“Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?”- The Book of Luke

***

Bodies did not appear in Hammond very often. The small Chicago suburb in Indiana, as the inhabitants liked to classify it, was a gray sleepy place. Just another burnt out factory town. They lived in quiet desperation, playing long games of Bridge and Canasta to amuse themselves. Gossip was currency. People did drugs and got into fights, but bodies did not in and of themselves suddenly appear. There were intimate crimes. Lover’s quarrels, deals gone bad, that kind of thing. The only crime most of the older women in town knew was what they read in books by Sue Grafton or Ann Rule. Some of them watched too much Dateline. Everyone was obsessed with death—the making of it, the tending to it, the slowness of its vast bitter shadow. 

Maggie, a sharp woman about seventy years old, rounded the living room corner and glanced up at the clock. She had another hour before she needed to meet Birdie. There was plenty of church gossip to barter with. Nora was seeing someone new. At her age it was practically a sin. 

She looked out her front window to survey the fresh morning. A few birds chattered in the front oak tree. No one was up and at ’em yet—or they’d already left for work. Maggie didn’t have a sense of that anymore now that she was retired and had been for quite a few years. The world had collapsed into a single point. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Each offered the illusion of progress. Sometimes Maggie wished she could find a new man like Nora but then she thought of her old man and dancing in 1973, the summer they went to Greece. He’d thrown up on his suede shoes from all the Ouzo. She carried him back to their hotel and sang him the only song she knew at the time—“the Barbara Streisand song from the commie movie” as he called it. She didn’t like when he called it that. 

The white noise around her dulled into oblivion before a piercing noise rang through the air. It made her think of 1776, it made her think of Paul Revere, it made her think of textualism. Something wasn’t right. The noise vanished as soon as it began, almost like the screech of a car suddenly stopping. The universe had developed a hole, Maggie thought. The world had ended and all that was left to do was drink Folger’s and watch Fox News. Hell in a handbasket and conspiracy theories. She believed about half of what they said. 

Fear gnawed at her gastrointestinal tract. Her doctor was always telling her to drink less coffee. But she liked the rhythm of waking up and making a pot, two spoonfuls of sugar, and a bit of cream. Most mornings it was what she looked forward to the most. 

When she finally stepped out on the front porch to see what the ruckus was all about, she saw something fluttering across the street, like a flailing moth. Someone’s hands were slowly making circles in the air. This wasn’t just a child who fell off her scooter. She tried to survey the scene from afar but realized she would have to go up close and investigate. Maybe someone needed her help. 

She crossed the road to the small ravine on the other side. There was the body. Not a person, because there was no longer any movement. The fluttering moth movements had been the poor girl’s last attempts at life. Maybe they’d meant something. More than likely though, it was just a way to ward off the inevitable. 

Looking closer, Maggie realized the poor recently deceased girl was perhaps not a girl at all. It may have been what the news called transgenders. The pronouns in her head immediately split into two. One was the thing she was supposed to say and the other was the thing she wanted to say. The two swam next to each other like twin koi. 

The sight almost made Maggie gag. The only time she’d ever seen someone dead was her husband. It was different to see someone recently deceased when it was in a hospital and they’d been on a ventilator. This was someone who moments ago was alive and well. She turned away from the bright red blood oozing into the dirt. It looked like stab wounds but she wasn’t a forensic pathologist in spite of all the crap detective shows she watched. The actual sight of death was nauseating. She hadn’t seen someone so cut up before.

Maggie stepped over the gravel and walked back to her side of the road. Flies buzzed around the body and she had no intention of trying to find out more about the poor thing. She placed a quick call to the police as rocks crumbled underneath her feet. 

From a few hundred feet away she saw a cardinal dip down into her yard, landing on the feeder she put up before her husband died. He always called her “his greatest” and fixed the garage door on time. Maggie missed that. In exchange for making the coffee and putting up with his shrill complaints for forty-three years, she was given lasting adoration. 

She steadied herself against the garage when she heard a fresh scream from the other side of the road. A child had come across the body. There were still no sirens. Maybe they’d told her to stay by the body—she couldn’t remember. The child was making hell over the grime. She had fallen off her scooter, shocked by the gore. 

“Come here!” Maggie shouted, trying to get the young girl to come over to her side of the road. But it was too late, whatever dark spot had been planted in the girl’s mind was already worming around, making a nest. 

Maggie walked back over to the other side of the road and tried to put her arm around the child. She recoiled from the old woman in terror and screamed with shattering force into her face.

“Oh baby,” Maggie whispered, letting the words crackle in mid-air. There was no need to dwell, she thought. The two waited in a stand-off. No parents appeared. No police. This was their terra incognita.

“What happened to her?” 

“I don’t know,” Maggie said. 

“Her body looks messed up,” the girl said. 

Maggie didn’t say anything, letting wordlessness restore order. The poor girl down in the ditch was mangled. Someone had done something to her. Or she’d done it herself, Maggie thought. But she couldn’t find a way to say anything to the girl. 

Police sirens finally broke the tension. 

“Let’s get you home,” Maggie said as she stuffed her hands in her front pockets. She’d let it go on far too long, such morbid fascination with skin and bone. “Do you live close by?”

The little girl nodded and pointed a few houses down to indicate where she lived. Maggie nodded and silently followed her the two blocks home. The police whizzed past them just as they reached the tall periwinkle house with sunflowers. 

