Hanna

    She took up smoking in an attempt to hurt herself, but her lungs would heal faster than she could damage them. She didn't buy that smoking was bad for her. Smoking was bad for some future self, some old her that wasn't her, who she could summon no interest in protecting. She saw herself as an old lady sitting at the bus stop, and sought to erase her. Nor was his own self to do with as he pleased, and though she hated the thought of him as an adult, she did not seek to destroy him in the same way, and so would not give him a cigarette when he asked. He would reach his tiny limbs up to try and pull it from her mouth, so she held her arm out straight against his forehead, watching him grasp at the air with a satisfaction reserved for elder sisters just out of a growth spurt, obsessed with her newfound power over the world. Nor really was a pathetic creature. He whined and flailed and she just stood there barely noticing him. She kept her breathing even, taking in the smoke and letting it out her nose without opening her mouth; kept it up until only the filter was left, then she spat it at Nor's head and sat down on the bench.
    "I know you have more! Gimme one!"
    "Shut up." He did. They sat in the mist, just on the edge of rain, waiting for the bus.
    She paid for them both when it arrived and Nor kept quiet among the strangers on board. They all smelled funny. The few that looked around did so without focusing their eyes. Except one fellow in a baseball cap, who leered at her for the whole bus ride. She pretended not to see him, instead watched the rain patterns on the window pane, splitting and reforming before running down to oblivion.
    The bus stop was down the street from home, and home was behind a wire fence behind the sidewalk, the grass growing tall until she was told to cut it. The entry hall let onto the den on the right, where Dad sat with the TV blaring. On the screen, a phalanx of police cars were resting on a curb, silent sirens flashing. "What happened?" she asked.
    Dad called from his chair without turning around. He was eating popcorn. "Shooting at the mall. Only a couple dead. They took him down fast this time." Nor raised his arms in his oversized coat and roared at the back of Dad's head like a dinosaur, but gave it up when no one acknowledged him, miming a tyrannical stomp toward the kitchen.
    Hanna left him to it and ascended to her room, locking the door for her recent after school ritual: stripping off her clothes and snapping a polaroid of herself, which she then tore into little pieces and flushed down the toilet. Then she changed and put her current favorite album on the stereo. It was a disc from Willow, the quietest friend, and thus keeper of the loudest music; the debut of local band The Blood Gutters. They weren't great, but they played with abandon, and abandon is what she wanted.


    The next day at school, she opened her locker to find Marie standing inside it.
    "I was waiting for you."
    "In there?"
    "In here."
    "Why?"
    "Helen is casting a spell today!" She attempted to blow a bubble with her chewing gum, but spat the whole chunk on the floor between them instead. "A spell."
    "Huh?"
    "That's right. We're all going to be there." Marie was diminutive, and looked as if she had been assembled from mismatched parts. Hanna still debated whether this impression was inherent to the flesh itself, or a property of the way she moved, as if her arms and legs were snapped on to her torso with ball sockets.
    "What is she trying to do?"
    "She wouldn't tell me. She won't tell anyone."
    "Where?"
    "In the library after school. She said she needs you to do something, though."
    "Me?" Hanna slammed her locker, then opened it again. "Can you get out of there?"
    Marie hopped out with a little flourish. "That's right. You. She wants you to get some fingernails."
    "Uhhh..."
    "They can be anyone's fingernails. But not yours. Or mine. Or any of us."
    "What about Nor? That's an easy one."
    At that moment, Nor was zooming down the hallway, still in the knit cap he had worn on the walk to school. His hands in front of him grabbed the yoke of an invisible fighter jet, as he blasted the delinquents still in the hallways during class. "Ratattatatatatat!" he said.
    Marie opened her eyes wide, to see her own thoughts before they escaped. "I don't think so. I think it needs to be someone from our grade."
    "Fine."
    "Whose you gonna get?"
    "I don't know yet."

    At lunch, Hanna ate six cookies from the commissary, then puked up three of them in the bathroom stall. With her arms still resting on the toilet seat, she looked up at the graffiti on the back wall. "Jesus is watching you right now," it said. She chuckled, then threw up two more cookies. She lit a cigarette before the last one could rise up and sat puffing away.
    A voice from the next stall. "Hanna?"
    "Helen?"
    "That's bad for your esophagus."
    She didn't respond, and they sat there in silence, clouds of smoke joining each other at the top of the wall. She could hear the quiet hiss when she drew in, until it was drowned out by someone screaming in the boy's bathroom. 

    In English class, she found herself drawing a picture. It appeared to be an old hag, perhaps from a nightmare she'd had and forgotten. It was emaciated, and wore a raggedy dress that left its shoulders exposed, and a witch's hat. Instead of a broom, there was a mop and bucket at its feet. The toenails were grown long enough to be claws. At the end of class, she examined the paper and thought it was probably the best thing she'd ever drawn. Why did it have to be of something so ugly?
    "If you forget to close your quotations, evil spirits will escape and haunt you for the rest of the year!" The teacher's default posture was to loom, owing to the way her shoulders curved forward. She stalked between the desks, and gestured as if sprinkling words onto the heads of her students.   
    "'Some can gaze and not be sick
        But I could never learn the trick.
        There's this to say for blood and breath;
        They give a man a taste for death.'"

    Hanna had no idea what she was talking about most of the time, but she enjoyed how the tide of language washed over her.
    
    In a secluded corner of the library after school, she found Helen alone, squatting on the tile floor, where she was drawing symbols in chalk. Helen had bright blonde hair which she kept in pigtails high up on her scalp, the only childish thing about her. Standing, she was taller than Hanna at her new height, and fully developed. Even her voice was the pitch of a grown woman. She looked up from the floor with jade eyes that were themselves an act of violence, committed and invited. Hanna had already admitted to herself that she was in love with Helen, and assumed that everyone else in the world felt the same way. There was a hum in her eardrums when Helen was near.

    They sat in the car at the gas station. Dad stood at the open door, Mom in the passenger seat. Nor had his cap pulled down over his eyes. He kicked his legs. "Did you know gas is made from dinosaurs!?" he said.
    "Is that true?" said Hanna.
    Mom didn't look back. "Maybe."
    "Mom, where does gas come from?" said Nor.
    "You just told us it comes from dinosaurs."
    "I know, but like, WHERE does it come from?"
    "Underground."
    "Underground WHERE?"
    "In other countries. And some places in this country."
    "Who takes it out of the ground?"
    "People who want to sell it."
    "But WHY!?"
    "That's a silly question, Nor."
    "Ptbtbttbbtbt!" he said.
    Hanna looked across him and out the window at the numbers ticking up on the pump display.
    
    The candles at the five points of the star had already burned halfway through their wicks. "Did you tell her?" said Marie, nodding from Helen to Hanna.
    "Tell me what?"
    "We're starting a gang," said Helen, sprinkling the nail clippings around the inside of the circle. "You're in it."
    "For protection," said Marie.
    Helen peeled back her lips and showed her teeth. "And for fun."
    Willow was hugging her legs, her head tilted downward so that her hair covered most of her face. "Will there be boys in it?"
    "I guess there could be," said Helen. Hanna felt a whine in her left ear.
    "What about initiations?" Little Marie punched her fist against her palm.
    "You're all in it already. But initiations for the new people."
    "What kind? Like a beating or something?"
    "Maybe. Or a piercing."
    Marie broke in. "What are we doing? What's the spell, what's the spell?"
    Helen shushed her. "We're cursing my dad. And maybe whoever owns these fingernails."

    She could recall the first time she saw a butterfly's body up close, and being disgusted by it. Sometimes when she looked in the mirror, she got the same sense of being made of squishy segments, and unable to view herself as a whole being; as if she would need the eyes of a stranger in order to be a coherent person instead of a mass of flesh. She could only assess the imperfections of each individual part of her. Some days, she could look at nothing but her own stomach, that she did not like the way it curved outward. She was aware enough to attempt to take this reasoning and apply it to someone else: she scrutinized Helen's stomach when she could do so unobserved (made easy by the tops Helen wore), and found that it curved outward in much the same way. Yet there was a key difference that prevented further comparison. Helen's tummy was a part of a whole, a whole that flowed from one bit to the next, a context in which that curvature seemed natural. And so, she would try to transfer this mode of sight to herself, perhaps by standing further back from the bathroom mirror, all the way into the shower if necessary. To no avail, as whether she was looking directly down at it, or at a reflection in a shop window across the street, she was only a disembodied stomach attached to a person.

    She stepped into the hall after school to see pillars of smoke on the TV screen. "What's happening?"
    "Bombing Baghdad. Old hat." He was eating a plate of nachos. "No death toll estimates."
    She went upstairs to her room. 

