Alexandra Yang

up your mind. If you really want this, I won’t stop you, although I can’t promise that you won’t regret it. It’s a shame. I did enjoy talking to you.” “If things had been different, I think we could have become friends.” Scarlet gave him a small smile. Midnight hesitated, and then smiled back. “Yes, I think we could have.”

Scarlet took a deep breath. Then she ran. She jumped off the cliff that towered over the Silver Lake. And for a moment, she saw the true beauty of the land that she had grown up in. The beautiful forests, filled with all different types of trees. She remembered the crystal waters of the Silver Lake, and the gentle winds that caressed her hair. I’ll still see it again, won’t I? And then she fell. Her heart dropped, and she couldn’t breathe. But as she was falling, she looked at Midnight’s expression. He was happy. So she smiled. “...I’m sorry… Farewell.” And then the girl named Scarlet was no more, and the boy named Midnight was. And the crocus flowers on the ground seemed to droop ever so slightly. And the sun seemed to shine ever so slightly less. And the moon seemed to beam ever so slightly more.

A Still Motion Picture

Alexandra Yang

Julian texts her at 10.

j: are u coming or not? m: yes omw

Marcy grabs her bag and steps out onto her doorstep. The sky paints her shadow blue. In the distance, cars pass on the highway like bursts of static and every time she looks up, the stars seem to have multiplied.

She rides her bike along the road to the station, avoiding the parts of the sidewalk she knows will be cracked. She’s come here enough to know this path by heart. Like always, she sees Julian’s Cheshire grin first, and the rest of him coming into focus a moment later. Conny stands beside him, his features outlined sharply by the light of his phone. Penelope slouches out from behind them, hands in her pockets.

They take the train. This late, the car is practically empty. Two teenage girls sit in one end, sleeping on each other, and there’s a man in a suit at the other staring out the window. She takes a seat near the middle and Conny slumps down beside her. Julian and Penelope remain standing.

Julian and Conny start a racing game on their phones. Under the fluorescent lights, she meets Penelope’s eyes, and her gaze is fathomless.

She’s known Penelope her entire life. They attended the same daycare, same preschool, been beside each other all the way up to here, to now, to the night before they graduate high school. There’s intimacy there, in that odd way that there always is with somebody who’s been present to watch you grow up. It’s funny, she thinks, how enough time can become an adequate substitute for attachment. Julian and Conny may have brought them together, but there’s a lifetime of things that they’ve never said in

It’s a fall afternoon and golden light is streaming in through the windows. Practice ended half an hour ago, and they’re the last two left in the washroom. She picks up her bag and starts walking to the door. Two steps past, there’s a prickling at her nape. She looks back.

It must be an illusion, what she’s seeing. In Marcy’s periphery, Penelope’s still bent over the sink, furrowing her brow as she scrubs at her fingernails. The Penelope in the mirror stares straight at Marcy, expression neutral, lips slightly tilted. Time seems to slow to nothing. Marcy nods, slightly, to the reflection. Her expression doesn’t change, but there’s a faint air of cool amusement around her now.

The wind blows, the leaves rustle, the light shifts. When Marcy looks again, Penelope is stepping away from the sink, and the mirror shows nothing but an empty locker room.

They get off at Marion Street. She walks alongside Penelope, their elbows knocking against each other with every step. Behind them, Julian’s beaten Conny, and they’re laughing raucously, the sound bouncing off the buildings.

They file into the dimly lit 24-hour diner right off of Fifth and order loaded fries, nachos, and milkshakes. She’s memorized their order by now - mint chocolate for Julian, raspberry for Penelope, vanilla for her and Conny. She sits in the booth and Conny slides in next to her. This close, she can feel the line of heat coming off his body, hear the faint humming coming from the back of his throat.

Of the other three, Conny is the one she knows the least. Something about

They’re at camp, the summer before high school, racing up the hill. Conny runs like no one else can, as if his feet have wings, as if his body is made entirely of air. He reaches the top first, before anyone else has even reached the half-way point. He’s poised on his toes upon the summit, arms spread out, and Marcy can see it, so close to possible that it’s already happened. She can project his trajectory, map the tenseness of his muscles, and all of his lines lead straight into the sky. It seems entirely like a natural continuation of his path, as if there is a centrifugal force that’ll bowl him right past the limits of gravity and up into the air.

The sun’s starting to set by the time they run back. She sees his outline against the red light of the horizon, a single point taking an impossible, unfollowable path. Painted black on the ground, his shadow is unmistakably not shaped like the rest of him.

They go to the beach, last. Penelope kicks off her shoes and wades ankle-deep into the water, and Conny jumps in and starts splashing her. She shrieks, and he laughs. Besides her, Julian’s eyes shine eerily in the light. Sometimes, in her dreams, he blinks and the moon disappears from the sky but remains hanging, full and heavy, in his eyes.

Marcy had nightmares almost every night as a child. Her mother says that she woke up every night, shaking, sobbing, screaming as if she were dying. (Marcy, for what it’s worth, doesn’t remember any of this.) For years, her mother tried everything she could to fix it - sleep therapy, better mattresses, routine setting - but to no avail. Then, one day, they stopped.

Marcy used to have nightmares. Then she grew up, and she left them behind.

All of them.

Right?

The first time she met him was when she was walking home from school. It was winter, and the sky was glowing dusky yellow, as if something very bright and strange were hiding right behind it.

He was standing in the middle of the road, looking up and grinning as if he had just discovered that he could fit the whole world between his teeth. Then he had turned and saw her, and she had felt something like an echo, reverberating and cavernous in her chest, as if she were standing upon a very small boat above leagues of bottomless sea. There was something poorly hidden in his gaze, and she thought it looked a bit like recognition.

The next day, she met him officially when he was introduced to her class as a transfer student. He’d sought her out at lunch, his teeth perfectly straight. Hi I’m Julian, can I sit here? Her lingering unease had dissipated under the weak sunlight, and she had nodded. It had felt oddly natural, to have him by her side, as if a piece of her were slipping back into place.

She’s always thought of Julian in the abstract, in the possessive. It’s been three years, now, since they met. She’s seen him jubilant and anxious and scared, in his most human moments, and she still can’t shake the feeling from that first night. Something about him feels as if his edges do not fit in quite right with the rest of the world around him, like he’s standing at the boundary of something much wider than this small town.

Before the fear and the surprise, that first night - she knows the first thing she felt when she saw him was a brief echo of recollection. I’ve seen that face before.

The world is far wider than she can see. Forgetting is always the part that comes last in the story.