Reformation

All those who believe themselves certain of their own salvation by means of letters of indulgence, will be eternally damned, together with their teachers.

- Martin Luther, "95 Theses"

Outside the storefront on Mission and 20th, Daphne watches them scurry to beat the chime. She sets down her book and adjusts her sleeping bag, her glasses traipsing southward on her nose. They are a tote-carrying, clean-sneakered mass, cased in athleisure and corked with ear-plastic. A woman steps over Daphne, humming, and Daphne blinks and makes note of her bag: Hospitality House.

In Indiana, Daphne lived by the church. It was yellow-walled, with poorly-written signs ("Jesus Saves, Come Insyde"), but to witness it was to witness salvation: from the park bench across the street, you could just make out Mrs. Rawley's eyes before and after confession, and by then, Daphne was old enough to decipher the one as sad and the other as resigned. Something in that church could turn them another shade of blue.

Here, this is what Daphne sees. The women walk in and are greeted by a slim blonde wearing a milkmaid dress. They peruse clothes but don't move the hanger with more than a finger. They touch a screen and contort in a mirror. Then, they disappear into a back room; for what, Daphne does not know. All she knows is that when they leave, schlepping a white parcel and setting off the chime, their eyes are that same shade as Mrs. Rawley's, and they look straight ahead.

Every morning, Daphne takes in the inventory of her life. She folds the blanket over her head into four squares and places it in her duffle. She eats the banana brought to her by a biker boy who intermittently lifts his front tire. She rolls and unrolls her gloves—for it gets cold and warm with every passing shadow—and considers the red of the stop sign.

The day is spent reading. Next to her sleeping bag are the books the bookstore owner didn't want: a Haruki Murakami novel, The Year of the Flood ("People only want Handmaid's Tale anyway"), a biography of Dante Alighieri. Occasionally, she evades getting stepped on by a monochromatic shoe. In her notebook, Daphne takes turns recording Murakami quotes and her exchanges with Sir Louis, the large and gray-bearded man who sleeps three feet away and has a disposition for poetics.

"Daphne / my wife-nee / come give me a laugh-nee!"

To which Daphne replies, "Oh, fuck off!"

By the end of the day, the black Moleskine is five pages dirtier, inked with the proof of a lived day. A cloud passes over the place where the sun disappeared. The slim blonde twists a key and flips the sign to CLOSED.

On the day that everything changed, Daphne might have slept early if it weren't for the moon.

That night, the moon was a sand dollar tangled in the building tops. It was gorged and yellow; Sir Louis claimed it had the face of a cigar-smoking man. What an oddity, what a moon, Daphne wrote, and for years she would come back to these words with an uneasy respect for her own premonition. For when the woman slouched past the slick streets and paused before Daphne, there was more moonlight illuminating Mission Street and therefore more shadow. The streetlights curdled red, eel-shaped streaks on the pavement. The woman stepped over one and held out a sleek black purse.

"For you," she said. She steadied her hand by jutting an elbow into her hip.

Daphne took the purse wordlessly in two hands.

"I've been all off," said the woman, absently, as if referring to a cold. "I don't know why I'm telling you this. The point is this is more my indulgence than yours."

Washed in the backlight of the yellow moon, Daphne examined this woman—disheveled black hair, long peacoat to her knees, wired headphones curled around her neck—and only registered the changing color of her eyes as the woman turned and walked away, leaving Daphne with a purse in her hands, which revealed, upon further examination, twenty stacks of hundred-dollar bills amounting to a total of $20,000.

***

What do you do when you come into money? First, Daphne ate. Margherita buratta, crispy fried pho, a cup of a coffee with both mint leaves and cream. She saved some crust in the woman's purse and left a few crumbs for the crows. Then, she arranged her affairs. Falling back into bank notes and Craigslist ads and printed papers was easy enough now supplied again with means, and Daphne kept thinking all the time of Indiana, of the red-blooming university campus and the red-faced man, and how when they made love, he had tried to wedge his thumb past her teeth, and how now their old apartment had been adorned with a new and well-coiffed wife.

Her sublet was located between SoMa and the water, and in this barren room, Daphne slept in her sleeping bag for three days. On the fourth day, she decided to buy a mattress. On the seventh, a frame. This decision took her back to Mission Street, where for the first time in a moment, Daphne was chased by a:

"Daphne / the fuck-nee / where the hell'd you go!"

But Daphne had no mind to pay Sir Louis, for she was disappointed to discover the furnishing store had shuttered. She ambled idly down the street, searching store windows for a sign to be told what to do. They advertised the remedy to every whim: cat-eye sunglasses, personalized perfumes, electronic bikes with hydraulic brakes.

