“Lovingly, Peaches” by Michaela Rae Luckey

My mother named me Posie, but my nickname is Peaches. When we were young, my mom would read me and my older brother bedtime stories every night until we fell asleep.

One night, I asked, “Why do people call me Peaches?”

She put down our book and said, “When God put you in my tummy, I had this craving for white peaches–craving means something you’re really hungry for.”

My brother and I nodded.

“I ate those peaches all the time even though I’d never really liked them before. When you were born, your Daddy and I were surprised because your skin was so white. Daddy made a joke that it was because of all those peaches I ate. That’s why we call you Peaches.”

My mother was a sweet, soft woman who was happy to be a country lady with a talent for making casseroles and beaded jewelry. She keeled over of a massive heart attack when I was in my senior year of college in Arizona; my brother said she was making Tuna Surprise when she died.

Now I’m twenty-five and I still live in Arizona, in the same town I went to school in. I tell my friends back home I stay because Arizona inspires me and my writing with its mesas, open desert, and the clearest night skies imaginable once you’re out of the city. The cogs of small town gossip means they know my mother’s life insurance from her decades at Sears left just enough to buy me one year working part-time at the university’s library. They all also know I actually stay because my boyfriend, Joshua, asked me to, but it works because he reminds me to nuance my imagery and when there should be a sex scene.

Joshua is a poet, the foil to my prose. He lives on the other side of town, closer to the campus we met on. I live in a third-floor studio apartment. It’s almost empty except for stacks of books, papers, and magazines lining the walls. The only decorations are three posters of Samson Cane novel covers: The Disappeared, Hound Tooth, and The Mansion on Blackwell Moors. The prints are replicas of the original book covers I found at the university’s poster fair my freshman year. I make sure to dust them once a month and repress them flat where my humidifier warps the paper.

I write horror and Samson Cane, my favorite writer, does too. In his 2001 New Yorker interview, a week before the movie adaptation of Hound Tooth hit theaters, he explained that his pen name comes from the Stephen King novel In the Mouth of Madness. I forced Joshua to go with me to see the movie: we both disliked it, but he, mercifully, didn’t say anything.

I sit in my small sunroom that used to have a wasp nest in the outside corner. I’m writing my monthly letter to Cane (partly to avoid working on my manuscript). He’s touring his newest work now and he’ll be in town on Friday to give a reading. I’ve decided to hand this letter to him in person, so I choose my words methodically.

“It’s so genuine of you to interact with your readers as openly as you do,” I write. “You making a point to visit smaller towns is salt-of-the-earth through and through.”

Early spring heat bakes the window panes, even through the cloth shades, and my apartment’s AC clanks loudly to keep the desert air at bay. Joshua’s massive bong sits in the corner. Black muck is cooked into its swirling red glass. Joshua always says he needs it to release creativity; I think it dulls mine. Often, I want to ask him not to smoke when we work, but I’d hate if I impeded his words—something only a writing couple can understand he likes to say.

I write, “When I read your work, it’s as if I’m a kid sitting by a campfire while a counselor tells a scary story they’ve perfected over a decade of summers.”

I delete the last sentence then add it back in—it feels cinematic. I hear the front door open. Flip flops slap against my scuffed herringbone floors. Joshua walks into the sunroom.

He kisses the top of my head. “You working on the cannibal piece?”

He’s talking about my manuscript (working title: A Family Affair). It’s about a mountain family who’s forced to feed on hikers to survive and maintain their anonymity from the modern world just over the valley ridge. My main character, Silas, is a hiker trying to get over the loss of his wife who has to outmaneuver the family (who I never give names except Father, Mother, Daughter, and Son). Joshua doesn’t like that Silas seems so soft, so unrealistically suited to make it out of such a harrowing ordeal alive. I like to think my writing makes it clear how he could.

I’ve written a few horror short stories during college—one was even published in an online magazine, Witch Bitch, when I was a senior. Mostly, I’ve written articles for other online sites—usually unsolicited book and movie reviews on Cane’s work. It’s strange, but whenever I go to write I always find my way to the topic of him—as if I were destined to be a scholar about him and only him. I love it, except in the moments when I’m forced to find my own voice, like in A Family Affair.

