By Nick Porisch
When I met Margaret I thought she was maybe going to change my life, right up to the point when she ate my sister’s dog and trailed its innards across the floor of my apartment.
The dog’s name was Sheila. She was a tiny, 5 pound Pomeranian that could yip loud enough to shake the windows. I was enlisted, or maybe conscripted, into taking care of Sheila for 8 weeks while my sister gallivanted across Southern Europe on an academic sabbatical. I wasn’t the first choice for the job, but her girlfriend’s apartment didn’t allow pets, and our parents’ pit bull was all too eager to gobble up any small mammal that crossed its path. So, the role of dog sitter fell to me – the younger brother with a pet-friendly landlord, no pets of his own, and slim chances of gallivanting any time soon. It was just bad luck that Sheila ended up getting eviscerated, anyways.
Margaret, or at least the idea of Margaret, entered my life around the same time as Sheila the Pomeranian. She arrived in the form of a slideshow of charming images, witty voice recordings, sardonic text responses to generic questions about what she liked to do after work, and icons representing her level of drug use, her religion, and her desire (or lack thereof) to have kids. A collage of materials designed to neatly sum up an individual. A dating app profile.
“Too good for me?” I showed my roommate, Caleb, her first photo.
“It’s not even a question about good,” Caleb said, scanning the image. “She’s way past you.”
I wrinkled my brow. Caleb had an eye for people; he wrote a column for a local queer magazine on our city’s spare, but vibrant, gay club scene and was known for his ability to summarize a club’s vibe at a glance using short, effective adjectives. Leery. Of what, it didn’t matter. A leery crowd makes not for a bumping club. Pulsing. A simultaneous verb and adjective, immediately gripping for a reader who is deeply, fundamentally compelled to pulse. Sinuous. Enough said. Stay away.
“You’ve seen one picture,” I said and swiped to the next slide.
Caleb considered the second photo. “Scratch what I said,” he said. “She’s above you.”
“Above me? Like, out of my league?”
“Like she’s flying in the sky,” Caleb said, “and you’re down here on Earth. I mean, look at her. Look at that septum piercing. Look at the piano tattoo on her tricep. Look at her clothes. Look at her eyes, man. I love you, dude, but you only remember your chart because I write it on an index card for you when we go out together. You don’t know The Tower from The Temperance. If you drew Death, you’d assume it’s a bad thing.”
“It’s not?”
He sighed. “What does she do for work?”
“She’s a sound mixer for punk shows. I think she does linocut, too,” I said.
“Oh my god!” Caleb exclaimed.
I thought for a moment. “Sometimes, cool people need, like, a regular person, to keep them grounded. I think there’s a quote about that on Modern Family.”
Caleb leaned back on the couch and cackled.
“What?” I asked.
“One,” he said, “the fact that you base your romantic worldview on Modern Family is exactly why you are not prepared for someone this cool. Two, ‘I’ll keep you grounded and make sure you don’t soar too high’ is an awful fucking pick-up line.”
“Whatever,” I said and looked at Margaret’s smirk in the next photo. The constellation of pixels making up her eyes seemed to promise that she knew something I didn’t, that she could peel me out of my humdrum life, even if it was just for the duration of a single, awkward date. To be honest, I’d been feeling existentially frayed, lost in a hazy mental wilderness of coffee, traffic, data entry, traffic, soccer, beer, melatonin, again again again… but those pixels weren’t just a window to a soul, they were a door to a whole new world, maybe.
I hit the green check icon in the corner of the screen and Caleb shrugged.
Sheila yipped from her dog bed in the corner of our living room. “Shit, I gotta grab her wet food,” I said and set my phone down on the armrest. I left the room, rifled through stacks of blue and pink tin cans, dug a bottle of salmon oil (for coat health) from the fridge, and returned to find Caleb’s face scrunched like he just took a big slurp of spoiled milk. “What?” I asked.
He passed me my phone. There was a notification from the dating app.
MATCH.
*
Here’s what I knew about Margaret:
She did linocut. After a brief but educational search, I learned that linocut is a printmaking technique where designs are cut into linoleum, rolled with ink, and then pressed onto paper so that the design’s negative space makes up the image, at least according to Wikipedia. I had seen it around, at coffee shops and stuck to fridges. It was undeniably cool. I did not have any linocut prints on my fridge. I was undeniably uncool.
She didn’t smoke weed, but dabbled in psychedelics. In a post-legalization world, this was so much cooler than my coworkers who took edibles while they watched Wicked or Doctor Strange. I’d never touched psychedelics and only smoked weed under the lamest circumstances.
She was 25. I was 25.
She’d been to 14 countries. I’d been to 3, including the one I lived in. If you’re curious, the other 2 were the countries immediately adjacent to the one I lived in.
She was ingrained in the punk community and worked at a punk club, but seemed elevated above the paradoxical conformity that comes with that crowd; nothing commands sameness more than a burning hatred for posers. I went to a Front Bottoms show one time.
“Don’t tell her about the Front Bottoms concert,” Caleb said.
“But–” I started, and Caleb just shook his head.
She lived with three roommates, all artists and musicians. I lived with Caleb.
And that about wrapped up my scope of knowledge on this person. At the time, I thought this smattering of information gave me an understanding of who she was. Caleb was right that Margaret seemed like someone who flew while I walked on the sidewalk, but I thought maybe she’d be able to pick me up and take me with her, even just for a couple blocks.
I messaged her a couple, tasteful hours after we matched. Her profile mentioned London Fogs as her favorite drink, so I asked where to find the best one in town. That was at 9 PM, and I didn’t get a response until the next morning, when I was sitting in standstill traffic on the freeway. A new lane was getting put in, but for the time being that meant there would actually be one less lane than usual until the project was complete.
Darby’s.
