The backyard

Matcha Lattes on Sundays, that was the current ritual. And, as we got older and the opportunities for late nights at the club turned into evenings with face masks, giggling about past nights at the club, which then became, “we need another face mask night,” we clung to the matcha dates.

Well, I know I clung to them, because as a starter career turned into lucrative freelance work, which then became a more stable career, I was running out of people I could talk to about anything. Only my sister was the one that knew enough about me that I could never let her go.

“You know, they used to pump these full of sweetener, and I was excited when they stopped, but they low-key taste like grass…” Xena pointed out, shaking some sugar packets.

I smiled, “You would know…”

“Shut the fuck up.” She said, whispering the last few words and pinching my forearm. I retreated to my side of the table and smothered my laughter. She shook her head, smiling.

When she was a teenager, desperate to get the kids she was babysitting next door outside and away from the T.V., she “invented” the game “farm,” and her character was Bessie, the cow.

You might see where this was going. I’ll never forget coming home from walking our dog, Titus, and seeing her on all fours, munching the grass.

“You know, maybe I should get back into nannying, I think that would be a good way to earn some income.”

A terrible idea. Kids loved her, but parents hated how she riled them up and made them act, well, as strange as she did.

But who knows, maybe parents nowadays are different.

“You should, you really enjoyed that,” I said, surprising myself by meaning it, too.

“You don’t really think that, but thanks. I’m running out of money from the last egg donation, and people aren’t really in the mood to buy art.”

“Maybe you need a change of scenery. Have you thought of coming golfing with me sometime?”

“I love you, but that sounds like ass.”

“I know…” I drummed my fingers on the table. Once again, we were thinking of some way to find a short-term fix to a long-term problem: my sister wasn’t me, and there’s not much you can do to fix that without running into even more serious problems.

She sighed, “I should have maybe been more conservative with that big chunk of change, this time.”

I shrugged my shoulders. I loved the way she spent the money that came into her possession. I wasn’t going to be the person that lied and said that her spending was a problem. She was just the sibling that spent the money on things, experiences that made life worth living, and fixing the problems that arose was just something I lived with. I didn’t have too much else besides her. We had each other. That was it.

Well, I had a husband. But did I? I rubbed my wedding ring with my thumb. I hadn’t told anyone, yet. In fact, not even Xena.

She sighed again, tracing the lip of her mug with one chipped fingernail. “I should have taken that money from Mom’s friend. The one who wanted me to paint their cat for, like, a thousand bucks.”

I raised an eyebrow. “You didn’t take it because you thought it was too much.”

“It was too much,” she said, looking out the window as if the weather would back her up. “But now? Too much sounds nice.”

Okay, the more real reality was: Xena’s financial life had always been a performance art. A little absurd, a little impossible, yet somehow still managing to keep the lights on.

But it wasn’t the money that worried me. It was the way she treated stability like it was an invasive species—something to be eradicated before it could take root.

“I think about that time,” she said suddenly, “when I convinced myself I could read minds.”

I laughed. “You mean your psychic phase? I still have the notebook where you wrote all those predictions about me.”

Her mouth quirked up on one side. “Most of them came true.”

“That’s because you made them come true. You told me I was going to dye my hair red, so I felt like I had to.”

“Still counts,” she said, sipping her matcha. But then her smile faded. “I kind of miss it, though. Believing I had… something. Like, something that made me worth paying attention to.”

The air between us shifted, and I recognized the edge in her voice—the one that came just before she pulled back entirely.

“You are worth paying attention to,” I said.

She waved that way she did when she felt like I’d offered her a halfhearted tissue for a mortal wound. “Yeah, yeah. But that time was different. It was like I could invent myself out of whatever hole I was in. Doesn’t matter if it was true—it felt true. And that’s… sometimes enough.”

Sometimes enough. That was her whole life philosophy in two words. I know, I had found her Reddit account.

The thing is, I understood exactly what she meant. There’s a way the mind can build scaffolding out of things that aren’t there—psychic powers, dream jobs, unlikely windfalls—and sometimes that scaffolding holds you up just long enough to make it to the next day. Unreal, but real enough to keep breathing.

