Features

Last summer I killed the man in the mirror. Well, not all of him, just the infected part. Just the part that smiled too widely and laughed too freely. The part who had let his feet be nailed to the floor and who welcomed the brick-and-metal vines creeping up his legs. He had been getting too comfortable for too long, always leering from storefront windows and dark computer screens and polished cars. He had set up shop behind my eyelids, rented out a nice little room in the back of my head. He mocked me with the enormity of his presence. My apartment was covered in his tracks, his socks, his smell, his existence baked into the very floorboards so that every step screamed my—his—our name. 

I had killed him seven times already, and I would continue to do so for as long as I lived. The signs of his arrival had been the same as always. I felt heavier walking down the stinking streets, as if something was holding on to my ankles. When I walked into diners the waiters already knew my order, so I resented the eggs they put before me. I suddenly no longer needed to consult my phone to get around; my traitorous feet had memorized the route on their own. And when all these signals coalesced into one horrible sense of routine, there he was, in every reflection. And very quickly I felt the thing that always followed his resurrections. It happened on my way back from the deli. It was getting dark and cool out, but as I walked I burned. My lungs combusted; flames exploded up my throat, sizzled past my spit and found oxygen beyond the gap in my teeth. Black smoke rolled off my skin in waves. I imagined myself taking off like a bullet. Eyes forced open by speed. The air crackling in front, behind, all around me. I saw my skin melt, my hair crumble. Pure energy ignited my bones, burrowed into the marrow. I gasped at the pain and every car on the block seemed to pump their horns at the same time. One thought circled in my head.

The city knows me too well. There’s too much of me here.

One of my friends came to my door the following week. His name started with a K and he looked smudged, like a drawing with too much shading, like old letters read too many times. The place where his face was seemed angry, or perhaps sad. It changes each time I remember it. He stepped around my paintings and stood between two cardboard boxes, half full. It was raining outside and the water clinging to the edges of his hair made him even blurrier. 

“You just got here.” His voice was staticky. 

“It’s been two years.”

“You just got here.”

“I’m bored of the city,” I muttered, inspecting an old charging cable. The wires poked out at one end. Sparks jumped out of the wall when I unplugged it. “This’ll probably hold for a few more weeks right? I hate buying airport chargers.”

“Chris-”

He said my name like a curse. I blocked it out. He said it louder. An ambulance siren screamed past my windows. K sighed, letting his hands audibly drop to his sides. I busied myself by throwing old brushes into the overflowing trashcan, and pretended not to notice.

The rest of that night is watery, incomplete. I think at some point I must have wandered through my memories with a sledgehammer, delicately demolishing anything that held too much feeling. I remember tasting something like regret in the back of my throat though, and no amount of water can wash it down completely. I remember the stars, after K left, after the rain cleared. Usually they comforted me, but on that night all I could see were a dozen white eyes twinkling in disappointment. It didn’t matter. There is nothing more exhilarating than leaving everything behind.

It’s a choice in the way that breathing is. The appeal of a place doesn’t matter. The depths of the friendships don’t matter. None of it compares to the inevitable burning beneath my skin that begs me to just get out. None of it curbs the slow resentment that rears up at every trace of familiarity. Spend long enough somewhere and everything becomes a landmark. Everything generates meaning, and encourages you to mean something, too. Every new city or town will devour you in some way: skyscrapers will grow in your stomach like parasites; mountains will burst through your lungs; your own house will invade you, turn you inside out, so that your bones resemble furniture and cutlery shoots out from your gums. It’s supposed to be beautiful, natural even.

“It means you belong,” K said once. His voice was so full of grief it nearly drowned me. His eyes held the whole night sky, but the part of me that wanted to agree with him was slammed down by the part of me that remembered a neighbor I’d had as a child. Every time I saw him he was sitting on his porch, reclining shirtless in a chair the same sunburned color as his skin, so that it was impossible to tell where it ended and he began. Sometimes he’d have his buddies over for cards and beer, and they’d all sit on the porch together while I eavesdropped from next door. 

“When you gonna sell this place, Richard?” they’d ask. He’d sag a little in his flesh chair. He dealt cards with swollen fingers and coughed up drywall. 

