by Adriane Hanson

Rye tipped his head back, exposing the stubbled bark of his throat, raw from razor burn.

“Mi corazón es una boca,” he said, exhaling a cloud of smoke.

I sat on the windowsill and flexed my feet, the oil-black polish on my toes shimmering in the sun. Rye lay on the porch roof, below my reach, reading a book of Mexican poetry and sucking on a shriveled joint.

I took a sip of the slushy Rye had made. Blue Gatorade, Robotussin and crushed ice. When I stirred the drink, it turned queasy purple. Yuck. I took another few sips for luck.

Growls rose from the basement of the house next door, then the throb of bass guitar. Sirens whooped far off in the distance. Drunks and dogs howled. A train rattled over the tracks down the block. From my perch, I could see the hopper cars shrieking by, loaded with coal and decorated with graffiti: yellow fangs dripping blue blood, CORPSE PARTY spelled in acid green bubble letters, a hot-pink rat king devouring itself.

I was hoping for a storm, but the evening was clear and hot. A mosquito flew in lazy circles before landing on Rye’s naked chest. On cooler days I loved to run my fingers through the carpet of wiry blond hairs. He reached up and smacked himself, leaving a dark streak of blood.

At the beginning of the summer, we had planned to apply for scholarships to study in Mexico next year, it would even count toward Rye’s Spanish literature major, but in the last few weeks all of our motivation seemed to have dissolved into the humid air. Rye lost his job as a dishwasher just as our first month’s rent on the room was due. Too many times he snuck down to the river instead of showing up for his shift. Now he collected cans, donated his plasma, did odd jobs for our friends, but the bills were still mostly up to me. We’d agreed that he’d find another job once he was stable enough.

“Siempre tengo hambre,” said Rye. “Pero nunca satisfecho.”

Jared, the guy who owned the house, kept the candles lit and the curtains shut most evenings, his prayer circle gathered around the living room table, so we were confined to the hotter second floor. Amens and muted pleas rose up through the wood and carpet. Many afternoons the drone lulled me to nap, but my shift at the bar started in ten. Rye’s eyes shut. The medicine he took made him sleepy all the time, nearly impossible to wake.

I turned and lowered myself onto the bedroom floor. The dun-colored carpet was crusted with stains, streaked with neon colors where I’d spilled my polish. Laundry consumed most of the room. The pile breathed, expanding and contracting in the sticky heat of the house. Empty film canisters rolled across the floor when I shut the window. I found my black miniskirt and a clean-enough black T-shirt and slipped them on.

“Rye!” I yelled down to him. No response.

Watching his chest rise and fall, his eyes scanning some interior horizon, I remembered the winter when we were first together, waking up in his bed most mornings under the stained plaid comforter, the warmth of his body surrounding me. Even in the winter he was a furnace. Wet clumps of snow slid down the windows. He’d tell me his dreams, whole lifetimes, and it was like we were the only people in the universe. I rarely remembered my own dreams.

Another mosquito landed on his eyelid, feeding on a faint purple river. Rye was alive. He’d probably be alive when I came back. I rested my chin on the windowsill. Maybe I wouldn’t come back.

• • •

As I walked past the sugar beet refinery, smell like corn burning the air, I imagined grains sifting into my lungs, sweetness dissolving in the warmth of my blood. I kept my eyes down. The only things to see were metal towers thrusting into hot gray sky, smoke billowing from their mouths, and grass burned colorless by the sun.

The Bar at the End of the World was a one-story brick building at the edge of our neighborhood. The building was once a butcher’s shop; the concrete floor was still stained with faded blood by the drains. A mural of a mushroom cloud decorated the back wall above the pool tables, and a TV played a continuous mute loop of old sci-fi movies.

Sean was wiping down the bar, rubbing the gleaming wood in slow, methodical circles. I stood outside for a moment watching him, his auburn hair inflamed by evening light, the shops across the road reflected in the glass storefront, Rainbow Liquors and Daddy O’s Guns ‘n’ More, its red sign blinking Pawn Pawn Pawn. I lifted my hands and made a box with my thumbs and index fingers, like I was taking a photograph. Click. I needed to get my camera fixed, but that would take time and money.

