Bloody Mary

Short Stories

Dear Friends,

I’m sharing a short story from a collection called New Yorkers. On the partner site

Inner Life

,

James F. Richardson

writes on work/life separation.

Best,

Sam

BLOODY MARY

She was from one of these old colorful families — Newport when it was a real rogues’ gallery, ship captains who may or may not have been pirates, depending on how you read the fine print in their charters, slavers, although not, fortunately, in her direct lineage. Her branch of the family had drifted away from that a couple of generations earlier, were living, incognito, in the suburbs. It was her cousins, at the gatherings of the extended family, who liked to lead her away into attics and storerooms, show her the yellowing sepia photographs, even, on rare occasions, the old oil paintings, explain the various crimes and scandals of one or another of her ancestors — with the men it was boom-or-bust economics, with the women, lunacy. “Crazy gallops in the family,” said her cousin Adele, who may have been a little touched herself. Adele was from the richest, least reconstructed branch of the family, and the best keeper of this ledger. It was hard to take any of it particularly seriously, it had a bit of a ‘bloody mary’ aspect to it, and Adele, her eyes gleaming, had a weakness for embellishment, but there they were, one scoundrel after another, always good-looking, always well-dressed, and invariably it turned out that the men had had a bounty placed on their heads by the government, that the women had taken off all their clothes and raced naked through some estate — that was what their madness always seemed to consist of, maybe it was just a failure of imagination by Adele, always naked women sprinting between gazebos and ballrooms.

Again, it wasn’t something that Caitlin took particularly seriously growing up, beyond a few nightmares, some perplexing creative writing assignments in school, but it also meant that she wasn’t caught completely unawares when her mother started acting more and more strangely around the time Caitlin left for college. At first it was possible to laugh this off as standard WASP eccentricity, her mother had always been a brooder, prone to senseless, circular puttering in her garden, which Caitlin imitated to great effect with her college suite, and also to sustained solitary drinking, which was getting incontrovertibly worse but still might be attributable to empty nest syndrome. Caitlin’s father kept her regularly updated on her mother’s deterioration. He called her about once a month, both at school and during her year abroad in Spain, said, in his worried, serious Greenwich tone, “So, about your mother,” and the news was never good and he always reported it accurately, but this was such a familiar dynamic between the two of them, the pragmatic father, the only child, both of them ‘with a good head on their shoulders,’ both used to accommodating and skirting around a difficult, moody woman, that there was, in a way, something reassuring, something cozy, about his updates, and although Caitlin vented to her apartment-mates about it and cried real tears about it, “I can’t believe it, my mother’s in the loony bin,” she said, and her apartment-mates petted her hair and gave her very deep, authentic hugs and looked her in the eyes for long seconds afterwards, there still was something put-on about the whole thing, even the warm tears felt insincere somehow, it all reminded Caitlin of ‘bloody mary’ and the dull, rainy Sundays in the ancestral family house when cousin Adele, eyes gleaming, would dredge up another family horror story.

Caitlin returned home from the year abroad just after her mother had had shock therapy. She was a very different woman now, more different than had been portrayed in her father’s dispatches. She declined to greet Caitlin, had apparently gone into hiding upon Caitlin’s arrival. She stood inside the front entrance, for some reason neglecting to put down her suitcase, from the other room she could hear the whispered, hissing arguments, then her mother frog-marched out, like a convict, her shoulders hunched forward, her eyes peering upwards. With what seemed like a great effort of courtesy, she extended her hand to shake Caitlin’s, said, “How d’you do?”

“Caitlin’s been in Spain,” her father prompted. “She’s just come back.”

Her mother waited attentively, like an actor who wasn’t sure she’d been given the right cue.

“Lots of bombings in Spain,” she said, “lots of silly ways to get yourself killed.” 

That seemed to be as much as she wanted to contribute, and only now did Caitlin set down her suitcase and opened up the front door and stood in the June sun next to their quiet country road and cried bitter tears and there was nothing insincere or put-upon about them, eventually her father came out to join, her mother having gone back to bed, and he stood sometimes with his arm around her or sometimes just by her side and offered the reassurances he was so expert in and Caitlin just heaved up tears and said, “I’ve lost – I’ve lost my – my mother, I’ve lost my mother,” the words coming out in varying order and making no greater sense no matter which way she arranged them.

