Work Text:
On the thirty-ninth day, the boombox dies without warning.
A voice shattered mid-sentence, a spurt of feedback so abrupt the silence that follows is bell-chime shrapnel, she should know. Without music, without words ricocheting out of hard plastic, dusk takes on an eerie early morning quality. The new sort of it, the unnatural. No cars on for miles for her to wonder about, no broken bottles, no nightlife, no life, full stop. Nothing but the deafeningly low roll of sand corroding itself.
Sighing, Carol bends down to examine the casing. Whatever good it does, when a vestigial synapse in her thinks, great, now I gotta dig up the warranty. And another, fresher one, commands her fingers to bend in the shape of a handset. Both equally stupid.
She sighs again, the day's weariness pushes against her vocal cords, her mind bereft of even the lyrics she once had to wrestle away from blank pages.
It's—funny (yeah, let's go with that), isn't it?
Funny how promises of atom bombs are, orange sparks on speed bumps drifting like ashes from a car she doesn't give a shit about, the absence of howling.
On her way back from Vegas—the city that never sleeps carrying on a mirage of itself, does it comfort him?—, the city lights that used to keep her awake buzzed like warm rain as she sped past ghost towns, seconds of respite before it scorched; bug, magnifying glass. She had the drone of the car's engine to snuff her thoughts under, the flutter of still-damp hair, a measly, temporary goal to reach. Anything that could feasibly pass for purpose. God knows there's not much of that to go around these days.
All boiled beneath the lamplight.
Because it's all for show, this. This—attention, care. Or whatever they insist on calling it.
"If you wanna leave, then fucking leave," she mumbled, a seamless sequence of dark in her wake. They can't get inside her brain, so what's the point of looking after her? They cannot touch her—her dry lips split around it, though she couldn't be sure what shape they took—so they'll dangle their so-called life preserver in her periphery and, what? Hope she gets tired of the water? Well, good thing they're too stupid for irony.
The hum of the lights was chatter, a sound she didn't make. Her headlights were off, so they draped her in white; it made her fingers dent the wheel. All the brains in the world, every person she's ever met, and they still don't—
One at a time, she pried her palms off the steering and scrubbed luminescence off her forearms. Disguised the warmth as her own.
Ever since then (and she isn't counting. How stupid would that be? Implying there's something on the other end, someone to relay the details to, anything but hedonistic bubbles of near-unconscious), she's kept the boombox on, one way or another. Until it's time to replace it with the rustling of bedsheets.
Fireworks at odd hours of the morning, when she can't sleep. Every blast audible from all the way down on Earth. Sometimes they spark too close to cigarette ash; she's stopped looking.
Last week, she couldn't find the holes at the golf course, so she found the maintenance shed and busted the lock with a crowbar. Drove the lawnmower around until her ears popped. She tried to teach herself how to skip rocks at the decorative pond, glimpses of fish carcasses flashing between the disturbed green with each sinking attempt. But she lost herself in the waterfall beyond.
Carol tries to do something different each day. Then she comes home, watches the screen. The same familiar, granulated mouths move endlessly without her catching a single word they say, eats the same readymade dinner, sleeps in the same side of the bedsheets, even though they were changed the morning before they arrived, before the world ended, and they never smelled of Helen at all.
She doesn't write. Not a word.
She remembers rising from her desk, finding Helen downstairs and insisting she'd get so much more writing done without deadlines looming in the horizon, if she could just afford to write by porcelain clatter and indistinct conversation, cheap refill coffee warming her fingertips between keystrokes, without someone sheepishly wriggling themselves into view and knowing her name, hardly much else. Without someone looking over her shoulder, into the screen, where sometimes she'd still slip on a pronoun or two before she had the chance to scrub that plaintive 'S' from it. Before she'd plastered over her weakest sentences, hauled them halfway adequate, like it'd outweigh that Romantasy label she had to scoff at before anyone else could (and her disgust lays in a missing consonant and a hundred more descriptions of bare male chests and scratchy facial hair than she ever wanted to write).
If she had all the time in the world, she'd hide away in her studio, curtains closed, to write the way she used to. Back when it was easy. She'd experiment with styles that don't fit Wycaro without the fear she might never find that voice again if she lets go, maybe find her way back without trying. She'd polish Bitter Chrysalis until her name on the cover became a mirror.
She does not write at all.
What's the point of gutting her words, tightening each line, when it's the soul of it, the woman at its core, what lacks—well, all of it. Substance isn't in the words, any writer worth a damn knows that.
