Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash
Ahead, outside the nearly emptied Starbucks, Fern spots a lab attached to a stick of a woman. Her arm, tugged by the leash, moves in semaphore as the dog traces scents, circling with quick tapping paw. A man exiting the Starbucks hands the woman a coffee and she gives him the leash. With their free hands, they interlace. It goes: coffee, hand, hand, leash, dog. Lucia is still on the line when the dog is out of sight.
“What?” Fern asks into the pause.
“You okay?” Lucia counters.
“Yeah,” Fern can hear the gentle shhh of the phone sliding across Lucia’s dash, having come unstuck from its mount. Lucia must be turning or coming to a stop. “Yeah, sorry. I’m just spaced today.”
“That’s okay. Listen, I’m almost home and I have to unload the groceries, so I’ll need both hands. Talk soon?”
“Talk soon. Love you.”
“Love you.”
Fern is nearly home as well. She puts the phone in her bag and tucks her gloved hands more deeply into her pockets, waiting for the light to turn. She pictures Lucia in Georgia, unloading the bags from her little purple car.
As she crosses the street, Fern takes off her N95, reaching up to rub behind her ears where the straps have dug in. She likes to take off her mask in crosswalks, knowing there are people nearby, protected by glass, who will see the whole of her face.
In the lobby, she checks the mail again. The box is still empty. And then there is no delaying it. Two flights up, and she is back in her studio. Two rooms, a bathroom and a living room, that — thanks to a hot plate, a sink, and a carefully balanced minifridge — also served as a kitchen. In the corner she dubbed her bedroom: a nightstand, a bookshelf, a circular mirror, a twin bed against the windowed wall.
It’s only six o’clock, but she knows she won’t leave the house again today. There’s nothing else to do.
She takes off her boots, washes her hands, and pulls out her phone to watch TV on her bed until it’s late enough to sleep.
The neighbors are playing music, again. The bassline carries even when the song has quieted, even through the pauses that make her certain it’s over. Then it starts again baa-da-da-da-da deeerrrrr.
The music always starts after 11. There are nights when she wonders if it’s on purpose. Do they want her to crack? To not just rap at the ceiling with a broom handle, but emerge from her unit, climb up the stairs and knock on their door? Do they want her to seek them out?
She wouldn’t complain. Once, at the thai place down the block, a server had brought her shrimp pad see ew instead of chicken. Her boyfriend had urged her to send it back — she was allergic to shellfish, epipen-in-the-purse, identify-your-next-of-kin allergic — but she hadn’t been able to. She drank her Sprite and ate the fried wonton strips that came with the table.
“The waitress won’t care if you send it back. It’s her job. She won’t think you have it in for her, or whatever.” Fern ate the wontons. When her boyfriend was in the bathroom, she switched his green curry with her untouched plate.
“Why is it okay to take my dinner, but not okay to just send yours back?” He had asked upon returning, indignance raising his left eyebrow.
“Because she doesn’t have to like me. And because you do,” she smiled and dipped a wonton strip into the curry sauce.
Turns out she had been wrong about that last part.
So, she won’t go upstairs to complain to the neighbors, even as the clock tips closer to three in the morning. She won’t even tap the broom to the ceiling. She leaves the fan on and stares.
Some days, she can feel her heart, the strange edges within. She worries about its physicality when the rest of her, her hands, her chin, her elbows, all seem to be fading. Her heart has always confused Fern. It speaks directly, but in clipped, Magic 8 Ball phrases. Don’t count on it. Cannot predict now. Ask again later. Signs point to yes.
When the neighbor's music fails to keep her awake, her own heart takes up the job, tapping out an irregular rhythm, sending thunderous waves of blood past her ears.
“Do you think you’d know if I had a heart attack?” she asks when Lucia picks up on the other end.
“If you fell in a forest, would you make a sound?” Lucia replies, voice groggy with interrupted sleep.
“I’m being serious,” Fern insists.
“Honey, I don’t know. I think if you didn’t pick up my calls, I’d have a pretty real cause for concern.”
“Okay,” Fern pauses. “So you’re saying I don’t need Life Alert.”
