Leah Erickson
The Girl Who Would Live Forever
”Ammonium nitrate?!”
Adele was stunned silent. Her mother had slammed her bedroom door open, and now she stood over her, quivering, face flushed in anger. She couldn’t think quickly enough for a response, so she merely narrowed her eyes and scowled. She was laying on top of her bed, schoolbooks dumped beside her on the floor. She stared at her mother’s frizzed red curls, the throbbing vein in her temple. The sun flashing off the mirrored discs embroidered into her Indian cotton blouse.
”WHY would you steal such a thing? Do you think this is funny? Terrorists steal ammonium nitrate! I ran into Rick in town, he was buying tractor parts. He told me that someone’s been stealing it from his garage, and he’s worried they took it to make a bomb. Anyway, I just had a feeling and Iooked in your closet while you were at school and SURE ENOUGH…”
She had kept it in a trash bag, under her dirty clothes. She had liked to sift it through her fingers, those fine white crystals, so cool and pure. It made her feel calm. She had had no intention of blowing up anything. It was that potential that fascinated her. Crystalline beauty, compressed explosion. But how could she explain this to her parents? Or to anyone?
”Why did you do it?”
”I don’t know.”
”Don’t LIE TO ME!”
They stared each other down, neither saying anything, until her mother said in a quiet voice, “Adele, from now on I want some answers out of you. I need to know what’s going on. I don’t know if this is teenage hormones or if it’s that goddamn chip that’s making you this way…”
”It’s ME, Mom! I AM the goddamn chip! There’s no DIFFERENCE anymore!”
Her mother’s face drained of all its fury, as though Adele had just pulled a plug. Now she looked hollow eyed and tired. She sighed. “Listen, Addie. I’m…I’m trying to make friends around here. I’m trying my best to be a part of the community, I just signed up at the soup kitchen. I just…I will not tell Rick that it was you. He’s a nice old man…Do not steal from our neighbors. OK? We need them. We need to have friends.”
”We never needed friends in our old town. Why are you so keen to fit in now?”
But her mother only closed the door quietly. Moments later she heard her parents murmuring and then quietly arguing.
Adele sat stony faced with arms folded, willing her mind to go hard and blank. This was the second time that week she had gotten yelled at. Last Thursday the school called her parents to tell them that she had defaced a wall in the girl’s restroom. Another girl had seen her scrawled “INFORMATION RULES!” in black marker. Underneath she drew a Grim Reaper. She’d gotten three days of in school suspension.
As the sun began to set, she became bored with being angry, and she returned to the pleasant haze of her daydreams. Every day she dreamed of the doctor’s son. He was the only one in her classes as smart as she is. She felt an alliance with him, they were both on the same level. Both were outsiders, both wanted something more, she could tell.
Besides, she loved his squinting blue eyes and his scornful smile. His long muscled arms, which in her dreams held her tight and close. She spent hours of her day staring at him, just so she could relive his memory here alone in her room.
***
It was a rural town surrounded by farmland. There were a couple of sad strip malls, some churches and gas stations. There was a dying downtown full of shuttered storefronts. You could hear the trains coming through twice a day on their way to other places.
When Adele rode her bike through the streets of her new neighborhood, she could feel people watching her. The people here would look at you with undisguised, open curiosity. But they didn’t say much. It was a quiet place. Many of the neighbors were elderly, though there were a few families with small children, yards full of wagons and plastic kid houses and skateboards. But even these children went weirdly quiet whenever she rode by. They don’t like my faceWilhelmina, she thought. She knew how she looked to others. Too serious. Too gauntly intense for a fifteen year old girl.
The only one who did say things to Adele was an old woman who lived down the street from her, in a red house with a rose arbor. The woman was wiry and straight-backed. She was always well dressed in skirts and nylons and tottered around her yard, anxiously smoking a cigarette. She was obviously crazy, because when Adele passed by the house the woman would call “Wilhelmina! Come back! I…have one thing to say to you, Wilhelmina!” But then the woman’s caretaker, a short round Mexican woman, would try to steer her back to the house. And Adele ignored her. She did not like her, was disturbed by her. She let the old woman’s words be carried away on the wind that whistled through her ears, whipped through her hair.
***
Their old life was never discussed. Her parents pretend it didn’t happen. Only she seems to remember everything.
