When she was younger, Gemma often felt like the world was made of metal that had been left sitting in the sun, and anything she touched could burn her. But whether it was a consequence of maturity or just the medication a psychiatrist had put her on in her mid-twenties, Gemma, now on the other side of thirty, no longer experienced life that way. The world was not the deadly conductor it once had seemed. There were very few things that could burn her just by touching them, and that reality felt strangely devastating. She missed those moments of self-indulgent sadness: the sensation of looking out at a mountaintop at night and feeling that no one in the world had ever seen it quite the way she was. She knew now that most mountains had already been seen in every way imaginable.
Her rental for the week was a small one-bedroom house at the very top of Main Street. A flight of sixty-two stairs led up the hill from the sidewalk to the house; the town of Pineborough, Arizona, elevation seven thousand four hundred feet, was famous for its stairs. Built into a steep mountainside, the town was an accessibility nightmare, and many of its homes had these harrowing staircases. Gemma had not exactly forgotten this, but she realized as she lugged her bags up the first few steps that her calf muscles were not what they were ten years ago. Gasping slightly, she made it to the front porch, found the keys in a lockbox, and let herself inside.
The house was spare, but not sterile. White shiplap walls and a sofa the color of a soft pink sunset. Someone had left a sunflower in a vase on the table, and a Post-it that read Welcome, Gemma, with a little smiley face drawn beneath it.
Gemma’s phone buzzed in her pocket. She jumped as if electrocuted and took it out, pulse quickening. A WhatsApp notification from an Arizona area code. Gemma read the message. Then read it again. She placed the phone screen-down on the table beside the Post-it note and closed her eyes, trying to summon some surge of deep emotion. It didn’t come.
Everything was quiet as she made her way down the hilly road towards Main Street. Pineborough was a small town like many others in America: a population of around three thousand; a single grocery store where the workers knew you by name; one main road that hosted a few small shops and cafes. The cool, blue light of dusk and the resin scent of ancient conifers hung heavy in the air. Gemma passed a bakery that had been there ten years before, and a stationary store that hadn’t. She felt a strange blankness that confused her. She hadn’t known what emotion to expect on her arrival, but she’d been certain that whatever it was, it would be overwhelming. What she had not expected was this: a sheen of normalcy, of nonchalance. Here she was in Pineborough for the first time in a decade, and that was that. It felt wrong that she wasn’t overcome with emotion, that she was here in a place she had cared about so deeply, for so long, that its topography felt burned into the texture of her very skin, and she felt…fine.
On her first night in town when she’d come here ten years prior, twenty-one-year-old Gemma had gone for a moonlit walk around the sloping, cobbled streets of the village. The sky was a deep, starry navy sprinkled with stars; the nineteenth century facades looked like the set of an old Western movie her dad might have liked. These visuals, along with the electric buzz of being in a place where no one knew her and she could become absolutely anyone she wanted, lit up the fibers of Gemma’s body and made her feel like she was floating. She had just crossed to the north side of the road and there was not another soul in sight when a shadow fell over her from above. Gemma had looked up towards the old building across the street, where a figure was standing on a balcony on the third floor.
It was a woman; gaunt and pale, her face smeared with makeup that looked as though it had been sobbed out of place. The moon hung low in the sky behind her and cast a strange silver glow around her edges. For a split second, Gemma and the woman stared at each other, and Gemma was sure she knew her but couldn’t place how. She had the unsettling sensation that she was looking at a ghost. Then a coyote howled somewhere off in the hills, and Gemma had hurried away as quickly as she could. She never saw the woman again, but in retrospect, her appearance on the balcony had come to seem like an omen of Gemma’s ill-fated time there.
Remembering it now sent a small shiver up her spine, though she still couldn’t quite explain why. She pushed it out of her mind and headed towards the dive bar at the far end of Main Street.
Gemma saw Lane as soon as she entered – how could she not? Lane had always been the tallest person in the room. She looked mostly as Gemma remembered, just ten years older. They both looked this way, but she felt Lane wore it better. Before Gemma could formulate an opening line, Lane crossed the bar in three long strides and stood in front of Gemma with her hands on her hips.
“Goddamn,” Lane said, a disbelieving smile tugging at the corners of her lips. “You came. You really fucking came.”
Gemma looked up at her. She had always been intrigued by the way people shrink as they get older, but Lane was only in her forties. For a second that contained a decade, the noise of the bar faded and everything slowed. Gemma once again found herself awash with that strange sensation of blankness. How often had she played out this moment in her mind? Too many times to count. It was like a stone she’d been turning over and over in her hand for years until its original shape had been smoothed away. She’d pictured it a million different ways; every way except this one. The one where she just felt nothing. Lane was here, and so was she, in Pineborough, and that was that.
