Utopia

Chapter Sixteen- Ad Interim

The plate slipped from her hand and landed back in the sink, splashing hot, soapy water over Kira's front, the back wall, and the dishes to the sides. Her vision swam. Her stomach rolled.

Kira crouched, leaned forward onto her hands against the floor to stop herself from falling back. She breathed shallowly from the mouth. The humidity from the sink, the onions frying on the large stovetop, her own sweat, all scraped across the pliant surfaces of her mouth, crawling nearly into her stomach before falling into her lungs. But it was better than trying to breathe through her nose.

It was harder to stand back up. She pulled on the sink for support. Her headphones sat silently in her ears—their purpose for the day was to block sound rather than create it. It wasn't quite enough.

Kira worked more. She washed more dishes. She breathed more steam. She blocked out more movement behind her. She thought she did alright, but she didn't notice the way her hands shook, the way she swayed. But when the cup swam away from her grasping hand, she finally caught the Hadleys waiting for her attention. She could not say how long they had watched her.

Solitary drops of hot water rolled down her forearm as she reached up to pull out her headphones. It was perhaps her imagination, but the kitchen seemed quieter now, under the influence of its owners, than it had all morning behind her walls.

"Kira," Mr. Hadley broached sternly, "might we borrow you for a minute?"

Her glance to the kitchen-staff betrayed her. The argument she might have made was cut with a simple assumption of responsibility from Mr. Hadley. A small oath rose in her, but she swallowed it and felt its full passage down.

This likely wouldn't be a short conversation. And she wasn't particularly enthused to be talking to the missus. The Hadleys were a united front, the perfect partnership, but they still had room for their own strengths and weaknesses. When a shift needed covering, Mr. Hadley was first to roll up his sleeves. But when someone needed scolding, well, they would find themself in the position Kira was in now.

She took the proffered towel and dried her hands. Her stomach still rolled as she followed Mrs. Hadley out of the kitchen, to the little office beside the bathroom.

The lecture was a battering ram of old storytelling. Swift and direct, it offered too little information and too much. They knew about the condition she came to work in. They knew about the cups and plates she broke. They knew about the stealing.

Kira refuted it all, but only as a formality. They knew. She knew. What could she say? Mrs. Hadley asked, still more kindly than Kira thought she deserved, that Kira not make this harder by lying.

They didn't want her to finish her shift. Mrs. Hadley offered her a ride home, offered the diner phone to call a ride as if she didn't carry one in her pocket, offered anything that might help with that careful particularity of the unspoken.

Kira refused it all with that same careful particularity. She waved off the ride when it was offered again, claiming the walk would hardly pose a danger, but might clear her mind.

Doubtfully, Mrs. Hadley walked her to the door, watched her walk and walk until she turned the corner, and Kira heard the faint, belated song of the bell as the door swung closed. She waited around the corner to hear it.

It wasn't where she needed to turn, and so when her audience was gone, she returned to the main road and continued forward. She was not a part of herself enough to be upset. She was caught, she was sent home, that was all. She did not yet know if she would try harder.

It was one of those perfectly cloudy days; the overcast sifted and threw the light in all directions, so that it seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere, and the shadows only congregated in the densest regions where light could not reach, beneath cars and between trees. It did not even threaten rain.

The conversation, the lecture, was already passing from her mind. It wasn't as though she thought it unimportant, she simply didn't have the capability to digest it. She was the loneliest whale, singing her unintelligible song, scraping by on mouthfuls of tiny creatures that lived and wriggled in her stomach. A giant, lonely creature with only her own contents for company.

It seemed so accurate a description in her mind that she smiled. She began to imagine the sky around her as her ocean, the clouds as foreign creatures high and far away. Despite the overcast, she imagined that pale blue sky of the mid-afternoon in autumn. Cold and everywhere.

How easily her smile faded.

It was all everywhere, all the time. The sky, the cold, being hungry, being tired. The problem was being alive. The problem was living a half-life in a full body.

When Kira saw the borders of her apartment, she felt that urging within herself to move faster, to be inside, but there was no response from her physical self. She ambled in the same heedless way.

And why shouldn't she? She had been sent home.

Perhaps they would fire her. Perhaps Susannah would kick her out if she couldn't pay rent. Or perhaps their fledgling enterprise would be occupation enough in the lawyer's eyes, and she would allow Kira to stay.

She supposed it hardly mattered. The apartment, her parents' home, even a cardboard box in the rain with a tin cup, it would all be the same. Every day would be the same—it always was. When she first started reading, before Lys, before the Murphys, she had hated that every chapter had been important. She had hated the chapters that weren't.

It never seemed real. Every chapter was not important—there were days and days of unimportant things. Of waking up and going places that hardly mattered and hardly speaking and going home and going to bed. Where were those days in all the stories?

But she hated it more when they were there. What was the point? Why would she waste her time on someone else's waste of time, on someone else's pathetic wonderings. It was only filler.

She hated it even more now. Hated the perfect overcast and walking home from work. Hated the music that played again and again in her ears each day and the cars that passed by, the people who played in the street. All her days were the same, even when she made some semblance of progress, even when everything was new.

But with Lys, none of it had been filler. Even when she sat at home waiting for the other girl. Even when they only watched TV. Even when Lys puttered and hummed and made food Kira could never eat. Every moment had kneaded and folded itself into the soft parts of herself. Even when it stretched further away than her own memory could reach, she felt Lys' laugh. Her smile. The way her eyes softened.

Kira held, in the deepest part of herself, the press of the other woman's skin, even though she could not feel its warmth. She held the way Lys used to throw her arm around Kira when she slept. When she simply wanted to touch her.

It had always been so easy, she thought, with that erasing quality of sentiment. What were a few hard months in the beginning in the face of decades together? Every day Lys reached for her, and Kira felt held. Every day Lys spoke with her, and Kira felt heard. Every day Lys looked at her, and Kira felt the Earth forming, the skies falling, the oceans flat, still, and completely wild.

None of it had been filler.

Kira climbed the steps to her apartment. She unlocked the door. She kicked off her shoes in front of the door even though Susannah would trip on them.

The bottle was in its usual place beneath the bed. She grabbed it, but instead of opening it, she only clutched it to her chest.

If she had known that this was like a magic lamp, that it only filled so many wishes, she would have been more particular with its uses.

The cap came off the bottle easily. She did not even sit up, and sticky tendrils rolled up her lip, then over and down her cheeks, spilling on her pillow.

She felt her bed dip. Felt the hand on her calf. She didn't look because she couldn't stand to see her ghost fading. Couldn't stand to see the blurring edges. The apparition did not even speak.

The bottle slipped from her hands. Her cup was filled and filled and had no bottom.