Circa You

Alison was born gasping for air, a rope of flesh constricting her meager throat. As she grew up, she’d always stand out because of the red hair that stayed true to its roots. It turned bright as saffron in the midday and rich like velvet drapes at dusk. When she was a little girl, her mother had fashioned it into a bob that looked like an apple from behind.

That was how she looked when I first saw her. She saved me from drowning by the pier near home. We got to talking after that, and at some point, she promised to teach me to swim if I taught her to fish because I put in her head—a mop of licorice—that the river had sturgeon. An old man told my father about it, who then told me about it.

Suffice it to say, however, that all fell through. We did meet a few more times and bounced plans off one another of how we’d catch the sturgeon, her suggesting we got our dads to wrestle it. My father wasn’t around, though. In between our exchanges, I invented excuse after excuse for why we couldn’t start my swimming lessons yet. And by the end of the summer, we had broken our promise, and I didn’t see her again until my teens.

The countryside hasn’t changed much, other than the trees feeling shorter now. I make my way through empty dirt paths to where we met for the second time. It’s a rotten corpse of a playground in the next town over, further down the river, and just bearable enough to walk to. Leaning against the slide, I strain my ears in search of a cardinal. There used to echo songs of all kinds from the trees, but they’ve gone quiet.

I was much older when I saw Alison again, a couple of hairs growing haywire on my chin. The girl was sitting on a weeping swing set, crooning while cradling an acoustic guitar. She turned to me as I got closer, but she didn’t recognize me at first. I guess I did grow my hair out to cover up the zits on my forehead, but I knew her instantly. Whether Alison was six or fourteen, those eyes wouldn’t change. They narrowed as her flawless cheeks gave way to a toothy smile.

I took a seat beside her and we caught up, somewhat, about my plan to go to college in the city. My father amounted to nothing before he up and left, and I had no siblings either, so I told her I was my family’s only hope. As I went on, she leaned forward, cocking her head and letting her hair cascade over the knees brought up to her chest. She only listened. Her pursed lips looked like a little bird’s beak, while her attentive hums resonated with some pitch inside me. When I paused, she slipped a cigarette between her waxy lips.

I’d never seen a girl smoke before then. The whole scene played out as if I were looking through a peephole. Now that I’m grown, whenever I see a cigarette butt, I’d look for even the faintest stain of her lipstick.

After a while of talking, she stomped out one last butt. Then we promised to talk some more, swimming lessons and sturgeon-fishing being brought up in jest somewhere along the dying notes of our conversation. I realized as I eyed her departing figure that I was already hooked myself. Her reticence was alluring, like she kept secrets locked behind those pursed lips. She was stunning unlike anyone else. My mind would have the syllables of her name jump over a fence all throughout that night.

She’d be there mostly in the summers; counting our childhood encounter, I met her in five. The girl stayed a ways away in a house that was nothing like anything else I’d seen. It was an immense white and gray affair, propped up by pillars stolen from the British Museum. From its gates, verdant arches funneled people through a cobblestone pathway. There was also an apple orchard behind her house, with fruits she said I just had to try. I never did, though, as I’d never been there personally. And there’s no way I could visit now.

Her house was almost painful to look at for a simple country rat, even just through a photograph. She was surprisingly unbothered by my living situation, though, in a shack with my mother. In fact, Alison admired the closeness she interpreted based on her image of it.

The thing was, the girl wasn’t exactly fond of home. She often spent time away from it and hung out with some folks who did worse than cigarettes. The four of them fancied themselves a band, again, mostly for the summertime.

Alison had known the leader since childhood, but she’d only been with them a couple of years. Her guitar would swirl in their dense, psychedelic soundscapes, while the sweetness from her lips seemed to sing with your breath. They were so loud I felt sick standing too close to the speakers.

I got involved with them that same summer I reunited with Alison. They practiced in an old shed, a little up the hill past the old playground. Their leader was an 18-year-old who sang and played bass in only the most tenuous sense. He tolerated my presence so long as I was on media duty.

The thing was, the drummer did own a camera but didn’t know composition if it shot him in the face. So I ended up taking photos and videos for them. By the band’s own admission, they were brilliant. I even reconsidered the whole college thing, imagining a life of selling fish pictures to nerds putting together field guides. I toiled with these fantasies as I hung out more with Alison and the band.

