Diondra loves Good American jeans, filling out their seats with all the juicy contours of Georgia fruit. She can often be found admiring herself in the corner fitting room. The one with three mirrors.

My customers, of course, can’t see Diondra’s crazed smile: sharp corners under eyes that shine with ill intent. But I know her malevolent features and foul deeds by heart. That’s why I had to strangle her and top her off with two feet of concrete down in the stock room. Mannequins had nodded solemnly at the rightness of it all: me freeing the world of Diondra’s cruel proclivities.

“Miss? Did you hear me? I asked if you have this in a large,” a customer says, holding up a black bustier.

Halloween is a week away, and I’ve been turning a huge profit selling bustiers, corsets, miniskirts, over-the-knee boots, and headbands festooned with cat ears or devil’s horns.

Speaking of devils, Diondra is now gyrating inside the bustier, her presence evidenced by the awkward shuddering of black fabric.

The customer blinks at it. Puts it back on the rack and gapes at me.

“I—uh—sorry, yes,” I say. “I’ll get one from the stock room. Be right back.”

On my way to the basement door, I brush against a console table atop which there’s a bowl of random things: my measuring tape, fitting room keys, and the serrated pumpkin carver I used to make jack-o-lanterns for the window display.

I peek back out at the sales floor, hoping to catch a glimpse of Diondra. The shifting of a silk dress in the window reveals she’s got her legs wrapped around the mannequin, grinding. Thank god the candles in the jack-o-lanterns are LED. With all the fabric Diondra’s got flapping around the store, regular candles would’ve been dangerous. I roll my eyes at her juvenile hijinks, but I’m glad she’s occupied.

I take my shoes off, ease the door closed behind me, and descend into the storage room. Its concrete floor is absolutely frigid. I rifle through the bustier rack.

XS.

XS.

XS.

S.

M.

Come on, gimme a large….

XL.

Fuck.

M.

Oh, come on!

L.

A large. Yes!

I grab it. Turn around. And slam into a hovering Burberry trench.

I raise my eyes to find a pair of sunglasses suspended three inches above the trench’s popped collar. The shock on my face reflected in those lenses sets off a painful quaking in my chest: a strange feedback loop of my fear escalating my own fear. 

“I was just…g-getting something for a customer.”

The sunglasses slowly tilt. Diondra’s cocking her head, amused.

I take a step back and hit a clothing rack. In an eerily smooth movement, the trench and sunglasses close the gap between us. I feel a tug on my blouse, then hear the screaming of fabric and the raining of buttons on concrete. Suddenly my body is shoved into a 180-degree spin. Now I’m facing a full-length mirror. A strip of my torso is visible where my shirt’s been torn open. Icy fingers slide beneath my underwire. They cup my breasts. Barely any movement registers in the mirror. Goosebumps spread down my flanks.

Something cuts into my throat. I gasp and bring my hands to my neck. It’s the measuring tape. Diondra’s got it pulled so tight I can’t get my fingernails under it. I claw and I claw but I can’t get it off. My lungs burn. My head pounds with every beat of my heart. Oh, the pounding. Desperate for oxygen, I buck and thrash, but the measuring tape only slices deeper into my flesh. I hate that I can see myself like this—eyes bulging, lips pulled into a teeth-baring grimace, face purple and hideous. I hate that Diondra gets to watch me struggle. I scrape at my throat so hard there’s blood smeared on the measuring tape…all over my bruised, gouged flesh. My neck. My poor fucking neck. It always was Diondra’s favorite part of me—warm and smooth and too beautiful not to destroy.

The mannequins turn their heads away.

I wheeze. I’m so hot I’m cold, icy panic spreading over every inch. But soon my suffering leaves me, and there is only blackness.

When I return to consciousness, I’m slumped in the corner fitting room watching Diondra try on a pair of Good Americans.

“What do you think, babe? Does my ass look good in these?”

“Enough to eat,” I rasp, then, startled, look into a mirror.

I can’t find myself. There’s only a Burberry trench, belted shut over a 26-inch waist I recognize as my own. Tears roll down my face and splat on the beige fabric.