So, Bitter Chrysalis is a no-go, another mediocre book to her name, without profit to show for it. Just fine, just meh. But there's gotta be something, right? Inside her. Something else, something good. Something her, and good. Instead of compromise and mutual exclusivity.
What's the point of searching for it?
Hell, what's the point of anything, hm? No one's gonna read it and mean a word of what they say. The twelve others who could don't give a shit about what she has to say. Not even when all she wanted to do was help them.
Most of her life has been a play, a rewrite of what she really wants to say for the silence that will make other people stay. So she could, twice a week, she could sit on Zoom and brainstorm with them. Robots, and—and whatever else. For the people who took all she had, because they're all that's left.
… There was this—fan, she supposes, at her first signing, back when her hand still shook over the scribble of her own name, on her own work. Back when she still wanted to love the Wycaro she'd given the world, instead of the one embedded splinter-like under her haphazardly coated nails. A young woman, with watchful eyes and her own brand of paper clip dents in her palms slid a copy of her second Wycaro across the tiny table, thrummed on its edge and asked what made her start writing.
Carol lied, of course. A sliver of truth within it, as with any good one; a lie regardless. A brighter, faux-leathered tale of ink splotches on plastic: I had something to say. Something I knew no one else could say.
Then came the rest, superimposed signatures as Carol thought about Raban's standoffishness, all the sneering that hid a soft heart for Lucasia to cradle. He wanted her to; for a long time, he'd wished for it. Even if he tried not to let it show, he'd been hurt. Women swooned, promising him in long-winded not-reviews that they saw him too, that they'd chip away at him until they could embrace the warm bits. Carol walked along Lucasia in her determination, saw her occasionally trample those around her, herself in the process, her propensity to miss the forest for the trees. Her readers loved her, reassured her when she found herself stuck in the aftermath, said oh, she's just like me. But she isn't.
Raban's pessimism, Lucasia's self-destructive curiosity. All the different versions of herself she played to get to where she wanted, in spite of herself.
Carol wrote all of it, lightly at first, dipped her toes in to see what the world could think of her, if she wasn't her. Wrote because she had something to say, yes, a story to tell. A bid for community to make, however small. Thought that, maybe, if she detached herself from her words, then someone would bear to listen.
Perhaps someone would find Carol Sturka in there, laid out in digestible pieces, free of the repulsiveness that seems to ooze out of her the longer people sit in her vicinity, the longer her mouth moves.
In Helen's voice, she could almost believe it when people's praises towards her unraveled into messages for the characters themselves.
In her own, she rushed down every run-on sentence, zeroed in on each misplaced period. All those people who loved her—who loved her work—, saw Lucasia and Raban as printed letters. The realization shouldn't have been half as devastating as it felt.
All those people, sung praise for something that doesn't carry as much of herself as she hoped it would. It'd change everything, that discarded 'S'. Switch places with her in oblivion.
They love someone who doesn't exist. They can't love her, not even now. There's no consciousness, no active choice in it; it's as meaningless as empty promises of salvation for a woman she could never be, either. Whatever that means.
The one thing she thought—knows she should—love, tainted. The one thing she can grasp, that still belongs to her. Even though it wasn't meant to. Everyone's and no one's. In a world where almost everyone knows everything there is to know about her, Carol has never felt less seen.
The black plastic of the boombox scrapes the pavement as Carol sits back in her lawn chair, fingers absently skidding the air to find the last beer in the pack. For a few missing seconds, fizzing fills the air, rising up towards the atmosphere, scattering in monochrome glitter halfway through. Liquid weight in her gut runs warm, like thawing palms. Each sip is more distant than the last. A lie she never used to tell herself. No need for them, back when there was noise.
It's been years since it burned going down, but she downs it like it does. No one's around to see it, anyway.
"What?" She remembers smiling over the rim of her glass. Not every night, no, but often enough it settled into habit. "We all have our vices."
Helen, cigarette pack in hand, feet aimed for the door, offered a flat smile and a light shake of her head.
Lies need recipients. Or a pervasive mastery of shadow puppets that Carol never stuck around silence enough to build. With Helen, she could pretend not to know she needed it, forego the muscle memory acquired in creaky bunk beds, pathetic little benches at the edge of changing rooms, the soot stuck between tiles. She never planned for… after. It'd been so long. Helen's hands rendered it pointless.
No one knows when the rug's getting pulled, how it'll happen. She should've known better.
(Wild flowers have started peeking between the ceramic tiles. They're this soft shade of purple Helen loved.
Carol knows exactly what they're feeding off of.
She takes another swig.)
