Parapraxis

She appeared across July like an occasional hobby, and brought that Bronco with her-- scratched scarlet paint, exhaust pipe coughing black tar. Where she drove it, its wheels left dents in the ground. And every time she walked out his door she left dents in his heart too.

She had black hair cut short and black eyes, and old scars crossing her shoulderblades. When she didn’t have one hand on her car she seemed to be uncomfortable, and more than once he had caught her talking to the air.

Newcomers weren’t much of a thing these days, so when he asked her what her name was, he found himself surprised that she gave it.

“Lip,” she said. She pushed a lock of jet-black hair out of her face. “You?”

“Arthur.”

“King Arthur.”

“Not really.” He gave out rooms and sold canned food to the people who needed it, and kept away the ones who didn’t with a club. Any nobility he might have worn once had been rubbed off of him, like a thumb on a skipping stone. “Lip’s a funny name.”

“Not really.” A small smile crossed her mouth. “I like it.”

She was mischievous, and he liked her.

“You got a place to stay? And maybe a place to park my car?”

“It’s a nice car.”

It had been the right thing to say. She smiled wider and patted its side door. “Thank you. It belonged to my father.”

“He took good care of it.”

“He loved that damn car. It went in the bunker with us when all of this went down.” She waved a hand at the sky. “So? You got a room for me?”

“Depends on what kind of room you want.”

She looked at him. Her eyes were two drops of ink, staining the pale expanse of her skin. They were slitted like the eyes of a snake but beautiful, and he thought maybe he’d want to stare at eyes like those forever.

Her clothes came off easily too, shedding like snake skin and puddling around their ankles.

“I can’t stay long,” she commented later, sitting on his armchair and lighting up a cigarette. “Places to be, you know. Things to do.”

He was in bed on the other side of the room, across from her, but thinking about how he’d prefer to be curled in the chair with her. Pressed skin to skin and tongue to tongue, like a pair of snakes after all. “Even during a time like this?”

Lip shrugged again, smiling that inscrutable smile. She took a drag and the butt flared scarlet, a match to the pulsing color of the sky outside. “I wasn’t born during any other time than this one. I’ll be damned if that’ll keep me from living.”

“I have found,” he said, “that moving from place to place doesn’t do much good. You’re just the same person all over the world.”

“If you’re telling me there’s no sense in running from myself, rest assured I learned that lesson years ago.” Lip stood. “I still have places to go.”

Despite her promise she lingered sometimes. During the days she stayed, she picked fruit from his orchard and dragged water from his well, helped him change the sheets and heat food for a hundred people. She repaired two old car engines and a broken water heater, her black hair in a ponytail under her baseball cap and sun-crinkles by her eyes from smiling. Every few hours she disappeared with that car of hers and he never got an explanation out of her, where she’d gone and why. At night she came back to his room with him.

“Your beard curls here,” she said, patting a spot below his ear. “I like it. It looks like leaves during the fall. Like something beautiful dying.”

“You look like beautiful dying things too,” he said stupidly, but she still laughed as though he’d been poetic.

Sometimes she disappeared for days at a time. Her gaze would wander to the Bronco, hitched beneath the awning of his garage, and she would leave. He supposed she slept in it, made camp somewhere, but he couldn’t decide where; there was nothing around him but land, torn bruised skin stretched taut over itself, a river cutting through the swell of a hill somewhere to the east like a burst vein, and the crumpled remains of houses alongside parched black roads.

His inn was the only place for hours around where people were people. Where the sins of their forefathers had not branded them with an internal and combustible misery. He liked meeting travelers, individuals broken and breaking under the strain of existence, coming to him with coins and begging to be made whole again. He liked to make them as whole as he could.

He had half a mind to open another inn someday, take in more strays. Perhaps Lip would help him run it, he thought, if he could convince her to stick around. He could watch the gray freckle her black hair, watch crow’s feet grow beside her eyes. He could tell her, you’re allowed to stop and put your feet up, you know. The world will breathe on its own and if it doesn’t, well, it already killed itself once and there’s nothing you can do about it.

