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By Liz Breazeale
1. The day they labeled her case cold, the three of us slumped, staring at our friend in the photos on Katie’s wall and fridge and in frames on the bookshelf, and her face buried among all those novels made it too easy to categorize what happened to her as fiction, a plot in a mystery.
2. Katie said, voice cracking, we have to do something. She’s already been forgotten.
3. She, she, always, to us, we couldn’t say her name after, remembered her in pictures instead of syllables.
4. We thought of our friend all the time, with every bending tree backlit against the moon—the night we didn’t know was the last, the party that went so late she left before us. When she told us she’d walk home, it was only a few blocks, Steph said something we wished we could preserve because our friend laughed at it, whole body laughed, but the memory hazed, bent around the edges.
5. After Katie spoke, Molly downed a shot from the bottle of wine between us. She had tears in her eyes always those days, must’ve seen through them like glasses, prisming the world with grief.
6. Katie grabbed the one thing we’d been given from our friend’s apartment, the one object not boxed up—her binder of ghost towns.
7. She’d wanted to study them in grad school, those boom-and-bust gnats on a map and the women who lived and died there, flashed in and out of the world like lightning bugs. She was a historian through her whole body, turned the pages of the world back and back, tried so desperately to know them, the sex workers and wives and madams and cooks and children nobody thought about. She pilgrimaged there, to all of them, mostly nameless hillocks, ruts in the soil; she scraped clear the gravestones at her favorite site, chiseled the moss and the mud away without thinking, the way you help a loved one do the dishes or put away clothes without their asking.
8. After Katie picked up the binder, she walked out of the room, down the stairs, and into the night. We followed, struggling to jam on our shoes.
9. We remembered the only pieces of her they found: the flattened shoe, black with red insole, a mosquito smashed mid-feed. The water bottle, fuchsia lipstick marks chewing at the rim. The Dooney & Burke crossbody her mother gave her a decade ago, limp and draggled across the road. The only witness: a boy from CU who saw nothing, just heard a strangled scream, a door slam, tires.
10. We were silent the whole drive through the canyon, up into the bends and hefts of the foothills, the reels of the highway casting around slopes. We knew where we were going, car punching through the pupil-dark, all those animal eyes reflecting from the woods.
11. Our friend had stood at the edge of her favorite ghost town, the winking gazes of the stumbling, ruined buildings on her, the tiny haunted graveyard, and said, can you stand the idea of dying and no one alive knowing where you are or why, doesn’t it break your heart?
12. What a thing to fathom, blinking in and out of existence so quickly no one can find you after you’re gone.
13. When we pulled onto the dirt road, bumped and juttered and were thrown against the windows, leaving souls of greasy smudges on the glass, Katie was steady at the wheel, never slowed. We knew this was right, the blinding bumps like vertebrae under the thinnest of skin.
14. We parked and the car headlights made a halo of the trees, trees our friend had felt so safe in, the way they closed off the sky. Katie slung a shovel over her shoulder.
15. We wandered, air fresh and unfamiliar, smelling of coniferous and pinecones and desiccated needles, shadows shifting, crafting themselves around trees older than the world we lived in, and we were sure the dancing spaces absent of light were our friend waiting for us, wondering why we took so long. We hoped if she chose someone to haunt it would be us.
16. Katie couldn’t read the map, thought we’d pulled up next to the graveyard but they were only stumps from some long-ago devastation, and we stumbled, snapping branches and pausing when we heard an owl and feeling far far down that this was her world, not ours, that our friend would know exactly where to go, how to navigate this place by the lonely stars hole-punched between branches.
17. We found it almost at the edge of the headlights’ reach, the best-preserved headstones still so broken like fallen horses, like horses near to death.
18. Our friend had made lists of their names and dates of birth and death, traced their inscriptions with charcoal, all dark space, brutally blank except for one or two words. She tried to fill in the gaps, caulk their emptiness with details but how do you summarize a life, how do you insert everything that matters, the way they wore their hair most days, the way they opened jars with a swift small suction-pop, the way they laughed with all their body, the way they bruised easy like fruit spoiling too soon, the way they the way they the way they.