One of our regulars, Roger, sat at the end of the bar nursing a whiskey. He lived in the low-income housing units across from the refinery and wore a red and black poncho despite the heat. Otherwise, the bar was empty. Even on the busiest days Sean never seemed rushed or stressed. His arms were strong and freckled, his eyes chips of granite. I wanted to turn around and run home.

Sean didn’t look up when I opened the door.

“Sarah,” he said. “You’re late.”

I looked around the room. Roger raised his glass and grunted a hello.

“Sorry to leave you alone with the thirsty throngs.”

Sean finally raised his eyes to mine. “Punctuality is important,” he said.

“Thanks for the advice,” I mumbled, but I couldn’t commit to the sarcasm.

As I walked behind the bar and put my purse on top of the icemaker, I pictured myself laying on the bed of ice, curled like a shrimp, slick and blue veined, Sean closing the door and latching it. He’d love to hear me plead to be let out.

Sean ghosted past me. Wrung out the dirty red rag in the sink.

“I’m going to do inventory,” he said, bending down and opening the trap door, descending into the basement storage room. He turned on the light and closed the door behind him.

I checked the levels of the well bottles in the metal shelf below the bar. The altar of expensive booze behind me, lit up by red Christmas lights, was mostly for show. The garnish trays were all full, the lemons, limes and oranges cut into uniform slices, in the precise and infuriating way Sean did everything. I wondered sometimes what had gone wrong in his life for him to wash up here.

I clenched and unclenched my fists.

Smile, my mother’s voice admonished me. No one likes a sulky girl. The voice was losing power. Eventually, with enough time and distance, I’d send it down into oblivion. I needed to make at least $300 this weekend to take care of our bills.

“How’s it hanging, doll?” Roger asked.

“Asi-asi. How are you?”

Sean had told me that Roger would be 93 on his next birthday, but I wasn’t sure if I believed him. “I’m fine,” he said, “Except ….”

I topped off his Jack and poured myself a shot. We clinked glasses, giggling.

“Except?” I prompted him.

“Except … oh what the devil do you call them? The others … they keep trying to get into the house. Every summer, they come back. I put that poison around the perimeter of the wall, but they still keep coming.”

“The others?”

“Oh you know … the bugs, the insects, umm … ants! Ants! HA!” He slapped the bar.

“Ants?”

“With any luck they’ll eat me before my kids can put me in a home. Before I start shitting myself and drooling like a goddamned infant.”

“That would take a lot of ants.”

“I’ll cover myself in honey and leave the door open,” Roger said. “Eventually something will come in and eat me.”

His gnarled hand clenched the glass. He gulped the rest of the whiskey and gestured for more. A Post-it below the bar listed his daughter’s number, for nights when he got too twisted.

On the television screen an astronaut wheeled head over heels toward a black hole, a glut of random objects hurtling with him: a refrigerator decorated with clumps of magnetized letters, a mounted deer head, a fire extinguisher, a pink five-pound weight. The astronaut’s face could not be seen; his helmet reflected the corona of flame around the black hole.

The door creaked open. I smelled the group of men before I saw them: lawn clippings, sweat and curdled milk.

“Hey ma,” Jorge said to me, “Seven shots of your finest rail whiskey please. What a scorcher.”

Jorge owned a landscaping business that serviced rich clients in the suburbs. I liked him because he talked like a sailor and tipped like a prince.

My stomach dropped as I stepped on the trapdoor to grab extra shot glasses. I turned to put them on the bar and poured down the line without losing a drop.

“How’s school going?” Jorge asked me.

I shrugged. “It’s summer.”

After I moved in with Rye, my parents cut me off. They said that was the “last straw.” Seemed to me they’d had plenty of last straws before, so I don’t know what made this the last last straw. Maybe because I cursed them out, salted the earth behind me. They thought Rye was the one thing standing between me and a normal, settled life, the type of material accomplishments they could brag about to their friends. My mother wanted me to change my major from photography to something more practical, and truth was she probably wasn’t wrong. What was I going to do, photograph weddings? Spend my life documenting other people’s happiness? Bartending paid better, but not enough to support two people. I had two years left in school and Rye had two and a half. I was only 23, but the gap between where I was and where I was supposed to be felt insurmountable.

