Good morning Jack. It's me.
It's June 1st and it's eight O 6.
AMI just woke up a little while ago.
I don't feel right saying just woke up like that because it
makes it sound soft, doesn't it Jack?
It makes it sound gentle, like I stretched and I blinked at the
sunlight and I came back into myself, all slow and sweet.
And that is not what happened. I woke up all at once, Jack.
I had been dropped back into my body from somewhere way up high.
I had another dream. I mean, it was a dream, I know
that, but it really didn't feel like, well, not in its usual
way. It didn't have that strange
floating logic to it, where one thing becomes another and you
just accept it because you're sleeping and your mind is too
stupid to protest it. This felt more certain.
It started in the clearing again.
The grass was wet and the trees were way too still.
Despite hearing the wind, the air had that same thick feeling
to it, like the whole woods were holding its breath and waiting
for me to do something wrong. I looked down, expecting to see
myself, my bare feet maybe, and my toes in the mud, and that hem
of a Pretty Little dress I would never wear awake.
But they weren't mine, Jack. They were feet, obviously.
Human feet, not hooves or claws or anything that dramatic.
I'm not trying to sound ridiculous, but they weren't
mine and I knew it immediately. Not because they were horribly
different or because they had had six toes.
You know how sometimes you hear your own voice on tape and even
though it's your voice, it just feels wrong?
It's familiar, but like someone made a version of you out of the
correct parts and didn't really put them together right?
It felt like that. I remember staring down at them
and thinking, those are not my feet, those do not belong to me.
And then before I could even move properly, something grabbed
me. It grabbed me by my ankles, both
of them, and they were hands, Jack.
I never saw a face and I never saw a body, and I couldn't turn
enough to see who it was. And maybe that was part of it.
Maybe whatever dream I was in didn't want me to know who it
was. All I saw were hands clamped
around those, not my own ankles, and then I was being dragged
backwards through the woods and my hands kept catching on roots
and stones and little broken branches.
I could feel every awful bit of every scrape and jolt, and my
body, or at least the body I was in, kept twisting and kicking
and I was trying to grab at anything I could reach Jack
fistfuls of wet leaves and dirt and Moss, but none of it helped.
It all just tore under my fingers, or well, somebody
else's fingers. I was screaming, I know I was.
I could feel it in my throat, that raw, ripped open feeling.
But the woods kept swallowing the scream's whole, and all the
while I knew where I was being taken.
I didn't have to see the river yet to know I was being taken to
the river. You could just tell, can't you?
Sometimes the place gets so lodged up in you that even
blindfolded, you know when it's near.
The trees thinned out and the ground turned soft, and I could
hear the water rushing. I started fighting harder then,
because even in dreams there are some places you don't want to be
carried toward. Even when the feet aren't yours
and the hands aren't yours, and maybe none of the body belongs
to you at all. Still, something in me new If I
reached the river, something worse would happen.
Jack, I didn't make it that far. I woke up right before the bank,
right before I hit the mud, and I woke up because there was a
weight on my chest, and for one horrible second I thought
something had followed me out of the dream.
Jack. But it was just Unka.
He was just there, laying right on top of me like he belonged
there, purring so hard his whole little body shook with it.
Jack, he's never came inside before.
Not once. He wouldn't even come over the
threshold when it was storming, and he wouldn't come in for dry,
warm, leftover chicken or cat food, or even all the
embarrassing little coaxing noises I made at him.
And yet this morning he was on my chest in my bed like it was
the most ordinary thing in the world.
I just laid there for a minute with one hand on him because
what else do you do, really? He was warm and he smelt like
dust and outside and that sun warmed animal smell.
He looked up at me once and blinked like I was the one
behaving strangely. Maybe Dennis let him in before
he left. That would make sense, wouldn't
it? Dennis is gone, by the way.
He left before I could wake up. He must have left early for the
shop. The bed was cool on his side
when I rolled over, and there's a mug in the sink that wasn't
there before, and I'm still wearing his shirt, so he was
here. I didn't imagine that part, at
least. There's something very intimate
about waking up, and someone else's shirt isn't there.
I don't know whether to be pleased with myself or ashamed.
Jack. Maybe both, maybe that's the
proper thing. Anka stayed on me until I sat
up, and then he hopped down like he'd only come inside to
supervise whatever nightmare nonsense I was getting up to in
my sleep. He's back out on the porch now.
He half begged with loud meows for me to let him out, so I did,
and now he's just out there lazing around as if the bed
thing never happened, as if he didn't cross a line he had been
guarding for dates. I checked my ankles after I got
up, they're still bruised and still ugly with scrapes and cuts
and I don't know what I expected exactly.
Probably finger marks, maybe fresh ones, and a little neat
answer stamped on to my skin about what was happening.
But of course there was no answer there, just the same old
dark shapes wrapping around the bones, like my body is
remembering something that my mind still refuses to.
I'm working the dinner shift tonight.
Rosemary's going to be there for the overlap, and I haven't
decided whether I'm relieved or not about that.
Part of me wants to catch her alone and ask her where the hell
she was and why she looked at me like that yesterday, and the
other part of me doesn't want her too close at all.
That sounds mean, Jack, Or paranoid or both.
I don't know. I'm going to make coffee and
then shower very reluctantly because I smell sort of like
motor oil still. I'll talk to you later, Jack.
Jack, it's 3:41 PM and I'm parked Outback at the diner.