They never said it out loud (it occurs to Carol that it's those things what slosh about her with every gulp. Those things. Those. The ones she should've exhumed from her goading cynicism), but they knew it was a chasm between them and those around them. Knew it was Carol's doing. Maybe Helen thought to acknowledge it would be to bestow it fangs.
Always—always—the worst of her trampling the rest, however much there is of it. An ill-timed, nervous joke to garnish her latest tirade, her huffing blowing silver linings away, soil-curdling insistence.
Some of it, she's able to conceal. Wycaro's mediocrity, her disenchantment with something she could've loved anyway, in grumbling about how hard it is to chip away at her real self with it perpetually on her plate. At least she doesn't have to fret anymore about how much better she could be, huh?
The rest, her black hole of a mind, all the refuse that comes rushing out of her the second she remembers she's choking, her wounded-animal fear—it overloads people's senses, and what little she is underneath no longer fits.
Honesty is a roaring flame. A lingering glance under the wrong eyes, a slip of the tongue. And then she's 1265 miles away getting pumped full of drugs, a fake therapist rubbing her hand as he walks her through traumas she just didn't know she had, urging her to open her heart out to love—true love—again, stabbing lightning into her thigh if she dares linger on the hazy carousel of women she's forced to flip through. Oh, how sweet life will be when she realizes no happiness can come from straying. Her shame, that's the proof. Do good things ever feel wrong?
Her fingers dent the empty can.
In a way, they managed to scrub the lesbian out of her. Sanitize, mask it, if only because she hated them more than she hates herself. Drill unsteadiness into mortification at the mere thought of anyone figuring her out again.
The world had ended, and she bit her tongue so hard it bled when she found herself surrounded by families and the stranger the world extirpated from the moat of her ribs. Why, she etched into her palms. Why is she the only one who's alone? Feeling her eyes glaze over, she pushed forward, swallowed Helen's name in full, the acid burn of my wife (she died. She was all I had). Business as usual.
Except they all know now. Every last one of them. Carol wonders, hearing droplets patter around in the can, if they told. A simple answer to that what the hell is wrong with her? at least one of them certainly spat after her little show in Bilbao.
Nothing is hers—theirs; hers, and Helen's—anymore.
They'd go for the kill, if they could, erase what the smiling assholes before them could not. And then it'd all be peachy, right?
Twelve other jerks on Earth and she still gets paralyzed at the thought of them tinkering about and stumbling into the truth. Sharing grimaces over Zoom; no wonder she's damaged.
Whatever. What's their opinion worth when they don't know her? They don't care to.
She shouldn't, either.
Still she emptied her memory card to sterilize a goddamned—doomsday recording. Smile, follow the lines. Dig the heels of her palms in the couch cushions, hold her breath. Still she inhaled, exhaled in front of an ostentatious hallway mirror, nodded to herself to wring out unadulterated courage, from her core, for once, and ask the only person who'd stay back for her—she knows—for company. His silence kicked the air right out of her. Plunged her, swift, into the skin-crawl of overstaying after just having stepped through the doorway. Of staring people in the face, a flimsy, taut smile for armor, and shrinking, pulling apart under their gazes. She guesses she should at least be grateful Koumba had it in him to humor her. For a time. Out of pity. As positive of a emotion she can instigate in people.
Everyone makes up their mind about her within minutes. Why would it be any different now? With her chest wide open, it's harder to pick up the pieces.
But, what's new, right? The whole world (yep. The whole wide world. Every newborn, the second their lungs swell. Every fan of hers that used to exist. That one little girl from Lesotho. Especially her, unbound by the—treehugger imperative, or whatever) hates her.
That's right. That's the truth. Always has been.
It wouldn't leave her mouth then. Helen knew. Shoved her gently by the shoulder until Carol made room for her. Rolling her eyes, she asked if making sense wasn't part of her job.
After all, how could the whole wide world hate her, when she had so many fans waiting on her word?
How could the whole wide world—all of it—hate her, when Helen knew her better than anyone, and she held her so sweet her thoughts melted? Let's see you find a comeback for that.
But she's gone. What's left of the world a mindless swarm that still dared steal her, the eleven others like her holding Zoom meetings to decide her presence is so terribly disruptive, and a no-show who'd probably feel the same. Pretending she doesn't exist unless it's to yell at her or, or maybe teach the others to tiptoe around their feelings when they don't give a shit about puppeteering their loved ones around like meat suits, melded in one, upholding the act with familiar faces and denial. Sorry, right. Too crude. It isn't Carol's fault that she can see it. That she can't—can't not see it. Wasn't given the choice.