“I put that on you. Your shirt was ripped. You’re welcome.”

Your shirt was ripped. Like she has no idea how it got that way. God, I fucking hate her. Tears of odium glitter in my eyes.

“Don’t you fucking cry,” Diondra snaps. “My delectable bod is encased in concrete because of you. Remember that.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“No you’re not.” She turns toward me.

Now I can see her face. I…I can see her face. Her cruel smile. Shaken, I say nothing. She turns back around.

Faceless again, she says, “Ah, but it’s all good. You got what you deserved in the end. You’re stuck here now. It’s just you and me and all these clothes. Forever.”

The idea of eternity stretching before me in a Diondra-laden hellscape sends a painful rumble of acid up my throat.

I think of the pumpkin carver. Would I be able to pick it up—wield it against Diondra the way she wielded the measuring tape against me? Can you kill a ghost? I wonder. And there’s no time like the present to find out.

Night City is not a walkable city. A “tips and tricks” article I read before starting Cyberpunk 2077—a game by Polish developer CD Projekt Red where you play as a freelance mercenary in a terminally capitalist sci-fi future—encouraged players to explore the game’s world on foot, not just zoom through the streets from behind the wheel. But like the Californian sprawl that NC is inspired by, all I found as a pedestrian were eight-lane highways, parking lots, and cars that kept hitting me and driving away.

Maybe the constant hit-and-runs are a bug (of which there are, infamously, many), or maybe it’s a commentary on the fact that the US has the highest rate of traffic fatalities among high-income countries. Before the pandemic, just five percent of American commuters took public transit to work; in Night City that figure appears to be zero percent. There are bus and subway stations but no actual buses or subways—the stations are entirely cosmetic—leaving NPCs to patiently wait for nothing, forever. A new update finally added functioning trains, but the feature only works on the PS5 and other expensive, new-generation consoles, leaving pleb PS4 owners like me in the dust.

You can ride the train in Grand Theft Auto IV’s fictional version of New York, which serves no practical purpose; the game’s focus on stealing and driving cars is right in the title. But there’s something banally comforting about descending into a grimy, dimly lit station and riding all the way from not-Midtown to not-Coney Island, the screeching and rumbling and automated station announcements (“This is . . . Grand Easton Terminal”) all uncannily realistic. The most memorable and spectacular missions in GTA IV involve the subway: a bank robbery where you escape on foot through a tunnel, and a high-speed underground motorcycle chase where you dodge oncoming trains before gunning down your target as you cross the equivalent of the Manhattan Bridge BDNQ track—which I immediately recognized when I rode the Q for the first time and emerged from the darkness to the glass forest of Lower Manhattan, a sight that, in the year I lived in Brooklyn, I never tired of.

It’s just everything else about New York that was tiring, most of all talking about New York. My therapist told me that looming over every conversation you have in New York is the invisible presence of The City, the idea and symbol and specter of it, as if it pulled up a chair next to you. At parties my partner G and I went to, The City was a constant and perennial topic of conversation: how we just moved here from Pittsburgh, how it takes at least two years to get used to, how you have to fight for everything, whether it’s a seat on the subway or a reservation at a restaurant or a ticket to a concert or a 700 square foot 1 bedroom in Flatbush we paid an obscene amount for, where every Wednesday G had to wake up at 7 am and commute an hour to their stupid corporate content writing job that literally made them cry multiple times until it wasn’t worth it anymore, just wasn’t, none of it was.

As my friend Andrew put it when he finally moved away from Philly after living there for over a decade, “I prefer trees to concerts.” We also preferred trees, and G preferred to make half as much money as a visiting lecturer at the University of Pittsburgh, returning to the place where we met and fell in love. When I first visited Pittsburgh I was struck by how forested it was, a city in the woods with narrow row houses clinging to dense green hillsides that look (as G once evocatively put it) like crooked teeth. Upon returning I realized I’d forgotten what it felt like to live among life, to hear and see the chirping of birds and skittering of squirrels and darting of deer, which apparently are so overpopulated that the city hired volunteer archers to kill them in Riverview and Frick Park.