    Helen's house was like a ragged version of her own, scaled down slightly, and styled so that a shotgun blast through the front door would travel straight out the back. It sat on the corner of an intersection sporting a condemned stoplight which no one had bothered to take down. It still hung from its wire along with two pairs of old sneakers. Drivers stopped in confusion, waiting for something to happen before creeping onward. The rain was perpetual and light this season. It clung to the outer layer of her hair, to her clothes, to the palms of her hands. It traveled under and around every umbrella or coat.
    Helen rarely invited anyone to her house. When Hanna entered, she was greeted with the sight of Helen's father in a father chair much like the one at her own house, except that it looked off toward a blank wall instead of a television. Helen's father looked around with nearly the same eyes as his daughter. They were perhaps a brighter shade of green, and full of a violence that skewed in one direction. "Whozzat?" he said.
    "This is Hanna," said Helen.
    "Hey, Hanna. Make yourself at home."
    There was something old-fashioned in his carriage, in the set of his jaw. He looked like the author of a book from her English class. Like a man who could have been someone vastly better but for life, with a wide jaw that tapered to a point and a piercing gaze. He seemed aware of the effect it had on her, dropping his eyes after one searching glance in her direction, after which she was able to breathe again. She wished immediately to be elsewhere, and he seemed inclined to allow it. Even with his back turned and obscured by the armchair, a haze surrounded him, as if she were peering through the air over a gas stove. One hairy arm was still visible at the edge of the chair, reaching for a glass of whiskey with fingers that all looked like thumbs.
    Helen tugged her up the stairs.

    One day, she decided that she couldn't get out of bed. "Honey," said Mom. "It's 6 AM. Time to get ready."
    "Look outside, Mom. It's still night."
    "Get up, little girl."
    "I'm not a girl, I'm a plant now. Just stick me in the window and water me."
    "Hanna's a plant now!" shouted Nor. He jumped on the bed. She summoned enough energy to kick him off before retreating further into the blanket.
    "You're not a plant. You are a deadly apex predator. Now get up!"
    She still felt like a plant, like all of her strength was ebbing into an invisible system of roots.
    "Just water me."
    Mom came back with a glass of water and poured it on her head.


-- When I Think of You, I Think of Murder

    When it happened, she could think of nothing to say to Helen. So she said, "I'm proud of your dad." Her friend's eyes were surrounded with circles of red.
    "You know he took down three cops before--" Helen cut off and stared beyond her.
    "All my dad does is sit around watching TV."
    "Doesn't your dad have a job?"
    "Yeah, I guess."
    "Well, maybe Dad should've bought a TV," said Helen.

    Her sneakers seemed to her as if they must be where the majority of her soul resided, since blood must have a tendency to pool in her feet while she stood. She even imagined that she could hear it squishing as she walked, being pushed up into her legs or out from beneath her toenails. She looked back at the sidewalk behind her just to be sure that she wasn't leaving a trail that could be followed by whatever prowled the suburbs in the small hours of the morning.
    The tree branches crept over the street lamps, looking like gold and black fingers. It reminded her of the hag she had drawn in her notebook the other day. She had dreamed about her just that morning. Walking down this same street in the dark, like now, pursued by the hag. She had a moment of panic where she couldn't remember waking up that morning, or whether she was still in the dream now. She pinched her thigh and the moment passed. The sense of moving forward in accordance with the motion of her legs convinced her it was real, despite the morning fog drowning all but the surreal.
    The bus driver was, as always, a man with empty eyes, though not always the same man.
    Math class was a constant struggle to stay awake, being just after lunch, when the early morning had caught up with her and grabbed her brain in its malaise. Helen's presence two rows over was the thing that kept her awake.

    The wire fence in front of Helen's dad's house was wrapped in ivy. She couldn't help referring to the house that way, despite what had happened. She asked Helen, "How long are you going to stay here?"
    "As long as no one notices, I guess. Maybe it'll be our club house."
    Hanna pulled a leaf from the ivy and crumpled it in her fist. Part of the front door window pane was cracked, the wood at the bottom of the frame splintered. She tucked the remains of the leaf into the resulting gap as they entered the house. "What are we doing?" she said.
    "Snooping through Dad's stuff. Deciding what to loot, what to toss, what to burn."
    "By the way." They started down the steps to the basement. "You don't think our curse had anything to do with...?"
    "Go ahead, say it."
    "Never mind."
    "No. No, I don't. Bastard did what he wanted to do, like always."
    Hanna could only recall the one time she had met him, and attempt to reconcile that image with the monster locked in Helen's mind.
    The basement was colder than the rest of the house, though it was right next to the furnace; an old thing like a knight's helmet covered in ash. Through the bars, she could almost make out a desiccated, over-sized face.
    The far end of the room was stacked with wooden trunks and plastic tubs. Some were full of books, others kitchenware that had never seen use. One cardboard box was full of old letters and journals. Hanna avoided that one because it wasn't her business, Helen for reasons of her own. One box was full of ammunition. That one went into the burn pile. The last box they made it to was a worn trunk containing a single item. A sword in its sheathe, the length of Hanna's arm, slightly curved and beginning to show signs of rust along its edge. Helen drew it and held the blade beneath the ceiling light, both of them watching its reflection pass over the steel.
    
    Sometimes, Willow spoke up enough to remind her that she was a person and not a piece of sad furniture. "Hanna?" They sat in her room after school, the Blood Gutters on as always, the liner notes open on Willow's lap. "Do you try to shut out the consciousness of the people around you?"
    "Why, are you telepathic?"
    "No. But it feels like it. I don't know."
    "Well, what is everyone thinking?"
    "I can't tell. But I can feel that they ARE thinking, and it's so loud."
    "Can you shut it out?"
    "Sort of. If I think of them as objects instead of people. That one is a bench. That one is a lamp post. Especially if I can't see their eyes."
    "What object am I?"
    "Sometimes you're a cow."
    "A cow!?"
    "I guess. You're always chewing gum."



Marie: lemme tell you a ghost story
Marie: about Atlas the killer
Marie: who some say still haunts the halls of the courthouse to ths day
Helen: fuck you
Helen has left the chat.

    Helen placed 5 candle stubs at the points of the star. In the middle, she sprinkled some powdery substance that Hanna thought must be ash, along with the fingernails she had contributed. They belonged to a boy she'd had a class with the year before, who would do what she asked of him without question, and without spreading tales of it to anyone she knew. He presented them to her in the hallway outside the cafeteria as if handing off a ritual sacrifice. Which she supposed is what they were. Just for a different ritual than he imagined. There had certainly been a twinkle in his eye that he tried to hide. Helen poured the liquid wax from the candles onto the pile, then passed a flame over it. Not much happened in the visible world, but beneath it the spirits were roiling.
    "What would the devil want with a nerd's fingernails?" said Marie.
    "What do I know what the devil wants?" said Helen. "It's just a spell."
    Marie shrugged. "Did it work?"
    "We're not finished," said Willow. She produced four paper cups. Helen separated the mixture into four piles, one for each cardinal direction, producing a dissonance with the five points of the star; and separated out the fingernails. Willow looked up at her.
    "What? I'm not going to drink a boy's fingernails."
    "We have to DRINK that?" said Marie.
    "It's only a little bit." Willow peered around the library, then produced a bottle of wine she'd been hiding in the corner.
    "Where did you get that?"
    She let out a rare smile, mostly incisors, her eyes suddenly bright beneath dark bangs. For a moment, she looked like a completely different person. "Church." She poured enough in each cup of ashes to turn it from a sludge into a liquid. "Drink up." She hesitated. "But we really should include the nails."
    "I'm NOT doing that," said Helen.
    Willow shrugged and began whispering something under her breath as they each raised a cup...


--

    Where the sidewalk crumbled, the air smelled like a jackhammer. The telephone poles were covered in industrial staples, lost pet and child fliers, garage sales and expired coupons. Halfway up their length the rain-sodden papers continued, trailing off to expose split-wood towers lashed to the sky with wire and rubber. The rain brought an occasional spark where a cord's insulation had worn through.
    Hanna placed her hand against a pole's trunk as if it were a tree in the forest, feeling for some hint of life in the lumber, careful to avoid the petrified chewing gum and nails. An old concert flyer fluttered beneath her fingers, old enough that the people who stared out of it must've long ago discarded their instruments. She thought she almost recognized one face in the photo. Old colors leaked in the wet, from the page onto other pages, over her fingers and down into broken concrete and the soil that must still lie somewhere beneath it. If she rested her chin on the pole and looked up, it formed a crescent beneath a web of diverging phone calls zapping through the intersection and onward to their demise; her bangs at the top of her vision like giant raven feathers obscuring the clouds. On the far side of the pole, facing toward the street, several mushrooms had sprouted outward at about the height of a human head and the size of a human tongue, such that the pole seemed to be tasting the rain. She stuck out her own tongue to do the same, wondering how clean the rain was.
    Marie watched her and toyed with her arms, concentrating to see if she could turn them into cannons. "What are you doing?" she said.
    "I'm hugging this telephone pole," said Hanna.
    "I can see that."