Maggie craned her dry, scaly neck to look back at the crime scene. The child stopped pushing her scooter in front of a large gray-slated house that still had Christmas lights up. It was February, Maggie thought. The child ran up to the door and rang the bell, too young to have the responsibility of a key. 

She waited until the girl was safe inside before sighing and walking back to the police, still refusing to take her hands out of her pockets. 

***

Melon slobbered as he trotted in front of her. There were too many dogs in the cul-de-sac and none of them wanted to make new friends. Melon was a young Husky with an adorable fuzzy face. Riley thought he was sweet enough, though he wasn’t the dog she grew up with, he was the dog the family got after Cocoa died. A Black Lab mix. Her family liked big dogs. 

Riley had volunteered to walk the new family dog because she A) didn’t know any better and B) needed a break. Her family was nice enough, polite Christian Midwesterners, they enjoyed watching game shows like Jeopardy. But sometimes she felt stifled by the silence. Nothing she referenced or said made sense to them, which made her, in turn, feel illegible. Besides, the memories of her childhood flooded back too easily when she sat in that house. She preferred the freedom to roam. When she was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, Riley wandered the same streets after dark, trying to evade the nothingness of her childhood home. 

The dog started barking. She heard sirens. Someone must’ve burnt something in the microwave. She finished going around the three cul-de-sacs her family had told her about and walked by the garden of gnomes that signaled the end of the walk. Then she turned around, humming the words to Bizarre Love Triangle. She could only listen to love songs drenched in irony. 

Her parents were staring at the TV when she got back. Her mind started registering everything in fragments: 

DEAD WOMAN
WOMAN FOUND IN DITCH IN SUBURBAN NEIGHBORHOOD
BODY LEFT UNATTENDED—

DESECRATED (DESERTED? She couldn’t tell. The captions weren’t on. Something something Satanic symbol?)

DEAD WOMAN (Dead, dead, dead, the words like a chant.)
DEAD TWENTY-EIGHT YEAR OLD WOMAN

DEAD TRANS WOMAN! 

By the time it clicked, her eyes were dilated. Riley’s mom came over and asked if she was on any drugs. 

“No mom,” she said. 

“Did something happen while you were walking Melon?” 

“No,” Riley said again. “No.” 

She let Melon’s leash go and watched the dog bound toward the stairs. There was no methodology, rhythm, or routine for mourning the kind of sister you never knew and felt a sudden, rash kinship with. Riley didn’t even live here anymore. But she recognized the neighborhood from the B-roll. That was only a few blocks away. She’d heard the sirens and not even put two and two together. 

There was processing to be done but Riley didn’t know how to do it. Her parents were both looking at her. Somehow the one time she needed her sister, Rose was out of sight. 

“Riley,” her mother said. She turned away, finally jockeying back into motion, and made her way to the backyard that beckoned like a sanctuary. Riley could be alone only a few hundred feet away. That had been so necessary growing up—the ability to vanish into the oaks and elms like an insect. Burrowing was a speciality, digging up moss and loam with her feet until the ground was wet with ruin. 

The images from the news report flashed in her head.
DEAD TRANS WOMAN FOUND

UNIDENTIFIED
ALONE

UNKNOWN ASSAILANT OR ACCIDENT? 

Obviously it wasn’t an accident, she thought. Someone hated her. 

Don’t make it about yourself, she thought, the words bubbling like toxins in the bloodstream. 

RILEY IVES FOUND DEAD. 

That used to be her daily intrusive thought. Riley Ives found dead at 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 30. 31. The years didn’t still the terror. She thought she’d outgrown that numbing thought. Instead the fear came to roost. All the far right rhetoric had gone mainstream. Surely it was all connected. The world was fundamentally an unsafe place to be.

Riley retreated further into the woods behind the house, the one place that had been a haven growing up. She sat next to decapitated toadstools and walked over fallen logs. The treehouse her dad built when she was eleven had rotten but pieces of the structure were still standing. More or less. When she first climbed up she knocked down at least four boards. The muddy forest floor swallowed them whole. She forced open the window and looked out at the landscape. The trees gave way to the suburban division Riley’d grown up in. Up in the treehouse she could see the old tire swing and the beginnings of the small creek but not the horse farm in the distance. When she was younger she used to go there all the time. Sometimes she brought carrots and beckoned the horses but they never came anywhere near her. She didn’t know the password. Or whatever equine call that could garner their attention. Animals were never her thing, neither beasts of burden or the domestic kind her family liked. She liked dogs as much as the next person but never enough to adopt one. Every time she came home to visit they had a new dog. Cocoa had been hit by a hot pink semi-truck taking a devastating amount of toy dolls from one side of the state to the other. They all spilled over the side of the road, little golems in the gray silt, and in the middle of the mess was Cocoa, a black lab with blue eyes who could no longer wag her tongue. 

There was a part of her that wanted to die. She had to live with that. 

***

Riley knew eventually she wouldn’t be allowed to come back, so she tried to take it all in. Her parents were finally giving up the family home. That’s why she was there. To pack up all the memories, good and bad, before they sold the haunted attic to some other poor, unsuspecting stranger.

She went on a long, looping walk through the woods to survey her childhood stomping grounds one last time. Past where she buried the pets, the rotting treehouse, and the swing where she nauseously pondered her childhood. At the edge of the woods was the sprawling horse farm. These were her stomping grounds before she turned eighteen and moved away. By the time she reached the horse farm she was completely lost in her thoughts.