When her psychic phase ended, she fell into a darker one. The kind where she would sleep until the afternoon, call me at midnight to talk about how maybe she’d made a mistake by not moving to Bali with that guy she met at a gallery opening, and sometimes say things that scared me enough to stay on the line until I heard her breathing steady again.

I think about those nights whenever she laughs at her own expense now, like nothing ever hurt. She doesn’t know I still carry all those phone calls.

“I wish I could go back to thinking like that,” she said now, softer. “Like, all I need to do is imagine something big enough and it’ll happen. I was happier.”

I didn’t say anything. Still, she considered me with her eyes like I had.

“Maybe not,” She continued. “But I felt like I had a superpower. And when you lose a superpower, you start to feel like you’re just… some random.”

I wanted to tell her she was wrong—that she’d never been random in her life—but I also knew there was no undoing the grief of losing something you believed in, even if it never existed in the first place. The mind doesn’t make that distinction.

We sat for a while, watching other people drift in and out of the café, the warm gush of too-hot-August air following them. Giving the air conditioning a reason to fight for its life.

“You know,” she said, “I’ve been dreaming about Titus again. The weird thing is, in the dreams he talks. Like full sentences.”

“What does he say?”

“Stuff like, ‘You can’t leave yet, we’re not finished.’ Or, ‘The grass tastes different today.’” She laughed under her breath, then grew serious. “It’s not creepy, but it’s… it feels like something. I wake up thinking I need to figure it out before it disappears.”

I thought about telling her it was just her mind pulling together scraps from the past—Bessie the cow, afternoons in the yard, our dog trotting along beside us. But I didn’t. Because even if it was unreal, it clearly mattered to her.

Instead, I said, “Maybe you should paint him. In the dream. Saying those things.”

She blinked, then smiled slowly. “Yeah. Maybe I should.”

Something else was bothering her, that day, and the week that followed.

I didn’t notice it right away—not until the third time she bailed on a call with some vague excuse about “needing to let her tea steep.” Which would have been nothing if she actually drank tea more than twice a month. But the next Sunday, our matcha ritual was different. She was there, smiling, asking about my work, but her eyes had this… off-focus quality. Like she was reading a teleprompter only she could see.

When I asked what was going on, she waved it away. “Just tired.”

That was Xena’s way of saying, you won’t get the answer, so stop asking.

Except I didn’t stop.

By Wednesday, I got a text at 1:07 a.m.: Do you ever get the feeling that your brain is trying to erase you?

I called immediately. She didn’t answer.

The next morning, she acted like it never happened. Sent me a photo of her breakfast—avocado toast balanced on a canvas she was “air drying.” I stared at the picture too long, wondering how you can air-dry a painting that hadn’t been painted yet.

“Are you sleeping?” I finally asked, over lunch that Friday.

“More like… drifting,” she said, as though that was a poetic improvement. Then she told me about some new dream she’d had about Titus. In this one, he’d been sitting on her bed, reading from my old yearbook. She said he kept circling my picture with a red marker, murmuring, “She’s not ready yet.”

I didn’t laugh. It was creepy, never mind that Titus was a dog and couldn’t circle anything with a red marker. Instead, I asked, “Do you feel safe?”

“Don’t be dramatic,” she said, which was hilarious coming from her. But her hands were trembling when she picked up her latte.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I thought about how she’d said “erase you” instead of “forget you,” about how she’d started staring into space mid-conversation, like she was holding her breath in her own head. I’d seen this version of her before, years back, when she went silent for months after quitting a job she’d loved because she said the air in the office “wasn’t meant for her lungs.”

The unreal part was how she could still pass for fine. She’d send me memes. She’d post new paintings online—though I started realizing most of them were old pieces she’d just cropped differently. She’d even make plans for things I knew she wouldn’t follow through on. It was like she’d set up a cardboard cutout version of herself to keep people from noticing the real her had slipped out the back door.