I thought the wind must have picked up in the nearby fields, making the cornhusks rub together. When I peeked over the fence it was just the sound of Richard laughing. “When I’m dead, that’s when. This is where I belong.” 

Illinois, I think it was. Or maybe Virginia. Impossible to remember, to hold the details of those memories up to my eye without them crumbling in my hands. To reach beyond the fog of time, which corrupts and dissolves like acid. I never feel the loss immediately. It is only after, in stages, that I mourn the death of a place. Or at least, I used to mourn them. Now I only allow a strained sort of sympathy for the corpses of recollections that rot in my mind. It’s easier to forget. It’s better. It soothes the guilt and leaves room for new memories, new locations. Every place will live in you for as long as it can, but every place must also die. Small towns decay faster, and when the skin peels away, their naked bones can become indistinguishable. It doesn’t matter. We all carry graveyards inside us, for homes both lost and abandoned.

We carry ghosts, too, and Richard’s dead eyes haunted me through every move. I thought I saw hints of their gaze in K, whose dark skin glittered with graffiti and whose hair sparked like electrical cables. The city looked good on him, but all I could see was a trap. I rolled my eyes at him as cruelly as possible.

“I know,” I spat, “that’s exactly why it’s time to leave.”

He looked hurt for just a second. I hoped it would be easier for him to forget me, too. Then he shook his head with a sad, knowing smile, and I knew it wouldn’t be. 

We spent our last day together untangling ourselves. The plan was to take the train uptown to Central Park. Instead we trudged straight past the subway station without a word. I was wearing the wrong sneakers, the ones that pinched my toes together, and the nail of my pinky toe had begun to dig into the side of its neighbor. We took different routes than normal, turning at random, zigzagging our way through the city. We took shortcuts. We walked in circles. I made sure to put extra force in my steps, despite the pain in my foot. I crunched wrappers beneath my shoes. I ground my heels into the grates. I wanted the city to know I was done with it. It cried out with car horns and sirens. K shook his head. He was always shaking his head at me. An old woman was feeding pigeons on the corner. Her face was like cracked concrete, her milky eyes like unpolished windows. Beneath her clothes her hips jutted out, thin and angular, barely supporting her weight, in a way that nonetheless struck me as very elegant. The birds crowded around her so tightly that her feet were hidden, her long skirt giving the impression that the pigeon mass was holding her off the ground. She cooed at them and they cooed back. She held out her arms on either side and three birds landed on her, then two more. She bowed her head slightly and another one found purchase in her hair. She was so beautiful I almost wept. When we stormed past her the pigeons squawked and flapped away, leaving her barren. I felt her glare on my back. Around us the city howled.

By the time we made it to the park it was late afternoon. People popped their collars and crammed in earbuds. The sun begged and pleaded for more time as Apollo’s chains pulled taut around it. 

K looked up. “It’s okay,” he whispered, a sad smile tugging at his lips. “Tomorrow you can come right back.” He side-eyed me expectantly. I contemplated saying nothing. If I just turned my head I could pretend not to have heard him. I could tie my shoelaces. 

“Yeah.” I faced the sky. “We’ll see you again soon.” A cool breeze dried the sweat on my back. The sun slowly stopped struggling. It yawned, nodding to us. I don’t remember which one of us started doing it first, but it quickly became sacred, as absurdities between friends often do. As much as making myself sharp and unlikable would ease the leaving, this was a tradition I simply couldn’t break.

“See, now how am I gonna find someone crazy enough to do that with when you’re gone?” K grinned. 

I scoffed. “It’s New York. Throw a rock.”

We trekked up to our usual spot, a small grassy hill overlooking a bridge. Conversation came more easily here, chasing away the frostiness of before. We settled beneath an ugly, crooked tree that we had affectionately named Yggy. Really it was two trees that had fused and twisted into one indestructible eyesore, and both trees already had names—thousands of them etched into their flesh by everyone else who called this spot their own. K had wanted to carve ours, too, but I couldn’t bear the thought of such a permanent mark. Instead we whispered it to the roots, yelled it at the leaves, inviting the tree to belong to us for just one hour at a time. Letting ourselves be owned as well, in brief spurts. K told stories while I stared up into Yggy’s canopy. Months later, when his image blurred in my recollection, I would regret not looking at him more. I would sit at my desk wishing I had cataloged the shape of his jaw, his smile, his every pore. I would wish I had allowed myself to keep part of him with me. In a way I would also be glad I hadn’t.  