“Writing to Cane,” I say. I hug my computer closer.

“Ah yes,” Joshua says. “The lover.”

I purse my lips. “Please don’t call him that. It’s cheap.”

Joshua laughs as he plops down into the folding lawn chair in the corner. “Since when is ‘lover’ cheap?”

“Since every undergrad poet started using it to sound sophisticated.”

“I think you mean it’s a hackneyed term.”

Joshua challenges me like this all the time. I’m grateful for it. He makes me sharper with my words, thoughts, actions—he impassions me to thrive in my “greater personal agency.”

“Hackneyed,” I agree. “Cane is anything but that.”

“You’d know better than me.”

I look at my half-filled screen. I always try to find the balance for Cane between too much and too little. In my mind, I picture him opening my letter, seeing it packed to the absolute margins with microscopic text, and him resenting me for it; I also see him opening my letter, this time a blank white with so little to offer that he casts me off with the other faux devotees. In each vision, however, my stomach sizzles like an overcharged car battery as I imagine his delicate writer’s hands working open the envelope. His brown eyes, deep-set beneath bushy brows, taking in my words. My letter makes him smile, as his slinky, serpentine body paces his home overlooking Puget Sound, smartly decorated in antique maps of places he’s actually been and cracked, leather-bound books he’s actually read.

“Carson and Cal were wondering if we wanted to meet them at Hot Cat tonight,” Joshua says while packing his bong.

“I’m not sure I feel like it tonight,” I say, trying to hold my breath.

“I told them we’d go at ten o’clock though,” he says.

The dank smell of crusted, burnt weed hits my nostrils. I sigh quietly and shut my laptop.

“Okay,” I say. “Ten sounds good.”

***

The first Cane novel I read was The Mansion on Blackwell Moors. I was eleven and my dad had just gone to jail for setting a barn on fire. A farmer’s son looking to cash in on the insurance money had paid him to do it. I miss my dad very much because he was burly and kind and would hold me above his head, letting me pretend to fly like the desert vultures we’d see circling in the sky in the background of old Western movies.

The Mansion on Blackwell Moors is about Horace Shah, a half Sri Lankan-half British lawyer sent to the small village of Blackwell, England to execute the will of a recently deceased widow, Deirdre Hillcrest. During Shah’s stay at Hillcrest Manor he’s terrorized by Deirdre’s vengeful spirit.

I read, re-read, and re-re-read passages, each time bowled over by the power emitting from the tattered pages of a book scribbled with ejaculating penises.

The book found me one hot, muggy day in the Green Bay Correctional Institution lobby. My mother, brother, and I were sitting in the waiting room to see my father when I spotted a dog eared corner peeking out from underneath a dirty linoleum bench. I bent down, picking it up with my two small hands.

“What’s that?” my brother asked.

“Just something someone forgot,” I said.

***

We walk into Hot Cat. Hot Cat is a gothic Southwestern joint that projects B-horror movies behind the bar and whose specials are watered down gin and tonics with old raspberries on top. It’s our favorite bar, Joshua’s more than mine. Carson and Cal are sitting in our usual booth across from the giant movie projection. Tonight they’re playing Sleepaway Camp.

“Hi guys,” they say in perfect unison. Carson and Cal are a couple. Both of them are lithe and dark-haired, bodies toned by rigorous yoga routines and skin perfected by tea tree and sea kelp treatments. The only real way to tell them apart is that Carson is almost 6’5 and Cal barely clears 5’5. They’re beautiful and, normally, drinking with them makes me feel less lonely because, even though Carson and Joshua were roommates freshman year, Cal and I have become fond of each other. Joshua thinks he’s “shifty,” and sometimes he’ll provoke Cal on purpose when he’s too “familiar” with me. But tonight I’m wired, anxious. A Family Affair’s latest pages zoom by over and over in my mind like microfiche. As always, the story began strong, words linking together easily and constructively onto the page; now everything is stalled, stilted, stoned. The story isn’t moving for me anymore and to even think about opening the document brings me to the brink of tears.