“I’m saying you need to go to sleep.”
With the phone hung up, Fern pulls up Netflix and selects a show about a young woman living in a loft in Los Angeles with three men she finds on Craigslist. She sets the phone screen down on her nightstand and listens to the indistinct voices from the show blend with the ceiling fan until she falls asleep.
Outside Fern’s curtains, it is snowing. She turns out all the lights and pushes the curtains open wide to watch the flakes fall. The storm is fast enough that staring at any particular plot of air only gives the blurry impression of weather, the idea of movement. Following a group of flakes with her eyes, she can trace the pattern of the wind - not just down, but up, over, doubled back. Under the streetlight, they all seem to slow.
She watches passersby wander through the domes of light thrown by the streetlamps. First, a pair walking a dog in an orange vest, then an ill-timed bike rider, keeping a sturdy grasp on the handlebars. For long stretches of time, no one at all.
There are two people now — impossible for her to tell their age from the distance, but she imagines they, like her, are in their 20s. The snow has stopped all car traffic and they spread the length of the lane to throw a football. She watches as the run to retrieve near misses and slide in the gathering sleet. By the time they retreat back inside, they have still not looked up and met her eyes. She wishes they had seen her see them. In the dark of her room, she waves her hands in front of her eyes.
Fern doesn’t leave the house for days. She doesn’t have to, which is a lucky thing; everyone says so. Still, the miles unwalked gather in the middle of her calves and push. They grow tight beneath her ribs and crowd around her heart. She knows she should go outside. But knowing something in her mind and feeling it in her body isn’t the same as making the two connect. So, Fern texts Lucia.
Please help me get out of bed. I suck today. And Lucia calls.
“Are you wearing pants?” Lucia says, by way of greeting.
“Yes. Well, no. I’m wearing my indoor pants and I have to go outdoors.”
“Your indoor pants?”
“Yes. You can’t wear your indoor pants outdoors, or they’ll get outdoors germs on them.”
“Ah, like how you can’t wear your daytime clothes as PJs or your bed will get gross.”
“Yeah, that rule applies less now that my bed is my only furniture and I never leave my fucking apartment. But the spirit’s the same.” Fern says, rooting through her sock drawer.
“Are you changed yet?”
“Getting there.”
The gravity pulls especially hard and she feels almost inanimate: a doll with a full narrative in the head of another, but nothing of her own. She wonders, briefly, if she will become less solid when Lucia hangs up the phone, if she will become just the smallest bit translucent.
“Okay, I’m good, I’m dressed, I’m out the door. Clap if you believe in fairies,” Fern says, and Lucia claps.
There are good days, too. Days of unprompted, buzzing euphoria, in which Fern can be her own witness. It is neither entirely who she is, nor a false self, just another jagged glinting piece of person that heats and cools and cuts when reached for, but sometimes falls into place all on its own.
In these moments, on these days, she can see the throughline of herself. She finds the little things that live at the corner of her existence and names them. Each is small and inconsequential, but pointing to them within herself feels like brushing dirt away from something essential, like Adam naming the animals - and so they came to be.
Fern is outside at the edge of one of these days, watching the last of the daylight turn pink and disappear from a park bench, when Lucia calls.
“I can’t figure out why I feel like this and I can’t shake myself out of it.” Lucia says at the other end of the line, panic constricting at her throat, thinning her words.
“You don’t have to,” Fern says. “It’s okay.” And it is.
Lucia’s childhood friend is getting married in August. Fern pulls at her cuticles as she listens.
“So they’re just…. leaning into the restrictions?”
“It’s in August. She seems to think we’ll all be vaccinated by then,” Fern can hear the eye roll.
“Bold.”
There’s a pause, and Fern doesn’t jump to fill it. She listens to the shift.
“We’re supposed to go dress shopping — the two of us and her mom and my mom. Which is exactly how we talked about it when we were little. It all feels so normal.”
“Very idyllic,” Fern says.
“It’s strange. To be living out some part of what I imagined my future would look like back before I knew what to imagine.”
“You’re finally coming of age,” Fern offers.