Andrew had moved to Charleston for a tenure-track professorship (get a PhD in biostatistics if you like money and job security (not an MFA in creative writing, like me and G)) and lives a ten-minute walk from the brackish waters of the Ashley River, where he and his wife go fishing and shrimping and crabbing. When I visited him last fall they caught and cooked lunch, and afterwards Andrew showed me the high-powered gaming laptop his work got him for free (biostatistics) that we used to play Cyberpunk 2077—a game he described to me as mindless, although not necessarily in a bad way.

It was compelling enough that I picked up the game from the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh (the only library system I’ve ever used that has video games), playing through while G was away at an artist residency. You start by choosing the gender and customizing the appearance of player character V; I tried to make him look Asian, but mostly he looked constipated. (As many critics have noted, although you can make V have any genitals regardless of gender, you can’t make V meaningfully trans or nonbinary, and the game as a whole is aggressively binary.)

You then choose V’s origin story: he (I’m using “he” to describe my experience of the game) can be a corporate drone, a rough-and-tumble street kid, or (my choice) a complete outsider, a nomad who wandered the barren expanses of the NUSA before leaving his clan to make a fresh start in Night City. I’m a sucker for stories about nobodies from nowhere trying to make it in The City (see Shin Kyung-sook’s Violets, Xu Zechen’s Beijing Sprawl, and my own life), and Cyberpunk 2077’s intro certainly fit the mold, with V fixing his beat-up car in a dusty small town, readying himself for his new, urban life.

Among the many characters V meets—a world-weary boxer turned cybernetic doctor, a VR film editor who makes porn for a living but harbors her own artistic ambitions, a gravelly-voiced detective haunted by all the people he couldn’t save—Night City is a constant and perennial topic of conversation, how it draws you in and grinds you down and chews you up and spits you out. V is always hustling for his next gig, whether that’s stealing top-secret technology from a Japanese corporation, kidnapping a Scandinavian scientist, leading a sex worker revolution, or whatever else he has to take on to pay the bills. 

But this Night City, the idea and symbol and specter of it, exists only in the mostly non-interactive conversations V has, where you can choose dialogue options that sometimes shunt you into different narrative tracks and at other times are functionally identical. The actual Night City the player experiences is completely hollow, a Giant Eagle-brand Blade Runner knockoff (bright neon signage in Chinese and Japanese, flying cars, brutalist skyscrapers, smokestacks on fire) that becomes an active obstacle to enjoying the game. And despite references to V’s financial precarity (an email on his computer reveals that his rent is overdue) money is trivially easy to earn—I have nearly €$400,000 in my account.

Tim Rogers, in part 5 of his 10-hour review of the game that was honestly more fun to watch than playing the game itself, described video game open worlds as elaborate level select menus, which clarified my experience of Night City: pressing the touch pad to open the map, selecting a mission, getting into my car, driving several minutes to the flashing yellow exclamation point on the screen (ignoring the scenery because I’m constantly looking at the minimap in the upper-right corner, similar to how driving with Google Maps prevents you from actually understanding the layout of the place you’re driving through), parking, exiting the car, and at last starting the mission.

But if the mission can only begin at a specific time of day, you have to approach a bench or railing and press square to sit on or lean against it, the screen cutting to “SOME TIME LATER” when the mission can finally begin. Does V just wait there for hours, doing nothing? Does he check his phone? Read a book? Play a video game to kill time, in the middle of this video game I’m playing to kill time? Why allow me to skip to the mission’s correct time of day, but not the location? Why not go all in and make me wait for the virtual sun to set or rise, forcing me in the meantime to check my phone or read a book or grab my Switch and play another video game to kill time in the middle of this video game I’m playing to kill time—I need a video game from my video game! There are terminals scattered throughout Night City that you can use to teleport to other terminals, but that still involves walking/driving to one, selecting the one closest to the mission, sitting through a loading screen, and then walking/driving from that terminal to the actual mission location, a process that’s sometimes longer than just commuting there yourself.