***

Caitlin’s father worked in oil-and-gas and wrote investor reports that cost many thousands of dollars to read. He had a well-organized life, good health insurance, and Vera his wife received an assortment of excellent care. He was famous in his industry for the wry style of his reports and for a counter-intuitive, contrarian streak that allowed him sometimes to disregard all the metrics and analytics in his report and defer to his intuition, and some of that sensibility permeated into his evaluation of Vera. “Doctors have their various names for what she has,” he told Caitlin, “and they’re all interesting, all accurate up to a point — I’ll tell you I’ve learned a lot more than I ever expected to about all the things that can go wrong with the human brain – but, really, basically what’s going on, I think, is that she just regrets. It’s like it started with all her anxieties, you remember, did she get the right number of berries from the supermarket, should she have gotten more, maybe that trip to the supermarket was a failure, maybe the whole day was a failure, and for a while it was all contained to things like that, how the kitchen was falling apart, how the garden was being overrun by deer, and then it sort of metastasized, if only she hadn’t been hanging out with some dumb friend in college then she would never have gone through the horror of meeting me, if only she had never met me, then, I’m sorry, she wouldn’t have gone through all the agony of having you, and it’s supposed to be paranoia or schizophrenia or whatever the DSM is evolving to, but, at a deeper level, it’s a kind of spiral of regrets, a regrets black hole, although that’s not a clinical term yet, in which she starts with how miserable she’s feeling at the moment and kind of peels the onion back to get at the source of that feeling, which starts with why she got herself hooked on Vicodin instead of Percocet and why her morning coffee gives her ulcers and quickly unravels back to how the real problem is that she should never have been born at all.”

They were sitting on the porch, he drinking a Kentucky bourbon, she a spritz, as he talked all this out. He was very winning, her father, thin and handsome, with a nervousness in his manner that somehow made him more charming, an almost perfect lack of vanity or conceit except in the anxious way he kept pushing his hair over his bald spot. He had taken an unusually active role in Caitlin’s upbringing, he seemed made for caregiving, it was safe to assume that Vera was in good hands with him. He frowned, as if his analysis were mostly accurate but he was missing some small, critical point.

“I don’t want this to affect you,” he said slowly, spinning the tumbler in his hand, studying the liquid tilting at its base, “I mean, affect you any more than it has to. This is — ” he paused in his careful way, as he did when he was looking for the exact right word, he had a real talent for this, he’d developed it during all of Vera’s moods and rages, an ability to preserve the delicate balance of any given situation, “this is worse than anyone should have to deal with,” he said, “and it’s not yours to deal with, any more than it has to be. You’re 21 years old, your mother and I — well, your mother when she was capable of thinking this way, wanted very much for you to have the best life possible and we, or I, very much still want that. This will be —” another squinting pause, another search for the right way of expressing things, “this will be an ordeal, and we will have various jobs to do in it, jobs that none of us expected to have, but here’s what I want you to remember, that your main job is to do you, you do that, you live the life you want to have, and everything else — whatever we have to go through here — all of that will be worth it.”

 ***

It happens more often than you might think that a single conversation determines a person’s fate, or at least their trajectory, and that was the case with Caitlin’s late-night conversation with her father, their porch summit over whisky and spritz. She had been mystified by what role was called for her in her mother’s flight into insanity. She’d expected something noble and self-sacrificing, something about pampers and doctor’s appointments and that was what she’d been inwardly steeling herself for as her father started speaking.

There was a more subtle shift too. Throughout Caitlin’s upbringing, her father had been scrupulously laissez-faire about Caitlin’s life decisions, where she went to college, her major, that kind of thing, it seemed to be the received wisdom for a certain type of progressive parent, to express no opinions whatsoever, to not tip one’s hand at all, and if Caitlin’s mother managed to convey disapproval no matter what Caitlin did, which boy she was dating, what extra-curriculars she had selected, whether she had eaten too much of her dinner or not enough, her father was as poker-faced as a judge. The whole Spain idea had been one of the first few indications of any kind of a preference on his part, a Wall Street Journal article he’d cut out for her and left in her manila folder of mail, about how her generation had gotten too provincial and American-centric, part of a refrain she’d heard of his at dinner parties, the amusing-but-fundamentally-neutral riffs that baselined his conversation, about the need for a more internationalist sensibility.