A white horse nibbled at the tall yellow grass behind the electric fence.

“You like horses?” 

She hadn’t seen him coming from the other side of the perimeter. He was a spritely older man, maybe in his mid-50s wearing a gray and tan flannel and an orange baseball cap. She didn’t know sports so she couldn’t place the team. 

“I do.” 

The man squinted at her. She was worried he was clocking her but instead he started wiping his glasses off with his shirt. 

“What’s your name?” 

“Riley,” she said hoarsely. “Are these your horses?” 

He nodded and smiled. “Well, this one is. All the rest are gone. We had to sell a lot of them after my wife died.” 

“I’m so sorry.” 

He waved his hand vaguely in the muggy summer air. “I’m Henry,” he said before extending his hand toward Riley. She shook it lightly, afraid of how her hand would look in his. The early afternoon breeze shifted the green canopy overhead. The horse bucked and clipped around. 

“What’s her name?” Riley asked. 

“Winnie.” 

“That’s a sweet name for a horse.” 

She waited for him to say something else but he seemed preoccupied. He was just looking at her with two green eyes, his mouth moved as if he was chewing a piece of grass but there didn’t seem to be anything in there. She started to make a remark about the weather before he interrupted her. 

“Do you live nearby?” he asked. 

Winnie came closer to the edge of the fence and looked at them with her two buggy eyes. 

“I grew up through the woods in the neighborhood back there. My parents are moving out now that my sister’s in college.” 

“You have a younger sister? How old are you anyway?” 

“Thirty,” Riley said. 

Henry laughed. Riley walked over to the fence that was wrapped in electrical wire and ivy. Poison ivy was scattered at the base of the nearest wooden pole. Her phone chirped—probably her parents telling her to come back so they could all have lunch together. Riley didn’t want to wander back. Henry didn’t seem threatening, just a strange guy who didn’t get out much. Their brief conversation was the longest she’d spoken to a cis man who wasn’t her father in over a week. 

He came over and slowly guided Riley’s hand over Winnie’s muzzle. Her chipped pink nail polish looked depressing in the open air. She needed to go back to the nail salon but she’d have to ask her mom for a ride.

“She likes you,” he said. He was close now. “She has good taste.” 

Riley blushed. Squashed like a butterfly. He hemmed and hawed for a moment before coming out with it. She assumed he was nervous about his age or he’d never talked to a trans woman before. Maybe both. 

“Do you want to get dinner or something sometime?” 

***

Riley’s sister Rose reached for the coleslaw and scooped a tiny yellowish mound onto her paper plate. The plates were all packed up. Mom was grilling hot dogs on the screened-in porch. Dad sat on a white plastic chair drinking a Coke and humming to an oldies station. They were taking a break from clearing out the basement. 

“Rose,” she said, walking up onto the deck. She adjusted her camisole and jean shorts and brushed her hair. Rose was texting her boyfriend, an engineer named Kenzo. They were both juniors, nearly done with college. Their parents figured it was time to downsize and move out of the big house. Riley was just back for a few weeks to help pick through her old things. She liked having time to see Rose, but never understood how they figured into one another’s lives. 

“Yeah,” Rose said without looking up from her phone. 

Riley poked her shoulder and peered over at her pastel phone. 

“Stoooopppp,” she whined. 

“You know the guy with the horse farm?” Riley asked. 

“Yeah, why?” 

“He asked me on a date,” Riley whispered in her sister’s ear. 

Rose laughed. Mom came out of the screened-in porch with a freshly grilled hot dog for Riley. 

“How was the little excursion?” Mom asked, sliding a bun onto a fresh plate and handing it to her.

“Good,” Riley said. “Uneventful.” 

She moved so that her white shirt pressed against her breasts to accept the plate. Her mom smiled and turned away, back to the porch where Dad sat chewing quietly. He gave a guttural sound that, Riley assumed, was supposed to be an acknowledgment she was back from yet another walk. Melon was sitting at her dad’s heels, begging for a hot dog of his own. 

After hearing about the woman’s death two days ago, Riley kept taking longer and longer walks. Her time with Henry was the longest she’d gone without thinking of the poor dead woman. Dead dead dead. Dead as a doornail. Was that the saying?

“Isn’t he kind of old?” Rose asked. 

“I guess so. I didn’t really think about it. I didn’t expect it.” 

“You should, you’re cute. Too bad I’m not gay.” 

“No incest today, please,” Riley said. 

“Never.” 

Riley walked over to the patio and found a plastic chair to sit down in. Melon came over to her, his tail wagging wildly. She missed their old dog. Cocoa. She was a sweetheart with a scar near her nose. She and Rose had rescued her from the shelter. 

When Melon came over, Riley slipped him her hot dog. 

“Riley!” her mother said. 

“I’ll eat one later,” she said, excusing herself and heading for the bathroom. 

***

Later that night, Riley downloaded Grindr just to see if Henry was there. If he was a chaser she wanted to know before going on a date with him. What she wore depended on it. She looked out her window at the big oak tree. The neighborhood she’d grown up in would soon vanish from her lexicon. Once her family moved she would have no reason to return. Eventually the whole town would just be a symbol without an anchor, rotting in her memory like everything else. Now that there was a potential murder in the mix, the neighborhood’s chances of staying relevant were even grimmer. It would become a ghost town instead, keeping her company in the middle of the night with horrifying potency. 