The men clinked their glasses and downed the whiskey in a chorus of grunts.

Roger rapped his knuckles on the bar and I topped him off. I tried not to think of Sean moving around downstairs, fingers caressing the bottles as he counted them. I knew he would come up and help if things got too busy, but he’d rather be alone with his carefully stacked crates. He liked things that were easy to master. Sean spent the first week I worked at the bar testing me relentlessly, asking me to make obscure drinks that no one would ever order, Brandy Alexanders and Manhattans, watching me with wasp eyes as the bar filled up to see if I’d lose my cool. Lately he had let up a bit, but he still watched me closely, forever making a list of my inadequacies in his head.

It was a busy night, but everyone cleared out by twelve. I stood counting my tips, putting the ones back into the register and exchanging them for twenties. I stuck the wad into my purse. Not bad for a Thursday. Sean turned off the open sign, brushed past me and opened the trap door. He disappeared into the basement.

I hesitated at the top of the stairs. I really should go home. The wheels of the midnight train shrieked against polished tracks, tracks that crisscrossed the nation and beyond, flat across deserts and prairie, raveling through the mountains, under and through neon cities, millions of columns of light blazing in the blackness. I smoothed my hair and followed Sean down into the dark.

• • •

The porchlight was off. Of course. I always asked Rye to leave it on and he always forgot. I picked my way carefully across the broken pavement and up to the door. I used my cellphone for light as I struggled to get the key in. Sean’s cum still dripped out of me.

I wondered if I would get pregnant. The first time we had sex, Sean asked me if I was on the pill and I nodded, even though I’d gone off months before and hadn’t gotten around to getting a new prescription. Rye and I didn’t fuck all that much, the medicine put a damper on his libido, and he always pulled out when we did. I could have asked Sean to wear a condom, but I was convinced that talking about what we were doing would destroy the strange magic, break the spell we were under. We never spoke about it, or drifted outside of the roles we’d established in the beginning. I tried not to think about the things we did in the basement, the red wave that broke over me whenever he touched me.

Finally, the key fit into the lock and I opened the door. The inside of the house was darker and hotter than outside. It smelled like incense and stale pizza. I groped my way through the living room and up the stairs.

Light glowed at the end of the hall. Rye was passed out across the bed, arms akimbo, the lamp still on. Heat radiated from his body. I could feel it even across the room, his sweaty bulk. The gravity of his body pulling me toward him.

When you fall into a black hole, there’s something called the event horizon, a line you cross after which there is no escape. Your body will stretch and stretch until you’re ripped apart. It used to comfort me to think of black holes, to imagine being pulled apart by the hot dark, every atom obliterated. There are 100 million black holes in our galaxy alone. All those vortexes ready to suck you in.

Papers and books were scattered across the floor, a half-eaten piece of cake, smears of blue frosting on the carpet, an almost-empty bottle of codeine cough syrup prescribed to Jared. Taking off my clothes, I threw myself down on the bed next to him, drank the rest of the codeine, then turned off the light.

Sean’s freckled hands, cupping my breasts, tracing my ribs, squeezing tighter and tighter around my neck. The only light his cellphone across the room, someone trying to contact him. Bottles jutted against each other as he thrust into me. His fingers in my mouth tasted like bleach. I put my hands on Rye’s soft belly and banished Sean, tried to banish Sean. Eventually, my heartbeat slowed, my breath syncing up with Rye’s snores. The dark infinite enclosed me.

• • •

I opened my eyes and the darkness resolved into shadows, the shapes of our bedroom. There was a low crackle, like corn popping, coming from outside. The sound had woken me up.

Rye snored beside me. I sat up and crept to the window, pulling aside the corner of the curtain. The streetlight closest to us was out.

A man shuffled down the center of the street. I blinked, rubbed my fists into my eyes. The man was on fire. He walked slowly, the flames that licked him from head to toe seeming to cause him no pain. Bright against the darkness of the road, he left his own afterimage behind him.