    Hanna's room was attached to a bathroom she shared with Nor. Which was by far the worst thing about it. The lock on the door leading to his room was crucial, as he always tried to open it at the wrong time. She had developed a routine of taping a piece of construction paper over the keyhole when she used the toilet. In response, Nor had invented an unfolded paper clip which he used to puncture the paper. In response to this, Hanna had devised a system of threatening to beat him senseless if she caught him peeping. This in combination with the paper seemed to have worked so far.
    Her room had a single window that looked out onto the driveway, covered with a deep red curtain. With the sunlight filtered through it in the morning, it turned her entire room the color of heart's blood, the curtain fabric creating patterns that reminded her of the inside of an aquarium. Beneath the window, her stereo was covered in stacks of CDs, about half of which were bootlegs from Willow, labeled in her handwriting (severe and angular). Her carpeting was thick enough that she could run her fingers through it, soft enough that she often fell asleep on the floor after school. Her closet door refused to open, sealing away the remains of her childhood. Her dresser housed the clothes that fit her in her current form. She tossed her jacket on the bed and laid down on the floor, her cheek pressed against the carpet, hands at her sides. It was that limbo between afternoon and sunset, when the house and the neighborhood seemed to be holding their breath, except for Nor shrieking around downstairs like a pterodactyl. She considered putting on music or staring at her homework for an hour. Instead, she took a paperback from the floor within reach of her outstretched hand, and began to read, holding the book open with her chin.

    "Light spread across the valley as the Plains Drifter made his way through the tall grass. The child at his side asked him a question which he did not hear. A lion rested on a cloud in the sky. A herd of gazelle bounced over the hills."

    Hanna began to drool on the page, her body growing warmer as she drifted off. Her afternoon dreams were pleasant and bright, memorable but indescribable. She awoke gradually with an impression of years of sunlight having passed in a world where nothing was normal but all was right.
    Waking was becoming aware of the carpet pressed into her skin, the spit leaking from her mouth, and a sheen of sleepsweat that enveloped her. Night had fallen while she slumbered. The first sound to reach her was the whine of the ceiling fan, softly squealing, the flow of air beginning to sap the heat from her limbs. The next sound was a thud on the brick outside her window. She parted the curtains and raised it. Helen stood in the twilight driveway with a rock in her hand. "You awake?" she called. Marie was attempting to hide behind the mailbox.
    "Of course I'm awake. You know you can just ring the doorbell. It's only..." she glanced at her alarm clock, "...seven."
    "We know. This is more fun. Get your butt down here."


-- Phantom Steel

    That semester, she spent more time with Willow than anyone else. Not because they were better friends, but one or the other of them would end up at the other's house after school, lounging around listening to music. They shared the same bus stop, and thus without trying, the same walk home. The ritual did not teach her anything new about Willow. They barely talked, just sat and listened to the day fading away. Willow read song lyrics with her knobby legs crossed on the floor, pointing out the ones she liked, while Hanna smoked out the window or poked at her homework. No matter whose house they ended up at, it was an excuse to avoid Nor and her parents. The latter left them alone and the former was afraid of Willow, called her a scarecrow or a witch behind her back, but wouldn't say a word in her presence. For her part, Willow seemed content to say and do nothing, and her parents ignored everyone if they were home at all.  A sanctuary for Hanna, behind this bulwark that surrounded Willow wherever she went.
    Willow had eyes and teeth that dominated her face. She was gangly, and taller than Hanna. Her skin was pallid and pimpled. She looked like a much smaller girl piloting a much larger girl, and still learning the controls. She had long, delicate fingers, wider at the tips than at the base, and hands that were so flat they looked as if they could be folded up and put in your pocket if not for the bones and tendons maintaining their shape. She practiced her violin every day for her parents' sake, and seemed to take neither joy nor displeasure from it. She played scales and arpeggios and a couple of etudes, but never anything else. She would say, "I've got to practice my violin," then do so for exactly 45 minutes, then put it away and press play on the stereo again, singing along as if the song had been playing the whole time.
    Hanna did not set out to play favorites with her friends - aside from her burning crush on Helen - but she decided that she felt most comfortable around Willow. With Willow, she felt...unobserved. Her friend did not compliment or criticize her, or say much at all. She was off in her own little world while Hanna was in hers, and made no move to pull back the curtain between the two. With Willow nearby, she was free to exist without interference.
    Plus, she was good at getting them into concerts.
    Hanna yelled something at her parents, then tumbled out the front door into the evening. Marie had stopped hiding behind the mailbox and was now punching it instead. Helen gathered them all up as they set off down the street. Willow passed out the tickets.

    The parking lot was a mess of teens, scruffs and bums, exploded fireworks and cigarette butts. A bubble of sound bulged out the open door, drawing in all who ventured near. Inside was a world fashioned from the above elements; shredded, smelted, and molded into a space that was screaming at itself. On stage were the Blood Gutters. Unintelligible, out of tune, and bursting with viral confidence. Willow plopped down on a couch near the door and went into a trance, staring at the backs of the crowd. Marie seemed to vibrate and split into five versions of herself, each disappearing in a different direction. Helen began to push through the crowd toward the front. Hanna stayed close to her back, taking advantage of the wake she left. They reached the front and emerged onto a wall of flashing spotlights pointed directly into their eyes, stacks of speakers to either side cranked to disorient their victims. Between them, several people abused their guitars in unison, smudging the attacks of every beat until only an endless tide of noise remained. The drummer had a third arm whose only purpose was to twirl a stick over his head while the other two did the work. He had a sweatband across his forehead and one on each wrist, and two more around his neck, all of them sodden and flinging droplets on the crowd. He and the bass player to his left seemed to have developed their own dance routine, over the top enough to make up for the motionless rank of guitarists hanging from their own right arms.

    "Hanna..." Mr. Rollins folded one arm behind his back and carried his mug to the window. She recalled a persistent rumor that he only drank Irish coffee. "...do you think I enjoy this job?"
    "I dunno."
    His office was dutifully decorated, but she noticed a lack of motivational posters. "Do you think I find it fulfilling, preparing the next generation to fit into a society that I despise?" When she said nothing, he sighed and returned to his desk. "What grade do you think you deserve for the paper you wrote?"
    "I don't know."
    "Well, what grade would you have expected me to give you?"
    "Can I confess something to you?" she said.
    His eyes suddenly focused on her. She realized they had always been half-closed before. "Of course."
    "I don't remember what I wrote."
    He tapped his fingers for a moment, then slid the paper across to her. "Well, take it home and read it, then. Just bring it back and tell me what grade you want." He shrugged.
    "Mr. Rollins?" she said. "Are you okay?"
    He put his elbows on the desk and rubbed his eyes. They were half-closed again when he took his hands away. "No, Hanna. I'm sinking into the void on a ship full of morons. Don't tell anyone I said that."
    "Do you want a cigarette?"
    "You can't smoke in here. Or anywhere, for that matter. Please get out of my office."

    The night was a blur by the time she found herself surrounded by 3 to 5 shadows in a remote corner of the parking lot. One of them had a box cutter held against her belly. Another stood close enough to expel his breath on her cheek. He pulled the wallet from her pocket and they went away. She suddenly felt grimy. Sweaty. Drained. There were armed people everywhere. Knives for sure, but probably guns. Someone inside must have a gun. She watched the crowd through the open back door. Faces jumped out of the illuminated herd. It would be a boy, of course. It always was.
    That guy didn't look like he was having much fun. He was looking down at the floor with a gaunt face. She could just make out Willow somewhere behind him. What if he did something? What would she do? What could she do? He looked unhappy, she thought. Was that all it took? Every day she went home to see another city block cordoned off on TV, another dead-eyed mugshot. He looked like the type. She pushed through the crowd, feeling like a zeppelin anchored to her own body. She made herself put a hand on his shoulder. He looked up.
    "It's okay," she said. Then realized he couldn't hear her, or anything else. He smiled at her. She made a polite face and pushed right past him, grabbing Willow on the way to the front door, who asked what she was doing when they got outside.
    "I feel funny," she said.
    Marie was there. "You look weird."
    "I gave these guys my wallet."
    "What!?"
    "No. They took it." She pulled out a cigarette, noticed her hands were shaking. "They smelled bad."
    "Who!?" Marie stood up on the curb, glaring around, ready to leap on the first dude to make eye contact.
    "I don't know. They were saying stuff." She gave up on the cigarette and stuffed it in her pocket.
    "I'll get Helen." Willow disappeared inside.
    Hanna sat down on a parking block and realized she was crying. She wiped her whole face on her sleeve before anyone could see.