Gemma forced a smile and leaned in to accept a hug.
The small-talk portion was easy because it required minimal input from Gemma’s end; this had always been the case. They sat at a little table in a dark corner for maybe an hour or so while Lane recounted the minutiae of her latest exhibition, her divorce from a woman named Clara, the rafting trip she’d taken with her gallery manager last summer, and many other things that had happened to her over the years. Finally, three beers in, she leaned back in her chair.
“So,” she said. “How about you?”
“Me?”
“I’ll be honest,” Lane said, “I sort of thought you hated me.”
Gemma noted the way the inquiry had so quickly turned back towards Lane herself.
“Why would I hate you?” Gemma asked. It was so odd, so deeply unsettling, how she was aware of every rapid pulsation of her heartbeat and yet the outside of her still felt so blank.
“I don’t know. I felt like things ended weird,” Lane said opaquely.
This specific moment, Gemma realized, was the real reason she had come to Pineborough. She watched Lane intently, hoping for something, but after a long silence she realized that what she was hoping for would never come. She arranged the pieces of her face into what felt like it should resemble a smile.
“It’s all good,” she said.
They said goodbye outside the bar, made plans to meet back up the following evening. There had been some hints from Lane throughout the night: comments about how she wanted Gemma’s opinion on a rug she’d bought, how Gemma would love her little dog, how nice the view was from her balcony in the morning. Now Lane lingered expectantly.
“Seriously, Gemma, it’s good to have you back here,” she said. “I really cannot fucking believe you came.”
“Well,” Gemma said, planning to reply with something witty, but realizing she couldn’t muster it. She gave a tight-lipped smile and headed off back to the rental house.
Her mind churned and swirled and threatened to spill over. As much as she’d been pining for her long-gone melodrama, she realized now that if even one drop escaped the bucket she would be completely overwhelmed. So instead, she focused on the crowing of a distant raven, the crispness of the night, and the burning in her calves as she ascended the sixty-two steps to the house. She started to let herself inside, then doubled back and stood on the porch to look out over the little town below.
For the first time since she’d arrived, the protective cloak of emptiness she’d been feeling suddenly fell off her shoulders, and Gemma felt everything. A vision of herself – her twenty-one-year-old self – floated just out of reach. What would that lost girl think if she could see Gemma now? The career as an artist she’d dreamed of, gone. Friends or family or a partner who really knew her, nonexistent. There was no way around it: that twenty-one-year-old would be so deeply, crushingly disappointed. She would hate this quiet, closed off, colorless version. She wouldn’t even recognize herself.
The feeling of failure was so immense that Gemma closed her eyes to focus on it, just so it would hurt her a little more.
Lane’s studio occupied the whole top floor of the old bank building on Main Street. Gemma made her way up the stairs, alarmed at how easily she remembered to skip the wobbly step halfway up. Everything was as it had been ten years before, except now the walls of the staircase were lined with framed clippings from newspapers and magazines, all singing glowing praises to Lane and her work.
Gemma knocked on the door to the studio, and within seconds it swung open. Lane stood tall and grinning in the doorway. She wore paint-covered overalls, her hair in messy braids – every inch of her the image of an artist, almost to the point of performativity.
“Hey, stranger,” Lane said. She stood back to let Gemma in.
The studio, like everything else, was almost but not quite as it had been. It was a big, airy room with massive windows and a balcony that looked out over Main Street. Paint-splattered tarps and half-finished canvases littered the space. Gemma took it all in. Lane’s painting style had become more literal, somehow, in the last decade. The critics and galleries seemed to love it, but Gemma realized as she looked around at the unfinished works that she preferred Lane’s older stuff.
She had first seen it in a group exhibition at an art gallery near her university. The piece that grabbed her interest was small, barely bigger than a manila envelope. It showed a genderless figure enveloped in increasingly translucent versions of itself, repeating over and over like a funhouse mirror. Something about the painting was so compelling to Gemma that she’d even asked the gallery assistant how much it was selling for, which of course turned out to be a sum that might as well have been a million dollars to her, a broke art student. Still, she’d gone home and immediately searched the artist’s name: LANE CANTON. And when she saw the call for a summer assistant on the artist’s website, it had seemed like the ultimate alignment of the universe.
The universe plays games like that, sometimes.
“Take a load off,” Lane said, waving a loose hand towards the velvet couch by the window. “Drink?”
“Water’s fine.”
“No, you want a beer,” Lane said, already pushing one into Gemma’s hand. She flopped down on the couch, a little closer than was necessary. “What do you think of the new stuff?”
Gemma knew she meant the paintings scattered around the room.
“Seems like it’s doing really well for you,” she said. “I’m surprised you stayed in Pineborough.”