I looked at the notification on my lock screen and blinked. Another message:
Who makes the best black coffee in town?
I started to type Folger’s, and then the car behind me honked and I was forced to turn my attention back to driving.
We messaged back and forth for the next few days, and the profile that was intended to represent a human being became a series of dynamic messages, brush strokes adding to the perfect, refined portrait in my mind. I wondered what her mental portrait of me looked like. I wondered if it was full of bright, primary colors and bold, swooping shapes, or dull pastels and rigid angles. My portrait of her was indigo, emerald, alive but blurry, filtered through the smudged screen of a smartphone and the awkward conventions of speaking via written word with someone you’ve never heard laugh or cough.
Four days of messaging slipped by. After work one evening, I was throwing treats – broken in half to prevent choking, per my sister’s Google Doc of instructions – into the air for Sheila the Pomeranian to catch.
Caleb laced up his boots in the entryway. He was leaving for another club, in another industrial part of town mid-transition to another new arts district. “This isn’t going to go well,” he said without looking up.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because you’re already in love,” Caleb said.
“I’m not in love with her,” I said.
Caleb straightened up. “No shit. You’re not in love with her, but you’re definitely in love with feeling optimistic. I can see it in your eyes, dude. You’re like the opposite of an I-can-fix-him girl. You’re a please-please-fix-me guy.”
I stopped throwing treats, and Sheila growled. “Man, I don’t get why you’re being such a dick about this,” I said. “We’ll go on one shitty date or ghost each other in a week or whatever, so why can’t I live in the fantasy a little longer, okay? I mean, it’s harmless.”
“Living in a fantasy isn’t harmless when the fantasy is living, too,” Caleb said. He grabbed his jacket. “I’m just trying to keep you grounded. Make sure you don’t fly too high.”
Caleb slipped through the front door and let it clang behind him. I shook my head and looked at Sheila. “He doesn’t know shit,” I said. Sheila wagged her tail, ready for another partial treat.
A couple hours later, while I wiped goop from Sheila’s eyes and watched a compilation of highlights from The Office on YouTube, the unthinkable happened – Margaret asked me out. I was planning on asking her if she wanted to grab London Fogs at Darby’s that weekend, but there it was, before I ever got there: a short, welcoming message asking me if I wanted to go to a punk show that night. She would be working, so it would only be a half-date, really, but we could hang out afterwards, according to the text. There were no emojis, which I understood not to be a negative sign because I had already added “not an emoji person” as a brush stroke to my mental portrait of her, and the tone was straight-forward, but a text is a text is a text is a date.
I shot a message to Caleb that I was going out, gave Sheila a few extra pets, and was on the road within ten minutes.
*
The Hatchet Room was in a different neighborhood than my apartment. A different type of neighborhood, even. Where my neighborhood had Five Guys and Starbucks, here there was a chic tea bar and hipster fusion grilles. I realized that I’d actually been to this venue before, when I saw the Front Bottoms. I remembered not to tell Margaret about that.
The crowd inside the Hatchet Room was pugnacious, or at least that’s the closest approximation I can offer to what Caleb might’ve said. I’m sure he would’ve landed on something sharper, clearer, shorter, but that’s why he had a job where he got to party for a living and I had a job where I typed numbers into spreadsheets. People jammed against each other, stomped their feet on the cold, concrete floor, and compressed towards the stage, where a band played heavy, electronic wall-of-sound music, more LCD Soundsystem than Ramones. I wondered if my notions of punk were more reductive than I realized.
I spotted the mixing booth stage-right of the band, nestled in a quiet corner of the club. Figures moved around the booth, but I couldn’t pick Margaret out among the shifting shadows. I weaved through the crowd. The key to navigating a concert is to move in sync with the music. Take advantage of down-beats and move in the lull between notes. When everyone jumps in rhythm, jump with them. Using my strategy, I only got one “watch out, khakis!” during my traversal of the floor to the booth.
I emerged from the crowd, and there she was; a silhouette highlighted by strobing emerald and indigo lights, flickering in and out of view like an actress in a soap opera on an old, static-y TV, there and gone and there and gone. Like she could fade away forever, whenever. She didn’t look like she would eat my sister’s dog in only a few hours. She looked like a memory of a dream. She looked like she could still change my life, maybe.
“Margaret!” I yelled over the blare of the music. She looked up from the mixing board and shook her bangs out of her eyes, then spotted me – and there it was, that smirk.
“Hey!” she yelled back. “Can you hear me?”
I nodded and approached the board. The strobe continued to blast us with bursts of light that vanished as quickly as they came. “How late do you work?” I asked.
“Normally I’m here until the end of the music,” she said, “but I’m running a booth at the Fall Fest tomorrow morning, so I’m leaving early tonight.”
“Cool!” I said. “This is cool. Like, the club, I mean. I was going to ask you if you wanted to get London Fogs at Darby’s, but this is way cooler. I saw the Front Bottoms here one time.”
“Darby’s? Darby’s sucks,” Margaret said with disgust.
“What? I thought it had the best London Fog in town,” I said.
Her face lit up with recognition and she laughed. “Oh, yeah. When people on dating apps ask me where I get my London Fogs, I just tell them Darby’s so that they can’t stalk me at my favorite coffee shop, if they turn out to be crazy.”
“Oh,” I said and laughed. “Did you think I would turn out to be crazy?”
Margaret shrugged. “How can you tell anything about a person from a dating profile?” she said.
“Fair enough,” I said.
“It’s Wildcat,” she said and adjusted a dial on the mixing board.
“What is?”
“My favorite coffee shop,” she said. “It’s Wildcat, over on Lyndale. My roommate works there.”
“Oh,” I said. “Sweet. I go to Dunkin’ on Sundays, so, like, now we can mutually stalk each other.”