-- Beyond the Wall of Our Neighborhood

    Near the southwest corner of town was an abandoned building, supposedly a saw mill in its time, but degraded to the point where she wondered if it had ever been finished. Only the stone remained, foundations, supports holding up what was left of the second floor, and the staircase that led up to it. Rusted girders poked out where the stone had fallen away. Remnants of abandoned reconstruction littered the site: a partial roof of sheet metal, a power saw, a few piles of rubble. A cube the size of an outhouse was missing from the ground floor, leaving a pit of mud and debris, and whatever garbage people had thrown into it since. When it rained, as it did now, she could see earthworms rising from the dirt, probing the air, getting trapped between the rocks. A strand of ivy had succeeded in reaching the top of the pit, and the worms striving upward all looked to emulate it. She tossed a bottle in. Without thinking, she had aimed for a worm. He shattered between the bottle and the brick he sat on, spreading his guts across it. They glistened in the light.
    This was where they came to drink beer. Marie had a sister named Marianne who was already a senior in college, and bought them beer whenever they asked. "We're minors. Are you a bad person?" Marie would say to her.
    "Whatever," Marianne would reply, just before leaving for someplace else. She never asked for money and never stuck around.
    The sawmill was probably haunted. They made up stories about anything bad that might have happened there, which weren't hard to imagine. Willow filed them away and retold them, while Marie hunted for evidence of severed limbs. Once, they found half a box of shotgun shells, which prompted a new story, quickly added to the gospel.
    The building sat at the edge of town, in the divide between the familiar and the unknown, along a road that seemed to unravel into space. Everything beyond hummed with potential. It was only a theoretical world, accessed through TV and books and incapable of affecting the land northeast of the sawmill; which already existed in its current, unchangeable state.
    In the spring especially, spiders accumulated in the corners. She dreamed about them. Growing more and more numerous, growing fat and oversized off of the local wildlife. Spinning larger webs even as she and her friends sat there, building a cocoon that enveloped the entire structure, closing every exit, then slowly working their way toward the center where everyone but her remained oblivious. Sometimes, she had to crawl through a narrow gap in the webs to escape, spider legs larger than king crabs brushing her hair as she passed beneath them, a hissing sound just out of sight. Then the path in front of her would close, then the path behind. She grew tangled and woke up slapping her own hair to keep them off, then stayed awake until just before sunrise, when she would fall asleep just in time to get up and catch the bus to school.
    Her afternoon naps in math class were much more pleasant. In those, she only dreamed that she was sleeping through math class.    

    They now congregated at Helen's house. Hanna's parents knew what had happened, but everyone assumed things were being taken care of by someone else. So for the moment, at least, they had their own little kingdom in a house free of adults.
    Marie was caressing the sword scabbard. "What is it? Where'd it come from?"
    "Mr. Rollins said it's a dow." said Hanna.
    "I have no idea where it came from," said Helen.
    "Is Old Man Rollins a sword expert or something?"
    "He said his friend is."
    The house was quieter than ever before. Atlas, true to form, had left behind a heroic liquor collection that they dipped into almost every day. Today, they were drinking vodka-schnapps. Being slight and inexperienced, Hanna was still in that phase where it made her feel as if she'd just spun around ten times while listening to a funny joke. She felt like laughing and running and puking. She had yet to manage all three at once, but was making a valiant effort. Marie was a faster version of the same, until the drink that turned her angry (they all agreed it was the fourth). Willow recoiled into herself in terror, paying just enough attention to the external world to be sure that no one was addressing her directly. Helen did not seem to be affected. Hanna tried to point this out, but only managed to slide onto the floor while talking through a mouthful of phantom marshmallows.
    Marie had her arms extended above her head, and was sitting cross-legged while dancing. "I'm going to be a mariner when I grow up. It'll be a brutal life and I'll die at sea! What about you, Willow?"
    "I'll be the sea."
    "Haha. Then I'll be a sea monster." said Hanna. "What about Helen?" She pushed her friend on the shoulder.
    "Guess I'll follow in Dad's footsteps." That shut them up for a bit.


-- American Demons

    The shooting was awkward. They always were. There was security footage floating around the web. There was a lot of standing. A lot of silence. It was almost boring to watch, yet she couldn't look away.  Neither could she manage to put herself in the shoes of anyone in the tape. She thought about the box cutter pressed into her skin that night through a lens of lowered reality. She couldn't put herself in her own shoes, even while it was happening.
    Their bus stop was a bench and a sign. Nor was hyper in his raincoat. She held onto the back of his collar to keep him from dashing out into the street. The trash can was full of butts. She dropped another on top of the pile, watched it roll off onto the sidewalk. When she thought of the tape from the courthouse, she also thought of Atlas's eyes, that day in the den. His pupils were shaky. She felt them violate her and apologize for it in the same second. She wondered if Helen had felt that, too. She wanted to ask her why she hated him so much. There was no way to phrase that question that wouldn't hurt her.
    When she thought of Helen, she thought of strength. When she thought of Helen's thoughts for her father, she thought of weakness. And when she thought of Atlas himself, she sensed a strength corrupted by weakness.
    Nor looked up at her with a false grin. He'd lost a baby tooth to a football today. Blood stained his smile. She punched him on top of the head, which set him off crying. Immediately, she wanted to apologize but didn't.
    She came home to find her father watching a movie about a barrel-chested man snapping terrorist necks. She stood in the hallway to see if she could absorb any useful combat strategies, and gave up when she realized they all involved being a barrel-chested man. That wasn't really in the cards for her. There was a hissing sound off in the kitchen. She checked to make sure it was just Mom cooking pork chops and not one of the spiders from her dreams.
    At the bus stop, she stood back from the street, partly to avoid the waves of rainwater kicked up by passing car tires. Mostly to hear the crackle of the neon sign stuck to the restaurant front, that just said "DINE". It looked old and poorly connected, and she couldn't decide what color it was supposed to be. In its anemic state, she could reach out and absorb its power through her fingertips, transforming into a human voltaic cell. With proper training and meditation, perhaps even a dynamo. And the next time some grub threatened her at a concert, she'd ground herself and send a bolt up through his shoes, watch his skin light up and his head explode.
    The thought made her giggle. Nor looked up in response and went back to grinning, assuming she was laughing at him. She lowered her umbrella to feel the raindrops pelting her hair, making her scalp electric.

    "Mr. Rollins?" She was in his office after school again. He was still sipping from his mug, still disapproving of the air around him.
    "How can I help you today, Hanna?"
    She sat down in front of his desk. "What IS a dow?"
    "A dao? You're still thinking about that sword?"
    "Maybe."
    "Why is this so important? Where'd you even get a thing like that?"
    "It belonged to Helen's father."
    He slurped from his mug and studied her. "Helen? You mean Miss Roman?"
    "Yeah."
    He scratched at his chin beard. "How is she doing lately?"
    "Okay."
    "She's not okay, is she?"
    "Not really."
    He studied her again, then spun away in his chair, his face in profile backlit by the sun through the blinds. "It's a type of Chinese saber, so I've been told. Not sure why he would have one. Although..." He glanced at her again. The scrutiny made her fidget. "How much do you know about Mr. Roman?"
    "Nothing, really. He had green eyes, like Helen."
    He gave her a new kind of look. "Yes. Well. It's not really my place to tell stories about other people. Helen surely knows something of it herself." He spun back to his desk and picked up a pen, pretending to scrutinize the stack of papers in front of him. "Will that be all?"
    "Mr. Rollins?"
    "Erm. What?"
    She patted her jacket pocket. "Would you like a cigarette?"
    "...Get out of my office, Hanna."

    Marie had sandy hair and a plague of freckles around her nose and mouth. There was surely a darker-skinned Marie in the works who would soon burst out of her host's face.
    She was also the aspiring bully of the group, perhaps the reason she surrounded herself with tall friends. Though to date, Willow was the only recipient of Marie's wrath. She made for an unsatisfying target, as it had no effect on Willow's behavior. Trying to scar her emotionally was like trying to burn down a fire pit.
    Marie was picked up by her parents each day as soon as school ended, so Hanna could stop at her house on the way home and she would already be there. Invariably perched at her computer in an unused dining room, playing games Hanna had never heard of. "You should be like the chick in this game, Hanna."
    "What do you mean?"
    "She gets paid to murder demons."
    "I don't know any demons."
    "Well, I guess you gotta find somethin' else to murder then."
    "Of course." Hanna laid on the floor, one elbow propped on a couch cushion. She watched Marie crouching in her chair, shoes on, still in her school clothes, bouncing with each scream and spray of blood on screen. "Can I play?"
    "Innaminute." She scratched at her thighs and twitched before throwing her hands back onto the keyboard.
    "Why do you think Atlas did that?" said Hanna.
    "I dunno. He was probly fed up."
    "Fed up?"
    "Yeah, you know: fed up. Wanted to break out, wanted to take possession, wanted to lance out and be dangerous. Wanted to become an event."
    Hanna brushed the carpet as if it were a sick animal, feeling the words wash over her and leave something behind. "Are you fed up, Marie?"
    "Sometimes. Sometimes I feel like I'm just a potato, waiting for the harvest. But then I go splatter some demons." A menagerie of screams and a chainsaw roared from the speakers. "What about you?"
    "I'm not sure. I guess not."
    "Okay, your turn." Marie rearranged her skirt and hopped out of the chair. "You got two minutes, lady."
    
