by Jenny Ortiz

My hand moved to my nose to catch the blood before it fell on my grease-stained uniform.  Ducking into the bathroom before a customer called me over, I examined my nose in the mirror, but couldn’t see anything.  I sniffed a few times; a metallic smell remained in my nostrils.  After rolling my neck, and hearing the vertebrae crack, I went back to work.

The pitcher of iced tea felt heavier in my hand; the scraping of forks against plates seemed louder.  The booths were filled with people in church clothes, their faces smudged with ketchup, fingers tapping at the rims of their cups as they waited for refills.  Three different table jukeboxes were playing heavy metal and Spanish ballads.  Truck drivers sat in stools eating full meals of eggs, ham, cheese, and some avocado on the side.  Smells of cooking oil and pancake mix permeated the diner.

Jaynus walked in and took a seat in my section, which made me press my lips together.  Although his long blond hair covered his eyes, I knew he was looking out the window; I could almost feel the twitch at the corner of his left eye as he watched vigilantly.  We were always looking over our shoulders, but this time we were expecting her.  There’d been a time when Jaynus and I dreamt that running away would mean the hot sun on our skin, the taste of fresh coffee, waking up in a new city.  But then hiding in train cars, jumping over fences, and washing up in the bathrooms of gas stations started wearing us down.  We no longer wanted to work long hours while sweat soaked the elastic of our underwear in order to pay for our daily meals and a motel room.

Jaynus had begun staying up at night, studying the Bible and thinking about God.  I wasn’t God-fearing; I just wanted a big house and some money to spend.  After sex, I’d start falling asleep, and he’d start quoting Scripture.  Not that we were having sex as much as we used to—that began to fall apart soon after we got to Puerto Rico.  Fugitives, we learned, don’t get much time to sit on the beach and sip margaritas.  We avoided places full of Americans and took jobs right outside of Aguadilla; while I waited tables, Jaynus did odds and ends for different construction sites.

I brought him a beer and left him to his thoughts.  I’d never intended to be with Jaynus so long, but when you’re fourteen and climbing a fence with barbed wire, you don’t think of doing it by yourself.  It’d taken a long time for our thin bodies to fill out again, for the skin of our feet to heal.  The taste of grass came back every now and again, making my face grow tight with shame.

Thirteen kids had escaped with us from the government sponsored orphanage.  We were two out of four that remained.  Three had died in the woods.  They’d been weak, their thoughts feverish with their mothers’ voices, the taste of fresh water, the warmth of a clean bed.  Struggling to keep them standing, we’d dragged and pulled their bodies over thick tree roots and under dangling branches; before we reached the road, they’d slid off our shoulders.  I don’t remember if I cried for them.  At one point, Jaynus had pulled at the bark of a dead tree until his nails were broken, leaving the skin underneath raw and exposed.  His fingers were swollen the next day, and we feared he might lose one of his hands if we didn’t find some medicine.  A few of the girls had kept sniffling, but had I?  Asking Jaynus about it would be useless; he refused to remember.  He couldn’t even tell me what’d happened the day before.

The rest of us had separated, but slowly the others were found.  We were too valuable to be lost.  You pump enough drugs into a kid’s arm and there are bound to be good results, or at least a guide to what not to do to the human body.  Building heroes is expensive; we were expensive.  While we bragged about riding our bikes without handlebars, they could brag about making new antibiotics, leading a nation with one speech, and guiding missiles by satellite.  No matter how old we got, how strong our muscles became, we’d always be grubby kids with mud streaking our thin legs and knots in our hair, running away aimlessly in our thin white underwear.

“Mirah, another beer,” Jaynus called out.

Glancing over at him, I was surprised to find Utah sitting across from him.  I’d loved Utah.  We had escaped with her.  The day she left us, I’d stood with her on the train platform.  She was shouldering a taped-up duffel bag and looking ahead, her jaw tight and her stern glare focused.  She’d refused to answer any of my questions.  Men in white vans pulled up just as the train for Manhattan was pulling in.  I tried to board with her, but she pushed me away roughly, her hand against the new tattoo I’d gotten—Utah’s name on the flat space between my breasts.  She’d watched through the window as Jaynus and I ran from the men.  We didn’t stopped until we found a sewer entrance too tight for them to follow us in; we’d stayed for two days underground before we felt safe enough to come out.

As I headed toward their table now, Utah and Jaynus were in deep conversation.  Utah’s fingers pulled at her sleeves; the fabric tightened over her shoulders.  Placing the beer between them, I continued to another booth to take an order.  Through the loud buzz of voices, I could hear Jaynus telling Utah about the places we’d been, but I couldn’t catch her responses.