Margaret smiled. “If we both turn out to be crazy,” she said.
“Exactly,” I said. The music crescendoed, then slowed. The frontwoman accosted the crowd a little and the band took sips from water bottles full of brown liquid. Margaret stood up and stretched.
“Perfect timing,” she said. She turned towards her supervisor who hovered near the edge of the stage. “Dave, I’m heading out.”
Dave the supervisor said something I didn’t catch in return.
“I told you this morning!” Margaret said. “I have to open my booth at 9 AM tomorrow.”
Dave the supervisor said something vaguely passive-aggressive and Margaret shook her head.
“Let’s go,” she said and led me through the dense tangle of punks between us and the Hatchet Room’s entrance.
*
“Sorry this was so last minute,” she said, sitting in the passenger seat of my Camry. “Do you work tomorrow?”
I glanced at the clock on my dashboard. It was 11:50 PM. “Yeah,” I said, “but it’s cool. I kind of hate my job.”
Margaret took a long drag from my vape and analyzed my face through the cloud of nicotine. I noticed for the first time that her eyes were pale blue, really pale. Pale like ice.
“Your eyes are really blue,” I said.
“Is that a compliment?”
I nodded. “It’s, um, a pretty blue.”
She did that smirk again. “Thanks, then.” She passed the vape back to me and I took a small puff. A layer of quiet fell over the car like snow on a January morning. I looked at the flickering sign of the Hatchet Room across the street, at my steering wheel, at Margaret. Her eyes scanned the interior of my car, decoding who I was from the McDonald’s wrappers and broken windshield wiper and unopened mail cluttered in my backseat.
“Listen,” she said, “this was kinda last minute because I’m leaving town soon.” She turned her eyes back towards me.
“Like on a trip?” I asked.
“Like, for good.”
I looked at her and hoped that she saw the words burning through my eyeballs – TAKE ME WITH YOU. “I hate my life,” I said. “Not just my job. My commute. My clothes. My body. The movies I watch. The stores I go to. I hate it.”
“Have you ever thought about leaving?”
“All the time.”
We stared at each other.
“Do you want to know something?” she asked.
I nodded.
“I hate my life, too.”
*
A few hours later, we laid in my IKEA bed, tangled up in each other’s arms. I traced the tiny piano on her tricep and realized something; it was a player piano, complete with a tiny wind-up arm. She ran her fingers through my hair.
Sheila the Pomeranian waddled through my slightly ajar bedroom door and yipped. Margaret rolled over and saw the dog. “You have a Pomeranian?” she asked.
I shook my head. “I’m just watching her while my sister gallivants across Southern Europe.”
“I never gallivant,” Margaret said.
“Me either,” I said. “I want to gallivant. I want to be someone who gallivants. You seem like someone who would gallivant. Haven’t you been to, like, a dozen countries?”
Margaret laughed. “Okay, yes, technically.” She rolled back towards me. “My grandma was a cruise-maniac. Every other summer growing up, we went on some all-inclusive tour of the Caribbean or the Mediterranean or the Andaman. So, I’ve been to a lot of countries, but what that really means is that I spent most of my summer vacations living inside of a tiny box on the ocean. I don’t know if that counts as gallivanting.”
“Oh,” I said.
“You really like to tell people what they seem to be, huh?” Margaret asked.
“No, I just meant–”
She smiled. “It’s fine, dude. Everyone builds an image of others in their head. You just vocalize it more than anyone else I’ve met.”
Earlier in the night, she’d laughed at me when I told her she seemed like someone who watched foreign films. She’d never even heard of Bong Joon Ho. Later, I asked what she read, and she told me that she erred more towards Colleen Hoover than Murakami.
“Other people are allowed to be boring,” Margaret said, there in my bed. “I’m allowed to be boring, at least a little.”
“I think I have the world championship title for being boring,” I said.
Margaret shook her head. “I don’t think so. Maybe the world championship for self-pity.” The rubberband-snap of her comment stung and then faded, ready to be dug up and stewed over when I replayed the conversation in my head days later.
“Where are you going?” I asked. “When you leave next week.”
“Far away.”
“Will you fly?”
She nodded.
“Why are you leaving?”
“I just want to change. I guess that’s it, really. And I need to make that change myself, for myself.”
“Can I come with you?”
“I don’t think so.”
Sheila yipped again, then, finally tired out for the night, laid down on her bed in the corner of the room.
Margaret sat up and put her hair in a quick bun. I watched her hands move. “I almost buzzed my head this morning,” she said.
“Cool,” I said.
She finished adjusting her hair and turned to face me. A passing car threw light through my window and cast her in shadow for a moment, made her an outline of an unfinished sketch, all borders and no features, and then it was gone and I could see her eyes and the lines of her face again. “So,” she said, “this is kind of weird, but it’s, like, really hard for me to sleep without a weighted blanket.”
“That’s okay,” I said and prepared for the next part – that she was going to drive home, instead of spending the night.
“I have mine in my car,” she said. “Are you going to judge me if I go grab it?”
I laughed and she scowled. “No, I won’t judge,” I said.
“You’re laughing,” she said.
“I don’t know why,” I said.
“Don’t laugh.”
“Okay.” I bit my lip and we stared at each other, then she laughed and I laughed and she was pulling on her clothes to grab the blanket from her car.
She returned with a heavy, cozy blanket bunched in her arms. Faded butterflies covered one side and I noticed that the stitches along the edge were starting to unravel. She threw it at the foot of the bed, undressed, and crawled back under the covers.
“You’re selling linocuts at 9, right?” I asked and she nodded. “Can I see you again? Before you leave?”
“Maybe,” she said. “Yeah. I’d like that.”
We laid on the same pillow, our faces inches apart. “Can I tell you why I’m leaving? Really?” she asked.