By Sunday, I knew she was in trouble. She didn’t show up for matcha. She didn’t even text. And that had never happened before—not in five years. I sat in our usual spot anyway, sipping the drink slowly until it was too gross and tepid, waiting for my phone to buzz.

It didn’t.

That night, I drove to her apartment. It took her a long time to answer the door, long enough for me to start imagining the worst. But she did answer, barefoot, hair tangled, wearing a hoodie I didn’t recognize.

“You can’t just not show up,” I said, louder than I meant to.

She leaned on the doorframe, looking at me like I was the one who’d broken some unspoken rule. “You can’t just assume I’m always going to show up.”

That hit harder than I expected. I stepped inside without asking, and she didn’t stop me. Her place looked the same, but there was an odd emptiness—like every surface had been recently wiped down, yet the air was heavier, somehow.

On the counter sat three unopened jars of matcha powder. She followed my gaze. “I kept buying it. Just couldn’t make it.”

I wanted to ask why, but the way she rubbed her temple told me she was holding something back—not because she didn’t trust me, but because she couldn’t even name it yet.

So I sat down at her kitchen table and I waited, the way you wait for a storm you can already smell on the wind.

When she finally spoke, it was barely above a whisper.

“I think… I’m disappearing again.”

Her voice had that same far-off texture it did years ago, the one that made me want to grab her by the shoulders just to make sure she was solid.

“You’re here,” I said, too quickly.

“Here isn’t the same thing as here,” she murmured, curling her legs up on the chair. “It’s like I’m walking around in someone else’s footage of my life. The lighting’s wrong. The timing’s off. And sometimes I swear—” She stopped.

“What?”

Her eyes flicked toward the corner of the kitchen, then back to me. “Sometimes I swear…Titus is here…”

She paused, sending a ripple of unease through me.

“...Not just in dreams,” she continued, faster, now. “I hear his nails on the floor, smell his fur after the rain. And I know it’s not real, but I also know it is.”

I almost said, You’re imagining it, but the truth was—I’d smelled it too, just then. That wet-dog tang, faint but sharp.

She looked at me for a long moment. “You’ve noticed it too?”

And there it was—the thing I’d been avoiding for weeks. I should have known something strange was happening.

But now she was looking at me like I’d just confirmed a suspicion she’d been holding tight to her chest.

“What if,” she said slowly, “we’re not imagining it? What if some parts of us—parts of him—didn’t get the memo that the rest moved on?”

“What do you mean, Xena? Are you seriously talking about ghosts? I think it’s more likely you’re schizophrenic.”

“Stop, no. Like…Reality’s a little too thin in spots, and sometimes you see what’s on the other side.”

It was exactly the kind of thing Xena would say. And yet—my stomach turned, not from disbelief, but from recognition.

I thought about the nights when I was young, right after Titus died–the nights I’d woken from dreams of Titus waiting at the front door, my keys in his mouth, urging me to follow. I thought about how I could still picture the exact way sunlight used to fall in our old backyard, how I could almost step into it if I closed my eyes.

“What if the thin spots aren’t in reality,” I said slowly. “What if they’re in us?”

Her lips twitched, not quite a smile. “Then we’re both see-through.”

I laughed once, but it caught in my throat. Because part of me wanted it to be real—Titus, the smell, the sounds—because if it was real, then maybe Xena wasn’t just slipping away inside her head. Maybe she was onto something.

For the next hour, we didn’t talk much. She attempted the matcha–it was alright. Just alright. I flipped through one of her old sketchbooks, pages full of half-finished drawings of dogs with human expressions. Every so often, I’d hear something—like the faint sound of claws tapping across the kitchen tile—and I’d glance at her, but she never reacted.

By the time I left, it was dark. It had started raining. As I got into my car, I caught sight of something in her window—a shape, sitting on the couch where I’d been earlier. For a moment, I thought it was her. But the outline was wrong. Broader. Stockier.

I blinked, and it was gone.

Driving home, I kept one hand on the steering wheel and one clenched tight on my thigh, nails digging into my skin, just to remind myself I was still in the solid world. But for the first time, I wasn’t sure where the solid world began and ended.