Within an hour the rush had died down, and I was able to join them.  Jaynus’ face was tense; Utah was crying.

“Who’s she crying for?”  My teeth were clenched as I spoke.

“Only reason people cry like that is because their heart’s been broken.”  Jaynus’ lips barely moved; his hand cupped his face as if he were deciphering a mathematical equation in his head.

“Expert, huh?” I said to him.

“You tell me.”

His gaze moved away from me towards Utah.  Her thin body was slightly hunched; her gold hoops moved every time she wiped her face with the sleeve stretched over her slender, tanned hands.  Those hands were still dark, their palms round, like full moons whose edges are tinted red.  Although she was small and slouched, everything about Utah felt big, without boundaries.

“Why are you here?” I snapped at her.

“My boyfriend turned me in.”

Utah’s tongue was thick with a coat of saliva, which made her sentence sound fragmented.

“You told him about us?”

“I thought I could trust him.”

“That was a bad move.  He did it for the reward money?  I can’t believe they’re still offering money for each of us…”

“We’re government property,” Jaynus said, looking down at his hands.

“They used us—they knew they could, because we didn’t have any family—eventually we would’ve died.  Don’t tell me you feel sorry for leaving,” I said to Jaynus.  Then I turned to Utah.  “Wait.  Knowing they’re coming for you, you came to us.  You’re risking our lives?”

“I didn’t have anywhere to go,” she said between her clenched teeth.

“I didn’t have anywhere to go, either, when you left me,” I snarled.

“Don’t start.”  Jaynus looked at me.  “We have to get out of here.  There’s a bus going to the capitol; we’ll meet up with Ralph.  We can stay at his place until we can get a flight.”

“Back to the States?  They’ll find us.”

I tried to walk away, but Jaynus grabbed my arm.

“They’ll find us here.  How big do you think this island is?”

“Let me finish up my shift.  We’ll need the money,” I muttered before walking away from their teary faces.  Together they were remaking their memories; I could see them telling themselves that the hunger and the dirt hadn’t been so bad.

The bus ride to the capitol moved into a smooth soft lull, pulling Jaynus into a light sleep; his headphones slipped off his ears.  Utah and I remained awake.

“You’re still mad at me,” Utah said.

My eyes moved from Utah to Jaynus, whose hair covered his face.  Before stroking his hair, I answered her: “Did you think anything would change between us?”

“You’ve gotten hard.”

“And you’re still weepy.”

We remained silent for several moments.

“And Eli?  Have you talked to him?”

She smiled a little nervously.

“He’s dead.”  My voice was steady as I stared out the window.  In my memories I could see Eli’s sharp bones, his hollow cheeks sticking to his teeth when he spoke.  He’d designed the tattoo on my chest, but we’d gone in different directions before he could see it.

“How?”

“They chased him towards a moving train.”

“There are only three of us left then.”  Her voice sounded weary.  “They captured the rest.  They’re back in the facility.”

I tried to stifle my laugh with my hand, but stained my sleeve instead; my nose was bleeding again.

“At the facility,” said Utah, “they have drugs to stop the nosebleeds.”

“Wads of tissue seem to stop my nosebleeds just fine. “

Jaynus, awake now, squeezed my hand tightly; I opted to remain silent the rest of the way.  Utah’s face was blank.

The streets were filled with cars the color of rust and dirty silver.  Belanova was playing somewhere from one of the boutiques.  We passed hot dog venders; the smell of melted cheese and ground beef made my mouth water.  Tourists in white linen pants stepped past small children pulling at dirty fur-matted dogs on rope leashes.  Utah’s husky voice was lighter now.  She pointed at clothing stores and absentmindedly sang songs.

“Here we are,” Jaynus said.

Ralph greeted us with cold beers and greasy tortillas.  We grabbed the food greedily.  Ralph’s living room smelled damp; the black line of mold on the wall reminded me of the cell in which we’d been placed.  One cell for twenty children; no windows, no toilet.  A leaky roof.  Fights that led to small hands ripping weakly at dirty hair as we pushed one another aside in order to catch the brown water falling from the ceiling.  The smell of one little girl’s infected mouth on my face as she tried to grab food from my hands.

I shivered.  Of course they’d want to capture us: we were ugly.  Were Utah and Jaynus really thinking about it?

They’d promised to return us to our lives.  To return us to big backyards, the games we played with our friends, the bedtime stories our parents had read to us.  They told us they’d even bring our parents to visit.