Before coming here, they had felt like a real family. It seemed it had always been just the three of them against the world. Even her grandfather, the Senator, stopped speaking to his daughter’s family when Adele got the neurochip.
“It was bad enough when you were injecting genes into the child…”
”Gene therapy is better than it was before. Safer.”
”Did those people in your “community” push you to it? Those Free State radicals you and Ben were living with? Bunch of nuts. Dangerous nuts…”
”Daddy, the implant is to stimulate electrodes she already has. We aren’t altering who she is! Her memory is enhanced. Her school testing is enhanced. We are giving our daughter every advantage science can offer. Is it so bad that she is as smart as she can be? Is it so bad that her immune system is as strong as it can be?”
”It’s illegal. That’s why you had to go overseas to DO it. With MY money no less.. And, sweetie, ” The senator put his arm around his daughter, “I have my constituents to think of. You should see the letters I get. They think it’s immoral.”
”Immoral! Oh please Daddy! My daughter will live a life BEYOND yours or mine. She could live forever! She could invent things we never dreamed of! She could live in space!”
But the Senator cut her off, but not before kissing Adele, writing his daughter a large check, and saying, “I love you all, but mother of god, it’s not right. I just want to remember you all the way that you were.”
***
Adele was born under water, on a commune of artists and scientists. She could remember all of the details of being born. The bright tiled birthing pool. The water that threw flickering reflections on the ceiling. The soft white blanket that swaddled her. The argument that her father had with the midwife-there had been complications.
She remembered happy things, like being two and playing in a field of pumpkins with the other commune children. There was an old man, a political activist on the run from the law. He liked to fold origami. He folded Adele a prancing monkey, held it aloft, and said, “It’s the science of the practical, my dear.”
There were other, different memories the trips in an airplane. There were a lot of doctor visits. But it is the memories of the commune that she held dear.
Later on, their family left so that her father could pursue a career in academics while her mother home schooled her. They moved from town to town for years, until her father won tenure at a good school and they could stay in one place. That’s when the trouble began.
The campus paper published a story about Adele and her overseas “procedures.” The story was about whether it was legal for a doctor to patent a gene. The story was so sensational that the town newspaper picked it up. Adults started to give Adele strange looks when she went shopping or to the library.
One day, not long after her fifteenth birthday, a religious group picketed their house. Returning with groceries, she and her mother found people on their street holding signs that said things like “Don’t meddle With Creation!” and “Leave Town, Freaks!” and “Your daughter is not HUMAN!”
They quickly went into the house and her mother closed the blinds. Adele sat in the darkened living room, watching the dust motes in the slices of sunlight that cut through the slats. Listening to the chant of “You will answer to God!” Her mother came up behind her and said, “It isn’t about you, honey. They’re not talking about you.”
And so the blinds were always closed. The family kept to themselves, and the world didn’t intrude, as much as it tried. Her father liked to explain that there was nothing wrong with her, that in the future everyone would be getting procedures like she had had, and humanity would evolve and transcend itself.
He said that their family knew who they were, and it didn’t matter what other people thought.
But then there came the evening when someone threw a pipe bomb through Adele’s bedroom window as the family played Scrabble in the kitchen. The police were called. Her parents used to be calmly defiant, but now that had changed. The air was tense with fear. Her father looked red faced and angry. She would often catch her mother staring at her for minutes at a time, a look of fright and sorrow on her face.
They wouldn’t talk to her about the incident, but she could hear snippets of what they said at night when she was in bed.
Viv, don’t you think you’re overreacting…
…my child…
…our child! What about our ideals, our convictions!
”We can’t AFFORD our convictions! The price is too high!”
The next morning they told Adele that they would be moving away to the country. Her father’s father, a widower, had died of a heart attack. His house had been standing empty for months until someone had time to deal with it. That was where they would stay.
”When?”
Her father looked at her, thinking, but her mother said, “Now. Right now.” And left the room.
Her father sighed. He hadn’t visited his elderly father, or the town where he came from, in years. He would never speak of it or say why. But now he smiled sheepishly and shrugged.
”Don’t worry. It’s not a bad place. You can do what you want there. And they don’t judge you.” He looked out the window. “They’ll have to take me back. I’m one of their own.”
***
The ring of a bell, and the hallways were flooded with thundering youth. Shouting, laughing, banging locker doors. When she stood still, they would flow past her like river rapids.
