Spin Cycle

THREE

• III - LITTLE DARK ONE •

       KIRA WINTERS' APARTMENT IS A COLLEGE WAR ZONE of chip bags, laundry bins, and epistemological textbooks – which is perhaps exactly how Addison envisioned it would be before she walked in. The aroma of burnt pizza crusts and draft beer crawls up her nostrils and plays against the back of her throat, as though she can taste the combination of it all.

       There's a beer pong table laid out by the window, red solo cups in varying degrees of disarray on top of it. A sheet that Addison guesses was once white is splayed out over the couch, nursing armies of crushed potato chips in the creases. An unnamed girl with half her head shaved off is coiled into a pretzel on the adjacent love seat. Her jaw's unhinged, dark skin gathered below her chin like collapsed curtains, snoring loudly.

      "We had a party last night," Kira explains, leading her through the metaphorical no mans land, dodging mock Pilsner mines and overflowed garbage bags, "Marissa tends to get out of hand."

       Addison points. "Marissa?"

        "As she lives and breathes." She opens a door with Little Dark One scrawled across a fastened on whiteboard and gestures inside. "I tried to clear some space by the window – figured you'd know what to do with it."

         "Little dark one?"

          "Gaelic origin of my name – Marissa googled it a while back and it sorta stuck."

          Kira's room is void of all furniture, as though she's a temporary visitor in her own apartment. It's not empty, by any means – there are mountains of loose essays and a mattress with a navy duvet and a record player in the corner – but nothing is of any real permanence. Addison supposes she could pack up and leave at any time without a trace, if she wished to.

         She wonders if that's the point.

        She slips off her camera bag onto an empty section of hardwood and it lands with a resounding thud. Kira has already settled on the bed, stuffing the duvet under her splayed out legs. It's only then that she spots it – her left leg, or rather, the spot it should occupy. It's skeletal carbon fiber and peach plastic sticking out from the hem of her slack jeans, a synthetic replica of that which it once was.

         Addison remembers the other day, the bulky way she walked down the apartment staircase – that of an oil soaked hummingbird. A nimble girl that should be one thing, was built to be that thing, but isn't it.

        She realizes her eyes have been lingering one second too late. "Sorry."

         "Don't sweat it. I get that a lot."

         "I wasn't –"

         "— Staring?" Kira rolls her jean cuff down and says, "—Yeah, you were. But hey, maybe I'll tell you about it sometime."

         Addison looks away, out the window. It's overcast, fluctuating shades of grey and pewter. A familiar feeling curdles in her stomach; fermenting memories trying to crawl their way up into her esophagus, threading through her ribcage like some symphonic violin cacophony. It feels like rubbing sandpaper.

         Twelve years and she still smells that stench, decaying flesh and Chanel N°5 Eau.

         Addison hates cloudy days – it's why she settled in Grinrod, the sunniest town in Ontario, in the first place. As though the daylight could purge away the sense of loss, suck it from her pores, turn her into something glossier. Like if it was bright enough the hieroglyphics etched behind her eyeballs would be too eclipsed for viewing.