We’d been so focused on our parents’ weepy eyes that it’d taken us a long time to realize they wore the same white uniforms as the scientists.  That our parents stopped crying and began taking notes.  That’s when we figured it out: even our happy childhoods were an experiment.  We’d be the new humans, better than any soldier, loyal and strong.  We’d been made to win wars.  A great soldier didn’t just have special abilities; he or she also had memories of a great family, something we could fight for.  We’d been given a taste of happiness—then medication, three times a day, so we’d be willing to protect our memory of that happiness, though it had never been real in the first place.

After eating, Utah walked over to the bookshelf.  My eyes moved from her legs to her collarbone and mouth.

“Did anyone follow you?”  Ralph patted my back.

“No.”  I gulped down my beer.

Ralph had been the security guard at the facility who’d “accidently” left our cell door unlocked.  He’d also left two loaves of fresh bread on the table with a steak knife beside them.  It wasn’t until we met again in Puerto Rico that we’d understood the reason he’d helped us; the scientists had planned to take in Ralph’s own children.  They’d wanted to see if they could use civilians instead of children born and raised in labs.  The moment Ralph helped us the government saw him as an accomplice, a thief that needed to be disposed of.

“What time’s our flight?”

“Six in the morning,” said Ralph, waving the plane ticket at me.

“Go talk to Jaynus,” I said.

Ralph heaved himself onto a stool and began talking with Jaynus in a low voice over the new identification we’d ordered—passports, driver’s licenses, birth certificates, even a baptismal certificate for Jaynus.  I followed Utah, who’d made her way towards the backyard.  Ralph’s colorful shirts hung low on the clothes lines; floral dresses and ripped jeans stood between Utah and me.  A few droplets of rain fell onto the dry dirt.  Utah wiped the water from her face, although more drops settled on her like transparent freckles.  My instinct told me to kiss her, to feel her tongue between my teeth, the taste of her saliva mixed with rain.  But I stood still.

“You’d think a girl could trust her boyfriend.  I thought he’d protect me.  Instead he turned me in for cash,” she said.

“You should forget him.”

“It’s not that easy.”

“If he left you, he isn’t sitting around thinking about you.  You should forget him, like he did you.”

“Simple reasoning.  Simple and stupid,” she spit out.

“Why—because I didn’t forget about you?  I should’ve.  You left, and you didn’t stop to think about me.”

“I did think about you!  What I did at the train station, I did for your own good. You were getting sick.  You needed to be taken care of, and I couldn’t do it.”

“There was no reason I had to go back.  There still isn’t.”

“You’re getting worse.  You know it.  You saw Eli getting sick.  You saw how he was suffering.  He should’ve gone back.  He might’ve lived.”

“Don’t act like you know what happened to Eli.  Don’t act like you care about us.”

“I care about all of us.  And I remember when we were happy, how we used to laugh—”

“I guess they were running tests on me during the laughter portion of our imprisonment,” I said bitterly.

She frowned.

“Remember when you used to tell stories?”

“I was delirious from all the drugs they fed us.  I had to think in fairy tales.  If I didn’t, the hardness of the floor, the cold walls… all of it would’ve killed me.”

“But we were happy.  You and me.”

Utah held out her hand and I took it.  Her fingers were warm and slightly calloused.  There was a scar on her wrist from the barbed wire that had nipped her as we jumped over the fence.

There’d been about six children already in the cell by the time I arrived.  Every night Utah slept with her hand over my chest.  Our sweat collected in a small pool and ran down my collarbone and my shoulder.  With Utah, sleep had been like a layering of heat.  Like slipping off the earth and falling into the sun.  No matter how hot it got, I wanted to stay with her.  Sleep had been easy at the facility; after a day of injections and experiments, sleep was encouraged.  It was after we escaped that sleep became the enemy.

“I won’t leave you again.”  Utah smiled weakly before kissing me. Her hands moved from my face to my waist.  I pulled away slowly.

“I thought you wanted me…“ she continued, trying to hold on to me.

“I do.  I’m just anxious about escaping.  I can’t be intimate if I don’t feel safe.”

“You will be, soon.”

“I know,” I said as I turned away from her and went inside.

While the rest packed and planned the next steps of our escape, I slept.  My thoughts drifted, images passing as if in a movie:  Jaynus sitting in the pink-cushioned booth at the diner, sweat ringing the collar of his shirt.  Eli chewing a piece of moldy bread.  The sound of Utah’s bare feet on the floor, her limbs cutting the air around her like the hands of a samurai.