So, yeah. Twelve people and the rest of the world who, as one, decided to abandon her.
Helen wouldn't allow her to believe it, but in the quietest nights—no quieter than these ones—Carol knew she was the exception.
Because… because what is there to love, hm? What did Helen love? Would they answer? Would it satisfy her? Would she have the guts to spit out the question?
Carol is a cesspool, groaning under a pile of furs, in her wife's chest, under the fucking Northern Lights, corroding what she touches. She could've committed them to mind, traced every undulation with her fingertips, filed the colors in her eyelids to later wax poetic about, scribbled above purple sand. A love letter the world could read without understanding. She didn't.
Would Helen even have liked it?
Stranded with herself for the first time, hearing the clatter of millions of bones on pavement, Carol wonders how Helen could even stand to be—
… This is exactly what she didn't want, isn't it?
Unseen from here, Carol looks back to where she knows her grave is, swallows hard.
Memory. That's all she's got now; so easy to tarnish, in hands like Carol's. Helen isn't here—isn't really here—to coerce her arms down, so Carol must. For them both.
The beer can flattens under her heel. It's the last one out here, and the crawling in her gut remains, the sting of sand in her eyes finds the back of her nose. If only this tolerance she's built in her search for relief could morph into armor. If only the burs of loneliness in her chest stopped burning like alcohol did down her throat. Time. They've both had so much of it.
And all she's left with is a breathalyzer.
The chair groans as Carol's head leans back as far as it'll go. She imagines the sounds stars make, because no one can hear them. Thinks about the sand behind her yard, finding ways to narrate how it slid off the wood from a ship. What was she avoiding?
Did it look anything like fading red ash, shedding at the corner of her eye? Was she this sure they'd be gone if she turned?
For lack of an answer, she laughs. A hollow, hoarse thing dislodging her jaw. Hissing between her teeth like a snarl.
Good luck, she thinks, her head pounding too loud for words. Good fucking luck.
Their lives must be so entertaining, so perfectly tailored to their liking to stop the truth from seeping. They must be so satisfied with themselves knowing her videos are lodged among their trash, while their husks of a family massage their shoulders and answer stupid questions like a glorified Alexa.
You think you're less alone than I am? she scoffs, chokes on it. All those pseudo-people waiting on their word, playing the role of the bodies they inhabit for as long as they're in sight. It's so easy to forget right? Oh, right, minus that we worming its way into every sentence. Throw in their psychotic smiling as they tell you they drink slushied humans and you totally should too real soon, and it might get tricky.
A lot to be said about blissful ignorance, huh? The vice of the weak. If they were just a hair less scared, they'd see how vacant the world is and come running. But they're too fucking stupid for that.
Perhaps they deserve what's coming for them, then. Bet they've already wolfed down all their lies about riverside walks and a decade-long water slide to starvation. Serves them right.
It makes no difference for her. She's already alone as can be. Whether the other twelve choose to drown in their perfect mirage or not, Albuquerque stays empty, and Helen—what remains of her—stays a wraith. Not her at all.
Close your eyes, Carol hears in her voice. Zosia's arms would know how to hold her, somehow. Stolen memory. Carol isn't that kind of person. She'll never be, or she wouldn't be here in the dark, in the first place.
So, fuck them. Fuck their votes against her, their self-harvesting machines, their complacency. Maybe they didn't have anything worth losing, but she does.
The can groans under her heel, small and bent out of shape, same as their faces, every word they ever spoke. That's how much they matter. It's the only way she can stomach the cold.
Only Helen ever mattered. Her thoughts—her white-hot lies—, the honesty with which she'd delivered her vows a decade ago, soon as they could marry, never stopped weaving them into the strands of Carol's hair, cotton candy be damned. How deft her lips at stifling her rot, like she was meant for nothing else, the way Carol feared she might be.
Doesn't take a genius to figure out why Carol's been drowning since she left. She feels it now, the gunk in her lungs.
She'll drown. A million and one times she'll drown before she lets them have her, as awful as the parts that constitute her are. It's all she's got. The last thing in the world that belongs solely to her.
If they said she'd been threading water, instead, she would've been inclined to agree. Wouldn't have; they'd never know. Mouthfuls of it went down every now and then, still do, but her feet are one with the ocean floor. All she ever needed was Helen to keep her head above the waterline.
How selfish. Carol knows better than anyone the kind of torture having only herself for company is. Wouldn't wish it upon anyone.
Shouldn't.
Dragging her limbs, she heads for the door, fetches the last of her aerial fireworks, beer, and batteries. Anything to muffle the wind.