I couldn’t move. I’m dreaming. The man passed in front of our house. I must be dreaming. I wanted to go hide under the covers, but I was rooted to the floor.

There was something familiar about the way he moved, but I couldn’t make out his face. Suddenly he stopped and his head jerked toward our house. I fell backward, knocking over a tower of books, scrambled up against the wall and crouched under the window-ledge, trembling.

Rye turned over in his sleep with a grumble. Paralyzed, I tried to call his name, but nothing came out. Slowly, slowly, I lifted the edge of the curtain. The street was deserted and dark.

I turned on the lamp, looked at all the ordinary things in our bedroom: the clock with the golden arms that always showed the wrong time, books on the sagging shelf, Rye’s chest rising and falling. I crawled in next to him, letting the clammy heat of his body lull me back to sleep.

• • •

Before we got our room in Jared’s house, Rye and I had been living like stray cats, crashing at friends’ houses or down by the river, where at night, train kids and local bums would gather around a bonfire passing bottles. Anything to avoid going home to our parents’ houses. Rye got along with the homeless, the burnouts and the oogles. Like dogs, they sensed one of their own. I’d always be on the outside, no matter how many nights I slept rough. If it was cold enough, I’d slink back to my family’s house, sneaking in after everyone was asleep, raiding the pantry and leaving before my parents woke in the morning.

During the day the river depressed me. Trash curdled the banks and collected on the beach, strangling the tree-roots. Eddies of suspicious-looking foam surged with debris. It was too polluted to swim in but people still did. At night though, the water flowed quicksilver, mysterious, the sounds of the current would lull me to sleep no matter how uncomfortable I was in the dirty sand or stuffed into someone’s unwashed sleeping bag. If I had cash on me, I kept it in my underwear.

Rye and I grew up in the same neighborhood, a block apart. In elementary school, Rye and his friends would spy on me, hiding in the bushes that surrounded my family’s sunroom. I would hear them giggling and suddenly get self-conscious. All I could see was a quiver in the leaves but I knew they were watching me, and everything I did became a performance. The way I walked across the carpet, dipped my paintbrush in pools of color, turned the pages in my books. I could never relax when they were out there. It came back to me when I started working for Sean, that creepy-crawly sensation of always being on display, a thing to be judged and picked apart.

Rye and I would play with the other neighborhood kids, flashlight tag on summer nights, sardines in Misty Monroe’s house, the largest on the block, all of us stuck close together under beds and in cupboards. It was one of those times, when Rye was the hider and I was the first to find him, that we had our first kiss, under a blue tarp in the garage, the wheel of Mr. Monroe’s motorcycle digging into my back. Afterward, we avoided each other for months. In the winter Mr. Monroe would attach a kayak to the back of his truck and pull us all through the snow, going faster and faster until my hair streamed behind me and the wind wrenched a scream from my throat.

My family was typical: silent resentment and occasional peaks of anger. My mother pick, pick, picking at the two of us, my father flayed and penitent. But Rye’s was different. His dad looked just like him, the same blond stubble and milky blue eyes. Beer always in hand, he had nursed a middle-aged paunch since I could remember. By the time we were in high school he had graduated to liquor and was slowly drinking himself to death, cursing the wife who had abandoned him, his feckless son and anyone else who had the misfortune of coming across him. He liked to pinch my thighs, dig his thumb into the dip of my knee, like he was testing to see if I was ripe.

So, you can imagine how well he reacted when Rye started acting erratically junior year, when our English teacher found him kneeled on the moat of stones that bordered the school, hands bloodied, digging frantically in the sand below the rocks. He said he could hear a baby crying down there. By then we were a real couple. Rye’s dad scoffed at the idea that his son’s problems were anything other than acting out. When Rye would disappear, sometimes for days, off hopping trains or fuck knows, and come back filthy, claiming not to remember where he’d been, eyes hollowed out and replaced with glass, his father would act like he had been on some frolicsome adolescent adventure, put him in a headlock and call him a scoundrel. Rye never had a chance with or without me, that’s the terrible truth, but I might have had a chance without him.