My eyes opened.  The room was dark apart from the security light seeping through the slits of the metal blinds.  Swallowing hard, I lifted my head off my sweaty arm and listened for noises.  Jaynus and Ralph were still talking in hoarse whispers; someone was walking around barefoot.  I sighed.

“Are you awake?”  Utah stood with the door open.

“Yeah.  How much longer?”

“Not long.”  Utah sucked in her breath saying, “I like when it grows dark and cold.  When the cold sets in, I crawl under the covers and fall into dreams that always begin right before they end.”

“I remember the other kids,” I said.  “That one little boy who died soon after we got to the facility.  His dad came to see him, and he sneered at him, like he was mad that he hadn’t been stronger.  When we asked him why he wasn’t crying, the dad said something like, why grieve for a test-tube baby?”

After a pause, I added: “I don’t dream, Utah.  I just remember.”

“I don’t see the difference.”

“You wouldn’t,” I said quietly.  “I wish I were you.”

“What do you mean?”  Utah placed her hand on my chest.

Pushing her away, I said, “It’s as if you were never starved.  Bad stuff happened to us, Utah!  And when we thought we’d be safe, we were hurt even more.  Even after we left the facility…  Look at us.  We’re like rats avoiding the exterminator.”

“It wasn’t that bad.  Some of us were getting stronger.”

“And those were the ones who stopped being human.  Don’t you remember how their skin smelled?  As if it was burning.  And what did they do?  They sat in a corner eating uncooked rice ’til they died.”

The drugs they’d given us had been designed to make us stronger; after each treatment, our abilities were supposed to be enhanced.  Some of us became faster, or could see better in the dark.  Others rejected the drug every time, till their bodies slowly decayed.  Regardless of the results we watched all of them slowly burn from the inside, knowing we couldn’t help them.

“We didn’t have to look over our shoulders all the time.”

“Why look over your shoulder when you know what’s going to happen—when you’re only gonna get hurt?”

“We should go back and turn ourselves in,” she insisted.

“Are you insane?  Anyway, if you liked it so much, why did you even leave?”

“Because all of you wanted to go, and I didn’t want to be left behind.”

I kicked the sheets aside and got up.

“You come here as if you missed me.  As if you and I can be something again,” I said.  “You’re only here to save yourself.  I’m not as stupid as I used to be.”

I picked up my things and walked into the next room.  Ralph was sitting on his stool.

“Want something to eat?“ he asked.  “There’s an egg sandwich and milk on the counter.”

“Where are you going?” said Jaynus to me, though his eyes were on Utah.

“I don’t know.  Maybe Ponce.  I’m not staying with her any more.  She’s going to betray us,” I said.

“She wants what’s best for us, Mirah.”

I pulled at his jaw, so our eyes met.  “You want to go back, too?”

“I think it would be best.”

“We owe them nothing!  Our escape was their mistake.  If we were so valuable, then they should have kept a better eye on us.”

“The world doesn’t work like that.  God doesn’t work through mistakes,” Jaynus said, his voice not as steady as it had been.

“Who said anything about God?”

“Maybe we made the mistake when we left.  We were born to help our fellow human beings, but we got scared and ran from our calling.  And now we’re being given a chance to redeem ourselves.  We could be like Job—”

“Stop right there.  I don’t need you to preach at me.  I’d rather be in a drug stupor than hear about miracles.”

“Your body is shutting down.  We have to go back,” Jaynus said as he grabbed my arm.

“No.”

I pulled away.

“Simple cuts and scrapes I get at the construction sites aren’t healing.  They’re festering.  I need… we need medication.”

“That’s not why you want to go back,” I said to him.  “You’re a real idiot to think God’s setting all of this up for your redemption!  No one is going to forgive you.  Utah’s the one setting this up.  Setting us up.  She just wants an audience for her ballet recitals.”

When we were in the facility, she’d bragged about being a ballet dancer.  She’d twirl for hours around us, doing her stretches, believing if they’d let her go she could be a real ballerina.  Her dirty shirt, so big it reached her ankles, would flap as she danced.  The guards laughed at her.

“We’ll be a family again,“ said Utah.  “They said if we complete the program, we’ll get to be a family again.  And we won’t have to go to war until we’re ready.  They promised if I helped them get everyone back, we’d be safe, and we’d never have to be afraid.“

“I should’ve stayed with Eli.”  I backed away from them.