Her room was white like a freshly washed tomb. Shirts from her childhood covered the floor. Her mother wanted her to go through them and all the other things her mom had saved for her. A few childhood books that kept her company when she couldn’t sleep from the drugs she was taking, candy her mom kept buying that she rarely ate, boxes full of Halloween decorations, and blankets. Endless blankets. Riley saw a stray photo album on the ground. She sat on the cornflower blue bed and flipped through it. There were pictures of her and Rose as children playing in the woods. Pictures they’d taken of each other. Blurry, colorful, kinetic. 

Riley felt careless when she was home. Her time didn’t feel like her own; it was a painful, white-hot oblivion that made doing anything else seem surreal. Meeting up with an unknown man seemed fine so long as she got a little high beforehand. 

Rose’s room was dark. Riley knocked. 

“Who is it?” 

“Me,” Riley said. “It’s only seven o’clock. Why are you asleep?”

She groaned and told her big sister to come in. 

“What’s up?” 

“Tonight’s my date. I was just going to tell you.” 

“Oh my gosh, right, the date. How do you feel?” 

“I don’t know,” Riley shrugged it off. Rose’s old room was a pink shrine full of discarded plushies. She had the giant frilly bed sheets pulled up over her body. Mint green, lavender, and periwinkle books piled on the white side table. A few stray stuffed animals held court over neatly packed boxes.

“Can I have your keys?” 

*** 

Riley got into her sister’s car and sighed. She plugged her phone in and started a Slayer album. Driving was never her strong suit. Besides being trans, it was the other reason she liked living in big cities. All the presets were praise music and classic rock, just like their parents. At first she drove slow before careening across the highway. She whizzed past anti-abortion billboards, fast food chains the size of churches, and the gray smog that enveloped the sky. Beyond the industrial decay were trees. Big trees like spires. This was not her idea of utopia. The suburbs felt like a form of secure isolation where everyone lived in their own haunted house. Look straight ahead, point, click, buy something online. Whenever Riley crossed a small line as a kid—smoked in a park, set off fireworks with a friend in a baseball field—someone got mad. No one liked that way of living. People got mad if you jumped into the swimming pool after nine.

By the time Riley arrived at the Italian restaurant Henry had picked out, she was nervous. She envied her sister’s ability to stare at something she wanted and move forward. 

“Hi, sorry I’m late,” Riley said as she sat down across from him at a small, perfectly laid table. 

“You’re not late at all,” he said. 

“It’s a quarter past.”
“I accounted for that,” he smiled. She smiled back in spite of herself. 

The waiter came over to take their order. Riley quickly scanned the menu for something dainty but filling and decided on a fish course and white wine. Henry was already drinking Scotch. He didn’t seem nervous but asked for another round anyway. 

“How are you,” he said. 

“I’m okay,” she said quietly. He looked like he hadn’t heard what she said but he nodded and tapped his fingers on the table. “Just. Some weird stuff happened recently. I’ve been in a bit of a funk.” 

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Henry said. He waited for her to go on, but instead she silently stared at her empty appetizer plate. After a moment he hovered closer to the table and asked if she wanted to talk about it. 

“No, not right now. I don’t think,” Riley stuttered. 

The waiter finally delivered her wine. She took a long swallow. 

“I didn’t—do something—something wrong?” Henry asked. 

Riley waved him off apologetically and choked a laugh. “No, no. No. Nothing like that. Let’s just start over. I’m sorry. How was your day?” 

“It was good. I worked in the stables, went to Home Depot. Walmart. Pretty normal day. What about you? The parts you want to talk about.” 

His smile was so warm. He was too old, this was just a bit of fun, Riley reminded herself. Any goodwill was temporary. 

“I’m staying in town because my parents are moving. They’re downsizing. I’ve been sort of helping out.” 

“That’s nice,” he said. “Are you close?” 

“Close enough. My sister Rose’s back from college. It’s nice to spend some time with her.”
“Where do you live?” 

“Chicago,” she said. “I don’t come back very often.” She didn’t mean for it to sound so pointed—like an expiration date. 

“I’ve never lived very far from here. I’ve been to Chicago, of course but usually just short trips on vacation. I’ve been to the Museum of Science and Industry a bunch. One of my kids lives in the Ukrainian Village somewhere.”
“Oh cool,” she said, afraid to ask more about his kids. It seemed gauche to ask about fatherhood on a potential date. 

“I don’t think I could live somewhere so big.” 

“It’s really not that big,” Riley said. “It’s not like New York or anything.”
“I’ve never been. Don’t really want to.” 

“A few of my friends moved to New York from Chicago. I’ve visited a few times. I was only in one neighborhood most of the time I was there but it seemed like a bigger Chicago.” 

He smiled again. She had to force herself to look away even if just for a moment.  

“It just seems like a very big, messy place without a lot of empathy.”
“Empathy?” 

“It doesn’t seem like an easy place to be a stranger.” 

“I’m not sure it’s that easy here either,” she said. 

“You seem to be getting along okay,” he said. 

Riley wasn’t sure if it was his turn to be pointed. Was it a mention to her flaw? Or was he simply glad to keep the conversation going for more than a few seconds? 