“Of course,” I said.
“Something happened to me over the summer that made this,” she gestured at the length of her body, “not feel mine anymore. Like, I feel trapped in my own skin. Do you get that? It’s a terrible feeling. All I want to do is change myself, to make me mine again. Do you get that?”
I nodded, though I knew that whatever version of that feeling I held within myself was nothing compared to what I saw in Margaret’s eyes.
“So, I’m going to fly away,” she said.
I wondered if I knew her, then. In that moment, had I moved through to the other side of the two-dimensional, abstract mental portrait in my mind and gotten to the real person, the real Margaret? Could a single intimate conversation build a bridge across the unfathomable divide between two human beings? Looking into her ice blue eyes that night, I thought that the answer might be yes, but I doubt it, I doubt it, I doubt it.
“What time is it?” she asked.
“Probably like three thirty,” I said.
“Shit,” she said and grabbed her weighted blanket. “I really gotta get to sleep.” She pulled the 14 pound mass of fabric over herself. She brought it up to her chin, so I could just see her face and mat of dark hair above the covers.
“I’ve never been able to use one of those,” I said. “The weight makes me feel claustrophobic or something, I think. Like I’m being buried alive.”
Margaret shrugged and the blanket heaved on top of her. “I love it. It’s like I’m in my own personal, cozy cocoon.” She smiled and I realized that I hadn’t seen her smirk in hours. I wondered if the smirk was a conscious performance that had fallen away as we got comfortable with each other, or if I had simply imagined it as a recurring trademark because it was in her first photo on the app.
She curled up in her cocoon and closed her eyes, and I realized that I still didn’t know her at all.
*
I forgot the salmon oil last night, I thought, still half lost in a dream. Gray sunlight, fragmented by my broken venetian blinds, lit the inside of my eyelids orange as I slowly drifted into the waking world.
I sat up and ran my hands through my hair. Sheila was still curled into a tiny oval on her bed. My khakis were still bunched on top of my sweater next to the nightstand. Margaret was still covered from head to toe by her weighted blanket, an amorphous figure masked by folds of fabric and microglass beads. Somewhere in the night, I had drifted from reality to dream and back again.
“Okay,” I mumbled to myself. “Salmon oil.”
I pulled a pair of sweat shorts and a t-shirt on and meandered out of the bedroom. A text on my phone told me that Caleb spent the night with Carl last night, he wouldn’t be back until after I left for work. I’d already decided to call in sick, though, and go to Margaret’s booth at the Fall Fest while my coworkers filled cells on their computers.
As I pushed aside bottles of ketchup and soy sauce in the fridge, I thought about the sense of peace radiating from my chest. I wasn’t maniacally joyful or overflowing with high-strung optimism, just peaceful. I wished that I could take a snapshot of that headspace, freeze it in time and return to it at will. I cursed my brain for being endlessly transient because I knew that this specific mix of neurochemicals coursing between my synapses was only temporary and that tomorrow I’d be sitting in traffic and life would be shit once again. Searching for the salmon oil between leftovers and rotten produce, I felt wide open, like I was a set of chimes and wind was running through me, making me dance. I didn’t feel changed, though my internal monologue at the time definitely tagged that thought with yet. I was just… open. I wasn’t sure if it was because of Margaret, because of the fresh air flowing through the kitchen window, or because of myself. But I was open for the first time in a hot minute.
Then I heard Sheila yip from the other room. The yip turned into a yowl, then morphed into a squeal, and suddenly the serotonin running through my brain was washed out by sickly, confused adrenaline. I took my head out of the fridge and left the door hanging open.
I approached my bedroom one slow step at a time. Sheila’s squeals petered out, but something banged against the walls of my bedroom like a bird in a cage during a house fire. THUD. THUD. THUD.
“Margaret?” I called out.
I opened the door and a gnarly stench stung my nostrils. Dog entrails, fresh. I took a step into the room and my brain froze in a state of hyper-processing. Clumps of Sheila’s white fur dotted the floor, soaked in maroon ichor. My bed was empty. Margaret’s cocoon was cracked open and her weighted blanket sat in a mound on the floor. Margaret herself, though, was absent.
“Margaret?” I repeated. My brain’s gears grinded like a transmission with no oil.
Something wet and hot dripped onto my cheek. I dabbed it with my finger and then held it up to my eyes. It was the same syrupy consistency as Sheila’s drool when she took naps in my lap, but it was a dark, purplish red. My gut twisted. Slowly, I looked towards my ceiling.
Sheila the Pomeranian dangled between two hairy mandibles. A feeding tube latched to her spine and sucked fluid from her limp body like a Capri-Sun. The mandibles and the tube belonged to a massive, fuzzy, brown creature that clung to my bedroom’s popcorn ceiling with spindly legs connected to its thorax. Above the creature’s mandibles, I realized, were two icy blue eyes. Human eyes.
“Where’s Margaret?” I said, more out of shock than anything, like the monster eating my sister’s dog would open its insectoid mouth and give me a neat, clean explanation for this whole mess. Oh, Margaret just slipped out, it might’ve said. She realized her art show was an hour earlier than she thought and she had to leave in a rush, but she told me to pass this message along to you and to tell you she had a great time last night. Me? I’m just having some breakfast! Would you like any?
The creature finished draining Sheila’s body and let it fall to the floor in a sad, mushy lump. Four dark, ephemeral wings unfurled from the creature’s back. Morning sunlight refracted through the wings’ gossamer webbing and cast a gray halo around the creature’s body.
All at once, reality crashed down on me. “What the fuck?” I mumbled.