“Eli’s dead.  And we will be too, if we keep running.  We’ve lied and cheated ever since we left the facility.  We belong to them!” Jaynus shouted.

I ran out the door.  The sidewalks were vacant.  A white van pulled up at the door; I felt Utah’s hands around my shoulders.  As I tried to jerk away, Jaynus gripped my arm.  No tears, no fists.  I tried to suck in breath after breath, but my body wouldn’t react.  I felt like a pencil being rolled between two hands quickly, without thought or reason.

“For a moment I thought you were from the facility,” I said to the driver, my voice shaky, pulling away from Jaynus.  His grasp on me had gone limp as soon as he saw Eli get out of the van.

“You said he was dead.”  Utah moved towards Jaynus.

“I lied.”

“I don’t understand what’s going on,” Jaynus said.

“Your plans aren’t working the way you wanted?” I said.  “As soon as you told me Utah was coming, I knew what the two of you were planning.  So I called Eli.”

“But you said he was dead,” Utah whispered again.

“She’s like a broken record,” Eli said, a cigarette between his lips.

“We knew you were selling us out.  Eli’s been in hiding.”

“It’s time to go, Mirah,” Eli called out as he and Ralph got into the van.

“We were supposed to be a family now…”

“That’s what I’d thought at the train station.”  I kissed Utah on the mouth and went to do the same to Jaynus, but he jerked away from me.

“You’re doing the same thing to me Utah did to you.”

“No, I’m not.  You want to go back.  I don’t.  I’m doing what’s best for all of us,” I said before getting into the van.

Through the rearview mirror, I saw them holding hands.  I didn’t want to imagine what they’d look like at the facility, so I looked at them until their tightly gripped hands and their blank faces were visible even after we turned the corner.  I looked ahead at the winding roads that would turn into the tarmacs of the airport, wondering how long before the end.






JENNY ORTIZ is a writer living and teaching in New York. When she was a little girl, Jenny wanted to be a gun-slinging drifter, much like a Clint Eastwood character. She ended up (happily) graduating from Adelphi University with an MFA in Creative Writing and is currently working at St. John’s University and LaGuardia Community College. When she is not teaching or writing, Jenny can be found hanging out in IHOP with her friends, discussing music, video games, or Avatar: Last Airbender. When at home, she enjoys reading Haruki Murakami or listening to podcasts from the New Yorker. Follow her on Twitter: twitter.com/jnylynn.

by Jenny Ortiz

Strewn on the couch are second hand clothes and old kung fu movies.  East likes Bruce Lee the best; she knows everyone says it, but Bruce Lee was a badass motherfucker; his son, too.  They were real cool.  With an untoasted Pop-tart, East sits on top of the clothes and watches Enter the Dragon, alone.

Later on, when the movie is finished, East goes into the kitchen for some cereal.  She opens the fridge only to find the milk carton empty.  Throwing on her leather jacket, she waves to her fish and heads to the supermarket.  This is the only thing she hates about the real world.  The things she needs don’t appear in front of her, she has to go out and get them.

As East walks down the block, she once again concludes that as much as she misses certain things that made her life easy, she would not be some kind of sleeper cell; that’s what she’d promised herself when she left the world created by the Authors and entered the real world.  She forgot about the steam punk nation she’d been born into and settled in New York.  She’d been a nomad there and had nothing and no one to miss.  Sometimes East thought about Roan, the way they’d travelled through forests and swamps on their way to… where?

She couldn’t remember what ending the Authors had planned.  A face off with her brother, Ian.  No, she shakes her head as she walks down the block to the corner, where the red awning of the supermarket is drooping low and is threatening to fall on the crates of dry apples and thick skinned oranges.  She isn’t going to spend her youth waiting for the Authors to pick up where they left off.  Let Ian control that world, overthrow the king or the corporation; she isn’t even sure who is in power anymore.  Her leader now is the President of the United States.  Though she isn’t sure what democracy means, East believes it’s better than an army of zombies that keeps the population in check.

The only thing East really misses about her old life is the show Dinopups.  She is wearing a shirt, with a Dinopups character on it.  It reminds her of the card game that went with the show and how she’d played with Ian.  She never lost.  She doesn’t have the cards or the show or, for that matter, anyone to play with anymore.

East doesn’t like to think about the past.  Her story had once been written with enthusiasm, only to be left midway through.  She and the other characters were in a perpetual wait, repeating the same actions, walking in circles, pretending to be lost.  Having clawed her way out of the swamp, East had pulled herself out from between the green ink and white lined paper.  Pushed the words off her skin and took a job at a Laundromat.  East avoided other characters, the ones who escaped and certainly the ones still in stories.  In every book, she could hear them calling for her to come back.

