A Hope and Dreams

I keep my seatbelt on, even after you stop the car, even when the interior lights dim and I lean into your space, arm over your shoulder, thumb running in endless circles, sticky dryness in my mouth, as I witness your decades old grief. 

She would call it an omen, if she had done anything that was of note, and wasn’t in such a publicly crowded space. As it was, all she could do was assume that the thunder rolling and lava spurting out from the ground was a sign for someone else, and so she kept on walking.

She can always see them spiraling to the worst case scenario and she always ends up tripping on her haste to clarify that it’s not, that it’s better this way. She doesn’t hate her clumsy, rushed words, which never get smoother even as she repeats them endlessly (she can never erase the need to clarify that she worries sounds like a lie), or the original assumption. She hates the fact that she’s never come out of that conversation feeling like her friends believe her. 

When it comes down to it, she’s more of a mirror than a person, at this point. Every few weeks she starts watching a new show, or reading a new book, and some obscure detail will catch her attention. A tick of one of the characters—rolling a weak ankle, sticking their tongue out the corner of their mouth—something obscure, created to just give a hint of a semblance of humanity. Then, a day later, she’ll find herself doing it, mimicking something that was never real in the first place, something that will soon be so engrained in her that she won’t be able to stop it if she tries, that she won’t be able to remember where it came from in the first place, that she won’t be able to recall who she used to be without it.

The reflections of headlights on the dark waters of the highway faded before his exhausted eyes, as he tried to steer his ship away from the horizon

She let him pick out a few dresses, and at checkout told the cashier that they were for his twin sister, who was sick with the flu. She folded them neatly, between the pants and the shirts in his dresser, and told him he could wear them if he wanted to, but only for special occasions: on the weekend, when it was just the two of them, watching cartoons and baking, or anything that included just the two of them staying home. 

It had been a mansion once, before the seaside winds warped the facade. Technically, it still was a mansion, although not one that many people would choose to live in, given the holes in the walls exposing gaps of sea-spray-stained carpeting inside. However, by merit of size alone, I would call it a mansion, and wouldn’t be alone in doing so.  All the kids in the nearby town—which sat at the intersection of the main thoroughfare of the entire state, and an overly optimistically named ‘central street’—called it their mansion, as had their parents and grandparents before them. It was, functionally, theirs, mostly because as far as nearly anyone in the town knew or cared, the mansion had never been occupied. They knew who owned it. Emil Malcom, the old man who lived in a run down condo on the edge of town had inherited it from his father, but as far as anyone could tell he had never set foot in the place.