The creature’s wings thrashed and it swooped down from the ceiling. Black chitin slammed into my body, shoved me to the floor, and the creature screeched, screeched the screech of an insect lit on fire blown up to the scale of a human. Its legs pushed down on my chest and its mandibles clenched my bicep. I screamed and writhed out from under its weight. The creature stood up on its rear legs. I looked up at it from on the floor and realized that it was big. Bigger than me. Like, Shaq big.
“Where’s Margaret?” I stammered again. My arm burned. Blood poured down to my elbow in sticky, warm streaks.
The creature clicked its mandibles. It took an unstable step towards me, then another, and its fore claws extended in a motion that reminded me of a fainting person searching for someone to catch them.
I scooted backwards on my ass until I was through the bedroom doorway. The creature’s frame filled the empty space and its eyes hungered for me, or pleaded for me, or just shone empty like two Alice blue cat’s eye marbles, I couldn’t be sure. I kicked the door shut.
Cold sweat beaded on my forehead. The door shuddered under the creature’s impacts from the other side. I held my bleeding arm to my chest and butt-shuffled away from the splintering fiberboard.
Click. A door latch slid open and I froze on the living room rug.
“Hey, man,” Caleb said and stepped through the front door, letting a rush of cold fall air in with him. He tossed his jacket on the couch and passed by me, his attention fixed on his phone. “I’m so fucking hungover.”
I watched him wander into the kitchen.
“Left the fridge open, dumbass,” Caleb said. He pushed it shut and carried a cold brew back into the living room. “Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”
He finally looked up from his phone and saw the numb shock on my face. His eyes drifted down to the wound on my arm leaking blood all over the rug.
“What the fuck happened? Who did that to you?” Caleb said.
“Um,” I said, “Margaret, I think.”
“The baddie you met online?” Caleb said.
“What? I mean, yeah,” I said.
“Where is she?” he asked.
I nodded towards my bedroom door just as a clawed leg burst through one of the faux-wood panels and retracted back into the room. Caleb approached the door and looked through the broken panel at the strange, horrendous creature on the other side.
“What the fuck…” he mumbled.
The creature – what had been Margaret just a few hours earlier – screamed and rammed into the door again. Caleb reeled backwards and crashed down onto his ass next to me. He took a deep, shaking breath.
“Okay,” he said, “I know how to deal with this.”
*
We shored up the crumbling door with every moveable furniture and appliance in the apartment. Caleb cleaned the mandible bite on my arm and bound it with a headscarf from the floor of his closet.
“I’ve heard of situations like this before,” Caleb said as we stood in the living room, watching our makeshift barricade rattle every time Margaret slammed her thorax into the door.
“You have?” I said.
Caleb nodded. “Was– is she bi?”
“Um… yeah, I think so,” I said.
Caleb nodded again and stroked his chin. “This has all the trademark signs of bisexual witchcraft,” he said. “I saw this kind of stuff all the time in college. Not on this scale, of course. Little spells. A hex that made your roommate’s kombucha taste like shit, a curse that made your ex’s straight boyfriend’s dick stop working.”
“So, what?” I said. “You think somebody cursed her?”
“I mean, yeah, probably,” Caleb said. “Did she mention any scorned lovers or ripped-off roommates? It’s usually an ex or a roommate.”
I paced on the blood-stained rug. “She told me she has three roommates, but it seems like they have good relationships. She didn’t mention any ex’s. I mean, that would’ve been kind of fucked up on a first date. She did say that something bad happened to her over the summer, something that made her want to leave town.”
“I bet it’s one of the roommates,” Caleb said.
“What? I said that she said they had a good relationship,” I said.
“C’mon, man, that doesn’t mean shit,” he said. “The roommate I had before I met you was my best friend, until he fucked my boyfriend and shat in my pillowcase.”
“He shat in your pillowcase?” I asked.
Caleb nodded.
“That’s awful,” I said.
“It was,” Caleb said. “Why do you think I decided to room with you, even though you’re the most boring person alive?”
“Because I’m not the type to shit in your pillowcase.”
“Because you’re not the type to shit in my pillowcase,” Caleb said. “Listen, what do you know about her roommates?”
I shrugged. “One of them works at the Wildcat on Lyndale,” I said.
“I like that place.”
“Never been,” I said.
“What else?”
I paused my pacing and looked at the constellation of maroon droplets on our rug. “Fuck!” I said. “What the fuck am I going to tell my sister, dude? Her Pomeranian got shredded by a giant moth-creature I met on a dating app?”
“Frankly, I don’t know what else you could tell her,” Caleb said. “But that’s a problem for another time. I’m guessing Margaret’s phone is in there?” He gestured at my bedroom. Margaret shrieked behind the barricade.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Wildcat is where you start then,” he said.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“I’m going to stay here and make sure she doesn’t eat any more small mammals,” he said.
I grabbed my keys from a bowl by the door and swiped my jacket off its hook. I opened the door and paused. “Caleb, if she gets out,” I said, “don’t hurt her, okay?”
Caleb nodded and gave me a salute. “Godspeed, brother.”
I returned the salute, then exited the apartment.
*
I reversed halfway into a parallel spot, realized I fucked it up, pulled back out onto the street, and finally got my car to fit in between the pair of sedans parked in front of Wildcat. My car sat at a weird angle, with its passenger side cocked upwards on top of the dead leaves packed along the curb.
Wildcat was packed with freelance graphic designers and remote 9-to-5ers. As I entered, an Alex G cover faded into a Big Thief song over the shop speakers and I found my spot in line, tapping my foot and feeling blood coagulate under Caleb’s headscarf. The line shuffled forward, one dirty chai at a time, until I was face to face with the barista doomed to register duty.
“Hey,” the barista said. Their pen hovered over a notepad of scrawled beverage names.
“Hey,” I said. “Weird question. I’m looking for a barista who works here.”
The barista looked me up and down, like she was gauging my likelihood of being a stalker. “Okay. What’s their name?”