“My managers are in New York. No need for me to be. Rather be the big fish in the small pond.”
“Sure.”
“Besides, the prizes, the awards, the galleries – those are all just accessories, you know? The real inspiration is in the work itself. To be an artist, a real artist, means working even when all that shit is out of your field of vision. Speaking of which, what are you working on lately?”
Something caught in Gemma’s throat.
“I’m a writer.”
“Oh, yeah? What have you published?”
Her last article for the website where she worked had been clickbait about a famous pop star’s low-rise jeans.
“I write non-fiction,” Gemma said, feeling about two feet tall.
“Hmm.”
Lane looked at her with an appraising expression; like someone considering a piece of art they weren’t sure they liked.
“What?”
“Why’d you stop painting?” Lane asked.
“I never said I stopped.”
“But you did, right? I can tell when somebody’s lost their practice.”
“I didn’t lose it,” Gemma said quietly.
“Then where’d it go? Come on, Gemma. You were pretty good, if I remember. I mean, you were still learning, but if you kept it up I bet you’d have improved a lot by now.”
“Maybe,” Gemma said. Her voice felt distant. She desperately wanted to change the subject, but suddenly she couldn’t think of anything other than the one at hand. Lane seemed energized. Giving unsolicited advice had always seemed to have that effect for her.
“It’s not too late, you know,” Lane said wisely. “Even if you feel like you’ve fucked up, or wasted time, or however you’re feeling – you can still get back to your art. Granted, you’ll probably never be where you might’ve been if you’d been consistent with it, but there’s nothing wrong with practicing as a hobby.”
“Okay,” said Gemma.
“I mean, seriously, just because you’ve lost it –”
“I didn’t lose anything,” Gemma said sharply. “You took it.”
Lane’s head cocked to the side like a dog trying to decipher an unknown command.
“What do you mean?” Lane asked, an uncertain smile on her lips.
It probably wasn’t too late to walk it back. It probably wasn’t too late to change the subject, to offer praise and flattery, to end the conversation on a peaceful note and go back to the rental house like nothing had happened. It probably wasn’t too late.
But the sting of anger in Gemma’s throat said otherwise.
“You took it from me,” she said. “You took it all.”
“I don’t –”
“It’s funny,” Gemma said humorlessly. “A few years ago, I got this Facebook message. Some random girl I’d never met before. She was an art student like me – she was your assistant, like me. Small world. Anyway, she told me all these things about you. Unbelievable things, except I believed them, because you did them to me too.”
“Hang on,” said Lane, a tiny note of panic in her voice now. “Hang on, Gemma. I never did anything to you. We – well, yeah, in retrospect I know it wasn’t totally cool for us to like, date, while you were working for me. But I thought – I mean – it’s not like I forced you into it. And any other stuff that happened – I mean, sure we had some misunderstandings, but –”
Lane took a frazzled gulp from her beer. When she finished, Gemma leaned towards her.
“I would be someone else – someone better – if not for the way you treated me,” she said quietly.
Lane seemed speechless. They stared at each other for a long moment. Gemma didn’t blink. Suddenly, Lane shook her head as if trying to clear water from her ears and stumbled towards the bathroom. The door slammed shut behind her.
Gemma stood and placed her beer on the arm of the couch, hoping it would leave a permanent ring on the fabric. She made her way across the studio and hoisted open one of the wide glass windows that led out to the balcony.
The sun had set while they were talking. Gemma looked out over the balcony. The mountains were black phantoms in the night; the stars were tiny moth holes in a velvet coat. She knew she would never come back here, and that was alright. Not everything you love is meant to keep.
It was several moments before she realized she was crying.
Gemma looked down across the hilly main street below, then froze. Under the balcony, on the other side of the road, a small figure stood staring up at her.
It was a girl, or maybe a young woman, and something about the sight of her made Gemma’s blood run cold. It was hard to make out the details of her face at this distance and in this light, but, though she couldn’t place it, Gemma had the strangest feeling that she knew her from somewhere.
The girl was staring at her, and Gemma felt an odd self-consciousness about how she, Gemma, looked from down there. For a fleeting moment she considered waving, but then the moment passed. A distant coyote howled. The girl hurried away, disappearing into the darkness of the winding cobbled streets. Gemma turned her attention back to the mountains, and never thought of her again.
Amy Monaghan is a queer Los Angeles-based writer with an MFA in Screenwriting from UCLA. Her fiction has appeared in publications such as Chaotic Merge, Witness, El Portal, Cagibi, and others. In her free time she enjoys road trips to towns with one gas station, reading books about tragedy, and collecting pine cones in the park. Learn more at www.amymonaghanwrites.com, or find her on Instagram @amy_monaghan_