“When I was in New York my friend Oona made me watch this movie called News From Home,” Riley said. “It’s about this woman who moves to New York from a small town in Belgium and she reads all these letters her mother wrote her. It’s kind of just shots of the city at night. Neon signs and crowded subways. I always thought if I moved far away it would feel like that, like I was reporting from another planet. But Chicago isn’t like that. It’s the same thing as here. Just bigger. Petty friend groups and dead-end jobs and a bunch of natural wine shops.”
“You’re lonely?” 

“Lonely? Yeah, I’m lonely. I’m drowning in it sometimes.” 

Her wine glass was empty now. The fish was nowhere in sight. The waiter came over and asked if she wanted a refill. Riley looked over to Henry who nodded. The glass was filled again. 

“Thank you,” Henry said. “So what about all your friends in Chicago? I mean you must be popular. A gorgeous girl like you.”
Riley blushed. 

“No, honestly. Why lonely?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I want to blame it on thing or another, but maybe I’m just not someone who’s easily satisfied. What about you, are you happy?”
Henry smiled wide and gestured obtusely. “Sure, why not. I’ve learned to live within the world I inhabit. That’s enough for me. Most of the time.” 

The fish came. She clanked her fork around her plate scraping the flesh into small soft whirlpools. 

“I want something to be enough,” Riley muttered. 

“I’m sorry?” 

He looked serious all of a sudden. Maybe he realized there was a limit to how far she would go that night. The tragic outweighing the comic. The wine vanished quickly after that. They talked about Indiana, Hoosier pride, and he tried to explain to her how basketball worked. 

“Maybe we can watch a game sometime,” she said without thinking. Even though she wasn’t sure what she thought of him she didn’t want to lose him so soon. 

“Maybe we can,” Henry said. 

***

She gazed into the mirror and turned vicious.

She excused herself after dinner. Not that he made any overture to invite her over. 

“I should get back before they worry.” 

They stood outside in the parking lot. The streetlights blinked above them in the darkness like lazy sentinels.
“Of course,” he said, but he didn’t move to walk away or say goodnight. “Can I kiss you?” he asked after their stand-off become unbearable. 

Riley nodded; flattered, confused. He parted her lips with his. It was gentle, soft but only slightly wet. He tasted like whiskey and maybe an old cigarette or two. By the time they separated, Riley was convinced he was a good kisser.

He watched her get into her car and drive off. She tried not to look back, wondering if it was clear that she wasn’t like other other girls from around town. He must have known. She felt certain. She didn’t want to bring it up anyway. 

The alternative radio station was playing some ungodly stadium rock meant to tug on her heartstrings with off-tune humming and a call-and-response chorus. The song’s sincerity worked. 

***

The whole house was quiet. Usually Rose FaceTimed Kenzo before bed but apparently that was already over and done with. She wondered how long Rose was planning on staying before going back to Wabash. 

Riley went to the bathroom and wiped off her makeup. Then she splashed water on her face and tried to wash away the stain of the day. It’d been a weird forty-eight hours. She wasn’t sure what the next day was supposed to entail. 

She gazed into the mirror and turned vicious. This was not her beautiful life. The kind she’d longed for as a child. When she did see the sublime, the feeling bowled her over. She wanted to trap inspiration in a bottle and wait until she could use some of it. That moment never came. Despite being surged up, she couldn’t catch a break. This was a world where violence reigned. Everywhere she looked there was new devastation. Even if her gender wasn’t under dispute, the climate was collapsing, and the fascists were militarizing. Good things come in threes. The Holy Trinity. 

But she couldn’t blame it on anyone anymore. Not meds, not men. She had a stable job back in Chicago and she had a string of lovers when she wanted them. The problem was none of it brought her back to life. It was as if somewhere down the line she’d lost some kind of joy and never recovered. Her friends could tell. She didn’t know how to respond when they checked in on her. Just that morning one of them had asked her how the trip was. She ignored it. There was nothing to say in the face of senselessness. Just hysteria. Maybe she didn’t even want to get motivated. Food tasted disgusting, dry like chalk. Her body wasn’t capable of receiving anything good, much less pleasure.

She opened her phone and scrolled through the carnage. There weren’t a lot of pictures of the accident, but there was more information. The woman was twenty-four. A few of the dead girl’s friends came forward to comment. “Izzy was a community treasure. She was one of the most kind and gentle women I knew,” someone named Ammad said. 

Riley knew she was lost and had to get out of the fog. The problem was the body at the end of the block. What if she was next? There were no options, only the raven-colored ooze no one could escape. No woman at least. 

She realized she was still standing in the bathroom, palming her phone and ignoring her reflection. The mirror churned like an onyx whirlpool. Her whole body had tensed up and she could barely move. Everything felt sore. 

***

Riley sat across from Rose as she started making everyone breakfast. 

Maybe Riley could be a mom. Maybe she could summon the courage and make breakfast just like her sister. She could make peanut butter toast, spreading everything evenly and microwaving each piece after toasting so that the peanut butter and honey melted just right. Something about that kind of motherhood felt within reach. 

“Kenzo likes it when I do it like this,” Rose said. “I really should get back soon.”
Mom looked up from her phone and frowned. “Already? Can’t the boy make his own breakfast?”

“It’s been five days,” Rose frowned. “I have tests to study for. It’s the end of the summer semester.” 