That’s what Cyberpunk 2077 can feel like at its worst: commuting to work. I sometimes compare my work as a podcast producer to assembling Ikea furniture. I’m given various components (voiceover narration, interviews, news clips) and a script, which acts as an instruction booklet I follow to “build” the story in audio editing software. As production wrapped on a project I worked on last year, my contract expiring exactly one month after our Brooklyn apartment lease expired, I often had to work evenings to meet deadlines, sometimes until midnight. Towards the end I was denied overtime and reprimanded for requesting it. This sort of “crunch” seems to be endemic to creative industries: as the release date loomed, Cyberpunk 2077 developers were told by their CEO that “six-day work weeks will be mandatory,” although thankfully “the extra work would be paid, as required by Polish labor laws.”

It can feel quite bleak to sit hunched over a screen manipulating virtual objects for money; it can feel bleaker still to, in the hours I don’t spend working, sit hunched over a screen where I mindlessly drive to a flashing yellow exclamation point, screech to a stop when the Night City Police Department tells me to NEUTRALIZE THE PERPS AND SECURE THE EVIDENCE, walk up to a group of armed NPCs, press and hold the right trigger to pull out a smart assault rifle and shoot target-homing poison-bullets that explode in clouds of noxious green smoke until everyone is dead, stand over their corpses, mash square to take their guns and clothes and belongings (whereupon the NCPD transfers thousands of eurodollars to my account, having successfully NEUTRALIZED THE PERPS AND SECURED THE EVIDENCE), get back in my car, and finally drive to a mission where I play in a rock concert, pressing square at designated moments to “flash devil horns” and “play [a] sick [guitar] solo.”

But bleakest of all is not having any virtual objects to manipulate for money, which is the situation I now find myself in—my latest freelance contract over, my final invoice sent last month, my bank account still awaiting payment. My move to Pittsburgh coincided with the collapse of the podcast industry. Hundreds of audio workers were laid off, including former coworkers of mine. Full-time salaried positions have been replaced with part-time temp work. I went from making $1,400 a week in New York to less than $900 every two weeks in Pittsburgh, adjuncting at a college Werner Herzog described as “intellectually impoverished.” But scraping by from gig to gig is still livable in Pittsburgh in a way The City hasn’t been for a while, with G and I paying seven hundred less for an apartment with four hundred more square feet, a short walk from the gnarled overgrowth of Frick Park where, despite a sign warning me that city-authorized deer hunters roam the woods, I released a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding in for over a year.

The day after my last Zoom meeting with my supervisor, I turned 29. The day after that, I finished Cyberpunk 2077. There are five possible endings to choose from; one of them is to leave The City, which is what I chose for V and what G and I chose for ourselves. For all my complaints, as I stayed up past midnight because I no longer had any reason to wake early the next morning, I was genuinely moved by the game’s final moments: piloting a stolen hovercraft with a convoy of fellow nomads, following the flashing yellow exclamation point one last time as a dust storm blows in, maneuvering through a narrow smuggling tunnel before emerging to the endless expanse of the New American West, pressing square to at last “breathe free”—the future uncertain, the night full of stars.

Everyone says that Mitch got really weird after he backed over his girlfriend, Carrie, with his 1994 Chevy Blazer. Personally, I noticed him getting weird before then, but I keep that to myself because people might think he did it on purpose. Half of us say he did it on purpose, and the other half says it was an accident, but I think most of us aren’t totally sure.

They’re still together and I’ve heard some of us say it’s just because Mitch can’t afford to rent his own place, or maybe it’s because Carrie now needs rides to doctor’s appointments all the time and we all know about her shit relationship with her shit family and a lot of us are busy with our jobs and our recreational dodgeball teams and the bands that we play in with each other, so she has to rely on him to drive her.

Some of us think he shouldn’t be allowed to drive anymore.

None of us think they should still be together, but all of us are afraid to say it to their faces.