I immediately realized that I didn’t know the name of the person I was looking for. I didn’t know the name of any of Margaret’s roommates. “Um,” I said, “different question.”
The barista looked over my shoulder at the growing line behind me.
“Do you know a woman named Margaret? She has dark, curly hair and a little tattoo of a player piano,” I said and motioned to the place on my tricep where her tattoo had been, where my arm was punctured and clotting.
“Oh, yeah,” the barista said. “I know Margaret. Devi’s roommate.”
“Yes!” I said. “I’m looking for Devi.”
“Devi’s not here,” the barista said.
“Oh,” I said.
“She’s selling pipe cleaner sculptures over at the Fall Fest on Lake Street,” the barista said. “Are you going to order a drink or not?”
I glanced at the backed-up line and squirmed.
Fifteen minutes later, I parked near the Fall Fest and left my guilt-motivated matcha purchase in the cupholder. Dozens of booths lined a trail running around a large lake called Bde Maka Ska. A nearby parking lot overflowed with greasy food trucks, a bounce castle, and a local bluegrass band that strummed John Denver covers into the crisp, October air. The sky was blue, the leaves were orange, and I was on a mission to figure out who turned my date into a ravenous insect monster.
As I ducked between an elderly couple – hands intertwined, feet shuffling at the same pace – and a beanie-clad Carhartt bro, I wondered how Margaret and Caleb were doing back at the apartment. I wondered if she’d busted through the fiberboard door yet, and if our makeshift barricade could withstand her panicked rage. I wondered, if she got through, if she’d tear Caleb to pieces or just shoot for the next door and beeline for the outside world. I wondered what Margaret was thinking, trapped within that body that wasn’t hers. If she could think at all, that is. The consumption of Sheila the Pomeranian implied a lack of human cognition, or at least so I hoped.
I scanned booths for pipe cleaner statues. One booth sold woodburned maps of the city, another sold metal print macro-photography of Gundam figures, a third also sold woodburned maps of the city. There were hand-blown water pipes, hand-painted watercolors, hand-sculpted water buffalo figurines. I bypassed murals in miniature. I brushed past quilts. I skimmed Venmo QR code signs for the name Devi, Devi, Devi, Devi, and came up short. Artists patiently waited for customers, waited for me to ask them if they had anything they thought my girlfriend might like, waited to find out if maybe I had room in my heart for a little piece of their soul, if that was worth twenty-five dollars to me. I began to sweat in the cold morning air.
I rounded a crowded corner and was nearly slapped in the face by a two-foot tall, three-dimensional depiction of Cookie Monster. His hand stuck precariously into the walkway and I barely ducked in time to avoid a fuzzy fist to the noggin. I stopped and looked at the Muppet mannequin. It was inexplicably adorned with a bowler hat and, more importantly, constructed out of dozens and dozens of blue, white, and black pipe cleaners.
“Watch out, man,” a woman seated behind a metal cash box at the back of the booth said. She set down a stack of cash bills and stuck her hands into the pocket of her patchwork hoodie. Her eyes immediately signaled disdain – I wasn’t the type to buy pipe cleaner statues and we both knew it.
“It was really kind of sticking out into the–” I started, then paused. “Whatever. Are you Devi?”
She pointed to the sign dangling from her table. Devi’s Divinities.
“Divinities?” I said.
Devi nodded. “I normally sell spiritual items. Crystals, talismans. Wicca paraphernalia. This is just something new I’m trying.” She waved her hand towards the array of statues lining her booth; pop culture characters recreated in striking detail with multi-colored pipe cleaners. “Do I know you?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Are you roommates with a woman named Margaret?”
“I do know you!” Devi said and grinned. “You’re that guy from that app. The one Margaret’s been talking to. The accountant or whatever.”
“Data entry. Look–”
“Wait, she texted me that you two went home together last night,” Devi said and her face fell. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
“Something happened, and I don’t know what to do,” I said.
*
Devi led me through the Fall Fest to her car in the vendor lot. On the way, we passed an empty booth, which Devi explained to me had been reserved for Margaret. Before I showed up, Devi assumed that Margaret had flaked on the event. According to Devi, Margaret was a flake. That feature was entirely absent from my mental portrait, up to that point.
Devi’s car chugged down back streets, avoiding the congestion around the Fall Fest.
“Do you know who might’ve done this to her?” I asked. Devi checked her rearview mirror and merged out of a disappearing lane.
“I have an idea,” she said and glanced at me. “You’re really in over your head, huh, Polo?”
I looked down at my jacket. “It’s Patagonia.”
Devi whipped around a corner and we pulled to a stop outside of an old Tudor home that had, at some point, been split up into a duplex. Ivy grew on the brick walls and leftist political signs dotted the front yard. One – made from a blown-up linocut print, I noted – denounced the gentrifying effect of AirBNBs and was aimed at the freshly-painted house next door. I’d never thought critically about AirBNBs before, but clearly Margaret had.
“Is this your house? Margaret’s house?” I asked. Devi nodded and turned off the car. “Do you want me to stay here?”
“Whatever,” Devi said and marched up the sidewalk to the front door.
I got out of the car and lingered at the curb. I wasn’t sure how I’d pictured Margaret’s house during our conversations. Whatever I’d imagined, it was blurry and vague and maybe an apartment like I’d seen before in a building like I’d seen before. Now it was in front of me and I could see the crack in the front room window that ran like a river across a continental map. I thought the house looked drafty and wondered if the windows shook when the wind picked up strong.
Devi unlocked the front door and disappeared into the house. I took a step onto the gritty concrete of the sidewalk, then another, then another, and then I was in the house.
I closed the door behind me and Devi shouted from down the hallway, “Take your shoes off!” I peeled them off. My sock got stuck on the left one and I had to roll it back over my ankle.