In Spain, she’d taken that idea towards its logical conclusion, she’d been part of a free-wheeling internationalist set, headquartered in a cool Barcelona hostel, she’d smoked cloves and then learned to roll her own cigarettes, played around with the idea of being a poet, read Gramsci and the aggrieved manifestoes of the Catalan separatists and the writings of Subcomandante Marcos and felt a frisson of danger imagining how her new interests would be received in Greenwich, Connecticut — although, as her father liked to point out, oil had a way of pooling in the craziest places on earth and he’d had to keep track of the craziest ideas in order to stay on top of it. But now, after all the evasions and mixed messages and platitudes that had stood in for parental advice, her father’s vision for her was at last coming into focus. She finished up her last semester of college, Spain had been very disruptive, she felt that she no longer knew anybody at school, like she was some kind of ghost or visiting dignitary, but that was freeing in its way, she was no longer distracted by things like campus status, and certainly not by the intra-suite melodramas that had been so consuming at the beginning of school. She diligently attended the career fairs towards graduation and settled on a consulting firm that was based in New York and offered a good starting salary. It was a long way from where she had been in Spain with her hosteliers. She remembered the vituperative way they had talked about finance, finance like some kind of global octopus, and it was difficult to square that with the sweet, nervous woman from the consulting firm speaking to a mostly empty room, passing out her recruitment brochures and actually getting a little misty-eyed as she talked about the ‘family atmosphere’ at Danziger Roth that you would never get at one of the larger firms.

Most of Caitlin’s friends complained about the abyss of their early 20s, not least her Barcelona friends on their occasional, bleating facebook messages as they talked about how their journalism internships, their organic farmstays, their haphazard road trips, weren’t adding up to what they called a ‘meaningful life.’ Caitlin wasn’t even exactly sure what they were talking about. She met her Uber in the morning — one of the firm’s perks that made such a small, significant difference — she stared out the window at the traffic all flowing into the city, the bridges and tunnels, the key arteries, she went through the turnstiled lobby in her suit vest, saw everybody else, all the various blazers and suits badge-in and scatter to their separate elevators. The days she found to be surprisingly well-structured, if a morning or early afternoon sometimes struck her as a bit inchoate, really just a succession of coffee-breaks, there was always bound to be some late-afternoon crisis, when her co-workers, these affable, goofy young people suddenly turned into Pentium processors, muttering rates and regulations and conversions to themselves as they typed furiously into their laptops, and to her surprise she found herself, after a few months, doing the same thing, muttering to herself in the late afternoon, it was a startlingly wide breadth of knowledge she’d been expected to inhale, and she found herself thinking about how an expected fluctuation in the exchange rate with the Argentinean peso would affect the manufacturing sales of a company based in Duluth and how those numbers combined with a novel interpretation of a tariff law would influence the purchasing likelihood of their true client, a South Korean firm just entering into the American market, and she found that her calculations and analyses were no less right than any of her colleagues. And if the evenings were a bit lonesome, after her Uber had deposited her back in Cobble Hill, and she grappled with the difficult questions about whether she could manage to cook for herself or just order delivery, if she should let herself have a glass of wine or if that was a slippery slope, and if dating was, for a while, the usual shitshow, she stayed with it, she dragged herself to parties, she opened accounts on fresh apps, she endured wine dates, she eventually found just the perfect person. Reese was the sort of sensitive ex-athlete who fetched such a premium on the dating market. He had just broken the back of his first years as a law associate, he had the harried, overworked look that Caitlin, in her secret criteria for assessing her dating prospects, found to be the only real measure of credibility, and now he had demonstrated staying power, he was being spoken of as a ‘prospect,’ the potential of partnership had been dangled before him, he was starting to be able to relax, to enjoy himself for the first time as an adult.

Caitlin went about once a month to Greenwich. It had been, in a sense, surprisingly easy for her mother to go insane. She had never been very social anyway, had never had a career, she had been a member of a few groups, book clubs, volunteer organizations, that she had disliked in any case, it was just a matter of withdrawing tactfully from them. The garden and the house had been her preoccupation, and now their upkeep was outsourced to professionals. Caitlin had seen enough movies about the suburbs that she expected the news about her mother to be a real disgrace, but, as so often, she found that reality was much more pleasant than the movie-version, the doctrine was out about mental health, there were well-wishers visiting the house in the beginning and then there were people ‘standing by,’ offering to be of help as needed, everybody was unbelievably respectful and understanding.

