Shadow of Tomorrow

Shut in the dry dust, in the dark, phone cord tangles between her fingers. The elastic spiral of it is crimped and stretched now and it doesn’t spring back the way it used to when she unwinds it from her thumb. Between boxes of pasta and sacks of rice, a crate of potatoes and one of peeling onions, she listens to the static-eaten voice crackling over the line. 

“Just for tonight. That’s all I— I just need tonight.” The sound buzzes and hums in her ear. So human. So artificial. Phones are funny like that, distorting the things you know in the chambers of your heart and giving them a tinny sort of quality until you aren’t sure if there’s really anyone on the other side of the line at all, if it’s real at all. “I know how it sounds, but honest, I’m not… nothing’s different. Not on the inside.”

Gracie runs a finger along the bottom shelf, slicing a line clean through the gathered dust. Rubbing fingertip to thumb, she watches the fine dust and lint flash in the crack of light that glows in from underneath the door. “Why did you even call?” she asks, after a beat. It’s too late to be in that house still, getting chilled, getting hollowed. 

There’s a crackly breath, and it sounds hurt. “Where else am I supposed to go? If you won’t let me stay, no one will.” 

“Magnolia Mae,” Gracie says and lets it sit. She hears Maggie’s sharp inhale. Middle names are for muddy footprints on the white carpet, buckets and buckets of fresh berries left to rot and wither in the sun, and new dents in the front bumper. “I meant you can have tonight and you should know better than to think you need to ask. You can have forever.”

“You won’t last forever,” Maggie mumbles after a moment. “Nothing will.”

“I’ve got fireworks in the barn, if you feel like going out with a bang, then.”

On the other side of the line, there’s a laugh, wet and runny but real, even through the way the speaker crunches it up. “I’ll be there.”

She does, in fact, get there. When there’s a rap against the door, Gracie untangles herself from the phone cord and crawls out of the dark pantry and into the orange flicker of the kitchen lantern, burning oil on the table. Her parents aren’t there anymore, but she can still see traces of them, chairs worn with their echoes. The scrapes in the wood from the buttons on her dad’s jeans. The black bleed from her mom’s cheap hair dye trickling down the back of the chair. She remembers the shared looks with their knit brows and worry-bright eyes, the hands laced in the center of the table. Then Maggie knocks again, and Gracie shoves the quiet receiver back into the rest that hangs on the wall. 

When she opens the door, it’s to a swarm of moths fluttering around the porch light and a rush of muggy warmth. Day always seems to have a way of bleeding its summer heat into the night. Coughing a little in the stifling damp, she shoos off the swarm to find smeared mascara and a torn flannel and only one shoe, one sock. Living shadow stains up the arm Maggie holds close to her chest, and it bleeds into the veins where her skin is still its proper, freckled pale. There’s an abandoned bike overturned by the porch steps, the back wheel still spinning a slow circle. Overgrown grass brushes the spokes with every turn. If Gracie remembers right, the bike, with its rusting red paint, belonged to the boy a door over from Maggie’s family. Absently, she wonders if he made it out too.

“Your truck,” Maggie says instead of any greeting, loosely waving a hand back to the empty gravel parking pad. 

“Louie had to go play white knight. His girlfriend’s piece of junk hasn’t started since February.” Tossing him the keys felt a little like honor, a little like death. 

“Your parents?” she asks next, already frowning.

“They went yesterday. Begged and cried for me to go with them,” Gracie offers, shrugging. She probably should have gone with them. Anyone else might have, though there’s still a lot of stubborn out there, a lot of misguided, a lot of desperate. She’s just never been afraid of the dark, even when the wolves howled. Even when she got bit, late that winter night, face to face with cold amber eyes, crimson staining the snow. Maggie cried a lot. Louie whacked the side of her head and called her reckless. Her parents put a lock on her bedroom window. 

She only fell in love. 

Nothing could rival the pawprints in crisp snow, the stardust of a new moon night, the dark under the trees. The exhilaration. 

“What about us then?” Maggie asks once Gracie had all but forgotten what they were talking about at all. 

She shrugs, looks down at the shadow burrowed deep in Maggie’s skin. If she’d stayed in her house any longer, it would have gotten to her heart, her head. Turned her into a dark-drenched, glowing-eyed thing that creeps and haunts and bites. It’s what they’ll all become, if the flooding shadow doesn’t stop filling the streets and leaking into the cellars and dripping from the trees. 

“I wasn’t joking about the fireworks,” she says.

“You’re an idiot.”

“You want to do it too, don’t you? Light the biggest bonfire and set off the brightest fireworks and beat back the dark, even just for an instant.” Gracie grins and her heart beats a little harder and she thinks that going out in a blaze of bonfire and colored firework rain when the world is going dark doesn’t seem too bad. She might like the dark, but simply fading isn’t in her plans. Her name is still spray painted in bold and neon in the high school’s back lot and the maple tree out in the field is still etched with her carved hearts and stars. The truck her brother burns down the highway in is hand painted, the factory blue covered in daisies and rainbows that leap between clouds.