    She passed through the vestibule at home, as she did every day. On TV, a mob of sickly humans reached out to a man in aviators and police uniform, who was mowing them down with a gatling gun and an ecstatic smile. Limbs and guts went flying. Dad was eating a plate of nachos.
    

-- Where the Hooded Man Walks, Wild Things Grow

    Nor was talking. He was always talking, but it rarely got through her filters. Whoever sat at her mixing board was cranking up Nor's fader. "What's cryogenics? Hanna, what's cryogenix?"
    "I think it's when they freeze people or something."
    "Is it real?"
    "I don't think it works."
    "I know all about cryogenix. They pull out all your blood and replace it with chemicals and then later take the chemicals out and put your blood back and you're fine."
    "You're dead."
    "Nuh-uh."
    "Yuh-huh."
    "Nuh-uh."
    "No blood means dead, idiot. You'll be dead." She put him in a headlock to try and shut him up. He struggled free, screaming, now raging around the sidewalk, upsetting all the grownups at the bus stop. Some old lady clicked her tongue and shook her head at Hanna. She blew a cloud of smoke in the hag's direction and walked off, catching Nor with a smack on the head.
    "Waaaa, what's that for!?"
    "For being a shit. C'mon, we're walking home today."
    "Hanna said shit. Now I can say shit."
    "Say what you like."
    "Shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit..." He danced a circle around her. She bopped him on the head one more time and he stopped.
    The way home went across the tracks. A couple of box cars still sat there, the same ones that were always there. They used to be red. They were shut tight and padlocked. To keep the homeless out, she guessed. The wind was turning cold today, drying out, taking the autumn away. She could feel it on her knees. Nor kept his hands in his pockets. The sidewalk was mangled into the street. The trees were almost barren, looking like the wings of a rotting bat.
    They passed a set of smokestacks surrounded by empty parking lots. The road seemed to rise upon itself at the intersection, as if a fault line had been paved over. Cars ramped over the resulting incline, almost destroying their tires in the process.
    She had a Blood Gutters song stuck in her head again. Willow played them constantly. It was bad and annoying, but it stuck. She liked the ones where they didn't sing about anything, just played. Those sounded like they were written by a different person.
    She realized Nor was still talking. "I'm going to be a cryogenix when I grow up. I'll freeze myself and wake up in the future when people live forever and keep aliens for pets."
    "They'll call you Mr. Popsicle," she said.
    "No!" he screamed, and took off down the street.
    "What the hell, Nor! Get back here!" She tossed what was left of her cigarette and ran after him.

Hanna: why would he do something like that
Willow: Who?
H: Helen's dad
W: Maybe he wanted a choice to make
H: what do you mean
W: don't you ever feel like their aren't any choices to make
W: like every choice is made for you
W: or needs to be approved by someone else
H: yeah
W: Maybe this was the only choice he could make alone.
H: but why this way
H: why involve other people
W: I dunno

    Hanna felt the gravel through her sneaker soles. Nor was inhumanly fast for some reason. She could just see him dart around a corner, half a block in front of her. The wind on her legs was frigid.
    She rounded the corner herself. And stopped. Nor had stopped himself and was staring toward the end of the alley. There, a man sat against the wall. He was pudgy, with thinning hair and a short beard. He reminded her of one of her teachers. At first, she thought he was just waking up. He looked in their direction, but his head lolled against his shoulder. He moved the hand that had been on his neck, uncovering a mass of red and purple skin, reaching the hand toward them. He was trying to speak, but no sound came out. A thick pair of glasses were broken on the ground next to him.
    Nor began to step forward. She grabbed him, held him back, and he didn't resist. The man was still trying to speak, to move. He slid down the brick wall onto his side, whimpering slightly. As he did, she could see the blood oozing from his neck, from a hole that pulsed and contorted as if breathing.
    When she could bring herself to move, she backed out of the alley as quickly as she could, pulling Nor along by the hand. He was trying to speak now, too, to ask her something, but couldn't formulate the words. The result sounded like an extension of the man's whimper projected from her brother's mouth. She kept moving down the street, craning her neck to look behind them (she could almost feel a wound there when she did), her heart beating too fast. There was only one other person on the street. A man with his hood up. She couldn't stop herself from glancing at him to see if he was watching her. It was too far to tell.
    "Gimme your lunch money," she said to Nor.
    The sun had almost set. The clouds near the horizon hung like shattered earthworms, turning from purple to black as the light faded.
    "Your change. Do you have change?" She stopped at the corner near a payphone. There was no one else visible but the one figure, about a block behind them on the opposite side of the street. Nor dug in his pockets, sniffling softly, producing a quarter and a handful of nickels. She stepped into the booth, pushing him in front of her and shutting the door. She put the coins in slowly, one at a time, afraid her fingers would fumble. They were cold, and more numb than they should be. The whole booth suddenly seemed made of ice. She shivered. As the phone rang, she looked around for a street sign, saw nothing. She looked back in the direction of the alley, the lone figure on her side of the street now. "Nor, do you see a street sign?" He pointed to a spot obscured by the phone. She leaned over to get a look while trying to look like she wasn't.
    A flat voice answered. "9-1-1."
    She choked.
    "9-1-1 emergency."
    "Someone's hurt. I saw him. I'm at 17th and Fink."
    "Can I have your name, please."
    "He's in an alley down the street."
    "Name, please."
    "I'm..." She hung up. She wanted her heart to stop beating so loud.
    "It's ringing," said Nor. The phone was ringing. She reached toward it but let her hand fall. When she turned, the man in the hoodie was there, just outside the door. She made eye contact with him before she could stop herself. He had blue eyes and a blonde mustache above his frown. He watched her for a moment, then moved off down the street. She had an overwhelming desire to be able to turn into a cloud of vapor, rather than having to leave the phone booth.
    "Come on, Nor." She grabbed his hand.

    He tried to ask her questions for the rest of the walk home. She had no answers for him. He ran up the stairs as soon as they got in the front door. Dad was watching the evening news, footage of tanks and bulldozers, flaming wreckage. She went up to her room, still trying not to think about neck wounds.
    Jim was asleep on her bed, his paws splayed in the air, his head tilted slightly, the beginnings of a dreaming smile on his face that left a fang visible on one side. She laid down next to him. His ears twitched and he continued to sleep. She scratched his belly, soft enough not to wake him, and thought that she never, ever wanted to see his blood.
    She still felt cold. Sweat began to push out through the pores on her forehead and soak into the pits of her t-shirt. A draft from somewhere in the house ran across her wet skin, carrying more heat away. Bits of glass were lodged in her mind. She could almost see them if she shut her eyes fast enough. Combined, they became the door of the phone booth, a pale palm pressed against it projected from the hooded man, who watched her with a box cutter in his other hand. Nor was there. As she tried to hold him back, he melted into a puddle and squeezed out through the crack beneath the door. The hinges began to move. She pushed on them to stop the door from opening, and when she did it began to fold open the other way.
    The fall of night woke her, still on her bed, Jim still nestled against her shoulder. Atlas stood in the middle of the room, watching her. Instinctively, she tightened her arms around Jim and pulled him close. He was still deep in sleep, breathing evenly. She waited, dreading what might happen, but Atlas just stood there, unblinking. The outlines of his face were clear, but the details were fuzzy in the darkness.
    She was compelled to speak to him. "I never felt that you were a bad person. I want you to know that." He said nothing, only faded away, still watching, leaving behind a shadow that crept out the door to her room.
    When she opened her eyes, Jim was lying against her face, his fur matted with her sweat. She got up slowly and put an extra shirt on against the cold.


---

    "Mr. Rollins? Why aren't you married?"
    "How do you know I'm not married?"
    She pointed. "You don't have a ring on your finger."
    "Oh." He touched the finger with his other thumb, scratching at it as if rotating an invisible ring. "Of course. Why should I be married?"
    "You seem old. I just thought you'd be married to someone by now."
    "Thanks, Hanna. I'm 32." He got up from his chair, sighed at the stack of papers on his desk, and stood at the window, still holding his mug, now massaging his ring finger with the thumb on the same hand. His voice drifted. "She had hair as black as pitch, and eyes of sea foam, as it gathers round the coral at dawn..."
    "Is this going to be a long story?"
    He turned then, uncomprehending, his gaze still off in the distance so that it swept across the entire room in the process. "A story? No....just thinking out loud."
    "Can you tell me the story next time?"
    He sat back in his chair and took up a pencil so that he could grind the point into his open notebook. "That's not a story I will ever tell again. Anyway, that's the prescriptive life. Perhaps prescripts are not for all of us."
    "Do you think you'd be happier if you followed the script?"
    "Maybe, Hanna. Maybe. You're a devil's advocate, you know that?"