Before we left for Hot Cat, Joshua finished reading over A Family Affair’s latest pages.

He set them in his lap, held me close and said, “Posie, these are brilliant. I’m really rooting for Silas now—it’s all coming alive. I’m so proud of you.”

When I told him how horribly writer’s block had taken hold of me he reminded me not to take the process too seriously. He likes to say that to truly write you need to detach, like when people let go of their consciousness and speak in tongues in revival tent churches.

I don’t tell him that I disagree, but only because I could be wrong.

Taped to my bathroom mirror is a clipping from Cane’s 1997 op-ed in the LA Times, “Writing Gore for the Everyman.” He wrote, “If you want to write horror successfully then you need to completely immerse yourself in dread, passion, sex, fear, terror—all of it. At its essence, the writer who feels nothing can’t make the reader feel anything; therefore, if you don’t completely surrender all sense to your work and then focus it through steel discipline, you’ll never truly write a day in your life.”

Sometimes, when I’ve had to call my brother or realize I haven’t left the apartment all week or couldn’t eke out a single sentence, I’ll lay on the cold bathroom floor, just gazing at his words.

“How’s the new apartment coming along?” Joshua asks Carson.

“Great,” they say together.

Carson says, “We had a fight or two over who gets the second bedroom for their office—”

“—but someone finally admitted we’ll never actually end up using it often enough for one of us to completely commandeer it so we made it an office/Zen room for two,” Cal finishes. “Posie, when is the book reading?”

I can’t stop my smile. “This Friday at Prickly Pear Books.”

“What book is he touring?” Carson asks.

“Wait for it,” Joshua says, wagging his eyebrows.

“It’s really great,” I say. “A lot of people are calling it his best book since Leviathan Rising.”

“Tell them the name,” Joshua says. He prods my ribs with his knobby elbow.

“Stiletto Murders,” I say.

“Oh, wow,” Carson says.

“Very sartorial,” says Cal. “What’s it about?”

“This designer is fired from the fashion house she’s given her life to because she’s gotten too old,” I say. “But after they fire her, her former protégé steals her designs and passes them off as her own.”

“The impetus of any great work,” Joshua says, sloshing his drink from side to side. “A sensible pump.”

“She decides to seek revenge” I say, “so she kills the people who burned her with a stiletto in the same design as the one the protégé stole.”

“Isn’t that the absolute worst thing you’ve ever heard of?” Joshua says.

“I mean it’s very…” Carson pauses. “Kitschy.”

“No,” I say, “ it’s subversive–feminist.”

“How is murdering people with a heel political?” Joshua says.

“It’s a statement on how capitalism warps artistic altruism. This woman gave her creative life to that design house and they threw her aside like trash. It’s something any woman could empathize with when they think about being an older professional.”

Joshua turns to Cal and Carson. “She’d defend anything he wrote.”

“She likes what she likes,” Cal says.

“It’s rad you get to meet him,” says Carson.

Joshua laughs and hugs me into his side. His stubble scratches my forehead as he says, “Posie could write circles around that guy. One day she will, too. All his work will look like child’s play when she’s through with it.”

Later that night, we’re laying in bed. I watch Joshua’s back rise and fall with his deep snores, his skin flecked with moles like paint. I get up from bed, still naked, and tiptoe into the bathroom. I lie on the tile and look up at Cane’s words tacked to the mirror. As I touch my body, I picture Cane on top of me. His breathing is intense, passionate, and afterwards he whispers in my ear, “Your words move me, Peaches.”

***

Samson Cane was born Cosmo Raymond Cappomaggi in Oak Park, Illinois—three blocks from Ernest Hemingway’s home—on November 7^th, 1973. His parents, Lorenzo and Viola, were second generation Sicilians and devout worshippers at Our Savior in Heaven Catholic Church. Samson is the oldest of seven children, three brothers and three sisters.