He knew how she would respond to that, of course. Smile her inscrutable smile and drive away. So he kept his mouth shut, but that’s what she did anyway.

July ran itself to a bruising halt and Lip packed her things in the Bronco.

“You could stay longer.” He leaned against the doorframe, watching her.

“I could,” she said, turning to him. “This is a beautiful place. There aren’t a lot of places like this anymore. Places where the death doesn’t touch.”

“So stay.”

“I can’t,” she said. “I’m sorry. I have something to do.”

He bit back a sigh. “How are you going to get gas for your car? Will you have a safe place to sleep at night?”

“I have gas,” Lip said, but didn’t say anything else. She came over and kissed him. Her mouth was soft and tasted like apples. She bit his lip for good measure, stroked the spot behind his ear where his beard curled up into dead leaves. “I’ll come back, maybe. I’d like to. I’ll miss you.”

He was too lovesick to say anything back, too determined to hold his pride close to his chest. He crossed his arms tighter and watched her pull open the door.

Behind her, the sky looked like a war wound. As the sun set it bloodied itself. It beat its red and orange onto her face, onto the hood of her car. She looked just like someone born in misery, but he supposed no one around here was much better.

…

Lip drove through August and made pit stops like an occasional hobby.

She stopped first at an old gas station that had strips of yellow paint peeling from its walls and shelves empty of anything except packs of bubblegum, bottles of ketchup, cans of carrots and peas.

“This wasn’t it,” said Petra.

Lip sighed into a mouthful of peas. “Yes, it was.”

“No,” said Petra. “We stopped at one that had wildflowers growing on the bank over there. Remember? You kicked my soda can into a thicket and I stung my hand on a wasp going to get it. I picked some of the flowers. They were purple and blue and yellow.” She turned her head to look, eyes unblinking and fixed on a sore spot of dirt across from them.

“The wildflowers went dead,” Lip said.

“No, they didn’t.”

“Everything died, you’ll remember,” Lip said.

“Wildflowers don’t die. That’s the point of them. They keep growing and growing. Take an acorn off an oak tree, plant it, and chop down the oak, is it dead?”

“Well, yes--”

“No, not really. It’s still alive a little. The little bit of it lives on.”

Lip, stretched on the hood of the car, looked at her long and hard. She was hung above Petra, whose right had been sealed in the light of the fire and whose left side was blanketed by patches of dark.

Petra was sitting very stiff and looking away from her, towards the wildflowers. Her expression was fixed and very fierce like she was watching them sway in the wind.

“I guess living things need other living things to stay alive,” Lip admitted.

Petra turned. She smiled a warm, Cheshire smile. “That’s what I’m saying.”

…

They drove through spots where campfires had burned and drove past ponds that weren’t really ponds anymore. Petra wanted to see trees they had seen once, so Lip took her to forests of rusted metal and broken branches, and listened to Petra wax poetic about how beautiful it was. She looked at plastic caught on a rotted log and thought she could see it.

Petra wanted smores, so Lip haggled a box of stale graham crackers off an old man in an abandoned grocery store, stole chocolate from a snoring vagabond, and made-do with honey when Petra insisted they ate marshmallows too last time. She thought Petra would be disappointed, but Petra just licked it off her fingertips, her eyes wide and staring and unblinking.

“A river,” said Petra one day. “We should swim. Like we did last year.”

“There aren’t a lot of nice rivers around here,” Lip said. She was on the hood of her car again and blowing dandelion seeds for Petra to chase. But Petra sat neat as a pin, black hair unruffled by the wind.

“There have to be,” she said. “We should swim.” She looked at Lip. “Remember, you almost caught a carp with your bare hands?”

“I remember,” Lip said, abandoning the stem of her dandelion. “But, Petra--”

Petra stuck her lip out in a pout. “Don’t tell me you think I could beat you swimming.”

“Beat me? I’ve always been a faster swimmer than you.”

“I’ve been practicing.”

Lip laughed. “You can’t have been.”

Petra’s marble eyes gleamed. “Take me to a river and I’ll show you.”