Lucia lets out a short loud laugh. “When do you age out of coming of age? Which part are we in now?”
“I think I got stuck somewhere around ‘of.’”
“I’ve been hung up in ‘coming’ for years, now.” They both laugh.
“It’s just weird, I don’t know,” Lucia starts again. “These arbitrary milestone moments. Beyond being totally antifeminist and heteronormative or whatever, they’re also just moments. What are we supposed to do with all of the in-between? I mean. Isn’t most of it the in-between?”
“Now’s more in-between than ever.”
“Now more than ever.” Lucia says, and they laugh again.
Fern spends too much time on-screen today, too much time in video conferences watching her own face reflected back in the camera. Her skin camouflages with the wall behind her, all texture falls out of her hair, until she is just color blocks on a screen, doing her very best not to scream just to see if anyone in the computer may notice.
She closes the computer, but it’s not enough. She leaves the apartment and listens to music so loudly that anyone passing by could hear it leak out the other side, but no one passes by. She walks to the grocery store and picks up items at random - cheese, gum, ice cream - until she sees enough people to quiet the chasm within her. She pays the cashier and walks back to her apartment.
It is not enough. When the door closes behind her, that is clear almost immediately. She puts the groceries down on the counter and paces, feeling the heel-toe heel-toe against the uneven wood. These are her feet, her calves, her knees, but they blur. She tries to jump without landing too hard to spare her downstairs neighbors, but it doesn’t work. Without a hard landing, a jump is just a jump and not a stomp. So she stomps hard, once, twice. Three times. Nothing but silence comes back to her.
Tears almost come several times, and she courts them as relief. Tears are physical, and hot, and sobs establish presence. But the relief she feels at the idea of crying calms her enough that the crying itself doesn’t come, like something caught in periphery that won’t focus headon. She laughs out loud each time they evade her, the panic sliding more deeply into place, slotting neatly into her breastbone. It is dark outside, so she puts on her brightest clothes before she leaves. At first she sprints, then she slows. She circles the block three, four, five times and feels the stomp stomp of running feet. Still, still — it is not enough.
“I can’t cry,” she says, breathless on the phone when Lucia picks up. “And I think my ice cream melted?” And then the tears do come.
All stories are change. Before the lockdowns, she would sit in coffee shops, art museums, public parks and wait for the change, build herself around its prospect. Sunday afternoons she would go to the coffee shop on the North edge of town and watch the other patrons. Once: two men in the corner booth, scrap paper, highlighters, textbooks, knees touching under the table. One’s pen ran out of ink, and the other pushed a replacement across the table.
A different day, different table: a middle-aged man scribbling out song lyrics on the cardboard coffee sleeve, waiting for his child to return from the bathroom. None of these people saw Fern watching them, or at least, they didn’t let on. So, she played her part as well. She would place her notebook purposefully, leave the cover of her book visible. She would adjust her glasses, and straighten her skirt, and take long, tall strides to retrieve sugar packets and pour cream. She gave her potential onlookers plenty of time to think — well, whatever they may want to think about her. She could see it — see herself — through the lens of the men in the corner, and the girl and her father settling into their table. She would build a multiverse for herself, of herself, through the eyes of these strangers.
She thinks about the coffee shop now, in her apartment, scrambling eggs on the hot plate. It’s 11PM, but she leaves her music playing, wondering if any of the neighbors can hear, if they may come to her door with a complaint.
“The other day, my roommate asked me what we talk about and I didn’t know what to tell her.” Lucia says down the telephone line.
“Cause we basically talk about nothing?” Fern replies.
“Exactly. But we talk about nothing for a good chunk of time. So. Hard to explain.”
“Well,” Fern says. “Most things are nothing.”
“Now more than ever,” Lucia says, and somewhere in the telephone wire, they smile the same smile.
“But we’re not,” Lucia says across the distance.
“No, we’re not nothing.” Fern calls back.
Sarah Perret-Goluboff is an emerging writer based in Chicago. Her writing can be found in Bridge Eight Press, 805 Lit + Art, and Five South. Most recently, her work was nominated for Sonder Press’ Best Small Fictions 2021 Anthology.