    "My dad says you're an alcoholic."
    "I suppose he's not wrong about that. Not when I'm working, though." He took a sip of his coffee for emphasis. "Hanna, I've met your father, as you know. And I only tell you this because I think you already know it as well. Your father is a man who believes that intellectual currency and actual currency are equivalent."
    "What does that mean?"
    He leaned back and scratched his nose. "It means he comes from a society that rewards experience with money."
    "But don't you come from the same society?"
    "Well, sort of. We all do. But some of us find ourselves staring in through the laboratory glass, as it were. So where were we? Experience equals money. Now, what happens if we reverse that statement?"
    "Money equals experience?"
    "Exactly. See what I'm getting at?"
    "I think so. But I have experiences every day, and no one pays me for them."
    "Well, that's because your experiences are of no value."
    She continued to sit, existing. "But that's bullshit."
    He slapped his desk, lightly, as if he were restraining himself. "Yes it is! But understand what I'm saying. This isn't about money. This is about the value behind it. Concepts are conflated into a cloud. Experience is wisdom. Money is experience. Out of that cloud arises an implicit social hierarchy. Does this make any sense?"
    "I....think so."
    "Yeah."
    "You're saying my dad doesn't listen to you because you make less money than him."
    "Uh. I like how I put it better, but yes, that's the idea." He put his feet up on the desk and drained the last of his mug. A mask of gloom had lifted from his face, replaced with a pensive frown.
    Hanna unzipped her backpack. "Smoke?"
    "....Sure, Hanna."
    She pulled out two cigarettes.
    "Ah ah! Nope. Not for you. At least not until you're out of my sight."
    She shrugged and put one back, handed the other to him with a lighter and waited.
    He twirled the lighter between his fingers for a moment, then pushed it back across the desk. "Ehhhh. How about after you leave, okay?"
    She placed her fingers on the lighter. "Do you want to keep it?"
    "I have my own. See you tomorrow."
    She left the office feeling like she had scored a victory in the Generation War; not knowing that her teacher felt the same.

    "Please, Danny?" The most she ever had to do was say please. She found that she could mark out the boys who would do whatever she wanted. They gave off a particular scent.
    "Fine." Danny was a boy she had met during lunch break. He was a junior, but she still thought of him as a kid because he was over half a face shorter than her, and scrawny. He wore military jackets and played with his lighter behind the school. He also sold mushrooms. He handed her a rolled up sandwich bag with the goods inside. "Just take like half of one of these, then wait a couple hours."
    "These look like Wonderland mushrooms."
    "They are. I stole them from a talking caterpillar."
    "You're funny."
    "Don't take more than two. I can hang with you, and stay sober if you want."
    "I'll be okay."

    The skyscrapers in the faraway city lined up beside one another, and if she stood in the middle of her street, she could see them crowding around its vanishing point. Then to the north of them by about 15 degrees, the smokestacks poked over the rooftops, dwarfed by their own output - an ashen thunderhead shaped like the World Tree. Beneath its branches, rain fell as dripping cancer, while the sky above remained clear. Within that shadow, lights flickered and fought to proclaim themselves. Even from this distance, she could make out a flaming cross mocked up in hot pink and Christmas lights up the side of an office tower. She felt drawn to the tiny lights below it, wishing to be close enough to see what each one stood for (or against).
    The clouds bled in her direction, the red day exploded and became the blue night. She dug an old pair of roller skates out of the garage. These she placed on her feet after removing her shoes, and crouched in the road so she could push herself along. With enough speed, she began to raise her center until she felt that she was standing. She would fall if she tried to lower herself again, so instead she waited until the road had stolen her momentum, then crouched to push off again.
    In this manner she continued until she could bring herself to raise one foot enough to push off and speed the other along. She coasted down the center of the street, letting the drivers part around her, feeling the first raindrops pelt her cheeks.
    What she hadn't figured out how to do was turn or stop. So she let herself slow and cease when she approached the next cross street, then clomped over to the sidewalk for the journey home.

    By the start of summer vacation, the rats were out in force. Some blamed the homeless for leaving out food waste or dying in the streets. Hanna watched two of them - rats, not bums - fighting over a slice of cheese pizza lying face down on the sidewalk and surrounded by heat haze. She was out of school and leaning against a brick wall a few blocks from home, smoking. Why here, she didn't know. It seemed like a good place to lean. She blended into the old posters and graffiti that stretched up the block, watching the pedestrians stumble by, the drivers shout at them and each other.
    Her mind wandered as it often did. But these days it skipped over Helen and settled on Atlas. She wondered at his state of mind, then versus now, and if the dead possessed a mind. She wondered if there'd ever been a female active shooter. She wondered if holding a gun made you feel good. She thought about thieves with box cutters and grown men stabbed in alleys, and wondered if security was real, or just an emotion certain people were allowed to feel.
    And she wondered if she could ever get rid of the phantom sensation of sharpened steel pressing against her abdomen.
    She was wearing the roller skates again. She thought of them as hers now, though they must've been Mom's or Dad's at some point. Mom's probably. She pushed off the leaning wall and glided down the sidewalk, steering round the rats and cardboard hovels.

H: i want to help Helen
H: but i don't know how
H: she's like a wall
H: a sexy sexy wall
W: uh
W: anyway
W: I think you need to leave her alone. Helen is strong. Too strong to accept help.
W: My advice is just find something else to think about for a while.
H: Wise Willow


-- Sewer Rats
   Get Wet
   No Matter Where They Swim

    She started a journal that summer:

    The smell is always there but worse in the heat. It comes from underground. Some day I want to know what's down there. Shit and water and rats and what else. There could be a whole city down there. If you drop a used piece of gum down a sewer grate, it could land in someone's eye. They could be looking up my skirt from down there and I wouldn't know. Some day I'll get the gang together and we will take back the underworld. Me, Willow, Marie, and Helen if she ever stops being sad. We'll start by throwing Nor down a manhole as bait. Then when they gather round to eat him or adopt him, we drop a stick of dynamite on their heads and storm the place. Once we expel the natives, we can be queens of the secret world. Peering up skirts and hissing at the surface dwellers.
    I will build myself a throne of rodent skulls
    on which to lounge
    in my alligator skin gown
P.S. Willow is lovely. All my friends are lovely. When we stand together, the room catches fire.
P.P.S. When you were alive, I called you Helen's dad. Now I call you Atlas. I hope you're in Heaven. Or at least have your feet up in a chair with a nice drink in Hell.
    I believe you could find Heaven anywhere if you really wanted to. If you read this, please tell your daughter that. 


-- Our Chemical Retreat

    She thought they should trip at Helen's, with the justification that there was nowhere else to go. But Helen didn't want to be part of it, and Marie offered her house. "My parents won't even notice," she said. "We can stay in my room the whole time. I've got TV and games and a stereo in there." That hooked Willow immediately and Hanna couldn't think of any reasonable objections. So they set up shop in Marie's room just after lunch.
    Marie's parents were....different than what she was used to. They wore bright clothes that hurt Hanna's eyes. The dad wore sandals. They had a pool in the backyard which was becoming an algae farm that no sane person would dip their toe into, for fear of what might lurk beneath the surface. Most egregious of all in Hanna's eyes was that their house was so large that most of it went unused. The den just off the entry hall looked like no one had set foot there in generations.
    The dresser was smiling. The knobs were eyes and the lines between drawers bent upward in a friendly fashion. Contortions were going on elsewhere in the room. Lines that were meant to be straight were not. Right in front of her, there was an indentation in the carpet that had never been there. "What's this?" she asked, running her palm over it.
    "What's what?" said Marie.
    "I don't know. My bones are too sharp." This might be the real problem, she thought. Her skeleton seemed to be growing as the rest of her shrunk around it, as if it drew matter from her flesh. She watched her hand grow thinner and waited to see if her finger bones were going to burst forth from their casing.

    The corner store must have been someone's home in the past. It was house shaped. The siding had been painted blue by someone who cared what color it was, now faded and stripped. The roof was shingled, the windows homey. It was the same store where she bought her cigarettes, far enough from home for discretion and a shorter ways from Marie's house (from which they had just made their escape in the midst of the shroomstorm). It was across Sunny Boulevard, which Marie still referred to as The Bad Street out of habit, because it represented the border between income brackets which those to the east forbade their children from crossing.
    The store was bigger than it looked from the outside, and sported an arcade machine near the toilets. It was broken - had always been broken - but was covered in artwork that Hannah's high mind could lose itself in while her friends wandered up and down the aisles, boxes of mini-donuts tucked under their arms.
    The clerk at the counter seemed to be trying to watch all three of them at once without following them around the store. Hanna noticed this while still studying the side of the arcade cabinet, her palms pressed against it so she could lean forward. In the center of a city street where manhole covers spewed fog, a woman in a miniskirt was standing atop a pile of dead thugs. A bolt of lightning flashed behind her; muscles stood out on her bare arms. Hanna ran her finger up one of those arms to her shoulder and up the lightning to a clouded night sky where a chopper pilot fought his controls against a mighty gale.
    Marie went by on one of her circuits, snagging another bag of chips as she passed. Hanna pointed at the lightning chick. "That's me," she said.
    "Fuck yeah," said Marie around the powdered donut in her mouth.

