Punzel: Behind the Tresses

Once Upon a Time

Snow has just had her seventh breakup. And the group chat is going crazy. It's great news because we never liked him, anyway. Guy was way too short for her. Aurora is going on about the notification sounds keeping her from her beauty sleep, but we all know she's been at it since morning. It's why she won't pick any of my recent calls.

The dunce.

She was supposed to come pick me up from the Dome.

And I'm guessing Snow has retreated into her sad tweeting phase and is not about to drive by any second now. If not, I should've seen her happy tweets by now.

About how East Kenmore Mall is better than West Kenmore Mall, which is stupid because they're built exactly the same and are right next to each other. Instead, all I see is a "Men are scum" and "CinemApp and icecream over guys, any day" combo, entangled with Gifs and memes, spamming my feed.

Mo wants to know how my flight was and if there really are rovers patrolling the streets looking for non-sentients, in the exact typing "r there rovers in Kenmore scanning 4 non-sentients?!!!! Reply me!"

She's always been obsessed with the idea of non-sentients existing among us, and I want to tell her, for the one thrillionth time, how ridiculous she sounds. But instead, I fuel her fire by replying with"Yes! I think they got one, this time!!!"

In two seconds, she's on to me and my phone is ringing nonstop, but I ignore it and dump it in the pocket of my sweatpants. Let Vocomail deal with her crazed babbling today.

I look up and I see the last of sunlight wading into the cemetery, refracting against the glass dome covering everything in the yard, and bouncing over headstones like tiny rainbow flecks.

If you could see hope, it would look like this, here and now, almost as if everything in here could come alive. And for a split second, I believe it. I expect that the patch of soil and grass beneath me will move and some century old zombie freak will grab hold of me. But it doesn't.

I read the tombstone behind me and it talks about a Eugene Fitzherbert. 1997 to 2020. And there's a little extra writing on what his life was like. Well, God rest your soul, Eugene.

I'm jogging out the Dome when I see Lucinda Earl. She's at her father's tombstone like she always used to be. Seeing her sparks something inside me. Call it recognition or nostalgia, but I want to go over and have her walk home with me like we used to do from school, years back when we were friends, while I rested in the solace of her non-judging quietness, but some things are far too buried by time to be revisited again.

And if I still know this Luce just as well as the old one, I know she's like dead weight. There's no pulling her out of whatever it is that's got her down whenever she's in it.

So, I act like I don't see her and walk away, this same person I've known all my life and shared ample amounts of memories with. But my luck times out too soon, and before I escape, she sees me.

“Punzel...” her voice has always been soft and feathery, always leaving her words floating and hanging in the air like there's more to it. Like there's more words to follow.

But Luce has never been one to finish her sentences. And there's this silence in between us, every time, that's always so... cutting. You can hear it just as loud, slicing through invisible things, the way a chainsaw cuts down a tree, or a tractor pulls down a house. And right now, it's here.

“It is you.” she says, this time, confidently. Some things have changed. Once, I used to try to force the words out her mouth by encouraging her, but it never worked. My back up option would then be to scare it out of her by screaming unexpectedly, but that was worse.