Caitlin felt that she was more or less in the role of one of the neighbors. She visited, she relieved her father on the rare occasions when he needed a break or had to go into the city for a meeting — with surprising seamlessness he had been able to transition to doing the bulk of his work from home. She experimented with a few bonding activities, took the old photo albums out of their resting place, leafed through the photos of her mother as a young woman, all the family gatherings, the wide smiles, the embraces with her newlywed father. None of these had the desired effect. “Good jaw,” her mother said once, tracing the lines of her own photographed face, “that’s what he’s there for, otherwise it’s whatever he can catch.”

Adele liked to synchronize her own visits to when Caitlin was there. She was enacting a peculiar, private dance of downward mobility, drifting further west and north into the Connecticut hinterlands, working as some kind of nurse’s aide, she rattled in for her visits in the family’s old Admiral, a gorgeous car with a clanging muffler, it was always hard to penetrate the inner logic of her life choices. The synchronization of her visits didn’t make much sense in terms of the distribution of labor, but Caitlin was grateful for the company. When her mother was up and about, they fixed her food together, watched documentaries — the photo albums had been abandoned, there was a theory that movies and news were too quick and destabilizing — but, really, she spent most of her time alone in her room, she nodded to them from her hooded eyes, like a teenager asking to be excused from the table, went trudging away. When Caitlin checked in on her, she found her curled foetally on the bed, in her clothes, on top of the sheets. Once, as Caitlin, in a burst of optimism, tried to initiate a conversation, told her about a deal she was working on, her mother absentmindedly unzipped her jeans, began to stroke herself. She did it in a very mechanical, almost irritated way, brought her finger to her nose to inspect something that was bothering her before she resumed. Caitlin, horrified, retreated to the living room, found Adele sitting on the couch in the dark the screen flickering in front of her. “Well, I guess everybody’s enjoying themselves,” Adele said cryptically, “everybody but me.” She was completely non-plussed by Caitlin’s news; it was always difficult to anticipate her reactions. They sat and watched the film, something soothing by the History Channel about America before exploration. “What do you think it would be like to be like that?” Adele said eventually. On the screen they were talking about the Iroquois Confederacy, it took Caitlin a moment to reorient herself. She shrugged, Adele was clearly off on one of her trains of thought.

“Have you ever had anything — ” Adele said timidly. She had always been a bit impolite, a gossip addict, with a bad habit for prying, but even for her this was pushing things. The screen was playing some kind of moody music over wilderness shots. Adele’s eyes were gleaming in the dark.

“Back when I was dating,” Caitlin said lightly, “and I was hooking up with somebody I didn’t know well — I mean, chose to be with that person and everything — but when I was actually with them, I always had a fantasy about stabbing a knife into them.”

“Oh that,” Adele said distastefully, like she’d never heard anything so predictable. “I can’t imagine having sex, I mean being a woman having sex, and not having that thought,” she said. They settled in to watch the documentary together, whatever Adele wanted to know wasn’t ready to be expressed, everything was quiet from the bedroom, they learned about Mohawk customs until the sound of Caitlin’s dad’s engine reverberated in the driveway.

***

By their late 20s, it had become completely clear that Reese would be a star. A partner had put an arm around him at a company picnic, announced in earshot of all the right people, “This is the future of our firm right here.” Caitlin had done well for herself in consulting, had an assortment of titles around her name, but the titles felt like window-dressing, it was clear to her that she wasn’t going to have Reese’s trajectory. In any case, work had felt like a grounding and stabilization in the first shock of her mother’s slide into insanity and now it was no longer so necessary. She and Reese had been relatively slow in declaring exclusivity, in moving in together, but now they did the usual relationship-and-real estate consolidation, moved into a beautiful new building in Battery Park City with a gym and bar and work lounge and all kinds of amenities that Caitlin hadn’t known existed. When she complained, on a rainy Wednesday night, about the kinds of hours she was working, Reese suddenly got a clever, faraway look, said, “You know, it is a little obscene for both of us to be working the way we are, I wouldn’t necessarily be opposed if you wanted to taper off a bit.”

