ghost who had made it perfectly clear he was capable of disappearing at any moment, which would leave her trapped in an abandoned service corridor with three spirits dressed like 1990s B-list celebrities.
If her body weren’t fully engaged in fight-or-flight mode, she’d have asked him to explain a few pressing questions like why aren’t you invisible, and how is any of this possible, and, kindly, what the fuck just happened.
“Listen, Logano. We’re a team now, you and me. You can’t expect someone to do all the work for you, but you can’t do it all alone either.” For someone who died before using a toaster, he sure thought he was the coolest thing since sliced bread.
Like, you’re stuck in the center of the world’s worst Venn diagram.”
The program the Lilith used for its circulation records probably predated Este’s entire existence, and let’s face it, the early 2000s were not known for their phenomenal digital prowess.
She had admittedly gotten used to having him linger in her periphery. The same way she’d gotten used to wearing her first thong—she didn’t necessarily enjoy it, but it served its purposes.
“‘There is life, there is death, and there is love.’”
“‘The greatest of these is love,’” they finished together.
It’s a vulnerable thing to have, a body.”
“When you love someone, it’s like building a library and filling the shelves. It doesn’t matter how many years it’s been since Austen wrote Emma or Fitzgerald wrote This Side of Paradise. We can still pull them from the bookcases and dive back into the words, the same as the day they were written. All the years and memories are still right here, cataloged inside us.”
For weeks, she’d been slowly dying. Life, too, wasn’t the harsh beam of a fluorescent bulb, on or off. It was a dimmer switch, a candlewick burning down to the quick. Fading and fading away.