“I know,” her mom said. “But it’s been really nice, hasn’t it?” 

Rose took a sip of coffee and rested her left hand on the granite countertop. 

“It’s been nice,” Rose replied. 

Riley looked back at her phone and wondered if she should text Henry. They had limited time together. She started scrolling online again, only to find another in memoriam for the dead trans woman. She was young, like Riley. The latest news to leak from the police department was that she had died from blood loss due to stab wounds. An old woman had found her, though there was apparently no known connection between the two. 

This in memoriam was different though. Ammad and some other friends had decided to hold a vigil. They said there was going to be a support group, more information to follow. A dead tranny group. 

“You should go,” Rose said, peering over Riley’s shoulder. “It’s going to be good for you. A vigil could be cathartic.” 

“Maybe,” Riley said. 

“I’m going to try and go home tomorrow. I think you could use the time and space outside of the house. I mean, if you’re staying,” Rose said.

“Just a few more days.” 

“Are you going to see that guy again?” 

“Maybe,” Riley said. “He was nice. Or, nicer than I thought I guess.” 

“What’s the support group for?” her mom asked. 

“The dead trans girl,” Riley said before Rose could stop her. 

Their mom stopped scuttling about. “She had a name, right?”
“Izzy,” Riley said. 

“Izzy,” she said. “You should use her name.” 

“You’re right.” 

Their mom turned on the TV and started flipping through the channels, looking for something to cut the morning angst. She found an infomercial about decorating the house for Easter even though it was a few months past. Rose looked annoyed and went to finish her coffee alone on the front porch. 

“What’s on the docket for today?” Riley asked. 

“I’m not sure,” her mom said. “I think Dad has a few projects in mind. Maybe go out for dinner.”

The eldest daughter nodded and finished her coffee before going to join her sister on the porch. It was hard to find anything to talk about with her mom sometimes, even when she was desperate to connect.

“That was weird,” Riley said, sitting down on the iron-wrought porch swing. 

“What?” 

“Mom.” 

“What’d she do?” Rose was texting Kenzo about an upcoming biology test. 

“All that stuff about using the girl’s name.”
“Well you should. Especially if you’re going to the vigil.”

Souring, Riley looked down at the prickly bush in front of her. This bitterness was hers alone to carry.

***

Melon trotted in front of Riley as they walked to the town square. A statue of an old white man stood next to a canon. There were about two dozen people there, many of whom had thought to bring candles. A few of the devoted even had signs. 

WE MISS YOU IZZY

REST IN POWER 

That kind of thing. Two younger girls were carrying a poster with Izzy’s face on it. Riley stared at the girl’s blown up blue eyes. She looked younger in the photo, surrounded by flowers. A cool breeze picked up and pushed through the crowd. 

After fifteen minutes or so the first speaker stood in front of the statue and raised a hand for quiet. He didn’t need to, everyone was already still, hardly whispering, just waiting for someone to speak. He was a twenty-something, skinny Black man with short locs and emerald green eyes. Riley recognized him as Ammad, the one who seemed to be doing most of the organizing online. 

The speech he gave was short and to the point. He talked about the history of violence against trans women. He had the crowd call back a few different women’s names, reciting how they died. How many of them were victims of intimate partner violence. How many of them were women of color, often Black trans women who were celebrated only in death, never in life. He wanted justice for all of them. For Izzy too. The crowd roared with her name, stretching her name into two syllables. A sacrifice to the twilight sky.

As the crowd continued chanting, Ammad pushed through a throng of younger trans girls in black band t-shirts and chokers. His right cheek streaked with a wet sparkle. Instinctively, she reached for his arm, trying to catch his attention. He jerked away at her touch and she walked in front of him as they both reached the edge of the crowd. 

“I’m so sorry,” she said. 

“Are you a reporter?”
Riley was surprised by his brittleness. 

“No,” she said. 

“Sorry. A lot of them have been surprising me. Asking me things.” 

“I’m trans.” The words felt rotten leaving her mouth.

“I know,” he said. Not with malice or tenderness, just as a fact. She wondered if that’s how Henry thought of her. Just a fact. 

Ammad started talking about a trans reporter that wanted a statement from him. “She didn’t know Izzy, but she seemed to think she did. In this weird like trans sisters way.” Apparently the reporter came all the way from Brooklyn and wanted to do a feature on Izzy for a queer website. The reporter paid for the whole trip out of her own pocket. 

“I told her to fuck off though,” Ammad said. “Izzy would’ve hated it all. She hated the corporate Pride reporting on trans death. The numbers counting down how many trans women of color had been murdered in a single year…” 

Riley took a step back. “Yeah,” she said. She wasn’t sure how this differed from the chant he’d just given but knew from the way Ammad talked there was clearly a chasm between the two. 

“She preferred fundraisers and actual community and punk shows. I don’t know. I haven’t wanted to like give a comment to anyone. It’s not going to do anything. We’ve been through this before,” Ammad said. “But you knew her?” 

“Oh, I…” 

“Did she meet you in one of the surgery groups or something?” 

“Yeah,” Riley said, gritting her teeth before taking a deep sigh. It was wrong, but there it was. She wanted access. There wasn’t much time left. She really should leave in a few days. What did she think she was going to do—solve the crime? Maybe. There were amateur sleuths all across the country. She heard them on podcasts all the time. 