They were talking on phones, squealing and tussling, lingering in doorways. Long haired girls in tight jeans. There were boys with low-slung baseball caps that left their faces in shadow. Underneath it all was the smell. A hectic smell of adolescent sweat. A smell ripe with sex, with fear, and all kinds of invisible signals that she couldn’t understand.
Although she’d been in school a month, it was still unreal to her. She had been home schooled for years, and had never experienced a mass of people her own age. And they knew that she was different from them. Are you, like, Mennonite? Or Amish or something? One girl with pink streaks in her hair asked. Because you just have that look. In the face.
When she watched the other teenagers, she saw them as though from a great temporal distance. She felt like an old woman. And the high school halls had the feel of a future recollection, fuzzy around the edges. (The doctor had told her that déjà vu was a side effect of the chip.)
She thought, They’re all mortal and they don’t know it. Their lives will have a beginning, middle, and end. Like one of those love songs that plays all the time from the cars in the parking lot. They will swell then fade. It is beautiful because it is temporary. It is beautiful because it will die.
And yet, she scanned the hall looking for the doctor’s son. He is what propelled her forward each day, in spite of feeling so sad and strange and disoriented. She was skipping school less than she used to. Her own heart quickened as she saw flashes of him as he made his way through the crowded hallway. He was tall, with ruddy cheeks and dark blonde hair. He wore round glasses. He walked in a stooped way, head forward, bobbing and loping
He must feel something for her, too. He often gave her long searching looks, as though they were complicit. As though they shared a joke together.
He was getting closer. Her heart began to beat faster, and in a panic, she had to look away. But she heard his voice say, “Addie. S’up!”
When her shoulder brushed his arm, she felt as though she would burst into flame. She felt dizzy, delirious. She felt like she was floating away, mounting higher and higher. When she stepped out of the building into the blinding sunlight she hardly knew where she was.
***
Her father knocked on her door as she read a book in bed.
”Ad, we need to talk. Someone said something to your mother…well, a friend…or I guess an acquaintance, told her that… ” He sighed, “sometimes they see a girl walking on the railroad tracks. They have, um, alleged, that this girl plays chicken with the train. Stands in front of oncoming trains…”
”Oh, so of COURSE it’s me!”
”They say she has long brown hair and a corduroy coat. Someone complained to the police. Allegedly.”
”Was it you?” her mother’s head popped into the doorway.
”Viv, I thought I was going to handle this.” Her father had been looking more tired lately. His dead parents’ house seemed to oppress him, to steal his spirit. The place was still filled with all of their things. His mother’s collection of ceramic roosters. His father’s trucker hat hung on a wall peg.
”WAS. IT. YOU?”
”Don’t yell at her. Or she’ll tell you nothing.”
”Well, god help me, Ben, but I’ve had it! Remember when she kept walking on the edge of the roof at night? You told me I was imagining the sound of footsteps. THAT’S NOT NORMAL. And now the train tracks. It’s obvious she has a death wish.”
”Don’t be dramatic, Viv. I won’t have this discussion…”
”That’s just how the people are in your family! The people in this town just don’t TALK about anything! They don’t have the words for anything! I’m tired of even trying to connect with people like this!”
”Well I’m sorry to be such a hick. I didn’t grow up a senator’s child. I didn’t go to your fancy prep school or have a summer home in Southampton. Some of us just aren’t as rarefied as you.”
Her mother glared, and then breathed in deeply, let it out. She turned to Adele. “Honey. Are you bored at your school? I know it’s not very challenging to someone of your abilities. Should we go back to home schooling?”
”No! I do NOT want to leave school! Can’t you people be consistent about anything? Leave me alone!”
”OK. Fine. This is out of my hands. Jesus, I should just take you back to… ” She stopped herself, shook her head.
”To where! Say it!”
”NO, drop it!”
”You were going to say Dr. Chong. Admit it! You can’t keep pretending that the past didn’t happen!”
”We brought you here,” she said through clenched teeth, ” for a new beginning.”
”You brought me here to hide me because you were ashamed of me.”
”Go to your room! You’re grounded!” her father suddenly yelled, pounding his fist on the table.
***
Her bedroom was at the back of the house on the ground floor. She very often climbed out the window and walked into the woods that began at the edge of their back yard. This time she brought one book, “Within a Budding Grove.” People tended not to believe that a teenaged girl could read Proust and enjoy him. To her there was nothing easier. She felt relaxed and swept away by the unnamed narrator. He was just like her. Remembering everything. She could remember every emotion she ever felt, every wrong ever done her. Not only the big things, but the small things. The buoyancy of the air. The color of the shadows.