• • •

“This guy says you can get infected by ghosts from eating bad meat.”

“What?”

“Like spirits are a parasite.”

Rye raised the book he was reading. Mundo de los espíritus, the outline of a man on the cover surrounded by a green halo.

“It’s about ghosts in different cultures. Did you know in China they have a whole month where the spirits come up from hell to haunt the living?”

We were sitting on the back porch with Jared, drinking coffee and easing into the day. The slats on the lawn chair dug into my back. Our grass was yellowed and balding, just like the grass in the yards on either side of our chain-link fence. In the backyard to the right, two black poodles snuffled back and forth, their coats matted. The air smelled like diesel and chlorine from the community pool a few blocks down.

“Spring break for ghosts?” I asked.

“The Chinese don’t believe in heaven, just different layers of hell,” said Jared.

“You guys are making this up.”

“My grandmother’s Chinese!” said Jared.

“Nobody believes anything anymore,” I said.

“You’re so cynical, Sarah,” Jared said. “I believe in things. I believe in the word of our Lord.”

“And I like you despite that,” I replied.

Jared sighed. I took a sip of coffee, hot and bitter. I’d asked Rye to pick up milk two days ago, but of course he’d forgotten. 9 a.m. and I was already clammy with sweat.

Rye started to read, “Spirits are like worms or maggots, they feed on dead things. Through death they replicate themselves. But they can be ingested by the living, when they feed on … uh … the corpses of animals. Often, they will pass harmlessly through the digestive tract, but they can become embedded in the intestines and from there pass into the blood. Spirits can also become attached to the living, like burrs, when they walk in haunted places. Although invisible due to their small size, they are indeed physical beings, that can usually, but not always, be eradicated through physical means, such as the drinking of vinegar or …

“Vodka?” I asked. “If so, I should definitely be ghost free.”

“Sounds like bullshit,” said Jared.

“Or maybe we’re all infested with demons,” said Rye. “That would explain some things.”

He looked toward the sky. “I’m up to my eyeballs in demons,” he muttered.

Gray clouds sagged low, shedding a damp fog that did nothing to lessen the day’s heat. I couldn’t see the refinery, but I could smell the sweet corn stench.

“Maybe ghosts are an STD?” Jared ventured.

Jared was the assistant manager of a Dominos seven blocks down. He came from a religious family, so he’d waited until marriage to have sex and ended up divorced at 20. In the ten years since then, he’d eschewed women and intoxicants, saving up enough money to buy a house. I’d known as soon as I met him that he’d give us the room for dirt. Jared was an odd one, the type who enjoyed both the security of rules and the breaking of them, as long as the breaking was done by someone else. Guess that’s what drew him to Rye.

“Why not?” said Rye. “That would make a lot of sense.”

He grinned and winked, put his hand on my thigh. His smile could still melt me sometimes, that gap-toothed, don’t-blame-me assuredness. But now it was like a knife in my stomach.

“Sometimes a spirit will become infatuated with a member of the living,” Rye continued. “It will stalk the love object, hover at the periphery of their life until either the obsession fades or …”

Something slithered down my spine. I thought of the burning man. I’d been trying to convince myself it was just a dream, but this morning the books I’d knocked over in panic were still fanned haphazardly across the ground. They definitely hadn’t been like that when I’d gone to sleep. Maybe I was going crazy. The call is coming from inside the house.

Rye’s fingertips scuttled up and down my ribcage like spiders’ legs. He continued reading.

“Or the spirit will attempt to join with the love object.”

“What does that mean?” Jared asked.

Rye shrugged and dropped the book onto the stubbled grass.

“The guy’s a lunatic.”

Bleached light leaked through a gap in the clouds. I moved my lawn chair to the edge of the porch and stuck my legs out. It was Friday, I could make a couple hundred bucks tonight if things went well.

Jared stood up and walked inside. The fog stifled the light.

Rye kneeled next to my chair. He pulled up my shirt, rubbed rough circles on my stomach. Often lately I woke in the night with him on top of me, begging please, please Sarah. I could deal if it was sex he wanted, but he needed every inch of me touching him, sweaty flesh threatening to merge. He was dreaming, easy to push away, but it was hard for me to get back to sleep after.