19. Katie paused at a headstone broken in two, a chipped-off tooth, checked the name. Mabel, she said, and Molly skimmed through the binder. Here, she whispered, pointing to an etching locked in a plastic sheet.
20. Katie started digging and we followed, clawed the dirt away with our nails, and when we came away our hands didn’t look like hands.
21. Sometimes the exhaustion would strike us at odd moments of the day, walking to work or sitting at a stoplight or shelving a book, anytime our minds could wander—the pull toward remembering, the feeling that our friend was close enough to touch, that there was something deep and urgent we needed to tell her but we couldn’t, never again, and there must’ve been a way to cut through whatever was between us and her, the immovable partition keeping us apart.
22. We struck something wooden, dragged out the bones, and cradled them.
23. We took only a few. We took only what we needed.
24. We don’t know why but it made sense in our own bodies that wanted to be close to her again, that still wanted to snap pictures of weird birds we saw and send them to her and say something dumb like sweet bird action or wanted to tell her our successes because she was the best person to tell good news or wanted to remind her of when we finished our last semester, did she remember how she bought four mini bottles of champagne and we took edibles and sat on her roof and watched the sun skirt the mountains like a hand over a thigh and what if we forgot that she was fun, how she made us laugh, how she could distract us from anything.
25. Molly cried over the bundle in the car but we didn’t blame her.
26. Our friend had wept for them, the girls so young and just spit out, the leather-tough women lost forever.
27. We washed the bones first, anointed them with water from the sink, light and grainy and hollow, colored as though with tea like things dyed to look old, like projects from elementary school our friend had confessed she kept, fake ancient maps leading nowhere.
28. Her parents wanted to take her back to Missoula if they found her corpse and of course they did, how could we fault them? But oh her body in a cemetery there, probably small, she hated that, how everything was small against the massive sky, how she never felt significant, and she’d be so alone out there, next to everyone who was a stranger to her.
29. We laid the bones on the floor, one rocking on its bulbed ends.
30. Steph gentled them into the right order, forming an arm, chanting: carpal, metacarpal, humerus, scapula.
31. The sky was scabbing with light around the edges. The wetness from our jeans pressed through us, gripping beyond our skin.
32. The last night of her life, our friend said she’d walk home and we told her we’ll see you tomorrow and it was the only time, we swear, the only time we didn’t pair off, and she was looking how she always looked, her mouth like the plains, the haystack of her messy bun. In our minds, after she was gone, she was beautiful, luminous and haunting, but in the moment we knew she looked only fine, just tired, eyeliner doing that thing where it clumped in the corners, whatever, we’d see her for brunch the next day.
33. Everything smelled unfixably of earth in Katie’s room, of must and dirt and wet, of the world in all its mourning.
34. Every weekend after, we brought back toes, we brought back fingers, we brought back tibias and fibulas and ribs. We molded her into herself bone by bone, learned the words for all the parts of her that lived so deep we never saw them. We would wash them, lay them out over a streak of butcher paper, slide them under Katie’s bed when we were done for the night. It was like our friend was sleeping under there, like maybe she would wake up.
35. I see them when I dream, she’d told us, I feel their ghosts behind me in the mirror.
36. Every time, before we went back to our lives, we touched the bones for one long second, saying goodbye finally to something real, the way you linger your hand on someone’s shoulder as you leave a room. We pressed them, felt a pulse narrowing, and for a moment we could imagine it was her, our beautiful brilliant human friend, whole and uncut and new, could imagine she was here and we didn’t have to think about our bodies or what would happen if they were broken because we would be remembered and we would live forever and we would never be buried in places where no one would find us, where we would always be lost.
—
Liz Breazeale is the recipient of an NEA 2020 Creative Writing Fellowship, and her first book, Extinction Events, won the 2018 Prairie Schooner Book Prize for Fiction. She holds an MFA from Bowling Green State University and lives in Denver. Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in Best Small Fictions 2020, Kenyon Review Online, Best of the Net 2014 & 2019, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Rupture, Pleiades, Fence, Fugue, Sycamore Review, Passages North, Monkeybicycle, and others