Page 86 - Vol. V #6

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where she was. The Ex-Whatever could live in any of these houses, or be in any of these restaurants or bars. If it was even The Ex-Whatever that she’d seen. She wouldn’t know what to say to him if she saw him anyway. Though there was a draft in the air, Abby felt no movement to address it; she’d learned to just walk on, numb to it.
Eventually, she found a bus station and looked up a route back to the hotel. The bus was half-full of riders and she found a seat near the back. A chime of a text surprised her: “Hey, want to grab a drink tonight?”
Something resembling a breath escaped from her mouth. She found as she read the text again that she no longer could muster up anything beyond indifference. Instead, for the first time in weeks, she saw him clearly in his apartment. His green eyes lit by the screen as he idly texted maybe while he cooked dinner, stirring the soup with
a wooden spoon or maybe while folding his laundry, his glasses fogged by the steam of the dryer. The vividness of this image, how tangible it seemed, scraped off his mystery. There was nothing more supernatural about him than a thousand— tens of thousands!— of others. Abby blocked his number.
The bus hissed and moved along its path. Peo- ple trickled out like air from a tire. Soon, she was the only one on the bus. She looked out into the quiet vessel with its seats where thousands had sat before. People had gotten on, breathed the same air, maybe talked, and there was no trace of them now.
Abby took out her phone and scrolled through profiles, the photos blurring into indistinguish- able faces, no more real than ghosts.
Holt’s writing has appeared in Gargoyle Magazine, The Southeast Review, F(r)iction, and Front Porch Journal, among others. A graduate of Stanford University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s MFA program, he lives in San Francisco, California.
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