Now Rye’s face slid against mine, chin rough with stubble, mouth soft and stale-tasting.

“Mi corazón es una boca,” he whispered.

I tried to push him away.

“Stop! I haven’t even brushed my teeth!”

Rye stood up.

“You’re never home at night anymore. I’m lonely. I know that’s pathetic, you need to work … I just … Shit, I start thinking about the knives in the kitchen, if they’re sharp enough. Feeling like my blood is drying up in my veins, like I need to see it flowing to know I’m alive.”

“Do you want to go back to your dad’s house?”

We looked at each other and we were both thinking of the last time we’d slept at Rye’s dad’s house, locked in the bathroom, curled up together on a bed of towels while his dad screamed drunkenly at no one and kicked at the door. Rye could have easily overpowered him, especially in that state, but he refused to lay a hand on his father, something I’d never understood.

“No,” Rye shook his head, “there’s nothing there for me anymore.”

The sun emerged, white-hot, behind Rye, lighting up his blond hair. He squinted up at the roof, like he was looking for answers there.

I made my hands into a frame, seared the moment into my brain.

Click.

• • •

After days of threat, the sky began to rumble. I ran toward the bar, hoping to beat the worst of the rain. Trash skittered across the sidewalk. The air was velvet with damp.

I threw open the door. Sean’s gaze ricocheted past me, then back to the television. A rake dragged through me. I hated it when he did this. I wasn’t even late. Sean was washing glasses, ignoring his vibrating phone. He was cagey about his home life, but I’d seen the picture of the pretty blonde bouncing in the corner of his screen.

The glasses clinked against the metal basin. Roger coughed. I threw my purse down, grabbed the whiskey and walked over to top him off. There was an odd, chemical scent coming from him. Bug spray. He smelled like he’d bathed in the stuff.

Pawn, Pawn, Pawn blinked red through the mist outside. Cans clattered down the sidewalk. A plastic bag slumped against our glass storefront.

A group of girls wearing damp shirts over bikini tops stumbled into the bar. Probably spent the day drinking down at the river. With them was a dude with scuzzy blond dreadlocks, constellations tattooed across his temples, wearing a studded leather jacket. His name was Heel. He was called Heel because he always carried scavenged bags of bread with him to share, stale pastries he lifted from the dumpster of a local bakery. When none of the girls were looking, he raised his eyebrows at me and doffed an imaginary hat. So that’s how it’s going to be.

Then the sky opened up, rain pummeling the ground so hard that gravel bounced upward. More river rats surged in the door. Girls screamed in delight and boys laughed and licked at the water dripping down their faces. The floor was already filthy. Sean would probably make me mop it before I left, standing and watching me until it was spotless.

Heel threw a couple dozen twenties onto the bar, smirked at me.

“Tequila for everyone!” he screamed.

The crowd cheered. I wanted to ask him what kind of hustle he’d gotten into, but I didn’t want to be the one to acknowledge that we knew each other. I remembered his fingers fumbling at my tits, wriggling under my bikini top. Cmon Sarah, no one will know. Cmon. Please. On and on until I finally gave in and let him put it in my mouth. The sour taste lingered on my tongue for days.

I lined up a dozen shot glasses and poured. Lightning cracked, and I spilled over the lip of the last glass. Crap. Heel took several shots, licked the spilled tequila from the wood. I wanted to grab his filthy hair and slam his face into the bar, claw the stars from his temples. Afterward, I’d been so grossed out that I’d stumbled the mile through the woods to my parents’ house. Rye never even noticed that I was gone.

I grabbed my purse, pinched Sean on the back as I passed him and inclined my head toward the bathroom.

A wad of wet toilet paper was stuck to the wall. The concrete was covered with layers and layers of graffiti: poems and pleas, gossip, a cartoon woman with a wolf crawled up inside her, licking the walls of her womb. My stomach cramped. I’d forgotten to eat dinner again. I took the pregnancy test from my purse, ripped open the wrapper.