I didn’t sleep much that night. Every time I closed my eyes, the window scene replayed—broad shoulders, the stillness of something waiting.

By morning, I’d decided I needed proof.

When I called Xena and told her I was coming over, she didn’t ask why. She just said, “Bring actual matcha, please,” like that would make whatever this was easier to swallow.

I arrived with two lattes and a backpack. Inside: my phone, a small notebook, a disposable camera I’d found in the back of my closet, and—because I wasn’t entirely sure this wasn’t some elaborate mental collapse—a dog treat I’d bought from the corner pet store.

She raised an eyebrow at the treat. “You expecting company?”

“Just humor me.”

We started simple. I placed the treat in the middle of the kitchen floor, right on a strip of sunlight, and set my phone to record. For twenty minutes, nothing happened—unless you count us getting jittery from drinking matcha too fast.

Then, just as I was about to give up, Xena froze. “Do you hear that?”

It was faint, like static at first. Then—tap, tap, tap. The sound of nails on tile.

I grabbed the phone. The sound didn’t get louder, but it didn’t go away, either. It just circled us, invisible, deliberate.

And then the treat moved. Not far—just a small scrape across the tile—but enough to make my skin prickle.

When I looked at Xena, her face was pale but alive in a way I hadn’t seen in weeks. “See?” she whispered, like we’d both been holding our breath for years and only now exhaled.

We tried again the next day. This time, I hid the treat under an upside-down glass bowl.

Again, nothing for a while. Then a flicker—like the light bent wrong for a split second—and the bowl rattled. Just once. Enough to set my heart pounding in my ears.

I wrote everything down in the notebook: times, sounds, the exact position of the treat. But the more I documented, the stranger it got. My handwriting shifted halfway through a sentence. The disposable camera came back with two frames already exposed—both blurry shapes that almost looked like a dog in motion.

And maybe it was coincidence, maybe it was stress, but I started to notice other things outside Xena’s apartment. My hallway at night seemed too long, like it stretched when I wasn’t looking. The clock in my living room ticked in uneven bursts. One morning, my coffee smelled faintly like wet fur.

I told myself it was “bleed-over” from Xena–that I was primed to see patterns where there weren’t any. But I couldn’t shake the sense that the thin spots she talked about weren’t just hers anymore.

On the fourth day of testing, Xena suggested something I wasn’t ready for.

“What if we follow him?”

“Follow who?” I asked, though I already knew.

“Titus. Or whatever’s left of him.”

The moment she said it, I pictured it clearly.

“You mean, like… leave the apartment?”

She nodded. “If he’s showing up here, maybe he’s showing up somewhere else. Somewhere he wants us to go.”

I laughed once, sharp. “You’re talking about a dead dog like he’s giving us coordinates.”

She didn’t flinch. “Maybe he is.”

And the thing was—I wanted to believe her. Because if Titus was leading us somewhere, then maybe this wasn’t about her slipping away. Maybe it was about both of us finding something we didn’t know we’d lost.

That night, I went home and packed a bag.

We left just before midnight, when the streets were quiet enough to hear our own breathing.

Xena led the way, and I carried the disposable camera, because part of me still thought proof would matter.

We didn’t see pawprints at first. Just the dim orange wash of streetlamps and the occasional rumble of tires on faraway streets.

Then—three blocks from her apartment—I saw them.

Not full prints, not exactly. More like impressions, shallow dents in the mud that didn’t match our stride or size. They were spaced perfectly, too deliberate.

Xena saw them at the same time I did. “Told you.”

We followed in silence. Picking up prints from mud in the puddles, anywhere where there might be a paw print. Each turn felt like a narrowing—fewer lights, fewer windows lit, fewer signs we were still in a city at all.

After maybe twenty minutes, we reached a stretch of road where the trail thinned and the asphalt looked almost wet. That’s where the prints stopped.

Not faded. Stopped.

Xena crouched, touching the ground. “It’s warm.”