Caitlin didn’t take him up on it, for one thing she didn’t know how she would fill up the day if she actually did taper, everybody else was so busy, on the rare days when she walked around the city alone it felt like a game of sardines or something, everybody was tucked away in their corners, the people on the street, the people who were ‘free,’ were the ones left out, but there was a shift in her, that conversation with Reese, like the porch summit with her father, was one of these seminal conversations that affected her decisions more than she might have admitted. She became less manic about answering e-mails immediately, she let calls go straight to voicemail, her priorities were suddenly different. When a friend or podcast talked about ‘fulfillment’ or ‘work-life balance,’ she no longer instinctively rolled her eyes, as she had been semi-trained to do by the hard-drinking, sour old guard at Danziger, now she nodded along in a somewhat vague, misty-eyed way, she took it on faith that there was something else out there although she couldn’t quite work out what it might be.

Reese was thinking along similar lines, he had become an aficionado of Joe Rogan, listened to Joe on the train, in the shower, pretty much whenever he had a free moment. Joe put him on to psychedelics and plant medicines, he followed up on a tip, an overheard conversation from somebody at work, sent what both he and Caitlin agreed was a very ‘dodgy’ e-mail to a group called Way of Light, and, instead of whatever they were secretly expecting, silence or a SWAT team outside their door, got a civil and business-like reply, naming a date, a price, and a location upstate.

They dieted for several days, as the e-mail instructed them, no coffee, no alcohol, no salt. Caitlin had a guilt about passing through the suburbs without visiting her mother, so they drove up on Friday night. Her dad was grateful for the night off, and they attempted the usual activities, the documentaries, the jigsaw puzzles. Vera had always had difficulty with Reese for some reason, she said, “I can’t concentrate on a movie when he’s in the room,” and Reese, who was good-natured even when he was being insulted, went to the porch to tap on his phone. Vera’s ability to concentrate on the film wasn’t great even without Reese in the room. Caitlin had carefully selected the movie, a documentary on Capability Brown, who had been such a hero to her mother back in another era of her life, and she watched the movie determinedly, staring enraptured at the screen, making approving noises at different moments, as if she could will her mother to pay attention along with her, but Vera kept inspecting some lint from the couch, then seemed to be studying, with displeasure, something on the back of her hand. She shuffled off to bed after not too long, and it was the same thing it always was, Caitlin in the living room, this documentary pointlessly up on the screen. She and Reese watched it together for a bit. “Let’s just hope your father is having a better time than we are,” he said acerbically, and suddenly something clicked for Caitlin — Adele had been alluding to the same thing, and somehow she hadn’t gotten it — it didn’t actually make sense for her father to have a ‘work dinner’ in the city that was running until early in the morning. He had been a saint — as everybody in the neighborhood invariably put it — a wonderful husband and father, but he was human too, he couldn’t be expected to not move on at all.

She was in a shaken mood when she arrived at the retreat. It was more low-key than she expected, which somehow shook her up even more — everybody was professional, suburbanite, a bit like themselves, subdued as they waited for the ceremony itself to start. A ‘shaman,’ who had the kind of complex goatee that she associated with IT guys, blew over a milky-white potion and poured it into a cup for her. She drank, smiled sweetly at him, he was looking her hard in the eyes, settled back down on her mat. It was completely dark, there was a musician playing on a guitar, she heard a serpent-like voice somewhere inside her say, “Do not come here again,” and she felt an immense disappointment, it had been an expensive weekend, complicated logistically, Reese had done a lot of work convincing her to go. She lay back, relaxed, it was good to know that this wasn’t really for her, that it would be a light trip. She would take care of Reese, who was already heaving furiously into a bucket. She had a series of flashing images, a wedding dress, a baby in a cradle, a ship riding at harbor, she didn’t know how to interpret any of them. As if taking pity on her and the money she had plunked down, the ayahuasca, somewhere towards the middle of the night, gave her a bit of a light show and magic carpet ride, she seemed to go surfing off over the curvature of the earth, in a domain of lights and fractals; just when she started to have a feeling of vertigo she was deposited back into her body, she slept or rested, ran her fingertips over Reese’s hunched back, woke up towards dawn feeling incredibly refreshed. The ceremony wrapped up with surprising anti-climax, the musician put away his guitar, a few of the people who had tougher nights went shivering and shaking into the house on the property to spend the day wrapped up in blankets. Caitlin walked around the woods, she listened to the crunch of her footsteps, and when it felt right she sat next to a tree that somehow reminded her of Vera. It was delicate and pliant but with a heft to it and she hugged it as tightly as she could and wept into the bark.