When Mitch drives over to my place and asks if he can sleep on my couch for a night or two, I say sure, of course, come on in, man, and we drink beer and watch a pirated hockey playoffs game and talk shit about how bad they’re playing.

I don’t tell anybody Mitch is sleeping over, but Jimmy finds out the second day when he comes by because he has nothing better to do since he broke his leg longboarding down that one hill by the old video store where some of us used to work before it went out of business. I tell him not to tell the rest of us what’s going on and he promises he won’t but he lies all the damn time, we all know it, so I know it won’t stay secret.

Jimmy says he wants to help Mitch and Jimmy thinks taking acid helps everything. None of us think Jimmy on acid actually helps anything at all. 

But then the two of them are melty on my couch and Jimmy keeps laughing until he’s in tears and then Mitch starts doing the same thing after Jimmy keeps repeating this sentence from this stupid show we all watch on Netflix, so now they’re both hysterical on my couch. I’m thinking what the rest of us will say if they hear about this, so I’m all annoyed and it’s too hot in my apartment.

I leave Mitch and Jimmy to it and go outside but it’s too hot outside too. I smoke a cigarette. I try to think if there’s any of us I can call to come over and fix all of this. None of us is a good choice. I smoke another cigarette.

Back inside Jimmy’s lying on the floor and Mitch is still on the couch and they both have tears on their faces but this time Jimmy is laughing and Mitch seems to be crying and I think maybe I should go back outside. But then Mitch sees me and his face gets all squished and he starts crying harder.

Out of all of us, I’m the worst at this kind of thing. I don’t know what to do. I step over Jimmy so I can sit next to Mitch and then he puts his head on my lap and keeps crying and I think: okay, I guess this is happening. When I was a kid, my mom would softly scratch my head when I was sad so I figure that’s something I can do for Mitch too even if my nails are all stubby and bitten short and after a while he chills out and we watch cartoons and Jimmy rolls around on the floor with his leg brace clunking against the peeling linoleum in my kitchen.

Later on after their trips peak, Jimmy hobbles out to work his shift at Jimmy John’s, and Mitch and I sit on opposite ends of the couch eating chicken nuggets I shook out of a bag and put into the oven on a crusty baking tray. I’m out of beer so we drink Kool Aid. At some point he says, hey, bro, don’t tell them about all this, okay? And I don’t really know who he means but I say yeah, duh, of course. But then later I realize he meant us—the rest of us—and I wonder if that’s what this is now. If there is an us and a them and which one am I.

I don’t know.

I start feeling really weird.

I really don’t think Mitch meant to run Carrie over.

The poor senator, referred by his daughter and the voters of Louisiana as Daddy, did not know how to explain the concept of death to his daughter following the white film and upside-down corpse of her goldfish in her bowl. He was sitting in his office and Valerie just came busting in holding the fish body by the orange scaly tail out of the water, flicking her wrist about and getting freshwater droplets and some fish scales all over the carpet and oak panels. Valerie was three and her tutors hadn’t covered social conventions yet and so she simply plopped the fish onto Daddy’s desk and asked, no, stated, “What.”

Daddy gave a blank stare at his daughter. Then said, “I have to use the bathroom.”

The senator ascended the three floors of his newly refurbished mansion (one had to always prepare for the next front porch campaign). He reached the top floor, yanked on a cord dangling from the ceiling to extend a hidden ladder so that he might enter the attic.

The rumors were true about Daddy, about the scriptwriter he kept in the attic. But believe me, it was not a love affair. After so many years campaigning it just gets hard to think for oneself. More of Daddy’s brain went into his image in the magazine covers and less into his head. So he used his scriptwriter to prepare for more personal events — interactions at Thanksgiving dinners, at the local Tamburlaine-town soccer games where his son Logan played, grocery store small talk. And so his scriptwriter, Bailey Zachs, lived in Daddy’s mansion attic.

The attic had a single window with a family of mute goldfinches. There was also a newly built restroom facilities complete with soap, a floor mattress, pen and paper, and a clever assortment of stuffed animals. He used shipping container crates as his desk per his specifications. It was just the right amount of cozy for an unpaid intern living for room and board and the right amount of novelty for the carpetbagger Daddy.