But as she makes her way to the open fridge in the back of the supermarket, East thinks about all of the people she left behind.  She knows the only reason she’s thinking about the story and the past is because of The Grappler, Jude here.  He’d moved from her story to another collapsed story, only to be abandoned.  He’d always been a good character—she liked his smile and the way his boots were always covered with desert sand.  But the Authors took him out of her story because she was supposed to only have interest in Roan.  But Roan isn’t around anymore and the other day, Jude and East went out on their third official date.  He’s coming over later tonight for a movie, some snacks, and wine.  Along with the milk, East buys a pack of condoms.

He’s late.  Two whole Bruce Lee movies late.  East watches the popcorn bag turn in the microwave, while the credits run on the television.  After taking a large swallow of chocolate milk, East moves toward her fish tank.  The red and orange fish glide around unaware of her presence.  They make large circles in the tank, ignoring the plastic submarine and the clay mermaids sitting on the rocks.  She imagines that being a character is very much like being a fish.  She was given food, and a daily schedule.  Her friends and her family were already waiting for her.  For a moment, she wishes she still had the security of knowing Roan loved her.  She wonders, if it had been written that they’d love each other right away, why she left him behind.

The fish don’t jump like East does to the sound of knocking on her door.  The popping sound follows her as she opens the door.  Wet and panting Jude stands in front of her with a big smile.  He’s wearing his tattered black coat and dusty boots.

“They’re writing the ending of our story.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I woke up this morning and was in the forest, looking for you and Roan.”

“Looking?”

“I work for the cooperation, duh.  I’ve been trailing the two of you.  Of course I’m only working for them to get revenge for my wife’s death… but that doesn’t matter, what matters is that I was trailing you in the story.”

“You just woke up in the story?  How’s that possible?”

“We are characters.”

“I haven’t been pulled back into the story.”

“Not yet, but I think you’ll be written in sometime tomorrow.”

“But I work tomorrow.  And I’m pulling a double shift because the rent is due at the end of the week.”

“What’s that matter?  We’re going back home.”

She looks around at the things she’s bought and rearranged so carefully.  The couch from IKEA she’d assembled on her own, photos of the day she adopted her fish, the magazine subscriptions, the television, Bruce Lee.

“I think I need a drink,” she says.

They sit together in a booth at the Left of Center, a bar that caters specifically to characters.  East pulls her sleeves over her hands as the waitress, a woman styled like a 1950s pin-up, brings them their beers.  The bar is crowded.  Mondays are always crowded.  Authors reread their weekend dribble and cut whole passages, full of characters.  Little than half of those characters filter into the real world, looking for something to do.  East hates being around them, but Jude takes her anyway.  A stock character tries to buy East a drink, which amuses Jude.  She slumps into the booth and stares straight ahead, pretending to be brain dead.  After a few minutes, the stock character shrugs at Jude, and finds himself a flat character to dance with.  Full characters only come to the bar because it’s the best discarded description of one.  Cheap drink and good music could cover up the crowds.  Ladyhawke’s Professional Suicide is playing and Jude asks her if she wants to dance; she’s about to say yes, but a gang of stereotypes walk in and take over the dance floor.  The music becomes frantic and the air dense.

It’s at these times when she remembers her past with sadness: the smell of the trees and the soft, mud like texture of the ground under her bare feet.  Towards the end of her time in that world, she stopped using shoes.  Gave up the worn down ankle boots for a thin layer of dirt on her skin.  Had Roan disapproved?  She couldn’t remember.

“Can we go?” she says, looking at Jude.

“We just got here.”

“I hate this fucking place.”

“You wanted to get a drink.”

“Why couldn’t we go to a normal bar?”

“Because this is where our people are.”

“They’re not my people.”

“And humans are?  You can’t do anything with them.”

“I’m leaving.”

“And going where?  You going to go see another Bruce Lee movie?  That’s really assimilating to the real world.”

She ignores him and zippers up her jacket against the wind.  Jude’s right.  She’s lonely here.  No, not lonely, haunted by nothing.  East realizes now that nothing has a weight.  It isn’t heavy, but uncomfortable, making itself known.  Whenever a Bruce Lee film ends and the credits are flashing on the screen, East feels the nothing.  She doesn’t feel it when she’s with Jude, but she hates his reasoning as to why: they’ll only be fulfilled if they’re reconnected to the story.  She crosses the street, narrowly avoiding a speeding car.  She doubts the driver sees her; she’s like a sliver of black paper floating in the dark.