It was everyone else struck with this disease of forgetting.
But today, it was too difficult to read. She kept thinking of Dr. Chong and his immaculate white office. He kept rows of brain scans on a lighted wall. The brains were coiled and delicate, ghostly. It was like looking at a wall of tanks full of ethereal sea creatures.
”Why do I feel like everything I experienced, I’ve already experienced before?” She was eleven years old. Dr Chong paused from checking her vitals and scribbling notes. He looked her in the eye. He never smiled or tried to placate her. He was always very calm, and spoke to her as though she were an adult.
”The brain stimulation that you are receiving sometimes will make you experience déjà vu. It isn’t real. It’s a type of…false memory.” He shrugged. “It’s ironic. In trying to catapult you into the future, we have also stranded you in the past, huh?” He patted her shoulder. “It’s OK.”
The words make her angry. False memory? But it all felt so real. The sense that looking at her life was like looking backward in time. Sometimes nostalgia for her own youth literally brought tears to her eyes.
***
She carried the tray of pipettes and beakers that she had rinsed and dried. Chemistry was the last class of her day. Students were already milling at the door, chattering, waiting to leave.
As she worked, she was aware that the boy who she loved was watching her. Her heart quickened. His gaze made her feel transcendent made her burn with quiet joy. Lifting each piece of glass to the cabinet, her movements felt imbued with grace; she felt beautiful. But she couldn’t quite look at him. He was like a golden silhouette, flashing in her peripheral vision, burning bright as the sun. And then he spoke.
”Hey.”
”Hey.”
”Listen. I was wondering.” He spoke in a low gentle voice so that she had to lean in close, and finally dared to look into is grey eyes, with their pale lashes that you could only see when the light hit. Again, there was a feeling of this having happened before, and that she already knew what he would say. And so she relaxed, and smiled. There was fatalism, and beauty, in this moment.
”What is it?”
”Well, you know my dad’s a doctor, right? I guess every body knows that. Well, he goes to a lot of conferences and stuff. He travels a lot.”
She laughed. “Lucky him. I’d love to travel like that. Anything to get out of this town.” She felt free and easy. The boy smelled like autumn leaves and cool air.
”Yeah. This town is beyond dead. Once I graduate I’m never coming back.” He smiled his scornful smile. But then he looked serious. “My dad mentioned you.”
”Me? Why?” The smile on her lips became tense and tight; she was afraid.
The boy wavered for a minute, then said shyly, “He said…that you’re kind of…special. That you’re different from everyone else. ” He was almost whispering. “That you have a chip in your head. And that you’ve been shot with, like, longevity genes? Is that true, that you can like, live forever?”
Adele dropped a beaker to the ground, which shattered with a bright tinkling noise, as he was saying, “But…I think that’s amazing!” As she ran from him and out the door (the bell was ringing, the crowd was trampling) he yelled out, “Stop, Adele! What I’m saying is that you’re the lucky one!”
***
Damn you all damn you all…the roar in her ears was deafening, and time seemed to have been rearranged. It felt as though she were in a film that was cut and spliced leaving scenes out: She was a girl in tears, flying blindly down the road on her bike, with the old woman crying after, Wilhelmina, my sister! Jump to a diner table scene, where concerned voices said, Adele, whatever it is, you need to talk to us. Let us in! In another instant she was back in her bedroom, this room where she had memorized every object, every nail hole, every crack in the ceiling. She wanted to tear it all away, burn it all to the ground.
She did not exactly plan to run away. She did not plan anything at all. She saw it all unfold in a vision, then simply felt compelled to obey it.
Late in the evening, when the house was quiet, she trashed her bedroom. Pulled off the bed sheets, scattered the books. Overturned a lamp so that it crashed to the floor. The window she left open, the curtains blowing in the breeze. All that she took with her was an old sleeping bag and her backpack. She didn’t take her clothes. She didn’t take her wallet. She wanted them to know that she was dead.
As an afterthought she took an Exacto knife from her art kit and slashed a shallow cut on her arm. Savoring the pain, she squeezed until the blood welled up, and then she smeared it on the wall.
***
Running through brambles, jumping over narrow streams. The moon was shining so brightly that she didn’t need to switch on the flashlight. She was giddy on pure adrenaline. She was not even thinking thoughts anymore. She was a feral girl, a forest dweller, a mermaid running on painful new legs.