Lip looked over the landscape. They were parked on a hill. Grass crumbled beneath the car tires, dirt crumbled away from the cliff edge. This high up she could see it all, the wasteland the world had become. Homes carved open from the inside-out, and people carting off what little they could carry. Loners in scraggling lines, families in miserable bunches.

Belonging had become such a ragged word, wielded by uncertain mouths.

“We’re nearly there, anyway,” she said. “We won’t have time to swim.”

Petra smiled dreamily.

“Home,” she said, as though the word itself was a balm.

…

The road bounced Petra in its lap as though she was a baby, making her laugh. It always had. From one to five to seven to eleven, and all the way up until Lip had lost the ability to measure Petra’s years on her fingertips.

Lip drove slowly, over uneven ground, stones getting caught in the grooves of her tires. Petra stuck her head out the window and laughed at the car’s uneven gait.

Lip thought about that face when it had been petulant, when the gentle warmth of Arthur’s inn had been enough to drive Petra away from its hearth, and Lip had been forced to go to her, to stay with her and keep her satisfied. Petra had been so confused and unhappy, her wails of, “We didn’t go here last time!” ringing in Lip’s ears, even when she had her face pressed into Arthur’s chest.

She had hoped his heartbeat might have been able to drive Petra away. But it had always been a chaotic and terrible love, and she thought she might be destined to cling to it forever.

“We’re home,” Petra said. They stared at the grave of their parents’ house as Lip pulled the car to their door.

“Yes,” Lip said. The place had been abandoned years ago. She watched ivy crawling over the windows, the spiderweb cracks in its gray walls.

“What a trip,” Petra said, clambering out of the car. She ran to the house in a pile of shapeless matter and shifting memories. “God. Don’t you just want to go sleep in a real bed now? Mom! Dad!” She pounded the front door. “It’s us! We’re back!”

Lip slid out of the car, too. Her chest hurt. She watched Petra hammer, calling out their names. She watched and that terribleness rose up inside of her again. It was hot and upset and it choked her, till all she wanted to do was spit it out. Force someone else to reckon with all her pain.

“Petra,” she said. “They’re dead, you know that?”

“No, they’re not. They’re inside. Don’t be silly.”

“Do you know?” Lip asked. She felt angry. “Do you know, and you’ve been jerking me around? I can’t do this forever.”

Petra turned to her. Her face was still very large and pale and empty. False emotions filled her eyes and crowded for space. She felt things on repeat, said them because she had been living in an echo chamber for half of Lip’s life.

“Do what forever?” she said.

“You’re dead too,” Lip said. It came out ugly, but she still said it. “Are you ever going to be dead, and let me be alive?”

“No,” said Petra, her tone so scathing Lip’s heart began to beat very fast. She took a step back. Petra took a step forward. “No,” she said again. “No, nothing’s alive here. You are like a drop of rain that will always be falling. You are like a piece of stone breaking off a grave. Your sky is the only thing with blood in it anymore. Your face is a perfect mausoleum to a better time, and I’m inside of it.”

Her expression twisted-- angry or apologetic, Lip couldn’t tell-- before she was battering the front door again, yelling for their parents. Lip didn’t know if she had imagined those words and Petra saying them. She didn’t care much, either, because they had been true.

“Petra,” she said hopelessly, but there wasn’t much more to say.

…

She drifted through September like a late apology, and wound up at his front door.

When he saw her coming, he pulled off his gloves and climbed down from the orchard. He came to her car door and smiled through her rolled-down window. “You came back.”

“I think so.”

He tilted his head to the side. Smiled again in a puzzled, benign, beautiful way. “You alright?”

“Something happened,” Lip confessed. The details of it were fuzzy. Something had happened, she knew that, but it dipped away from her like water when she tried to remember. “But it’s not important. I’m here now.”

“You sure are.” He looked so earnest in his delight, so genially handsome. Like the last ray of sun before a very cold winter, like the last living thing in a landscape of dead things, and dying things, and things soon to be shattered beyond repair.

Lip looked at him through the car window. Her eyes were wide and blank and staring.

“What did we do first,” she said, “last time I was here?”