The summer before Samson went to Arizona for undergrad, he traveled through Europe. He finished the draft of his first novel, The Wailing, while living in Tangiers doing odd jobs.

Cane has been married twice, no children. I bet as a child he was never understood by those closest to him—the proverbial curse of genius. He had friends of course—lots of them probably—but none of them ever heard him the way every person wishes they were heard. I think I can see it when I watch his interviews (especially those I’ve watched a dozen times): there’s a deep longing in Cane, invisible hands outstretched for a warm soul and body, like a scared child reaching for their stuffed animal in a dark room.

Sometimes, if it’s late enough or I’ve had enough to drink, I remember the nights right after my father died when my mother was crying in her room, door shut tight. I’d put on his ratty Badgers sweatshirt, my body so tiny inside it, and hug myself as tightly as my little arms could manage until it felt something like how it felt when he would hug me.

***

I’m finishing my letter for Cane.

I’m sitting in the sunroom with Joshua to my side. I smell frying plantains and eggs from the woman who lives below me coming from the apartment’s stairwell. She cooks them every so often and sometimes I sit near the front door so I can breathe it in; it makes me think of when my mom would make breakfast in the morning—with gobs of butter and not enough pepper. A part of me wishes my neighbor would invite me to dinner and move about her kitchen like my mom used to in hers.

I look back to my computer. The letter is done. As always, I sign off with: “Lovingly, Peaches.”

When we meet, I hope Cane opens my letter, reading swiftly and carefully, before looking to me and saying, “It’s nice to finally meet you, Peaches.”

“Holy shit,” Joshua says. He’s gawking at his computer, a strange grin splitting across his face. He leans his laptop down to me. The high, burning sun is shining directly in our faces. I tilt the screen forwards.

The headline reads, “Prolific Horror Author Accused of Sexual Assault.”

Beneath the obscene, hulking title is Cane’s picture.

***

“Un-be-fucking-lievable,” Joshua says.

We’re in our normal booth at Hot Cat. Only Cal is here tonight because Carson was sick from drinking too much raw kombucha.

“So he actually, like,” Cal lowers his voice, “raped her?”

He’s looking at me when he asks, but I stay quiet.

“No, thankfully” Joshua says. “The girl was a co-ed who said he wouldn’t let her leave the room. Guess he whipped it out but couldn’t get it up.”

“You don’t have to be vulgar,” I say.

Joshua downs the rest of his drink, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “It’s the truth. Are you not convinced?”

I say nothing.

Joshua looks to Cal. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she defends him even when more poor girls say he assaulted them.”

Cal downs the rest of his vodka tonic and, watching Joshua, clenches his jaw as he swallows.

“I didn’t say that,” I try, but Joshua rolls his eyes.

“We’re talking about something else now,” Cal says. Underneath the table he pats my knee gently.

“I’m going for another drink,” Joshua says. “You guys want one?”

We both shake our heads. He gets up, stumbling before he finds his footing, then walks away.

Cal asks, “Are you okay?”

“No,” I say. “I don’t think so.”

“Do you think Cane did it?”

“I can’t tell if it matters or not.”

Cal leans in close over the table. He smells like patchouli and sweat—I wish he’d hug me. His fingers are chalky from his pottery and there’s still tan clay wedged deep under his nails. “If I say something,” he says, “do you promise to not get upset?”

I don’t answer.

“Joshua shouldn’t talk to you like he does.”

“He’s—” I search for a word, “—cerebral.”

“He’s a nightmare.”

“He’s just a bit self-righteous.”

Cal darts his eyes to the bar. Joshua is chatting with a pudgy, tattoo-drenched bartender. Cal puts his hand on my wrist. “Do you even like him?”

“Why would you ask that?”

Cal brushes a loose strand of hair behind his ear with his free hand. Looking at me softly and patting my wrist with a tenderness that’s almost offensive, he says, “It’s unfair—you only loving assholes like Cane and Josh. You poor, poor thing.”