    "This is an intervention," Marie said to her. Willow nodded assent, always happy to let someone else do her talking.
    "Weird time for it," said Hanna. Marie's dresser was no longer smiling, but something else was, if she could only find it.
    "What? Oh no, not like a drug intervention. We just want to make sure you're okay."
    "Why wouldn't I be?"
    When Marie frowned like she might get punchy, Willow chimed in. "That night at the concert..."
    "Oh."
    "...you told us you were robbed with a knife."
    "...box cutter..."
    "You don't talk about it." Willow looked Hanna in the eyes long enough to be sure she was seen doing it. Maybe longer than she'd ever made eye contact with anyone. "You can talk to us if you need. If you want to."
    Hanna said nothing, felt the muscles in her face moving beyond her control. When they stopped, she told them about the man in the alley, that day with Nor. The first time she'd spoken of it. Then she told them about being afraid to walk home from school. Then just kept on dragging things out into the open. She said she wanted to disappear beneath the city where no one could see her. She said she could still feel the blade on her stomach right now. She said she worried someone would break into her house and hurt her cat. She said she was afraid Dad would get up from in front of his TV and take a gun over to the courthouse and...
    The walls swaying like fields of wheat. The three of them sat at the points of a small triangle on the floor. Willow got up and hugged her, Marie wrapped her punchy little arms around the pair of them. The red day became the blue night.
    The trip got nicer.
    They were flipping through TV channels. At a much slower pace than normal. She looked down and saw that the remote was in her hand and her hand was pressing buttons. She flipped right past the news. It was footage of tanks rolling over houses, which was just more than she could take right then. She settled on a lesser violence: America's Funniest Home Videos. People slipping on ice and caving their skulls in, shattering their tailbones on the edges of trampolines, and other acts of brutality pointed and laughed at by the audience. "I can't take this anymore," she said. "Change the channel."
    "You've got the remote, honey," said Marie.
    "Oh yeah." She tuned it to an old cartoon only to find it filled with animals being squashed or pulverized. "Aaaaahh!" she said, leaning back on the floor and curling up.
    "Maybe you should give me that for a bit." Marie stole the remote and started channel surfing too fast for the eye to follow. 

    Hanna and Willow were in front of the TV still, with controllers in their hands, Hanna feeling like she was being entombed in her bean bag chair, and amazed with herself every time she made the character on the screen jump. Marie was squatting on her desk chair playing the same computer game as always.
    Hanna pushed the A button and the little character jumped again. What was it? It could be a badger or a raccoon or some other furry, tailed creature. When she pressed the B button, nothing happened. There was unrealized potential there. What fantastic new power might it contain? The B button became a puzzle box. She pushed it every 10 seconds to see if it would respond. She varied the intervals at which she pushed it by up to 5 seconds in either direction. She pushed it multiple times in succession, then held it down. When her badger avatar picked something up, she pushed it again. Still no response, but possibilities swam in all directions. Finally, she had to ask. "What does the B button do?"
    "Nothing," said Marie.
    She was crushed.
    "So are we a gang yet?" said Marie.
    "Sure we are."
    "We should go beat someone up. That's what gangsters do."
    "I think they sell drugs. That sounds easier. Even Hanna's little friend can do that." said Willow.
    "He's not my friend. Anyway, does being in a gang make us gangsters?"
    "Of course!" said Marie. "It's practically the same word."
    "I thought gangsters like...wore suits and carried machine guns."
    "Those are mobsters."
    "We at least least need a turf to be a gang."
    "Well, I'm not gonna be a sewer queen. That's your thing, lady."
    "We'll take over the high school." Marie paused her pixelated murderfest and spun around in her chair. "We're always there anyway," Willow continued. "And it's summer, so the teachers won't be around to stop us."
    "I think there are still some teachers there in the summer." said Hanna.
    "What, you mean your boyfriend, Mr. Rollins?" Marie did a boyfriend dance where she sat, which involved hugging herself and massaging her sides.
    "Definitely not."
    "Did you ever get a grade on that paper you wrote?"
    She smacked herself in the forehead and felt it reverberate through her skull and in a line that extended behind her and into the roots she'd laid through time. "I forgot to read it. I don't even know what it was about."
    "That's cause you wrote it drunk at Helen's house. D'you remember that part?"
    "No."

    She was sitting on a stool near the TV. Marie and Willow were stretched out on the bed, asleep. Everything was more normal than it had been all day, except that Helen's father sat in the desk chair. He looked just as she remembered him, but made of other things. His irises were uncut emeralds that caught the lamplight, surrounding obsidian pupils and surrounded by whites of crystal. His hair was made of marble. His clothes too - a button-up shirt tucked into jeans - seemed to have formed around him, every fold sculpted to remain as it was.
    "I've never heard of anyone seeing whole people on a trip. Am I dreaming?"
    He nodded. "Makes sense to me. Cigar?" He held out an exact copy of the cigar that was now in his ivory jaws, already lit. She reached out and took it from him, though the intervening space should have prevented it. It felt real. She took a quick test puff.
    "Eugh. This is gross. How do you smoke these?"
    "Just get used to it, I guess. Man up."
    "Well, I'm not a man, I'm a little girl." She tapped the cigar as if ashing it, and it became a cigarette. Then she could puff away while contemplating the figment before her. "Atlas..."
    "Yes?"
    "You already know what I'm going to ask, don't you?"
    "Of course. Let's get it over with."
    "Why did you kill those people?"
    He leaned back in the chair. "We all have our own demons to fight."
    "So you became one instead."
    He shrugged and let his broad shoulders slip down. It was like watching a refrigerator wilt. "I like the way I put it better."
    "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. That's the saying, right?"
    "Leave it be, Hanna." He did not move his hands, but they were suddenly holding a rifle. A painted black, venomous thing marked with ridges along its barrel and snakeskin on the grip. "Do you know what this is?"
    "It's a gun," she said.
    "An AR-15. Not the model that made me, but it feels similar. Had this one long enough." He balanced it on the floor. "Even now, I remember what it was like to hold, how the barrel tasted."
    "...How did it taste?"
    "Like blood."
    Hanna looked down at her right hand and saw that she was holding the Chinese saber before her as if to defend herself. She grounded its point on the floor in imitation of him. What had Mr. Rollins called it? A dao? "Where did you get this, anyway?"
    He gave off staring at his rifle long enough to glance at the sword hilt between her knees. "That old thing?" He let out a low, bitter chuckle. "As you said, I'm just a dream. If you want the real answer, ask my daughter. She knows enough of the story to tell you. If she feels like it." He set his cigar on Marie's desk next to the keyboard and stood up. "As for me, I've had enough honesty for one evening. Goodbye." He vanished with the rifle, sword, and cigar. Her own cigarette remained hanging between her lips. She stared at the chair he had vacated, then drew in a long breath and exhaled a cloud of smoke that dissolved the room.

    "Mr. Rollins?"
    "Love it when you drop by, Hanna. Don't you have some mischief to get up to?"
    "I'm up to it now." She grinned and continued to chew gum. "Don't you have a life outside this office?"
    "Honestly, no. Plus I have some prep work to do, and I figured you might drop by around this time." He pushed up his glasses and massaged the corners of his eyes. The skin around them sagged. "What's up?"
    "What's the meaning of the universe?"
    "Uh, okay. Sure. The universe is inert matter, Hanna. The meaning is in you."
    "But...didn't you just tell me the universe is meaningless?"
    "You're too bright to actually listen, aren't you? No, I didn't. What I mean is, you ARE the universe."
    "Then what are you?"
    "I'm also the universe. A different iteration, if you like."
    That night, she went home and watched the courthouse video again, saw a low resolution rendition of a double handful of universes being closed off to very little fanfare; just a pop or two.
    "Where does the world go when I close my eyes?"
    "Now that one, I don't have a clever answer for. Let me know if you think of one."


-- Super Electric Witch

    At the edge of her world, where the half-finished or over-finished building lived, there was an electrical box. A few feet from the large hole into which she tossed her empty beer bottles, it cropped up out of the land just off the edge of the concrete that made up the building's first floor. She stepped off into the grass and gave it a hug. It was a cube, all of green metal, about four feet tall. It had rounded edges. It was comfortable to lean up against. It hummed. When she wrapped her left arm around it, a spark drifted up and through her body. The vibration ceased in the vicinity of her chest. Then if she raised her right arm with a pointed index finger, she could fire a bolt of lightning. She mimed a gun with her fingers.
    "What are you doing?" asked Marie.
    "She's an electric witch," said Willow.
    "I'm a SUPER electric witch, bitch." She stored a charge in her heart for a special occasion, then slipped back and fell on her ass.
    "You're a drunk."
    "That too."