When I pictured my baby, I imagined one of the tiny fetus dolls our teacher gave us in health class, lodged safely in my guts, perfect and plastic. It glowed with a gentle rosy light; it would never grow or change. The thought of being pregnant didn’t fill me with panic, even though I couldn’t keep it. Even if I was a fuck-up at least my body could do something right. There was a weird kind of hope in that.

I peed on the white tip and set it on top of the toilet paper dispenser to wait. I’d done this before. The glob of paper on the wall sucked loose and fell to the floor.

Someone knocked. Tipsy girls giggling. I wrapped the pregnancy test in toilet paper, put it in my bag and opened the door. Fighting the urge to snap at them, I hustled back behind the bar.

Onscreen, a black and white movie played, giant spiders that looked like mangy parade floats covered in black fur menaced a blonde-haired woman in a white dress. A blinding light appeared in the middle of the frame. The fuck? I’d seen this movie many times before and that wasn’t right. The light filled the screen, so bright I had to cover my eyes, then resolved itself into dancing white flames, at their center a motionless blackness in the shape of a man.

The burning man grew larger and larger, until he took up the whole screen. His light-colored eyes met mine, the only part of him I could see clearly. They began to bubble and melt like runny egg-whites. His mouth opened. A black hole, it sucked the fire into it, spinning and spinning.

“You alright doll?” Roger asked. I looked at him, rheumy amber eyes, and when my gaze lurched back to the screen the woman was fighting off one of the spiders with a rake, and the burning man had disappeared. I cleared my throat.

“Fine … just déjà vu.”

“I know what you mean, feels like I’ve been living the same day over and over …

“Yeah?”

“The last thing I remember before this, I was with my wife in the hospital.”

“When did she die?”

“13 years ago.”

“Do you miss her?”

Roger nodded. “Love’s too peaceful a word for what we had … but now that I have peace. Well, if you want my opinion, it’s fuckin’ overrated.” He raised his whiskey.

“I’ll drink to that,” I said, fumbling a glass and filling it halfway with Jack. Light speckled my vision, the outline of the man lingering. I gulped a stiff mouthful, then another, burn spreading through me like sluggish lightning. I braced myself against the bar.

• • •

It was 12:30. No one had come in for half an hour, since Roger had stumbled home. Sean was out back smoking. He’d be pissed if I followed him, but if I didn’t tell him now, I was afraid I never would.

I loved the smell of concrete after the rain, the way the world looked: baptized clean. An odd euphoria took hold of me. Sean sat on a milk crate, the tip of his cigarette lighting up his face. He turned toward me, mouth curved with desire and contempt. I took a deep breath.

“I’m pregnant.”

The shriek of the train passing echoed in the alleyway. Sean threw the butt of his cigarette to the ground and crushed it with his boot. He took out his phone and scrolled aimlessly.

“Did you hear me?”

Sean looked at me for a second, rolling his eyes, then back at the phone.

“That sounds like your problem, Sarah.”

If I did this, we’d be over. Part of me was looking on, aghast. There’s no we I reminded myself. Only you.

“It’s your problem, too, or it will be, if you don’t help me.”

He scoffed. “How do I know it’s mine?”

“I guess you’ll just have to take my word for it.”

He finally looked up from his phone, the screen reflected in his narrowed eyes. I held his gaze for several seconds, until he cringed and looked away, smashed his hand into the dumpster.

“Motherfuck! I thought you said you were on birth control!”

A hot pressure built behind my eyeballs. I had to play my cards right.

I shrugged. “Sometimes it fails.”

His mouth opened and closed, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying. All I heard was a piercing static. He spit on the ground next to my shoe. There was a weird satisfaction in seeing his face twisted with emotion, he who was always so controlled.

He took hold of my elbow, dragged me through the door and back inside. Thrust me behind the bar.

“You take care of things here. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

He slammed out into the night. My arm throbbed from where he’d grabbed me. I’d never been alone in the bar this late before, under normal circumstances Sean wouldn’t have allowed it. Too dangerous.

I wiped down the bar, then drew spirals through the damp with my fingertip, stealing glances at the door. Cloud cover blocked out the moon and stars, the lights of the pawn shop and liquor store long gone dark. Someone could be out there watching me.