***

An article in The Daily Courier wrote about the assault. A young reporter trekked to ASU to get a quote from Cane. When the reporter asked him for a comment, Cane said, “This woman and I did have a sexual encounter, but it was consensual and—so far as she led me to believe—comfortable. I recognize, however, that I underestimated how much she idolized me and my work, and I should have more thoroughly considered that influence.”

As I read the interview, I realized that he didn’t sound much like his usual self at all.

That night, as I sat on the floor and pawed through my stacks of books, I found my copy of The Mansion on Blackwell Moors. In the inner flap was my childhood signature and phone number for my mom’s old home in Madison that my brother still lives in with his fiancee. I traced them with my fingers and wondered what my dad would’ve looked like now. He was killed in a fight a year and a half after he was put away: the other man hit my dad on the temple with a rock from the gravel pit in the yard. When he died later that day, the doctors said he kept asking if he was in Minocqua before falling asleep and never waking up again.

The day of his funeral, I sat in the church rafters with my mother and brother, waiting for Father Anthony to call us, and began reading The Mansion on Blackwell Moors. I was almost done with the second chapter by the time they were ready to put my dad in the ground.

***

I’m trying to write the climax for A Family Affair. Silas is hiding in a rocky ravine and the cannibal family is closing in on him, enraged after Silas pushed Mother to her death from a cliff. The scene is stagnant, like standing sewage after a flood.

I’m unoriginal, I think. A copy of a copy of Cane.

I tap the mouse pad.

I scroll up and down through the pages.

“This is shit,” I say.

I delete the file and swear to never tell Joshua.

***

In the span of two days, three women have accused Cane of harassment, alleging everything from innuendos to full blown assault.

“He pinned me against the door,” one of the anonymous victims said, “and kept saying he would tell his agent about me if I stayed.”

As I poured through every article I could find, I tried to picture the Cane they described. What scared me most was how easily I could.

***

“You’re not still going,” Joshua says.

I pull my sundress over my head.

“The man is a rapist.”

I say nothing.

He grabs me by both shoulders. “You can’t still support him after all of this.”

“I don’t.”

He pauses, staring at me as if I was bleeding from the eyes.“You’re going to see him and give him your love letter.”

I pick up my purse, the envelope sitting inside.

Joshua walks to the front door and stands in front of it. “Why are you still going?”

“I need to.”

“The man is obviously violent. As a woman, you of all people, should hate him.”

When I take a small step forward he grabs the door handle behind him, squaring his body against mine. “Are you going to try and fuck him?”

“What?” I hitch my purse higher on my shoulder, the envelope crinkling.

“This is a horror show,” Joshua says. “I mean this is absolutely insane.”

I take another step towards the door but stop when Joshua doesn’t move. “You’re making me anxious.”

“You’re driving me insane. How can you still be devoted to him? And over what?” Joshua looks to his right, where my posters hang. “Over this low-brow, superstore-rack trash?”

Joshua slowly spins towards the wall and grips an edge of The Disappeared print. In one quick, deliberate yank, he rips the poster in a jagged diagonal. With a calm that terrifies me in its indifference, he tears the paper into smaller and smaller bits until it’s a pile of confetti covering his feet, the book stacks, and floor. He reaches for Hound Tooth and wrenches it off so roughly a few paint chips come off with the sticky tack. His shin knocks a book stack, toppling them to the ground. He glances down at the scattered paperbacks, pauses, then tosses the poster behind him. He bends down and grabs The Mansion on Blackwell Moors.

I stiffen.

Without looking at me, he rips the cover in two.

I lunge forward, grabbing for the book. He lifts his arms above his head, but stumbles over the dozens of books scattered around him. He falls hard onto the ground, his elbow smacking the hardwood and his head banging against the wall.

I pluck the book from his hand then dig for the cover’s other half in the chaos. I find it wedged under Joshua’s thigh as he turns onto his side. I put them into my purse and run out of the apartment.

***

In his 2007 New York Times interview, Samson Cane—fresh off the success of Leviathan Rising—said, “The writer is a creature who thrives in isolation. Writing is just your mind and a blank page. If you can’t sit with the worst parts of yourself, of the creative process, and feel an unimaginable high then maybe you shouldn’t write.”