Maggie grins, the realest she has since this all started, the crinkly-eyed sort that used to be reserved for sitting in the afternoon dapple of sun and shade under the willow out by the pond, fingers stained with berry juice and the cheapest, trashiest romance novel dog eared and fingerprinted and passed between them to laugh at. “You’re an idiot and a damn romantic.” Still, she reaches out a hand, offers it to Gracie.

So they walk, linked hands swinging between them, out to the barn. They dig through spools of copper wire and burlap sacks and the mountain of moldy hay left over from the summer the roof caved in and the rain ruined it all. 

“You should have left here,” Maggie says at some point, the growing collection of colorful fireworks in her arms tossed to the dirt floor at her feet. Gracie should have offered her a second shoe. 

There’s a lot she could have done, should have done. There’s a lot she could say now, should say now. Instead she only gestures to Maggie’s stained arm. “Leaving home behind is kind of hard, right?” 

It wouldn’t have gotten that way if she left when they called for evacuations. If she left when she saw the flood of strange, living shadow slithering down the street. “But I did it,” she says.

“When you were forced out,” Gracie adds, like it matters. She isn’t sure it does, because at the end of the day, Maggie may have been forced out, but she still left. When at the end of her rope, Gracie didn’t chew free, didn’t run for safety. Instead, she’s here, piling up the biggest fire hazard of the century, ready to burn it all down rather than leave it behind. 

Maggie tosses a pack of sparklers to the pile. “We can’t stay here much longer either,” she says like they’ll still leave. Like she isn’t helping to get ready for their stupid plan to stay and make a stand. 

“Take your bike and go then,” Gracie replies, picking bits of hay from her hair. “You’re welcome with me forever, but you don’t have to be here if you don’t want to. I’m not forcing you.”

For a long moment, there’s silence settled in the dusty air. A wire spool they moved falls from its mountain of clutter and clatters to the floor, but that’s it. That’s all there is. “I might like to see you alive, if I go.” She says it quiet, like a secret, like a confession. 

“I’m honored.”

“I’m serious.”

Gracie pulls her bottom lip between her teeth, breathes in sharp through her nose the scents of mold and grain and motor oil. It smells like hide and seek with her brother, like night’s around a campfire stargazing and getting sticky with s’mores, like hiding away from the world and the boyfriend she knew she never wanted in the first place. “I’ll make up my mind,” she says, “when it comes down to it.” It sounds big, in all the empty space. “To go or stay.”

When all the fireworks and matches they can muster up are lined up in the grass outside, they retreat back to the barn. Gracie unearths a bottle of strawberry wine she stashed in a nook in the walls a year back. It seems like the right night, if there ever will be one, to open it up. Instead of sleeping, they pass the bottle back and forth, leaned back against the mountain of hay. Words while away the hours, wine washing back the bitterness of the night with a sticky sort of sweetness. Even under the moon and stars, the heat makes Gracie sweat, dampening her hair, soaking into her collar. 

And by the time morning comes around again, the glow on the horizon doesn’t last long before it’s blotted out by the shadow snaking down the long, dusty road. 

“I think it’s do or die time, Gracelyn Marie,” Maggie says and stands up, stretching her arms up above her head, then down to her toes. 

For a long, long moment, Gracie stands and stares out at the darkening horizon, her name ringing in her ears. She could perch on the back of that rusty bike, leave this all behind and ride off into the world in search of a bright place where the sun will warm her cheeks forever, somewhere the coming abyss can’t reach. She could stay and burn out in a supernova burst here, a last, dying gasp in the cosmos. Brilliant, bright. Impermanent.

“Did you know I always hoped I’d turn into a werewolf after that winter?” Gracie asks, still gazing out. 

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“You know, the winter I got bitten by a wolf and I had to go to the hospital. I thought I might be a werewolf. Transforming and hunting and howling at the moon and all that.”

Maggie breathes deep, lets it out in a feathery sigh. “You’re not a wolf,” she says. 

“I know.”

The end of it all creeps ever closer. 

“You’re a person,” she says.

“I know.”

There’s the slightest breeze that stirs through the summer heat. 

Maggie bumps their shoulders together where they stand side by side, watching the tide roll in. “I love you,” she says, just as simple and clean as the rest of the list. You’re not a wolf. You’re a person. I love you. Easy.

“I know.” She always has known, somewhere in her teeth, in the shape of her hands. Not quite as easy to search out as the things that dwell in the heart, but there nonetheless. 

“Then let's go,” Maggie says and holds out a hand. 

Gracie takes it, sweaty as it might be. “Promise you’ll find me a new home. Somewhere as good as this one.”

“We’ll build one, together.”

Fireworks don’t burn, but a little red bike rolls down the lane, and maybe that’s enough.