Everything felt unreal, my body light, like my organs had been sucked out and replaced with clouds. I traced the panic button beneath the bar. Looking up, I expected to find the burning man staring at me, his fist gripped around the door handle. He would come toward me with his arms raised, and I would finally see his face beneath the veil of flame before he gathered me into his embrace.

Something tickled the back of my neck. The sputter of flames. I whirled around, but nothing was there.

Onscreen the astronaut was tumbling toward the black hole again, the parade of objects orbiting him. If it was a super-massive black hole, you wouldn’t be torn apart if you got sucked in, instead time would slow and slow, and you’d be trapped in the fall forever. I pictured myself plunging end over end, fingers grasping at nothing, dragging all the messy debris of my life with me: balls of dirty clothing, Rye and Sean, my parents, their mouths moving mute and angry, empty liquor bottles, a pink lava lamp I’d used as a nightlight until I was in high school, and last of all the burning man, a spinning ball of fire plummeting toward the unreachable center. That must have been what hell was like: stuck forever with your memories and mistakes, your pain, acutely aware but unable to change anything.

I jumped when the door opened. Sean threw a wad of cash down on the bar.

“I want you gone by next week.”

His face was flushed, eyes searing gray.

Part of me wanted to go to him, but I grabbed the money and fled, giving him the finger as I slammed the door closed. I wouldn’t be coming back. I ran all the way home, not looking behind or around me. If you didn’t slow down, if you didn’t see the hands reaching for you out of the blackness, they couldn’t grab you. It was like being a kid, hiding under the covers while the monster stood over you. As long as you didn’t see his face, you were safe.

The porch light was off. I stuck my key in the door and turned on the living room light, took the money from my purse and flattened it on the coffee table. The remnants of incense from Jared’s prayer circle still smoldered. 500. Plus the 150 in tips I’d gotten. And the 600 upstairs in the closet I’d been saving for rent. My fingertips tingled. That was enough for a new start, maybe, if your expectations were low and you were carrying nothing but yourself.

I was surprised Sean hadn’t asked to see the test, he was usually so meticulous. I pulled it from my purse. Maybe he suspected that I was lying, but he just wanted to get rid of me. It didn’t matter what he thought, not anymore. One blue line, the other window empty. Like I was. Cold, black nothingness inside me. Dark matter.

I tiptoed up the stairs. Gathered clothes into a backpack, books and makeup, my computer. On the wall hung a photograph I’d taken down by the river. The water slivered by moonlight, dark shapes floating. Driftwood. When I stared at the picture, the black logs looked as if they were swelling, then shrinking, squirming and flailing. There were infinite other universes with other infinite other versions of me, and some of us stayed and some of us left. I couldn’t look at Rye. If I looked at him, I’d be drawn in again, I’d fall down into his body like I always did. The pull of his gravity resisting my escape. I grabbed my broken camera and zipped the bag shut.

I looked around the room to see if I was forgetting anything. I had my passport and license. Downstairs, I grabbed a half-empty bag of chips and a package of mixed nuts. I locked the door behind me. As I walked toward the train station, it started to drizzle again. The lights of the refinery were blurred in the rain and smoke. It looked like a melting city skyline, skyscrapers decaying and on the verge of collapse. A siren echoed through the streets and a chorus of dogs howled in imitation. I opened my mouth and howled along with them.

• • •

Within hours I was on a sleek silver train headed out of town, out of the state, my life reduced to the backpack in front of me. We crawled by metal pylons, downtown glowing in the hazy dawn. A train passed slowly in the other direction. Among the passengers, their faces blurred by the rain, the burning man sat calmly in a middle seat, unnoticed by those around him. He didn’t look at me. As the train pulled away, a weight slid down my ribcage and disappeared. We passed fallow fields, pastures full of rusted cars. In the distance I saw smoke. Whatever escape I was making, I could one day be pulled back. More troubles would come to me. But for now, my heart was a riot. Silhouettes of mountains loomed in the distance. I gritted my teeth against whatever was to come.