A week later, he sold a three-book deal for six-figures, attended a movie premiere of a well-known horror director, and was arrested for trying to buy coke at a club frequented by clients who hadn’t even been conceived when he’d graduated college. The cops said when they arrested him he was with a girl barely a few days past her eighteenth birthday.

I can’t even remember how I convinced myself it was all just some misunderstanding.

***

I’m sitting in my car outside of Prickly Pear Books. Cane begins his reading in less than half-an-hour.

I tried to go in sooner, but when I pulled into the parking lot I was hit with posters of Cane’s face either slashed with the words RAPIST or GENIUS. The desert sunset is bruised purples and singed oranges. Though the sun is almost set, the protestors must have been here for a few hours as their light linen clothes are splotched with sweat. The quiet, aging hippie owner, Sonja, walks through the storefront door with two pitchers of water. A book seller, Jun, follows behind her with stacks of plastic cups in each hand and they begin pouring out water for all of those in the micromob. Sonja looks about ready to topple over from stress but nobody screams at her; in fact, each person nods their heads and thanks her and Jun—probably because everyone knows none of this was their fault. I grip the envelope in my bag and then finally open the car door and head inside.

***

Inside the bookstore, things are muted even though each time the front door opens the shouts and cigarette smoke of those outside spill in like a toppling glass of water. I’m sitting on the staircase that leads up to a balcony landing that overlooks the whole store. So many of us are crammed next to one another that I can’t tell whose sweat is whose despite the air conditioning blowing directly over our heads. I wonder if the staircase will collapse from the weight of us all piled on top of it. I picture myself impaled on a wooden railing with Joshua standing nearby in silent horror. That would’ve made a nice scene in A Family Affair, I think.

To my right, a rupture grows outside like the delay between the percussion blast from a far off mushroom cloud. The front door opens and reveals Cane. He’s no more than fifteen feet away from me, but I only get peeks of him through the bodies of those between us. A slice of a dark, navy sport coat. A sliver of greying blonde hair with too much gel. A bit of a thick, well-trimmed beard. I don’t stand up because it’s so tight that I know I’ll lose the spot I have, directly facing over those sitting in the mismatched fold-out chairs below, and just to the left of the podium where he’ll read. Shouts and cheers follow him from outside, though I can’t see his face to see what it says. Sonja, who looks nauseous, leads him to the backroom.

“Rapist pig,” a girl, about my age, shouts at him as he walks past.

Cane doesn’t react but Sonja flinches. Immediately, the bookstore erupts in shouts, murmurs, and even simple glances between people carry their own weight of indecipherable judgment.

“Why did we even come to this?” the coed next to me says to the boy by her side.

“To see if the crowd attacks him,” he says.

“I’ve never seen this place so crowded before. Shouldn’t this be deserted? Boycotted or something?”

“We’re here, aren’t we?”

With a pregnant pause they both look out over the packed bookstore and say nothing else.

***

After ten minutes or so, Cane walks out of the backroom. He stands by the door and nods to Sonja. Sonja crosses to the front where there’s two empty chairs. When she turns to the crowd, she wobbles.

“Thank you all for coming tonight,” she says. Her voice is so weak I can feel everybody’s hearts break simultaneously. “Prickly Pear sure hasn’t ever had an audience this big before so I thank everybody for bearing with us. If anybody needs water, Jun will be outside giving water to those folks and I’ll be standing by the desk.” She darts her eyes to Cane. “Without further ado, Samson Cane will read from his new novel.”

At first Cane doesn’t move. Then a few awkward claps swell into a mediocre applause, and after more people join in he starts towards the front of the room. He smiles at people as he walks and ignores the ones hissing at him as he passes. He stops in front of the chairs, turns to the crowd, and gives a little bow.