    The day after the day after her trip (the previous day had been spent on recovery and reflection) she found herself in Helen's living room. There was a fireplace in the far wall that had never been used. She had the real sword across her knees where she sat with her feet tucked under her on the carpet. "Where did this come from?" She tried to make it sound like a casual question. Like the answer didn't hold the keys to the universe.
    Helen was staring, plucking at carpet strands as if searching for something. "Dad was a vet."
    "A vet?"
    "Not the doctor kind. The war kind."
    She wanted more. Wanted to be told a story. But Helen wasn't in the mood. So she needed to change that mood. What her friend needed was a call to action. Any action. "So we've been talking about the gang..."
    "What about it?"
    "What we really need is a turf. Marie said no sewers. And Willow said it should be the school."
    "The school, huh? That's a contested zone. Plenty of others laying claim to it in the summer."
    "Yeah?"
    "We'll have to drive them out." Helen began to sketch a plan of attack on the carpet.


-- All She Wanted

    Everyone in the neighborhood, everyone in every neighborhood, had their own plot of land, more or less equally distributed, varying only between neighborhoods. It wasn't like that in the city, she thought, but the city seemed distant. Always visible, never real. Once, she had seen her father stand on the front stoop of their house, fists on hips as if surveying a kingdom. She expected him to raise Nor in his arms and wipe his palm across their front yard. "Everything that the light touches, my son..."
    But she didn't know how to want so little or so much. If she wanted anything - which was up for debate - she wanted everything. She imagined herself as queen of the sewers because it was a place that nobody who wanted things wanted, yet it would give her sway over the entire human world; an invisible network of inroads to every place from which she could spy and meddle and tinker. She wanted to own the world from beneath the world. The people would live their lives ignorant of her rule but still subject to it. A puppet master. Those whose power she disapproved of would disappear, dragged into their toilets by alligators. Those she liked would be sung lullabies by mice in their sleep: words of encouragement, subliminal commands, new legislation to be introduced. A holiday would be declared on which citizens would toast the Queen of the Underworld as a concept, unaware that she could hear them through their kitchen sinks.
    The final consolidation would arrive on the day her powers manifested, when she would send bolts of lightning up through the flowing water to electrocute all dissenters in their showers, leaving only those who cheered for The Unnamed Queen.

    The noise to signal ratio in her brain was too high. She couldn't listen to the Gutters since the concert. She'd flipped through the rest of Willow's hoard and settled on a band called Rat Attack. They were louder, angrier, and somehow colder than the Gutters. She played the album on repeat through her headphones, and still heard the energy of the noise when she took them off.
    As the summer dragged on, the neighborhoods grew angry. There was a buzz in the air, encroaching hornets or unrest depending on who you asked. She found herself soaking it in with the sunshine, ranging further afield, usually in the direction of downtown.
    It was out in the streets that she felt the most comfortable, that she was a part of this humming world. When she was shut up at home, the world was outside fighting to break down the door and invade. All the same, she couldn't help looking over her shoulder for the man with the blonde mustache. She practiced her skating, got good at keeping momentum, and stayed in the street so she could outpace anyone on foot.
    She explained all this to the clerk at the mini-mart one day.
    "You've got a better chance of being hit by a car than attacked by a stranger," he said.
    "Accidents don't scare me the same way. Accidents just happen. Crime watches you first, stalks you, imagines what it wants and how to get it."
    He produced a smile with a missing tooth in front. "Crime just happens, like everything else."
    She snagged her cigarettes from the counter and walked out, trying to feel in control of her world.

    On her way out of the house, she skated down the entry hall, past the den. She wasn't supposed to, but Mom was out and Dad wouldn't turn around from the TV. There was something burning on the screen, and for once it wasn't an oil well. "What's happening?" she said.
    "Riots downtown. Right here in our city. Can you imagine? Some people, I swear."
    "What are they mad about?"
    "Who knows? Some people were just born angry."

    Hanna is in the world and the world is in her, but each is something else within the other. Downtown grew closer by the day. She longed to see it wrapped in vines that towered into the clouds, lights flickering, clouds of static hovering in the air.
    She has a nose that is quite large for her face, but out in the world this nose does not exist. The eyes of the world see the bangs cut bowl-shaped across her forehead, see the outline of her face, the way her fangs are somewhat uneven, yet only she can see her nose. Once she pointed it out to Marie, who seemed not to know what she was talking about. Marie, who was never polite in her life except by accident. What is this battle of perception that muddles all to an incomprehensible state? Where lies a truth she can trust?
    She was beginning to feel that the problem might be sensory deprivation. There was nothing in her neighborhood for the eyes and mind to feast on. She felt weak, wan, malnourished as a result. Ravenous. She needed to eat. So she proposed a plan to the gang. They would trek across the 'burbs and dive into the real city, where so much light and so much darkness lived side by side. Perhaps they would learn something, but really all she wanted was the chance to drink in that chiaroscuro and feed on the energy it must contain. Before the summer ended. Just to get her through the next school year.

    When she finally corralled her friends and ventured into the city, she filed away the resulting imagery in no particular order. A man with only seven fingers seated next to a cafe door on the corner, holding a sign with some sort of catechism written on it. The bus ride where the shoulders of strangers both hugged and smothered her. The wall of a subway station made of silly putty, absorbing the dead skin of everyone who walked past, giving slightly when she pushed on it. Helen looking energized for the first time in weeks, bringing back that aura that Hanna was drawn to. A vegan cheese shop, called simply A Cheese Shoppe, with the words "Unnaturally Cheesy!" printed below in the middle of a golden sunburst. The sidewalk in front of the entrance was a galaxy of dried gum.
    It rained throughout the afternoon. They had one umbrella among the four of them, but Helen found another somewhere. The rising water flushed a dead rat from wherever it was hiding, out across the sidewalk. Or maybe it had drowned in the rain. It drifted out of an alley and down into the gutter. Marie squeaked when it passed her feet, and then began to dance as if it were the right thing to do. The raindrops made a mist around her shoes. 
    There was more, but not something she could attach an image to. When she was with her friends in the city, she felt....powerful. Like it all belonged to her. The jagged towers swept inward as she stretched out. They formed the points of the crown that might rest on her head.

    A dream that was always recurring seemed to be evolving as well. She would begin by skating down a familiar street. The street would give way to a tunnel descending into the earth. The interior walls rounded, turned fleshy. It was unclear if she was breathing air or water, but there was definitely a current to the substance that surrounded her. Glowing red globules flowed past, glomming to her arms and legs; then a steady rhythm that was all around, but distant. Sometimes she moved with the current, other times struggled against it. Branching paths curved forever around a center that she wanted more than anything to reach. When they separated, she had to choose one, yet had the sense that they all went in the same direction. No guarantee that it was the direction she wanted to go.

    Willow sat in the booth as if it were the desk in her office, back straight and hands clasped on the table, not touching her fries or the shake next to them. "So...What's everyone going to be when they grow up?"
    Helen gave off biting her nails and said, "I am what I am right now."
    "You yam what you yam!"
    "Shut up, Marie."
    "Damned if I will." She talked and chewed at the same time. "I'm going to be an A-10 Warthog when I grow up. Blasting Eye-rackees into red mist."
    "You mean a pilot?"
    "That's what I said, isn't it?"
    "It is not."
    Hanna stuck fries in her nose and left them there until grease burned the insides of her nostrils, then tilted her head back and shot them at Marie, who dodged one and got hit between the eyes by the other; then retaliated by catapulting ice cream into Hanna's hair with her plastic spoon. Hanna shrieked.

    The streets turned alive as the light faded, right when they had to go home. 

    "Aren't we supposed to talk about my future plans?"
    "What do you mean?"
    "Like, what I'm going to study, what I'm supposed to be when I grow up."
    "I'm not a guidance counselor, so no. Anyway, you're not _supposed_ to be anything."
    "But I'm supposed to have a plan."
    "Not for years yet. You can figure that out in college, if then."
    "Is that what your counselor told you, when you were my age?"
    "Ouch, Hanna. Ouch. Okay, you want some advice?"
    "If you have some."
    "You're not a good writer."
    "Ouch right back."
    "But you have a unique perspective, and you're still very young. I think it's something you should think about. If it's something you enjoy. That's all I have. And more than I get paid for."
    "Thanks."

    That night, they took the train home. Helen was sitting next to her. "Sometimes, I talk to him, you know," she said. "My dad. Just in my head. And he talks to me."
    Hanna avoided looking at her friend, staring at her own fingers instead. "What does he say?"
    "Whatever he's supposed to say. It's like...like the image of a person in your head understands you more than the real person ever could. Which means I don't know how much the image matches the real person. Which means maybe I didn't understand him, either. Did he have an image of me in his head? One that he could talk to, that actually understood him?"
    Hanna put her head on her friend's shoulder. The train shook, lights streaking by in the darkness. Some minutes passed before she said what she was thinking. "Do we even want to understand someone who would do that?"
    "Maybe if just one person had, he wouldn't have--" Helen shut her mouth to keep whatever was inside from escaping. They said nothing else.