I didn’t believe her until I did the same. She was right—the air here was sharper, but the asphalt under my fingers had the residual heat of a sidewalk at dusk in July.

I stood too quickly, dizzy. That’s when I noticed the air smelled faintly of cut grass.

We looked at each other. Neither of us had to say it—Bessie the cow, afternoons in the yard, the dog bounding through summer grass.

Something moved ahead. Not a full figure, just the shape of motion—like someone passing between you and a light source. My hand tightened on the camera.

“Do you see—” I started, but Xena was already walking forward.

There wasn’t a sound to follow, not anymore. Just the sense that each step was drawing us toward something we already knew, but couldn’t name.

The wet asphalt became packed dirt. Then, without warning, grass. Bright green, almost glowing under the weak light of the moon. It shouldn’t have been possible—the air was still cold enough to bite—but it smelled warm, alive.

“Do you hear that?” Xena whispered.

I didn’t. Not at first. Then—faint, rhythmic. The sound of a dog shaking itself dry, tags clinking against a collar.

We stood frozen.

In the grass ahead, a shape formed. Broad shoulders, stocky build. No eyes, no mouth—just a dark outline, so familiar it hurt to look at.

“Titus?” Xena said, her voice breaking like it hadn’t in years.

The shape didn’t move toward us. It just stood there, as if waiting. And suddenly, the part of me that had been clinging to proof didn’t care about the camera in my hand. Because if I took a picture, I’d have to know whether it would show anything at all.

Xena stepped forward. I followed.

The shape turned, slow and deliberate, and began to walk. No sound of paws this time, no marks in the grass. Just movement, drawing us deeper into something I was no longer certain I wanted to see.

The grass grew thicker as we walked, swallowing the sound of our footsteps until it felt like we were gliding instead of moving. I kept glancing over my shoulder, expecting to see the street, but the glow of the city was gone. Behind us was only more grass, rippling under a wind I couldn’t feel on my skin.

Xena didn’t look back once.

We came to a fence, the kind we used to climb as kids to get into the neighbor’s yard. White paint chipped in familiar patterns, though I couldn’t have said from where. Titus—or the shape that wore him—slipped through a gap too small for a living dog. We followed, and I felt the air change again—warmer still, with that faint tang of summer rain.

On the other side was a yard. Not any yard. Our yard.

The swing set we’d abandoned after the chains rusted. The old lilac bush that bloomed too early every year. Even the plastic kiddie pool from one summer when Xena decided she was going to “train Titus for water rescue.”

It looked perfect, untouched.

And wrong.

Because it was lit as if the sun were out, yet the sky overhead was still the same pale moonlight. And the air—the air felt heavy with something that wasn’t quite memory and wasn’t quite presence, but both at the same time.

“Titus,” Xena called softly.

The shape was near the back fence now, half in shadow. He didn’t turn. Just sat, ears alert, watching something we couldn’t see.

When we reached him, I realized my hands were shaking. Xena knelt, and for a heartbeat, I thought she’d pass right through him. But her fingers sank into fur—solid, warm, trembling just slightly under her touch.

I couldn’t breathe.

“Feel,” she said, looking up at me.

I knelt, pressing my palm to his back. The sensation was wrong in a way that made my teeth ache—like a photograph come to life, edges too sharp, warmth too steady. But it was there.

The back fence rattled.

We both looked up. On the other side was a stretch of nothing—black and flat, like the world had ended a few feet beyond the yard. But there was movement in that blackness, a slow shifting that made my stomach drop.

Titus—or whatever he was—stood and moved toward it.

“Wait,” I said, my voice breaking.

He didn’t stop.

Xena stood too. “We have to go with him.”

The thought of stepping past the fence made my whole body want to turn and run, but something in her face kept me still. She wasn’t afraid—not exactly. More like she’d been expecting this.

She swung one leg over the fence. I followed without thinking, and the instant my foot hit the other side, the air folded around us like a closing book.

No yard. No fence. Just a narrow path stretching forward into a dark so complete I couldn’t tell if my eyes were open.

Somewhere ahead, the sound of nails on a hard surface echoed, steady as a heartbeat.