Daddy popped his head in on Bailey Zachs preparing conversation points for Daddy’s meeting with Senator Hughes. He said with his adopted and overly affected Southern accent, “Bales, I got an issue. My girl’s goldfish just died and I don’t know how to explain to her that it…y’know…”

“Just say it went to a farm or that it’s in a better place.”

“That would be disingenuous.”

“She’s three. This isn’t a fucking eulogy.”

“Bailey!” Daddy wagged his finger as he remained perched on the ladder. “This moment should have some weight to it. This is the first time she’ll experience the passing of a soul. Even the greatest theologians can’t explain the great beyond, can’t ration what lacks fathoms.”

Bailey Zachs began to write on a piece of paper. Then he scratched out the lines. He wrote and scratched as Daddy continued his monologue, the ladder wobbling underneath him as he gesticulated with one hand at a time.

“Death, that mute siren — enticing for its possibilities of immediate redemption. One must imagine the unnoble nature of the willing death. Suicide tacks away the catapult shock of the theft of life. And that too, under such rationing, is why political election. It is a form of sacrifice, a self-death for the greater interest, even if those don’t see it. They will call me the flash bulb martyr. The television mystic. Not for my prophet-teering but for my suicide to allow myself to be the vision of the future. One shouldn’t drain the swamp but invite their being into it. That poor goldfish…humans are always chasing gold…”

Bailey Zachs stood up from his crate desk in a fit of sweat. He handed Daddy the piece of paper; the paper was completely illegible on one side with it’s mess of black ink, fingerprints, and miscellany loops. The other side was blank. 

“Tell her one side is life, and the other side is death. She’ll get it.”

Daddy lifted up the paper and shouted, “But which side!”

Maybe it was the rare squawk of the goldfinch, the overstraining of his energy on the ladder, or Bailey Zach’s was fed up with his internship arrangement. Either way, Daddy fell from the attic ladder and down three flights of stairs. Because the maids were ironing the new carpet of the mansion, Daddy’s body flopped onto the front porch, his death a beautiful array of slapstick and Jacobean justice in an age where the golden coveted crowns are disappointingly invisible.

Belinda sits on the toilet seat in a cubicle with a broken lock, the smell of bleach almost masking the smell of urine. Too late to move now with the baby straddled across her knees, legs kicking as she frees him from a dirty nappy. She braces the door closed with her foot.

Muffled station sounds. The 6.15 to Plymouth . . .  Belinda cleans, creams and changes the baby. His arms shoot out in alarm as the outer door slams. High heels clatter across the tiles to a cubicle further along the row. ‘Baby, baby, where did our love go?’ rings out tunelessly.

Where indeed?

She unbuttons her blouse, lifts the baby from her lap and cradles him. Cupping a breast with her free hand, she strokes her nipple against his cheek. He turns towards her, his head bobbing against her full breast, his mouth wide like a hungry bird. Tiny lips find the puckered bud that drips milk at his cry. Belinda winces at the toothless pull on her nipple, her toes curling against the elemental and exquisite pain. Beneath his downy dark curl’s, the baby’s heartbeat pulses visibly in the fontanelle as he pulls urgently on her breast. She feels her womb contract.

‘I’ve got this burnin’ burnin’ yearnin’ feelin’ inside me … oooh deep inside me … ‘ clattering footsteps in the direction of the washbasin, the tap squeaks, water trickles. Station sounds amplify for a moment as the exterior door to the washroom opens. A disembodied male voice shouts into the void. ‘Hurry up Dora, we’ll miss the bloody train. What are you doin’ in there?’

The tuneless singing stops, ‘Hold on Sid, just washing mi hands.’

Retreating footsteps head quickly towards the outer door. An echoing clang as it slams shut.

The baby’s eyes startle open,  focus and find her face, She smiles down at him, strokes his cheek, and moves him over to her other breast. He suckles with renewed vigour. The left side has always been his favourite; it feels as though he’s pulling her breast inside out.