By light of morning she huddled near a piece of a low ruined stone wall deep in the woods. Listening. Her mind completely empty. When later she heard voices call out, heavy footsteps echo through the canopy of branches, she slipped away, silently, away from them.
When evening came, she zipped herself into her sleeping bag and listened to the rustling and scurry of night roaming animals.
When the cold autumn sun woke her, she was stunned and sore. The exhilaration and anger and sense of dizzying freedom she had felt had carried her only this far before wearing away. She did not know what to do next. There was no next step. There was no plan. She did not know what to do.
She had no more food, and was dizzy with low blood sugar. She felt as though she were floating above herself. She felt as disconnected as though she really were dead. She was the ghost of a dead high school girl. Something from a bad horror movie.
By dusk her nervous system felt overwhelmed, flat lined. As if on its own volition, her body stood itself up and began to walk. It traced its way back through the woods, until she was back at the edge of her neighborhood. Under cover of darkness she went to the only place she could think to go. The only place where they were sure not to know who she was and turn her in.
She approached the red house with the rose arbor and rapped on the door. The dark eyed Hispanic woman, the old woman’s caretaker, came to the door and looked at her warily, but did not say anything.
”Hello. Hi. I, um, could I come in? I am a neighbor. Can I come in for a visit?” The caretaker looked at her, not comprehending. She spoke little English. But she gestured her in.
Adele looked around her, shocked by the massive amount of stuff in the house. Ornately carved dark wood furniture that was too big for the little rooms. Stacked up boxes. Tall shelves of Victorian dolls with porcelain heads. Rusted tin toys. An antique phonograph. An old cabinet radio. Things were piled so high and deep that they had to make their way through narrow passageways.
”Mamacita?” the caretaker called into one room. The old woman was there sitting straight up in an upholstered chair whose dark wood arms and legs were carved like lion’s claws. She turned slowly and saw Adele, and her mouth puckered in an “o.” She stood up, slowly, slowly. Adele felt like she wanted to run, but couldn’t.
”It is…Wilhelmina…back from…her honeymoon…in Africa.” She had to catch her breath between words. She came and stood in front of Adele and touched her face, astonished..
Adele merely nodded. “Yes.” Anything that would allow her to stay here. She was exhausted.
The old woman led her into the sitting room and gestured to a tufted loveseat. When Adele sat she could feel these things, this room full of history, pressing down on her. It felt difficult to breath. The old woman was moving her lips, trying to form words.
”You…have always been…impetuous.”
”Yes.”
”Leaving…your family…to marry a …scoundrel…”
She nodded yes. She had no problem agreeing to this other identity. She was weak. She was hungry. Things were going all bleary around the edges. She didn’t really know who she was anyway.
”I’m sorry to make you worry,” she finally said to the old woman. But when she looked into the woman’s eyes, an unfocused haze had come over them, like she had already forgotten that she was there.
Over the fireplace was a large mirror, tarnished with age. She looked at the reflection that showed two shadowy figures. Her and the old woman were indistinguishable. Shortly, the caretaker slipped into the room with a tray of tea and cookies.
***
And so she stayed on. There was something comforting about the darkness of the house, and the heaps and heaps of things, and the smell of dust everywhere. She liked to spend the day just looking in drawers and closets. There were piles of men’s shoes and hats. Ancient cracked boxes of board games. She found a Christmas tree decorated with ancient cherubs whose skin was blackened with grime, whose hair had fallen out. But they were still pink cheeked and vibrantly blue eyed.
There was a large black and white photo of two sisters, standing in front of a gate in long gowns. One had the same features as the old woman. The other’s face was more angular, and had eyes that stared out like an eagle’s.
There were clocks. Clocks everywhere, whirring and ticking. But each was set to a different time, and ding donged and coo-cooed upon the hour randomly.
Neither the old woman nor the caretaker questioned her being there, but merely accepted her. Neither gave their names. And they did not ask for hers. They would never know that she was a freak, that she was impure, a non-human. Tainted by her parents’ good intentions. (And never did her parents say they were sorry!)
The old woman sometimes talked to her as Wilhelmina, but sometimes went blank. Memories seemed to drift in and out of her head like errant radio signals. When they were gone, they were gone. She was left looking lost and fragile, staring as though she were looking deep down into an abyss.