And that’s when it hit me—this wasn’t just her place where reality thins. It was mine now, too.

The path was narrow, dirt pressed hard underfoot, though I couldn’t see it. The darkness here wasn’t just absence of light—it had a texture, like felt brushing against my skin. Somewhere ahead, the nails clicked steadily, the only sound keeping me tethered to movement.

“How far do we go?” I asked.

Xena didn’t answer, just kept walking like she’d been here before.

The air grew warmer, carrying the faintest smell of lilac. My chest tightened—an impossible scent for this time of year, one that belonged to a very specific week in our childhood when the bush in our yard bloomed too early, and Titus rolled under it until his fur carried the sweetness everywhere.

“Do you smell that?” I asked.

“I told you,” she said, and there was something in her voice—relief, almost—like she’d been waiting for me to cross some invisible line with her.

The darkness ahead thinned into a kind of low, colorless fog. Shapes began to form inside it: a swing swaying in still air, a plastic pool half-filled with water, the grass too green under the strange, flat light.

It was our yard again. Not the one we’d just walked through—this was sharper, more precise. It was the yard as it had been on one perfect day, without a single flaw.

Titus was there too, or his shape was. He sat by the lilac bush, watching us without moving.

I stopped. “This isn’t—”

“Real?” Xena finished for me.

I hesitated. “I don’t know anymore.”

She turned toward me, and for the first time in weeks her expression was open, unguarded. “Maybe it doesn’t matter if it’s real. Maybe it matters what it’s showing us.”

The fog pressed closer, and in it I saw movement—shadows forming into moments. Xena as a teenager, lying on the grass with paint smeared on her arms. Me, running barefoot with Titus at my heels. The kitchen window glowing warm at night.

It should have felt comforting. But it didn’t. There was no sound in these memories, no breath, no heartbeat. Just the images, holding still until they began to bend at the edges, warping like heat haze.

“Do you see that?” I asked.

Xena nodded, but she didn’t look away. “I think it’s showing me what I lose, every time.”

Before I could ask what she meant, the images began to ripple faster, breaking apart until they were nothing but fragments—paint smears, flashes of teeth, the swing creaking in silence.

Titus stood, stepped toward the fog, and without thinking, Xena followed.

And I, without thinking, followed her.

The fog closed in, warm and heavy, swallowing the shapes behind us. I reached for Xena’s hand, but she didn’t take it. She moved forward like she already knew the way, her bare feet soundless on the ground that didn’t quite feel like ground.

Somewhere ahead, Titus’s nails clicked once, twice—and then stopped.

We stepped into a clearing, though “clearing” didn’t seem right. It was more like the air itself had made space. Light pooled here, silver and dim, enough to see the faint outline of a door. Not a real door—no hinges, no frame—just a shape in the air, trembling faintly.

Xena turned to me. “I don’t think I can come back after this.”

The words landed like she’d been carrying them for years.

“What is this place?” I asked.

She didn’t answer. Instead, she crouched, holding out her hand. Titus padded to her from the edge of the clearing, tail wagging slow. He looked younger—sleek and sure-footed, like he had before his hips went bad.

I knelt too, brushing my fingers over his fur. It felt real. Warm. Steady.

“I thought you said he was gone,” I whispered.

Xena smiled, and for a heartbeat I saw her as she’d been before the distance settled in—before the silences, the missing days. “He was. But here… nothing’s gone. Not really.”

The door shimmered brighter, and the lilac scent deepened until it filled my lungs.

“You could come,” she said.

I shook my head. “I don’t think I’m supposed to.”

Her smile faltered, but she didn’t argue. She stood, placed her hand on the door’s trembling outline, and for an instant the light flared so bright it swallowed her shape. When it faded, she—and Titus—were gone.

The clearing was just fog again.

I turned, trying to retrace our steps, but every direction looked the same. The warmth ebbed, replaced by the kind of stillness that feels like it’s waiting.

When I finally stepped forward, the ground gave a little under my feet, and I wasn’t sure if I was walking back toward home—or following her after all.