Independent Bar.
Park the car. The stereo hisses into submission. The door is not far, then you are inside. Goth music. Black walls. Pop music. Red walls. The wristband—yellow tonight—rips your arm hair. First, a drink. Then skip upstairs for a perch above the dance floor. Above everything. You are above everyone.
Even now, the work remains a rumor. Some are afraid to go out, yes. But not here. Surely they’re safe here. If they travel with friends and don’t pick anybody up... They’re wrong.
“You need a drink,” he says suddenly. He saw you before you saw him. He approached you. Spoke.
“What did you say?”
“You need a drink.”
“Have one already,” you say. You jiggle a glass.
“You don’t get it. That’s cute, you know?” He stands. Bowlegged. Cocks his head to the side and grins. His teeth like a printer’s stamp pressed into his thick lower lip. “You need to buy me a drink.”
“Says who?”
“Ask what I want.” He’s Puerto Rican with a stainless steel lip ring, a tight shirt, and a concave abdomen.
“No,” you say. He won’t do for tonight.
But he’s persistent. He slides onto the neighboring stool and presses his thigh to yours. “You’re salty, papi, but I won’t hold it against you. Vodka cranberry, by the way.” He extends a hand. “I’m Alex.”
“What a coincidence,” you say. “Me, too.”
You shake hands, noting the wide, sinewy finger pads like a frog’s toes. A callus catches you below the thumb. Tonight he’s safe, but maybe some other night he’ll be appropriate. You disappear and a moment later fit his hand with a plastic cup from the bar.
“Drink,” you say, and he does, thanking you. You grin, satisfied with yourself. You spit in that drink.
“Wanna go home?” he asks.
“Things at home aren’t so good right now.”
“What’s that?”
“Nothing. Not tonight.”
Making your vague excuses—the bathroom, a friend waiting—you walk away. You’ve already wasted too much time with him.
The night progresses swiftly once you’ve refocused, and before long you spot your perfect boy dancing alone. He is translucence incarnate.
The rest comes simply. Your left hand meets his right shoulder. Your lips mesh. Can he taste you? No. You lack a distinct flavor; you are a perfect reflection of him even in this way.
“Matthew,” he says.
“No shit. Me, too,” you say. Your place, a string of things you say.
He agrees.
And then you’re both gone, slipped into the night like a knife into its chock.
FEW KNOW BETTER THAN LAILA MORALES THAT SLEEP, AS A luxury, is best enjoyed by the overworked. But all luxuries expire.
In the darkened room she stirs. Wispy tendrils of an amorphous dream—something on a ship, maybe? Or in a car? Or was it an airboat? And wasn’t that an old colleague, a lab partner?—dissolve into her subconscious like a slick of blood diluted in water.
Blackout curtains keep the sun out, air-conditioning maintains a constant temperature, but nothing counteracts a full bladder. Biology wins every time.
The stir deepens, lengthening until wakefulness breaks over her all at once with a race of the heart and a sharp intake of breath.
Squinting, she automatically seeks out the phone on her nightstand, dismissing, unread, the notifications cluttering the display. It’s ten A.M.
Her first conscious thought is Alex.
Her second: Bathroom. Now.
The second, more insistent, compels her to move.
She shuffles across the worn Berber, flicks the switch in the en suite, and yawns her way onto the toilet. She scrolls through her calendar. No work today at least, and for a moment she luxuriates in the blissful relief of a free Wednesday. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t tasks to accomplish. After weeks of tracking, projected forecasts, and escalating warnings, Hurricane Natalie is nearly upon them. They’ll need water, at least a few gallons each. She keeps empty jugs in the truck for just such an eventuality. Gas, too, for the truck, while she’s at it.
She flushes and moves to the sink, brushes her teeth, gargles, spits. Dries her hands. She’ll need Alex’s help with the shutters. That’s the sticking point. Downstairs she can handle, but she doesn’t like climbing ladders so her bedroom window presents a challenge.
Alex.
Hers is not a large place. It’s small, actually: a one-bedroom town house with a whisper of a screened-in patio. But it’s hers and it’s enough for one person. That’s the problem, she thinks. It’s not one person anymore. Not with Alex crashing on her couch. Indefinitely, Laila reminds herself. Two months in and the arrangement still irks her. “Please, mi’ja, it’ll be just for a while,” Alex’s mother, Esther, had insisted over the phone while Alex pressed in beside Laila, shouting obscenities at the phone. A hastily packed duffel bag slumped at his feet. Things at the ancestral home have degraded. That’s how Alex put it when she persuaded him to calm down and present his side. “He doesn’t listen!” Esther interrupted, prompting Laila to take the call off speakerphone. “I don’t know what to do. If your father were here—” Tears prevented her from continuing. Laila didn’t so much relent as embrace the inevitability—Alex was standing in her living room, after all. She weakly mustered the strength to ask: “How long is a while?” She’d wanted to add that she had her own life and that she liked it just the way that it was, but between her brother and her stepmother, the family hardly needed another diva. For the sake of harmony she held her tongue. “I don’t know,” Esther said. “Just until he settles down.”
She’d been through this before and the parallel is not lost on her: a decade as an only child, the doted upon pride of a small, well-to-do family. The role suited her. It was enough. It was quiet. She had her routines, a life with room enough for a mother, a father, and her. Then her parents divorced. Her father married Esther soon after. Then Alex came and crowded things. Seventeen years later he’s doing it again.
She sighs, steeling herself against the chaos reigning beyond her bedroom door, her inviolable sanctuary. (Meaning off-limits to you.) Downstairs she expects to find a trail of discarded fast-food containers, their contents half consumed, littered across every surface from the kitchen counter to the couch, where her brother’s thin, naked body will be sprawled, long limbs reaching like a spider’s across the balled-up sheets of his ruined web while a snore bubbles his parted lips. (“Coño, Alex! I don’t wanna see your dick, man.” Was it too much to ask that he put on a pair of underwear at least? “Yo, why not? It’s a nice dick.” She finds herself smiling at the memory. How is it that Alex always manages to make her smile, even when he’s being a little