He’s smaller than I imagined, weaker, and horribly, offensively normal–unremarkable in every way besides the fact that he’s the man standing at the front of the room. He doesn’t look like a rapist or a genius but just an out-of-shape, middle aged man. I had assumed his brilliance would pour out of him, washing over the rest of us so we’d get a taste of excellence in our small, mediocre lives and be inspired to rise to his level. But in an instant all I see is a man as rumpled as every other professor who’s slept with at least one of his students and saw nothing wrong with it because “they’re both adults,” and, inevitably, their escapades would come to light when enough writing majors compared their sexual histories and find they’d all been had by the same sad man who promised them their writing held great promise before emailing them the address for his shabbily decorated apartment.

Cane sits down, adjusts his tie, and opens his mouth to speak. I hold my breath, my chest swelling with hope.

“I appreciate you all for being here,” he says, his voice nasally and monotone. “There’s certainly quite the hullabaloo happening around us right now so I’m excited to have a night where we just get to focus on some good literature. I’ll begin tonight’s reading with an excerpt from the book’s prologue.”

Cane opens his hardcover copy and begins reading, steadily and expertly, “Moira Shawcross always knew she was exceptional, even before her family and friends realized it…”

I’m not looking at the crowd or distracted by the shouts still heard from outside or even care that my thighs are drenched with sweat. I only see Cane. I see every erratic hair, every blemish, every lint speck on his jacket, and wonder why his left shoe ties are missing their aglets but not his right.

“To Moira, fashion, though more specifically the aesthetic of beauty, was her god. She worshipped beauty no matter how it presented itself to her: old, young, fat, thin, white, black, boy, girl, or other. It didn’t matter as long as they were beautiful…”

I’m thinking of Cane’s lines and passages I’ve underlined, committed to memory, and tried to imitate in my own work. I feel a dissolution beginning within me–like a sandcastle gradually being destroyed by the tide. I’m reading the scene where Horace prays to both his Christian god and Buddah when confronted with Deidre Hillcrest’s ghost two days after my father’s funeral. My bloodshot eyes are burning as I try to stay awake to finish the final confrontation between Father O’Heneghan and the possessed Irma Quill the night before my first day of high school. I’m quickly jotting down an annotation on the page where pioneers Buck and Kittie Thatcher find a mutilated doe in the woods by their homestead as I sit at the bar to meet Joshua for our first date.

“When Moira discovered she’d been betrayed,” Cane reads, “she knew immediately that it wasn’t beauty that had betrayed her but something even more offensive to her precise sensibilities. What tortured her was the knowledge that those who had stabbed her in the back weren’t true disciples of all things gorgeous and divine…”

Now, I’m sitting besides my brother who’s watching The Boondock Saints for the third time this week while I revise my story about star crossed vampire lovers. I’m watching my mom riding her stationary bicycle in our living room, cigarette in one hand and our landline in the other. I’m drawing a heart on the snot-smeared prison plexiglass for my dad who’s asking about school. I see Joshua reading my book’s latest pages when he doesn’t know I’m home, shaking his head at some parts and smiling at others.

“It was then that Moira knew what she had to do. If she had truly always been beauty’s servant, fashion’s slave, or every bit as exceptional as she believed herself to be her whole life long, then she had to become judge, jury, and executioner…”

Now all I can see is my crumpled envelope clenched in my hands. Bit by bit, with every word, more and more of something within me unravels until the only thing I can do is to press myself into a ball, squeeze my hand over my mouth, and stifle my sobs.

***

I’m sitting in the sunroom. I smell baking pineapple cake from the downstairs apartment. I sit in the lawn chair Joshua usually occupied. My copy of The Mansion on Blackwell Moors is on the bannister, its cover meticulously taped whole. I open my laptop.

I’m starting a new story today.

What do you think it should be about?

*

Michaela Rae Luckey is an Aquarius, a cinephile, and a graduate of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where she studied English and Creative Writing. She’s relocated back to her hometown of Chicago, Illinois, and is working as an Editorial Associate at the University of Chicago Press. Her writing has appeared in Marathon Literary Review and Litro Magazine.

*

Featured Image: The Horrible Doctor Hitchcock (1962)