Belinda marvels at the velvet softness of her son’s cheek, the baby smell of him, the strength of his grip as he holds her finger in his tiny hand.

Sated, the suction lessens and his eyelids flutter. His mouth relaxes allowing her to pull her lengthened nipple from between his lips. He’s almost asleep.

My beautiful boy.

Belinda fastens her blouse, and snuggles him into his shawl, tucking the blue teddy she knitted him into its folds. She kisses him gently, then lowers him carefully into the cardboard box wedged between the toilet and the cubicle wall and covers him with his blanket.

 

Out on the platform, Belinda shrinks herself into a corner under the stairs. Startled from its sanctuary a pigeon flutters down to peck at an empty crisp packet at her feet.

A woman, dressed to impress, shakes back her sleeve and looks at her watch. Commuters hide behind headlines. A couple approach, pushing a pram along the platform towards the cafeteria. The man puts his arm around the woman’s shoulders.

That should be me.

‘Excuse me love, can I get past?’

Belinda looks at the man blankly; a station porter with a cart full of letters and parcels.

‘The door. You’re blocking the door. I need to get into the office.’

Belinda shuffles to one side.

The hands on the huge clock suspended above the platform move inexorably towards seven o’clock.

They’ll be getting up. Someone will notice I’ve gone. They’ll tell the nuns. They’ll come after me.

A tinny voice crackles over the loudspeakers suspended above the platform. ‘We regret that all trains are subject to severe delays. A signal failure . . .’

Time stands still, no one moves.

The announcement ends and the passengers are released to grumblingly move along the platform, heading towards the buffet or the waiting room.

Belinda recoils further into her corner. No trains. What shall I do?

A sudden waft of perfume. The elegant woman breezes past, stilettos sharply ringing on the stone slabs.

She’s going to the toilets!

Belinda’s unglues her feet from the platform, runs after the woman, leaden legs suffused with sudden urgency.

Please God, don’t let her find him. Let me get to him first.

Belinda forces herself to shut the door quietly.

If it bangs, he’ll wake, cry out and she’ll find him.

Belinda’s pale face, eyes red rimmed, cheeks mottled with tears stares out from the mirror. Who is this empty-armed, wild-eyed creature, coat straining over a still rounded-baby belly?

Oh God. Where is she? Where’s she gone?

The woman comes out of the cubicle furthest away from the door and moves towards the sink. Belinda’s frozen reflection stares at her from the mirror.

‘Are you alright, dear?’

Something snaps.

‘Oh. Yes. Thank you. I’m fine. Er . . . Sorry. I need to . . . er . . .’

Belinda pushes open the cubicle with the broken lock and braces it closed with her foot. The baby stirs. His mother picks him up and holds him close. 

 

(1) It was true that, for a spell, Greta stopped eating. Of course she drank plenty of water, but the idea of chewing and swallowing struck her the wrong way. She did not have a problem with her weight—this was nothing like that—so she ordered a number of nutritional shakes online.
There were many flavors to choose from, but she stuck with vanilla.

(2) During this time, Greta listened to music from her extensive record collection. She found herself playing Leonard Cohen, exclusively—as if the decision had been made for her—and then, feeling defiant, removed all but his music from the living room, placing her records in crates, which she stored in an empty closet.
This way, she intuited, whenever she heard Leonard Cohen, she would remember (like how smelling shampoo brought to mind childhood baths) this particular time of her life.

(3) Greta’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Fox, took notice, and brought over hot meals. Greta thanked them, and, to avoid causing a racket, made sure they visited after lunch or dinner.

(4) Often, she picked up objects and studied them, intently, only to find, the next day, that despite spending hours with a device, could not remember how many buttons informed her television’s remote control.
How the numbers and letters were arranged on her laptop.

(5) Once, while waiting for her abortion, Greta picked up a magazine—probably a National Geographic—and read an article about a people for whom pigeons were a delicacy. What struck her was the number of ways to prepare such a small, ordinary, bird. The journalist wrote about a number of dishes and how, during the course of a particularly tasty meal, he had coughed up a feather.
The natives told him this was a sign of good fortune.