That also proved to be short-lived, unfortunately. By the end of the next summer, the leader lost his mind—or as Alison put it one evening while nursing a broken string: he never ended up finding it. In hindsight, he was probably mentally ill in some way, but we didn’t really know what that meant. The drugs didn’t help either. Circa You, as the band had only just decided on calling themselves, hadn’t even put anything to tape when their leader shot his cousin up in the hills. That cousin used to hang around the band and even stole from Alison’s orchard. Got ‘em good, the leader said, right in his sick guts. Put ‘em down like a dog.

We stopped hanging around the guy afterwards. It hit Alison the worst, but he said he did it for her. He ruined his life for her.

That incident pretty much marked the end of the band. Just the year after, nobody knew where anybody else was, and we heard no word from the leader. Even so, Alison and I got closer. We were joined at the shoulder at that point. I was doing all I could to be there for her.

We’d still frequent the shed as it continued to rot. The silence heightened our other senses, and I became drawn to the intricacies of her every breath, twitch of muscle, and the way stray strands of hair would rebel against the translucent hand tucking them behind an ear.

Alison sang a song for me once. She slipped her lit cigarette in her headstock before playing as if she were three and crooning as only she could. It was a skeletal piece, far removed from her old band’s layered sound, but much closer to the first thing I heard her perform at that derelict playground. I felt her pale fretting fingers on my skin as she closed her eyes and settled into a slouch like an idle marionette. Her chest bobbed in short, caught breaths.

Near the end of her performance, a twig fell on her head through a hole in the shed’s roof, and as I picked it off, she looked up at me. I was bound to her abyssal gaze. Something otherworldly existed within her pupils that was as addictive as it was a hazard to study. All words were lost in their vortex.

Now, kudzu has eaten the shed. My shoes squelch in little mossy puddles as I step inside. The air is pungent with rust. Mushrooms grow out of the tattered couch where we sat, while sunlight shoots through the metal walls. When I close my eyes, though, the shed feels no different from all those years ago, as if its soul is still in here. I even expect to see her as I turn my head, but of course, she isn’t there. The humming I hear isn’t her either. I’d never see her again. Even when I don’t want to, my mind inevitably wanders back to our fifth and last summer.

I always knew something was up with her, more or less. I’d catch her staring off into space sometimes. Her silences also started seeming more like she was gagged by words.

Alison told me once about her parents. Her mother stared off into space as well, so she was kept home most days. The woman never forgave herself, believing her first act of motherhood was to harm her baby. It was eggshells and broken glass all around, Alison told me. She was much too tender of heart to hold it against the woman, though.

Meanwhile, Alison’s father was barely ever home. When he was, he never had much nice to say about his youngest daughter. She was behind her peers in most things, a chain smoker, and more trouble than she was worth. He suspected the girl was out and about in some unsavory business, only compounded by her older siblings’ gossip. He’d warned her to never let anybody touch her. Not until a husband was in the picture. The man’s tongue was only ever blunted by the kindly words of his young wife, who was remarkably sensible after five arduous childbirths.

A little before we met again, Alison’s mother had killed herself. Or maybe she didn’t. There was only so much to glean from an open bottle of antidepressants. Regardless, near the end of our last summer, Alison confided in me—while we sat by this very ledge just a few steps through the trees behind the shed—that she was glad her mother went on her own terms. She wondered how it felt. Maybe like the moment before you fall asleep, when all of the thoughts that weighed you down seem fleeting. As she stared down at the river connecting our little towns, Alison wished her thoughts could always be that way.

It was close to sunset then, colder than it should've been that time of year. The remaining light grazed us in patches. It was all silent, save for a cardinal. Then a smoky breath carried her words. She asked what to do with herself.

I could only pull her head to my chest. She spoke words muffled by my shirt, but I heard a plea for help as her nails dug into my drenched back. I realized this embrace was the only thing that kept this fragile little tree from snapping.

Alison rolled up her sleeve and told me of each of her pains, one at a time. When her mom killed herself, her dad let up a little. It seemed he no longer saw meaning in chastising his youngest child. She had been left more or less to her own devices.

The girl thought it was an odd feeling, though. She likened it to breaking out of her coffin, only to find she’s been buried at sea. There was nothing to hold onto. As odd as her mother was, the girl adored her. Seeing her stuck in time like that consumed Alison’s every waking thought.