A guy in a biker jacket opens the door to another bar, a bar with real people inside.  She mumbles thanks and slips in, avoiding the guy in the front checking ID.  Though no one is smoking, there is the smell of cigarettes on everyone’s clothes and the sound of the cash register is shrill and overpowers the sound of people talking.  East slips through the crowd and takes a seat at the end of the bar, orders a beer, and begins to watch the people.  She likes how the girls’ sleek metallic colored skirts crawl up their thighs as they dance in place.  The music is bad, but no one seems to notice.

When she notices him, he is standing with a girl in crème colored pants too tight for her thighs, but she’s still attractive.  He’s standing next to her talking, his face close to hers, and he is bent slightly to meet her. When he stands up straight, he’s tall, thin, and with his white buttoned down looks more like a sheet of paper than East does.

A heat settles in East’s thighs and right below her breasts as she watches the girl shrug and move away from the paper-like man.  He sighs and puts his beer bottle on a table nearby and leaves.  East follows him all the way down to the subway.  She luckily has a MetroCard and quickly follows him towards the platform where he waits for the A.  It’s already one in the morning, and from the looks of another man on the platform, they just missed one.  They’ll have to wait another thirty minutes.  Putting on her headphones, East chooses an instrumental to play while watching the paper man.

East likes taking the train; she likes watching the people.  They slowly become her characters, each one with a story she won’t abandon.  Sometimes, she’ll feel the urge to write one down on paper, but she never does.

He doesn’t notice her until they’re on the train and she’s standing next to him, her eyes on an ad by his head.  She smiles at him.

“You were at the bar with your girlfriend.”

“No, she’s a friend.”

“But you want her to be your girlfriend?”

“I—I don’t know…  Do I know you?”

“No.”  She pauses.  “I’m East.”

“Nice to meet you,” he says, not looking at her.  She is still smiling.

He has travel magazines on his coffee table.  East picks one up and begins reading about the fantastic beaches of Malaysia.  She knew a boy from Malaysia, tall and athletic.  He didn’t talk much, but told funny jokes.  She can’t remember any of them now.  He only worked at the Laundromat for a few weeks before he started school.  Once he started, he never came back.  They had washers and dryers on campus.  Now the only people working aside from herself were the manager, Kim, and Paul; none of them liked to talk much.

“I get them for free from the adjunct faculty lounge.  The Popular Mechanics, too.”

“Are you a teacher?”

“Not yet.  I’m a graduate student.  I get a stipend for helping a few of the professors with their classes.”

“That sounds interesting.”

“Yeah, it is.  What do you do?”

“I work in fashion.  I’m responsible for organizing and separating different colors and textures of the clothes to be used on the models. “

“Sounds pretty important.”

“It is.  One slip up and a whole week’s worth of fashion statements are destroyed.”

“Are you thirsty?”

“No.”

He’s already in the kitchen and doesn’t hear her.  The furniture in his apartment is sparse, except for the old couch and the stack of books neatly against the off white wall where the television should be.  On the bottom of the stack is a biography on Bruce Lee.  Carefully, East pulls the book from the bottom without toppling the other books on the modern world and literary theory.  She flips through the pages until she finds the photos and examines each one.

“Are you into him?” he asks.

“Yeah.  I have all his movies.  I’ve read this.  Did you know he pitched the show Kung Fu?  In the end, they didn’t cast him.  But he said the moves in the show were more ballet than—”

“I don’t know much about him.  My friend was studying alternative philosophy and left this behind,” he says curtly, avoiding her eyes.

He hands her a beer and they move to the couch.  They look at the bare wall silently.  Their arms are touching and she can feel the tension in his body.  There’s nothing to keep her eyes focused on and the beer in her hand is warm.  She sets it down by her feet and puts her head on his shoulder.  Looking at his forearm, East examines the black hairs sticking up and the veins bulging slightly.  He’s breathing evenly, which surprises her. She wants to ask him about the girl with the crème colored pants, but doesn’t.  Where the walls meet, there is an opening to her story.  She knows he can’t see it; the branches of the trees are sticking out and leaves are slowly crawling on the wall.  The shadow of a man passes through the trees.  She shudders; he puts his arm around her.

“Do you have a bedroom?”

“Yeah,” he says.