“That’s nice. She was scheduled to have a consult in the Bay next year. Guess I should figure out how to cancel that.” 

She stayed quiet, not sure what else to say. Ammad wouldn’t want empty words of comfort from her yet she found herself only able to apologize, finally seeing herself as the intrusion she was. There was no innocence in this. 

“No. It’s good to hear about her. If you have a story or something you should post it on the memorial website. We wanted everyone to go and be able to…” He choked up slightly but recovered quickly. “Read something new about her. Sorry. I should go. There’s a wake I’m still helping organize. Izzy’s parents aren’t—they don’t want us in their house. So there’s a separate one for her actual friends. Maybe I’ll see you there.” 

“I’m so sorry,” Riley said again. She caught a flicker in his eye. The way it was worse to try and say something than to let the silence engulf them. Ammad smiled weakly and walked away. She didn’t wave. 

Riley struggled to join the chant as she felt a creeping numbness. She walked away, her hand gripping Melon’s leash tighter than she meant to. 

Instead of playing what she wanted to—something awful like Slayer or visceral like The Breeders—she turned on a playlist called femcel. Asexual yearning and fingerpicking guitar flooded her ears. A witty breakup song likening one’s self to a dog. She looked down at Melon and wished she had a joint. 

***

They didn’t go to a basketball game. After talking with Ammad, she didn’t feel like it. She texted Henry and told him she was about to go back to Chicago. He invited her over to his house. They could walk around with the horses and have some wine. 

When Henry answered the door, Riley almost started crying. Not because of his presence, just from the day. Her parents, the family, her sister, the grief all choking her. 

His house was cluttered. Lived-in. There were books stacked everywhere, old magazines sliding down the musty stairs, little potted plants, mismatched wooden furniture, a giant TV in a cavernous den. There were two empty wine glasses on the glass coffee table. She clocked the fresh batch of flowers in a vase, wondering where he’d gone to get them. Then again, she thought, his property was massive, maybe he picked the daffodils and marigolds himself. 

“We can go see the horses if you want,” he said, motioning out the back way. 

“Maybe we can sit for a bit.” 

“Of course.” 

He was dressed in jeans and a nice plaid button-up. She felt an ick at his neat sartorial choices but pushed the feeling down. Age wasn’t something that should bother her. He was trying to be nice. 

Messages poured in on her phone. Her sister wondered when she would be home so they could say goodbye. Before coming to Henry’s, she had dropped Melon off and gone on a long walk, the kind she took in high school, chain-smoking cigarettes under the evergreens and wandering around near the river. She avoided the ravine where they had found Izzy. That wasn’t a ghost she was ready to summon. Not yet, not fully. 

Photos of kids and an older woman lined the counter that wrapped around the kitchen. 

“Do you not cook a lot?”
Henry laughed. “Why?” 

“All the photos.” 

“Do they bother you?” 

“No, they just seem in the way.” 

“I can turn them away,” he joked.
She didn’t crack a smile, just peered beyond into the dusty dining room full of cardboard boxes. Her gaze went blurry for a second before she refocused and let Henry guide her into the living room. She sat down on the scratchy, calico couch and let him pour her a glass of Cabernet. 

“How long before you go back to Chicago?” 

“Probably in a day or two,” she said after downing half her glass. 

“Need more?”
“Sure.” 

Crimson swirled around in her glass. The music in the background finally clicked. He was playing old rock’n’roll. Classics. The Stones and The Beatles and The Doors. Maybe he had weed. 

“How was your day?” 

“I went to the vigil. For the trans girl who was murdered.” 

“Oh my god. Riley, I’m so sorry. Are you okay? Did you know her?” He trailed off, asking more mundane questions than she could register. She finished the new pour in one gulp and tried to tone it down. Clearly he knew. He didn’t act surprised she brought up the other trans girl. He must have been a chaser the whole time, waiting for someone like her to come along. She probably wasn’t even his first. 

“I’m fine. I didn’t know her, it’s just… sad.” 

“Yeah,” he said. “I saw the news. Maybe they’ll do something now.” 

“What do you mean?” Riley asked. 

“I don’t know. Something about… everything.” Henry gestured meaninglessly. 

The ceiling fan purred above them. She tried to get her eyes to focus on one point, couldn’t recall the last full meal she had. Before going to his house she should’ve told someone. Even just a friend in Chicago. Surely she could revive one of the old group chats. Someone would want to hear from her. Oona maybe. Riley pictured the last words they’d exchanged—something about an upcoming surgery she was getting. She’d sent some care tips and forgotten all about the messages. 

When she came to, they’d been talking for almost thirty minutes. She couldn’t remember anything they said. He was talking about his daughter, she was a nurse in Montana. 

“Kelly loves the outdoors so it’s good for her,” Henry said. “She lives in Bozeman.” 

“That sounds nice.” 

“Are you okay?” 

“Yeah… Yeah.” 

“Too much wine?” 

“No, I’m fine,” Riley said. “Just a weird day I guess.” 

“Are you sure you don’t want to talk about it?” 

The tragic tranny didn’t want to tank the vibe any further. There was still a chance of making it to the bedroom if she didn’t start going on and on about death. He still hadn’t moved closer to her on the couch. If anything he had backpedaled since their previous date. Not even a kiss hello. 