When Daphne caught sight of herself in the glass of Lolo's bar, she realized it'd been three years since she'd seen her reflection. It was a shock, and the woman before her left her unmoored. When had her hair grown horizontal? What were these lines appearing above her brows? Daphne touched her cheeks gently, as if her skin was someone else's, unable yet to discern that in being invisible to every shoe she had somewhere forgotten the sight of herself.

And suddenly her feet stood at the storefront. Inside the window, the slim blonde was slinking around the display. She paused at a rack and purred at a woman in red. Daphne watched two girls in similar distressed pants enter, and as the door was nearing its frame, Daphne put her hand between and found herself stepping inside.

Everything smelled like lemon. Lemon and soap, lemon and clean, lemon and money. The two girls were pressing buttons on a flatscreen, one pressing down her stomach with the heel of her hand. The blonde started towards Daphne, face plastered with a half-moon grin. Daphne felt a sudden urge to run—to sink below the open flap of the sleeping bag, to save the moment only in her notebook and never touch it in her mind again—but then the blonde was saying, "Is there anything you're looking for, love?"

"Blouse," Daphne said. And in nodding reaffirmed to herself the declaration.

The blonde directed her to various options—silk ruffles, balloon sleeves, deep belly-button V-necks. Daphne picked up one with pink flowers. "You can try it on in the back," she was told, and so Daphne found herself at the feet of the famed back room.

The dressing room was wooden and scientific. On a knob, the lights could be adjusted to a more flattering shade. "Your top will be in the closet, sweetheart," the blonde cooed from outside, and Daphne opened the handle-less doors to find, indeed, perhaps miraculously, the top with pink flowers. She peeled off her sweater and replaced it. The mirror was tall and diplomatic. Daphne took herself in, the curves of her shins, the flesh above her hips, which a man in another life had once called "cute." She adjusted her glasses on her nose, patted her hair. Her head cocked to one side. Something about this top made her feel revised, edited, reformed into the comfort of a prototype.

In the loft, the two girls bought the same blouse with pink flowers. One of them left the store wearing it. They gripped each other's forearms when they walked, laughing. Daphne approached the blonde—now teleported behind a register—and presented the blouse.

"Obsessed with this one," the blonde gushed, clacking numbers on a keyboard. "One forty-eight."

Daphne blinked and waited for a follow-up. When she didn't get one, she fished in her black purse and pulled out two hundred-dollar bills.

"Love that," said the blonde. "So old-fashioned."

Outside, Sir Louis was yelling loudly. "Look at me / what do you see / look at me / wawawee!"

"That guy's the worst," the blonde whispered conspiratorially, ripping a receipt. "Never shuts up."

She picked out change and put the blouse in a white parcel.

"Here, love."

Daphne took the package in her hands. Her purse fell to the crook of her elbow.

"I used to live here," she said neutrally, mostly to the room.

"Oh, no way! Me too. I live on 18th." The blonde reached for an exacted bond. "You'd think we'd have met."

Daphne nodded, and as she exited the store, the chime rang behind her.

***

Back in her apartment, Daphne crawled into the sleeping bag atop the mattress. She wore the new blouse, tucked into sweatpant bottoms. Once, the red-faced man had told her she'd stopped trying for him, and she'd said he'd stopped looking at her, and for years she had wondered what might have happened if he'd looked more. Daphne pulled out her black notebook and recorded the events of the day. She wrote Sir Louis' words verbatim, as well as those of the blonde. She wrote the smell of the storefront and the light of the dressing room. She was unsure if she wrote to remember these things or forget them.

When her hand got tired, she put the Moleskine away. She curled out of the sleeping bag and tiptoed to the floor bathroom, where a housemate was leaving in a towel.

"Love your top," Melanie said, brushing hair out of her face. "Reformation literally changed my life. It's, like, buying clothes for a cause."

Daphne smiled politely and twisted the faucet, washing her hands. She splashed water on her face and went back to her room.

$15,643.29 left. Daphne counted it again. When she'd arrived in San Francisco, she'd brought with her only the memories of Indiana and the feeling she'd been broken in trying to fit something not made for her. Things had been lost naturally, in the losing of herself. When she found herself outside the storefront, she was comforted at least by the knowing there was nothing much more to see pass. Now, she pulled the Dante biography out of her duffel. The letters comforted her, the shape of vowels. She formed the words soundlessly in her mouth.

Purgatorio, she read. Dante's place for moral change. Daphne thought of souls in line in the terrace of Pride, suffering to become good, neither in Heaven nor Hell. She thought of the students she used to teach in Bloomington, bleeding unctuous emails for her in pursuit of an A. The Catholic Church had once sold indulgences that made passage through Purgatory quicker. She'd taught her students that week three. Daphne thought of the woman in the street in front of a yellow moon: I've been all off. And how the women had filed past her one by one, clad in the same expressions, droplets slipping back to a river, buying in a dress the affirmation that they too could save the world.

As Daphne turned off the lights, looking out the window at the moon, she wondered if now with this money she would become alright or become good.