She follows him and before they even get inside, she begins to remove her clothes.  The floor under her feet is muddy and in the distance she can hear Roan’s voice.  He’s looking for her.  East closes her eyes and lets the stranger kiss her.  Sex with him is like a warm finger flipping through the pages of a book.  She ignores him as he whispers the name Abigail and focuses on her movements.  When they’re finished, she gets dressed and leaves without saying goodbye.  She takes with her the newest copy of Popular Mechanics for the ride home.  She isn’t particularly interested in Abigail’s Bruce Lee.



On the train ride home, she reads the articles as a way to avoid making eye contact with the zombies sitting around her.  Even holding her breath, East can’t escape the smell of iron and feces coming off their dirty, broken bodies.  They aren’t very bright, so she can get off at her stop without worrying about them following her.  As she makes her way out, a man and his girlfriend walk in.  East doesn’t pause to check on them; instead she makes her way home.

On her way up the stairs to her apartment she finds Jude leaning against her door.  She smiles at him.

“Where did you go?”

“I went home with someone.”

“Because of the story?  You have no choice.  You’re going to wake up one morning and find yourself back there.  What are you going to do, crawl back to the real world every night?”

“If I tell you I’m good, you will think I am boasting.  But if I tell you I’m no good, you know I’m lying,” she mumbles slowly as she opens the door.

“What?”

Jude is standing in the doorway.

“It’s only the best line Bruce Lee ever said.”  She pauses, her body is slumped slightly.  “I think that it reflects this situation quite well.  I’m going to do whatever I need to so that I can stay here.  If I have to cut off zombie heads in the subway or get pregnant—”

“Is that why you slept with that guy?  To get pregnant?”

“How did you know I slept with him?”

“You slept with him?  I was just taking a guess.  East…  It’s not normal for us to be with them like that.”

“If I tell you I’m good—”

“Stop saying that.”

“Okay, how about this one: Love is like a friendship caught on fire.  In the beginning a flame, very pretty, often hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering-“

“East, stop,” he says as he pulls her towards him.

“As love grows older, our hearts mature and our love becomes as coals, deep-burning and unquenchable,” she says smiling.  “Pretty, huh?”

“East.”

“If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it’ll spread into your work and into your life.  There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them…  He said that too.”

East pushes away from Jude.

“Why are you saying all this?”

“Why am I?  How am I capable of memorizing every one of Bruce Lee’s famous quotes?  Why can I work in a Laundromat or have a one night stand with a stranger?  Why would the Authors build all of this in my character if I was supposed to do what they want me to do in a faraway place that doesn’t mean anything to me?”

“You’re the main character.”

“Do I have to be?  Why can’t they make another character?  We’ve evolved.  We’re no longer the characters we were.”

“That’s not true.”

“You haven’t killed anyone while we’ve been here.  You haven’t talked about revenge or even thought about your dead wife.  No, every night you come over and we eat Chinese food and listen to music.  You’re more out of character than I am.”  She pauses.  “Bruce Lee says—”

“Please tell me.  Tell me what Bruce Lee says.  He’s dead, East.  And you know what he did when he was alive?  He made movies.  He became a character.  He wanted to be one of us.  So shut up and come back to the story.”  His shoulders are slumped.  “We can be immortal.”

“The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering,” she recites another quote; this time she says it as she walks towards the kitchen table.  She sits down and looks at him.  “As you think, so shall you become… that’s what he says… said.  I think it’s appropriate for us…don’t you think?”

“You’re selfish.  What about Roan?  You’re going to leave him alone?”

“If the Authors let you remember me, remember the time we visited the Empire State building.”

“Night, East.”

“Night Ju—Grappler.”

After watching him leave, East turns off the lights and turns on the television, but doesn’t focus on it.  Instead she drinks some milk from the carton, and sits on the couch, waiting to fall asleep.  She thinks about the things she needs to do for work and wonders when she should buy a pregnancy test.  She avoids the sounds of the jungle coming from her bathroom, closing her ears off to Roan’s crackling fire or to Jude’s boots crunching the plants on the ground, as he prepares to kill.






JENNY ORTIZ is a 23 year old writer living and teaching in New York. When she was a little girl, Jenny wanted to be a gun-slinging drifter, much like a Clint Eastwood character. She ended up (happily) graduating from Adelphi University with an MFA in Creative Writing and is currently working at St. John’s University and LaGuardia Community College. When she is not teaching or writing, Jenny can be found hanging out in IHOP with her friends, discussing music, video games, or Avatar: Last Airbender. When at home, she enjoys reading Haruki Murakami or listening to podcasts from the New Yorker. Follow her on Twitter: twitter.com/jnylynn.