Most of the other participants had looked a little sorry for her when she said she hadn’t seen much, but the ceremony’s organizer told her, “You shouldn’t think that this ceremony ends when you drive away from here, a great many of the energies in your life may start to shift around,” and that in fact turned out to be the case. About a week after returning home, she had a sudden impulse to clear up desktop space on the spare computer she and Reese sometimes shared, and there — as if it was just waiting to be discovered — was a whole cache of files, meticulously organized, downloaded e-mails from several of his girlfriends. At the time she met him he had had, as he once indelicately put it, a ‘harem,’ and, as it now emerged, he had simply never cut ties with his ex-girlfriends as he started to date Caitlin or even when their exclusivity clause came into force. He had been too busy, both with her and with work, to spend much time with any of them in the intervening years, but, clearly, his other girlfriends hadn’t forgotten him, he really was very likeable and attractive, they had kept up a regular, very filthy correspondence, and now, as he was increasingly able to make his own schedule, as he could relax into having it made, he was able — as the downloaded e-mails showed — to spend more and more time with several of them.

Caitlin was, on the whole, more confused than angry as she interrogated Reese, as she pried out of him the full extent of his betrayal. “What I guess I don’t understand,” she said, “is how you could have made all these other efforts to be a good person, I mean could have wanted to do ayahuasca, for example, made that effort to be vulnerable, and you couldn’t tell me about any of this?”

He nodded vigorously, he had been a very cooperative defendant, he seemed almost as baffled as she was. “I was trying, I really was,” he said, “and I did want to be honest with you as much as possible, you really were very important to me, but all of this, it just seemed somehow to be beyond that.”

***

Reese was kicked out of the apartment of course, there was no other way of handling things. She went into the shower, put the water on very high while he packed up, didn’t come out until she’d heard the door slam behind him. She paused for a long time in front of the bathroom mirror, ran her hand over her face, tried, if she was doing anything, to imagine how Reese would have seen her all that time when he was double-crossing her, how he could have lived with himself. “Good jaw,” she said at last, out loud, and the voice was not hers.

She stepped out into an empty apartment, she went slowly from room to room, as if seeing it all for the first time, and everything about it was wrong. It felt like she were a broker walking in on some piece of real estate knowing that everything about it would have to go back to scratch. Reese had done a very shoddy job cleaning up after himself, she found pictures of him and herself on the mantlepiece and the bedroom bureau, picked them up and threw them in a large white trash bag that she dragged after her. There were deodorants of his, sports trophies of his, there was the offending laptop that had started this whole catastrophe, she tossed them all into the white bag. But this purge was not as satisfying as it might have been, she came across different items, a novel in Spanish, a blunt that had been carefully, ironically preserved as a souvenir of her Barcelona days, and she threw those into the trash as well with the thought that if she hadn’t gone to Spain her life might have been completely different, she wouldn’t have walked along the primrose path to meeting Reese. If that thought, from one perspective, struck her as not completely logical, from another direction it made perfect sense — as she thought about her life, she saw it as a long parade of regrets, the only question was how far back she went, what was the first domino, the prime mover, what could she really, ultimately blame.

The unmasking and expulsion of Reese happened on a Sunday. By Monday she was eager to be back in the office. Danziger Roth had been such a solace to her in her early 20s when she was first grappling with the news about her mother, but now, alas, it seemed to have lost its magic. The lobby, the elevators, the badge-ins, the rows of desks, they were all a bizarre pantomime, it all might have been a bit funny if she hadn’t spent almost a decade caught in this particular trap, analyzing exchange rates and tariff laws, and now there was all this time to account for, to add to her ledger of regrets. They seemed to be accumulating in her mind’s eye, the photographs and paintings of the mad women of Newport, and she made herself take the elevator downstairs, go for a smoothie, before she started streaking naked through the office.

Once she was on the street, she shut her eyes and opened them. She couldn’t tell if she was relieved or disappointed that the world was still there and seemed to be so intact — she was new to being mad, and was aware that she was somewhat naïve about it, she didn’t know the outlines of it yet, it would probably be more subtle and terrible than she was capable of anticipating. She bought a smoothie from her favorite place, she tried to savor it as she watched the street rushing by her. It was all so solid and familiar, she was sure that for her it would all start to change soon, it would all start to turn into something else. Into what, she couldn’t imagine.