“I’m really going to miss you,” he said finally, when pretending became too hard, “and like, I just don’t understand. . . because you’re not a kid anymore. No one is forcing you to just get up and go, right? And I thought you liked it here, and I thought you were happy and I thought, I thought--”

“I do like it here. I was happy.” My fingertips burned. My foot ached. “It’s just time, ok? I’m tired. I want to go home.”

“Isn’t this home?”

“No.”

“Then where--”

“I don’t know yet.” 

I still don’t know yet. I still want to go home. 

“Well, how are you supposed to know-”

I stared just past him for a long moment. The inside of my shoe felt wet and sticky. “I don’t know,” I said. When the burning stops, I thought.

“What happens when you can’t run away anymore?” he asked, picking at his nails. 

“Stupid question.”

“It’s not, though!” He palmed the grass, twisting his entire body around. His voice slammed against me, all jagged metal and broken scaffolding. “What about when you can’t afford it anymore? Or when you get too old . . . what if you need to depend on someone? What if someone needs to depend on you?”

“Hope they have a plan B.”

“I’m serious.”

“Me too,” I whispered. He was right, he was always right. The question tormented me less back then. At twenty-five, I still had some of my savings, enough to last another year or so. I had more clients then, too, people willing to throw money at a young artist to immortalize them or their pet or their friends. I had my own little niche. In the street, or online, I painted everything, and the city inspired me as it infected me. My work became less about the clients and more about the brownstone creeping up their backs or the neon lights trapped under their nails. A man paid me two thousand dollars for a portrait of his grandfather with rusty pipes snaking up his veins and wrenches covering his eyes. It was the last thing I painted before I left. 

It’s not so easy anymore. K’s questions still cling to me. I misplaced the sound of his voice in some corner of my mind ages ago, so all that’s left now is piles of loose, silent words, which I find crumpled beneath my pillow or coating my food. They must have sounded so kind in their original form, so full of real concern, but now they are cruel in their stark objectivity. The words stalk me, waiting for the day when I can no longer fuel the fire in my lungs. Waiting for it to consume me. I’m waiting, too. Sometimes I picture myself as an old man wandering around a dark house. I see tropical flowers budding through the floorboards, brown and rotten. The husks of the Empire State building and the Tokyo Tower jut out of the same wall, fighting for space. Three kinds of beaches blend together in my living room, and I barely avoid the rocks hidden under black and white sand. I picture myself sitting down in a room that is as much cathedral as temple, in a chair the same color as my skin, and screaming and screaming. 

“That would be a nightmare,” I said after a few seconds. I didn’t elaborate. K would’ve only argued, and I was finished arguing. I stood up. The sun had just about disappeared; the moon was still faint, but I saw her raise her eyebrow. I looked down. It was time to go; we both knew it. K let out a long sigh. He seemed older than he had just that morning, laboring into a crouch and pressing his palms against his knees to stand. 

“You never painted me,” he said to the sky.

“I’m sorry,” I said. Sometimes I think it was true. 

We rode the train in silence. When we got off we hugged and promised to keep in touch. 

“Don’t forget me.”

“I won’t.”

I did.

We parted. Had the entire city gone dark right at that moment, the furnace in my chest would have been bright enough to light my way. My apartment was bare, the mirror empty. My bags were already neatly packed. I spent my last night in the city scraping blood out of my shoe. 

Jasmine Watson's short story won first prize in the Eleventh Annual Humanities & Sciences Undergraduate Writing Contest. Jasmine's poem "Hide & Seek" is also published in this issue. She is an Animation major in the class of 2024. She has always loved writing, and has a special fondness for surrealism and abstraction. She has moved around all her life, eight times before 10th grade, across several countries, and the resulting mixture of wanderlust and nostalgia continues to inform all of her work. Judges Simon Van Booy & Jeff Beardsley had this to say about Jasmine's prize-winning entry: "We admired the intensity of this piece. It's tightly wound prose, with an economy of language which forces the author to use fresh, unpredictable words and phrases. The syntax is nicely clipped, and the single experience of the narrative builds throughout into something memorable. This story demonstrated raw natural talent, but also some quite good editing skills."