(6) What Greta did was remove the food—homemade lasagna, spanakopita, et. cetera—from her mother’s Corningware, placed the meals on plates, used forks and knives to arrange the food in disposable Tupperware, and visited old Mrs. Waverly across the hall. Greta allowed the woman to invent the occasion for her dropping by.
They celebrated her birthday, Greta’s birthday, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and, if her mother had prepared sole or cod, Good Friday (even if it was Tuesday).

(7) Greta realized how easy it was for a person to become forgotten. After the first two months following commencement no one—except for her parents—continued to call. At times she considered reaching out, even just a little, but there was no sense in playacting. She had spent four years in the open for all to see. (Many more than that, if you took primary and secondary school into account.) She needed a respite.
Agreeing to meet with Barbara was a mistake.

(8) Greta left the plates and silverware she used to prepare Mrs. Waverly’s food on the counter, near the sink.
She washed her mother’s Corningware, and placed the glass in the carrying case her mother used to transport the food across the city.

(9) Her friends from university probably considered her thoughtless.
A few probably confided in each other, calling her a bitch.

(10) Greta took her meals standing in front of the kitchen sink. Finished, she would rinse her can, and drop it in the recycling. Next, she would clean her straw, and place it in the drawer with the other utensils.
Finally, she took a glass of water to the sofa.

(11) Once, Greta stood with her mother in the Endwell Shopping Center’s Food Court. She felt a little thrill. Greta would show her. She marched into the candy shop. She looked at the fudge stacked in pyramids below the glass counter and pointed to the bars that she wanted and the girl said, “These?” while lifting the candy from their trays. The girl placed the fudge in a small white box. Then she tied a pink ribbon around the parcel.
Greta said that that was not necessary. The candy wasn’t a gift. Then the girl cut herself with a pair of scissors (she had been drawing the blade across the ends of the ribbon to make them coil). “Oops,” she said. Blood filled the girl’s cut and fell in large drops upon the glass display case. The girl put the finger in her mouth, and wiped up the blood with a cloth napkin. “What happened?” Mrs. Fox said, when Greta returned, empty-handed.
“You wouldn’t believe it,” Greta explained.

(12) She had other experiments.
Unscrewing the lid secured atop her favorite candle, Greta absently stroked the firm, silky wax, like she would a kitten. Later, she would walk around her apartment looking for something that felt similar. She never had success, but that was okay; for she had no expected outcome in mind.

(13) For hours she sat motionless on her chaise, looking out the window.
All she had to see was the sky. If she had been bored, would she not have moved on to some other occupation?

(14) Greta looked steadily at a french fry on Barbara’s plate and tried to picture herself eating the food.
She imagined the french fry from many angles, both in her hand and on the plate. (The french fry rested atop another, near the edge of the plate, by a glop of ketchup, and was the smallest in circumference.) Without moving, she got a sense of those sitting around them. They ate noisily, absent regard for anyone but themselves. A few covered their mouths while they spoke, but still. Covering your mouth while you spoke? Why not finish chewing and swallowing and then say what you had to say? At last the french fry disappeared.

(15) “Thank you for the tea, dear,” Mr. Fox said, diplomatically, “but it’s grown late. I think we’ll take our leave.”
“Oh, let me get that first,” her mother said, in no way passive-aggressively. She stepped into the kitchen, took the plate from Greta’s hand, and washed the dishes Greta had left in the sink for her mother to find.

(16) Had she not bathed daily she would have felt covered in dust.
Her slightest movements—even an awareness she was breathing—left her feeling utterly and hopelessly defined. Greta was not indifferent; she did not know what anything meant. At different points throughout the day she was not beyond raising a foot, though.
Or cracking her knuckles.

(17) Her new room has a window.
Her parents just left. She sees a bird on a wire hums, “And is this what you wanted, to live in a house that was haunted.”

(18) Today, Greta has little control over what happens.
Still, she is both cause and consequence, and she finds it very good. For example, she just now pushed the peas underneath the potatoes.