I told her how strong she was, in spite of everything. The guilt over what had happened with the band leader and the man he shot still ate away at her as well, but I assured her that was between two adults. She didn’t have to despair over what they chose for themselves. We were just kids, after all, barely 17.

Alison then asked if I still wanted to go to college, and I did—No, I didn’t, really. I found photography and fishing much more fulfilling than reading, but I told her I did and that I would. I’d go to college in the big city, bring her along, and she could forget about everything that happened in this dingy town. I’d take care of her. She didn’t need her father or her awful sisters.

Alison smiled before standing up. I followed her, but was taken aback as she crouched down slightly to kiss me on the cheek. I lost myself in her gaze, as usual. She must’ve said something too, but then she turned to leave. When I came back to my senses, I realized I had failed to tell her I loved her. Sweet apples lingered on my lips where I should’ve only tasted smoke.

That was the last day I saw her ruddy skin. I called in sick at first, but I did end up seeing her. It had only been a week. Her sisters changed her into a frilly white dress, and I swear, she never looked more wrong. She washed up the riverbank, closer to my town than hers. I couldn’t even tell, however, with how well they cleaned her up.

Her hair, still a lustrous red, lay like she’d only drifted off, tossing and turning. The curve of her lips, too faint for a smile, called to mind what she once said about her own mother’s peace. They’d made up the scars on her arm, too, as if they made her unpresentable. I wish I could have touched her.

Her father was also there, in the corner of the room. He didn’t know me. I saw her band members too, save for their leader, and they and everybody else thought of it as a great and tragic shock. They said it was a grizzly way to go, that they could’ve never seen it coming. I understood her, though, after all the time we’ve spent. No one else saw her like I did. Only I found the beauty beneath the pains of flesh and mind she bore. But in the end, I couldn’t save her.

Her ghost possessed my muscles then, and I found myself a heaving mess, once again, at the cliff behind the shed. At a late summer’s sunset.

I’d find myself back here time and time again throughout the years, as I went to college and gave up on photography, as I forgot how to tie a fishing knot, as I never learned to swim, and as the sturgeons vanished from the river behind the vacant house I once called home. I could only sit by the ledge.

The day dies before me. Alison’s hair seems to glow across the sky beyond the ledge, stars speckled about the strands as if pilgriming to earth. I hum, as best I can, a song Alison liked to sing, and her cool breaths lull every single anxious child in my cells. Shutting my eyes, I imagine her apple orchard, though I’d never seen it. I imagine taking a bite of the fruit I never got to have, under the shade of evergreen leaves.

Again and again, Alison would come to me. The only girl I’ve ever loved would grow more beautiful and even more indelible as her form took hold of every arousal of every sense I had. I'd see her in a red-haired stranger, in a discarded cigarette, and in between trees on summer nights. I’d feel the vice grip of her gaze every time I looked up at a starless sky. I'd hear her in every grouchy voice of a woman roused from sleep and every sweet melody hummed deep in the woods. The girl’s soul, wrung out of her liminal body, still hangs over me.

…

“Hey.”

I turn to the voice. The woman peeks out from the front of the shed. Crimson hair sweeps over her eyes. She wipes her hand with a handkerchief as she makes her way over to the ledge. Bug bites blend with the freckles on her itchy cheek.

She pulls me by the hand.

“I’m done, so let’s head back already. The bugs are killing me… What’re you looking at anyway?” She stops in her tracks and follows my gaze to the horizon.

“I was just thinking how the sunset reminded me of lustrous red hair.”

The woman grins and yanks me down by the collar. The trees rustle behind her, and somewhere, wings flap. Her frigid hands seize my face and turn it to hers. As our lips meet, I wonder why I smell cigarettes.

“I knew you’d like the color I went with,” the woman’s finger twirls around a lock of hair.

It’s nearly dark now. A cardinal sings, but she tells me it’s just a mockingbird.

Only after a while does she pull back and ask,

“You brought me all the way here just to say that? You’re so lovestruck.”

“Yeah…” I search for a cigarette butt on the ground, “I am,” but I can’t smell it anymore.

She kisses me again, and as I’m choked by rotten fruit, I thank God she closed her eyes.