I got here a little early because I didn't much feel like
sitting at home thinking myself sick for another hour.
The Sky's sort of overcast, not really rainy, just a flat white
grey colour that makes everything look washed out.
Anca was still on the porch when I left, and I almost told him
goodbye because I have enough problems without becoming the
sort of woman who gives a cat updates on her work schedule
like he's her husband waiting up for her.
Though honestly, he might listen better than most men.
I keep thinking about the dream, Jack, about those feet not being
mine. It's one thing to be frightened
in your sleep, and it's another thing entirely to wake up
feeling like maybe what frightened you wasn't fully
yours to be frightened of. I'm being dramatic again, and I
know that, Jack, but it's getting harder to call myself
dramatic when every other day something happens that would
sound ridiculous coming out of anyone else's mouth.
I should go inside. I can see Rosemary's car and
that makes my stomach feel strange.
I'll talk to you after work, Jack.
It's 9:36 PM now, Jack, I'm in my car.
I haven't started it yet. I just wanted a minute before I
drove home. You know, I don't know why the
car always feels like the right place to talk to you after a
shift. Just me and the seat belt and
the smell of old upholstery and whatever thoughts I didn't have
room to think while people were asking for more coffee and
ketchup. An extra napkin.
Tonight wasn't busy, exactly, but it felt wrong anyway.
Rosemary was perfectly polite, and that's somehow worse than if
she had just been rude to me. She said hello to me, and she
asked how I was feeling in that plain little way people do when
they don't want to actually hear the answer.
I said I was fine, which was a lie, but not one worth
correcting. I tried a few times to catch her
by herself, once near the coffee station and once when she was
restocking the creamers. Both times she slipped away
before I could get more than a few words out.
Not obviously, though. Not in a way that anyone else
would notice, and that's what's making it so madding.
It's not that she was avoiding me in a way that I could point
at and accuse her of. It was just a pattern, a
drifting off sort of thing, A sudden remembering of a task in
the kitchen, or some customer at the counter, or just some reason
to not be standing still with me for too long.
At some point I asked her if she was feeling better, and she said
much. Just a single word.
She answered too quickly, and then I asked if she'd been home
the whole time she was out sick, and she just looked at me.
Not for long, just a little look, a measuring one, like she
was deciding how much of this was safe to answer.
And then she said, I'm back now, aren't I?
And turned away to refill somebody's coffee before I could
say anything else. And it annoyed me so much, Jack.
Not because she was being rude, but because she wasn't being
rude. She was answering all of this in
some nonchalant way that made everything seem normal.
I kept noticing little things after that, the way that she
never brushed against me in passing, and the way that she
set down a stack of plates near me instead of just handing them
to me directly, and the way that every time I came close, she
found somewhere else to be. And maybe I'm just imagining
that Jack, maybe I'm building a whole miserable cathedral out of
broken up toothpicks, but it didn't feel imagined.
It felt deliberate. She left before I could corner
her again, which sounds insane now that I say that out loud.
She said good night to the room more than to me, if that makes
sense. And after that, the rest of the
shift was just, well, just the shift, customers and coffee.
A child who spilled his milk and cried like someone had shot him.
Because children are more dramatic than I am, apparently.
Frederick had burnt his hand on a pan and swore under his
breath, which was honestly the most normal thing to happen
today. I think at one point I caught
myself staring at people's hands.
That's a disgusting sentence, isn't it, Jack?
But I did everyone's hands. A man turning a spoon over in
his fingers while he waited for pie.
A woman folding a receipt into smaller and smaller squares.
And then there were Frederick's thick knuckles, and then my own
hands shaking a little when I poured coffee into a mug.
And I kept thinking about the dream, about those hands around
my ankles and those fingers that weren't mine.
And then, because I'm apparently determined to make a misery out
of everything, I kept thinking about Dennis's hands, about the
way he touched my ankle yesterday when he was looking at
the cuts and the bruises and the bandage that he wrapped around
my foot and his hand at my wrist and then at the back of my neck.
And the little ordinary kindnesses, or what felt like
them at the time. I don't know why I'm saying all
of this. I think I'm just tired, Jack,
and I should really go home. And Jesus Christ.
Got Jack. It's Gordon.
Hold on. What are you doing?
What? What the hell are you talking
about? Wait.
No, please don't walk away. Oh, Jesus Christ, Jack.
He's he's gone. He's gone around the side of the
building. Where?
I don't know. I don't know where he went.
Jack, why would he say that? Why did he say that?
I know he meant Dennis. I know he did.
I feel it deep in my gut. Jack Gordon is just a sick
bastard who enjoys saying things that lodges in people's heads
and rot there. Gordon doesn't get to just do
this. He doesn't get to just walk up
to my car like some nightmare with a human face and say one
filthy little sentence and leave me here to choke on it.
Dennis was kind to me. He was.
He's gentle and kind and he came when I called and he stayed and
he made coffee in my kitchen and he slept next to me in my bed
all night. And that is what happened.
That is what I know. And still, oh, I hate this.
I hate that there's even Stella. And still, why did Gordon even
say it like that? Not angry and not smug, not even
pleased with himself. He just sounded oh, God, Jack,
I'm not giving him this. I'm not giving him the
satisfaction of this. I'm going home.
I'm going home, Jack. I just know I don't want to sit
in this parking lot another second.
I'll talk to you tomorrow.