***
Adele was able to peek through the heavy damask curtains at her own house down the street. It felt surreal to see her own neighborhood through someone else’s window. The new perspective made it look unfamiliar and strange.
It was also unreal to see the police car parked in front of her own house. One time she saw her parents exit the house with the policeman. Her father looked dazed and sickened. Her mother’s eyes were wild with helpless fear. They did not look like the parents she had left behind. It was like a parallel universe to her old life. One that was tragic and wrong. It made her so queasy that she vowed not to look again.
She tried to lose herself in reading or chores, which she did while wearing one of the full-skirted housedresses she’d found in the old woman’s closet. .
One evening she washed dishes with the caretaker. She felt at ease around her, and liked the way she would hum or speak to herself in Spanish. When seen from the side, there was something proud and fierce in her profile, making Adele think of the Mayans. Their temples and human sacrifices…
They were listening to the kitchen radio. Between songs there was a local news update. She heard only “The case of missing teen Adele…” and she switched the station: she just did not want to think about it. She just wanted to forget.
The house was like a state of suspended animation. She felt like a fly in amber. I f she thought about who she really was, reality might thunder forward again.
***
”Wilhelmina!”
Adele started from sleep in the cramped spare room. She switched on the lamp, an old brass lamp with star shapes cut into the shade.
The old woman stood above her, her mouth twitching with anger, her eyes narrowed and staring straight into hers.
”Wilhelmina…I’m so angry at you…Why did you do it…When I warned you that he was a felon. A scoundrel!”
The anger illuminated her face, made it youthful and terrifying. Adele actually felt afraid, trapped in this little room, being held accountable for these transgressions of so long ago.
”I loved you…I tried to save you….and he killed you anyway…blow to the head…threw you down the stairs…Why did you LEAVE me?”
”I’m sorry, so sorry,” she said, and as she said it, she believed it. She felt great shame.
”Your happiness….was short lived…”
”I’m so sorry…”
But the apology didn’t matter. It didn’t even register. The old woman came out of it, and then didn’t know where she was. With great tenderness, Adele led her by her hand back to her bedroom.
As she settled back into her own bed, she found it difficult to go back to sleep. For the first time in the three days that she had stayed in this house, the place didn’t feel right to her. She was not Wilhelmina. She was not this dead girl, and she could not do penance for her. The crush of possessions and memories in these rooms no longer felt protecting. The stillness of this place gave her the feeling of being on the cusp of
There were musty old postcards, hundreds of them, in one of the drawers. Most of them were stamped and postmarked and had been received by someone named Ivory Johnston. They came from all over the country, from her college girlfriends and aunts and uncles and cousins. Some, the ones from London and Paris, came from Wilhelmina. Wish you were here! You are my best girl! Miss you!
But some were blank. They were old and musty, from the 50s and 60s. And they mostly had pictures of that very town. She chose one that had a picture of downtown, which looked recognizable, but different. This was a time before the local economy tanked and everything became rundown. This scene in black and white was a happy one, with crowded bustling streets and huge boat like cars that were like space ships. You could just see the railroad tracks in the distance,
This was the one she took. She thought a long while, pen poised, before she finally wrote, “I am alive. Love, A”
She slipped out the door but left it ajar in case she came back. She walked to her parents’ mailbox and stood in front of it, trying to decide whether she really wanted to put it in. Would it just make everything worse? Would she be able to enter back into her own life, even if she wanted to? For a moment she felt like a coward. If she had had guts, she would have killed herself for real, instead of faking her own murder.
But then again, imagine how it would feel to stun them all, like Lazarus back from the dead. The astonishment in their eyes as she walked in the door, a girl in charge of her own destiny. The power would be hers.
She stood frozen in indecision, staring at her house under the starry sky. And then, a single upstairs window lit up, glowing golden. It was such a pretty sight, like something from a picture book. A painting. It all looked so cozy. Once again she felt the stirring of memory. Where have I seen this before?
Crickets were chirruping. There was the swish of tires and the sweep of headlights as a car passed down the street. And still she stood frozen, not knowing if what felt like home was real, or another hologram of false memory.
Author Bio
Leah Erickson has been published in The Saint Ann’s Review, Sub-Lit, Atomjack, Silverthought, and The Stickman Review. She has a piece upcoming at Forge Journal. She lives in Rhode Island with her husband and daughter.