The house smelled like incense and apple cider. A tote bag made out of woven plastic bags hung on a hook by the door, next to rain jackets and a clay bowl full of keys and packets of gum and Tums. I was frozen, an NPC in someone else’s lucid dream.
“Goddammit, Margaret,” I heard Devi say and my legs jolted into motion. I followed her voice into a room I quickly realized was Margaret’s.
Devi stood at a small, rolltop desk overflowing with papers and knickknacks. Framed photos sat on top of the desk. Halloweens, siblings, childhood friends. Next to the desk was a large tank full of water and I spotted a little, aquatic frog hovering near the surface. Linocut prints hung from clothespins along a string above her window. They were vivid and detailed, unlike the usual depictions of beetles and cats that I saw stuck to freezer doors with magnets. In these, the colored ink and the white space seemed to reflect and refract each other, creating distinct images that came together to form singular tableaus. Most were of people and nature, or people and other people, made in a way where the subjects blended into one another. An old, worn teddy bear rested between pillows on the bed in the room’s corner. Devi flipped through a leather journal and I hovered in the doorway.
“Did you find out who did it?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Devi said and lowered the journal, holding it open with her index finger. “She did it to herself.”
A small rush of vertigo swept through my body and I blinked. “What?”
Devi huffed and tossed the journal onto the bed. “She’d been talking about… she’d been getting into metamorphosis incantations. God, she wasn’t even that into Wiccan shit, not until what happened this summer.”
“What happened this summer?” I asked. “She mentioned something bad, but that’s it.”
“What the fuck business is it to you?” Devi snapped.
“I… I don’t know,” I said.
“Margaret was going through a lot,” she said. “She wanted to leave her body behind, become something else. I knew that. I didn’t know she was going to go through with it, though, without telling me. Fuck.”
I didn’t know what to say. If I could go back in time, I still wouldn’t know what to say.
“Where is she now?” Devi asked.
“In my apartment, in my bedroom,” I said. “My roommate’s keeping an eye on her.”
“Did she hurt anybody?” she asked.
“My sister’s dog,” I said, “but that’s really it.” I ignored the pain burning through my arm.
Devi collected a handful of talismans from Margaret’s desk; a bit of bone, a moth’s wing.
“What are we going to do, then?” I asked.
“You’re going to bring me to her,” Devi said, “and I’m going to change her back.” She stuffed the items into her pockets and brushed past me into the hallway. I followed her.
“But didn’t Margaret choose this,” I said.
Devi pulled her shoes back on in the entryway. “According to her journal, the transformation was supposed to occur on the new moon, which is still a few days away. Maybe if she had those extra days to think, she would’ve changed her mind. I can’t fucking believe she didn’t consult me about this.”
I slid on my shoes and followed Devi outside. “This seems like it was a really big decision. One she probably thought about for a while, right? I mean, you don’t just become another creature unless you really want to, right?”
“It is a big decision to transform into another creature, yes,” Devi said as she walked down the sidewalk. “It takes weeks of nightly rituals. The transformation is painful and traumatic, akin to a surgery with no sedation. It’s fucking brutal, and she never should have done it.”
“But,” I said, “who are we to change her back, if she already went through all that?”
Devi stopped next to her car door and stared me down. I met her gaze on the other side of the vehicle.
“She made herself into a fucking monster, dickhead,” Devi said. “She’s my best friend and I’m not going to let her destroy herself like this.” She got in the car and slammed the door. I hesitated, then climbed in with her.
*
We found Caleb sitting on the floor of our living room, scrolling through short-form content and eating DoorDashed KFC – hangover soup for the soul. He was surrounded by a flimsy ring of salt that was about three-quarters white, before he apparently ran out of Morton and closed the circle with Lawry’s.
“Where is she?” Devi asked.
I pointed at the pile of furniture blocking my bedroom.
“I think she fell asleep,” Caleb said and wiped chicken grease off his fingers with a paper towel. “She stopped ramming the door maybe thirty minutes ago.”
Devi set to work arranging the de-transformation ritual materials on the living room floor. She looked at Caleb. “Have you ever purified this space?” she asked.
“Most purification rituals in America are actually closed Native practices–” Caleb started.
“Wicca,” she said. “Have you ever purified this space with Wicca techniques?”
“Wicca?” Caleb asked.
Devi grumbled and moved on with her preparations. She brushed aside Caleb’s makeshift salt ring with her shoe.
“Hey…” Caleb mumbled.
Devi set bones, crystals, and a few of Margaret’s knickknacks in a careful pattern, then placed a single moth’s wing gently at the center. She removed a black-handled knife from a holster on her belt.
“What is that?” I asked.
“An athame. Now, please shut up,” she said and began to whisper incantations beneath her breath. She raised her palm above the moth’s wing and drew the athame’s blade along her lifeline. Blood dribbled onto the wing and dissolved its chitin. She wiped the knife on her pant leg and tucked it away. “Okay,” Devi said, “let’s let her free.”
Caleb and I nodded and we peeled the furniture away from my door. The door itself – a cheap, landlord-quality piece of glorified plywood – was barely existent beneath the barricade. Its panels were smashed to bits and the door hung at an odd angle from its hinges. Through the busted panels, it was clear; the room was empty.
“Caleb, what the fuck?” I said and pushed the door open. My room was absolutely trashed. The bedding was shredded and deep, vicious grooves from Margaret’s claws marked the plaster walls. Sheila the Pomeranian’s husk still sat in the center of the room, but Margaret was gone.
“Oh, shit,” Caleb said and pointed at my window. Cold air whistled through the shattered float glass.
Devi looked over our shoulders into the room. “She got out?”
“Um,” Caleb said. “I’m, like, so hungover right now…”
Devi swept her ritual materials back up off the floor and handed Caleb and I each a small fragment of bone. “These should each have enough absorbed energy to initiate the de-transformation, if we can find Margaret and contain her long enough to invoke the Goddess’ name in her presence,” she said.
“What’s the Goddess’ name?” I asked.
“Brighid is the name Margaret most likely used to begin her transformation,” she said, “so it’s the name most likely strong enough to begin the de-transformation. Let’s go.”
Devi led us out of the apartment and I practiced that name – Brighid, Brighid, Brighid – under my breath as we passed back into the cool Autumn morning.
We stopped at the curb and stared into the pale sky. The sun glimmered behind a mass of thick, gray clouds that crept over our heads. I gripped the bone fragment in my palm. “How far could she have gone in half an hour?” I said.
“Far,” Devi said. “She has wings the size of a condor’s.”
“She’s probably gone then, right? Too far away to ever find?” Caleb asked. He shielded his eyes and scanned the clouds.
“She was probably scared,” I said.
“Goddammit, Margaret,” Devi mumbled under her breath.
“I think she’s probably gone,” Caleb said.
WHOOOF.
In an instant, I was in the air. Six clawed legs wrapped around my torso and exploded the wind out of my chest. I blinked and I was twenty feet above my apartment, blinked again and I was fifty. I watched Caleb and Devi become little dots beneath me on the sidewalk. Before long, the whole city was laid out beneath me, like the Hot Wheel carpet in my childhood bedroom.
I contorted my neck so that I could look up at Margaret. Her insectoid head was aimed forward, at wherever she was taking me. Her fuzzy, ephemeral wings beat against gravity. We cut through a cloud and I was drenched in water vapor.
My palm itched and I remembered the bone fragment in my grasp. She was right there, I could save her – but if I began the transformation mid-air, we would both plummet to the earth and splat on some suburban rooftop. I had no choice but to relent control and let her take me where she intended.
I turned my attention to the city below and tried not to vomit. I’d never been one for flying, not in a plane, for sure not in a helicopter, and absolutely not in the clutches of a giant, carnivorous insect creature. But here I was, looking down on my city like Mary Jane in Peter Parker’s arms. We passed over the Interstate where I spent an hour a day wedged between assholes and student drivers. I could see the throngs of people shopping for second-hand dreams at the Fall Fest. They weren’t recognizable from so far above, but somewhere down there was the Hatchet Room, where I’d met Margaret, and Wildcat.
Beneath us were hundreds of thousands of people and I wasn’t sure if looking at them from this angle made them seem more imaginary than ever or just made me feel more imaginary than ever.
What did Lenin say? One monkey is a friend, but a hundred monkeys are just monkeys? Something like that.
We flew into downtown and weaved between the city’s three or four skyscrapers. Margaret began to lower our altitude and I realized that we were heading for the top of one building in particular – the Capella Tower, a concrete and glass monolith with a large crown on its peak.
Margaret eased into a hover about seven or eight feet above the tower’s roof and released her grip on my torso. I smacked down to the gravel rooftop with a CRUNCH. I pulled myself into a sitting position and spat pebbles out of my bloodied mouth. Margaret lowered herself to the roof a few feet away from me. Her blue eyes glittered above her dark, blood-soaked mandibles.
I opened my hand and looked at the bone fragment, then at Margaret. She didn’t seem agitated or upset, like she had in the apartment that morning. She looked calm and free and open. Open, like the way I’d felt after I woke up next to her, when my whole life was a blooming magnolia rather than a collapsing tunnel.
“You chose this, didn’t you?” I asked her.
She stared at me. Here she was, I thought, the woman who was supposed to change my life, and there I was, with the only tool that could prevent her from changing hers.
“Margaret…” I said. “I hope you can be who you want to be.”
I threw the bone fragment over the skyscraper’s edge. It whistled away into the air.
Margaret titled her head towards the sky and slowly began to pound her wings. She lifted from the rooftop, picked up momentum, and then, as smoothly as she’d entered my life, she disappeared into the clouds and I never, ever saw her again. She didn’t even look back.
I sat there for a long while, watching the sky and wondering where she was going and if she would ever return. The skyscraper’s red aviation lights blinked on and off and periodically soaked the rooftop in a crimson glow.
Eventually, my phone buzzed and I dug it out of my pocket. I had a stack of missed calls and expletive-laden text messages from Caleb, but this most recent notification was coming from a third-party messaging platform, the kind you use to avoid international calling rates. I pressed the little green circle in the corner of the screen.
“Hey,” I said into the phone. “How’s Greece? What time is it there?”
I listened while my sister told me about her gallivants through France and Italy, over the Adriatic Sea and along the coast of Croatia. I watched the clouds overhead churn and get darker. She told me about all the people she’d met, the food she’d tried, the museums and cathedrals and buses and backroads she’d immersed herself in and that had immersed themselves in her.
“Has it totally changed your life?” I asked.
There was a long pause on the other end. “I don’t think that’s really how it works,” she said. “Like, yeah, I’ve changed, but I don’t think it’s changed me. I think I’ve changed me. Being here has just given me a little push.”
“That makes sense,” I said. A heavy drop of rain fell from the sky and burst on my shoulder. A few more followed it, and more after them. They exploded on the rooftop, making the gravel sound like Pop Rocks. “Hey, I gotta get going, but I’m really glad you called. Safe travels on the rest of your trip.”
“Wait, one more thing! How’s Sheila?”
After we hung up, I took one last look at the heavy, charcoal clouds that Margaret had disappeared into. I thought about where change comes from; within and without. I listened to thunder roil in the distance.
Then, I clicked on one of Caleb’s many frantic voicemails and called him back.
Someone needed to get me off of this roof, after all.