She moved closer to him on the couch. One of them had to be decisive. Her hand found its way to his thigh, thick with denim.
“Kiss me.” 

He looked surprised. “I wasn’t sure—” She cut him off, thrusting her tongue into his throat harder than she meant to. Her fine motor skills disappeared under the thick blanket of wine. After a second she tried to bring her legs closer to his but he gently grabbed her shoulders and pulled her back. 

“Riley,” he said sternly. “What is going on?” 

“Slap me,” she said. “I’m not afraid of it. You can hurt me.” 

“I think you are afraid,” Henry said. “I’m worried about you. I think you’ve had too much to drink and you’re worried about this girl.” 

“I don’t think there’s anything after we die,” Riley said. He looked at her quizzically, confused by the bizarre words she was speaking. 

“Are you okay? Are you—having some kind of an episode?” 

She walked to the kitchen and found the knife block. Slowly, she started drawing them out one by one, trying to discover the sharpest one she could find. Eventually she found the Chef’s knife and pulled it out, glistening in the evening light. 

“Please put that down,” Henry said sternly. “You don’t think there’s anything at all? No afterlife? Because I do. I think my wife’s somewhere in heaven.” She walked back over to where he was sitting on the couch. “Riley. Put that down.” 

Riley sat back down and handed him the knife. She pulled stray strands of hair away from her neck. 

“I think I’m ready,” she said. “You can hurt me.”

He fingered the knife with one hand and set the rest of his wine down with the other. 

“What are you talking about? Are you okay?” 

“Please,” she whispered.

“No! I need you to get out. This has gone on long enough. Get out of my house Riley. Or I’ll call the cops.”
Riley whorled around and stared at him. 

“Did you kill her? The other girl? Izzy?” 

She spat the words out in a hurry, afraid she wouldn’t get them right. This was supposed to be her triumph. Relief should have coursed through her veins like a bloodhound finally on the right track. Henry’s face flushed bright, splotchy red. Her victory deflated. She wanted to shrink down to the size of a mouse and run away. Forget this ever happened. Erase him from her memory, this failure of her own making. 

“Jesus. I was joking,” Riley laughed. He did not fix the blank, fearful expression on his face. 

Henry finally set the knife back down on the coffee table. Riley’s head was spinning from the adrenaline and drinking on an empty stomach. The living room was dark, neither of them had tried to turn on the lights. Slivers of moonlight escaped through the sheer curtains.
“Can we go outside?” 

“Whatever you want,” Henry said quietly.  

They stepped on the concrete porch and she lit another cigarette. 

“Do you smoke?” 

Henry waved her off and crossed his pale, hairy arms. 

“I’m not… a chaser,” he mumbled. 

He must’ve done some research online. That wasn’t a word he should have known.

“Or a killer?” She smirked, trying to pass it off as a joke again. Clearly he wasn’t capable of such extremity. That was her specialty. The hysteric. 

“I just thought you were pretty, Riley. Honest.” 

“And you wanted to fuck?” 

He huffed. The kind of noise her Midwestern dad was starting to make now that he was over fifty. “I don’t know. I don’t know what I wanted. I sure as hell don’t know what happened to that poor girl. God bless her, may she rest in peace.” 

“Well she didn’t get a lot of peace. I’ll say that.”
“It was probably someone who knew her,” he said. Clearly he didn’t want to keep talking about it.

Something in Riley shifted. She felt a bleak door opening deep inside her. The possibility of a grim rapture, a brief respite from the uncharted feelings swirling around like smog in her skull. He looked so clueless standing there in front of her with his hands buried in his pockets. There was no resolution he could offer her. That was up to her. 

“Or a serial killer,” Riley said before letting out a shriek like a wounded banshee. She flicked her cigarette and made a mad rush down the hill without saying another word.

***

Maggie was turning off all the lights when she heard something strange. It sounded like a shrill man screaming from the house on the hill, the one with the horses. She riffled through the drawers for a flashlight and put on her slippers before opening her front door and peering out. There was no man in sight. There was a young woman in the distance, making her way down the hill, zigzagging between old oak trees. Maggie headed straight for the ravine where only six days earlier she discovered the dead girl.

“This way, stay over by the pines!” Maggie called. The young woman was struggling to make down the ravine without sliding all the way down in a heap. Life wasn’t supposed to run on adrenaline, Maggie thought. This was like a terrible adaptation of some Agatha Christie novel. Too much excitement for a woman of her age. 

Finally, the girl made it to the sidewalk and nearly collapsed. 

“What happened? Are you okay?” Maggie said.

“He… the man up on the hill,” the girl gasped before trailing off. 

“What happened? Are you okay?” 

Maggie hadn’t thought about Henry in a long time. He was an oddball but he wasn’t entirely antisocial, the kind of person one only said hello to in passing. Not the type of guy you met at church or the block party. Still, he wasn’t someone she could envision being violent. 

“Did he hurt you?” Maggie asked.

“No,” she cried. “But he tried to. I think… I think he hurt that other girl too.”  

Maggie looked over as the neighbors trickled out of their houses to see what all the screams were about. They all looked alike in the harsh halo of the flashlight. 

Another young lady made her way through the crowd and kneeled by the scared girl’s side. 

“Riley? Is that you? Are you okay?” the girl asked. 

“Rose,” the scared girl said. “Something happened. Something bad. I think I know what happened to that other girl.” 

Maggie looked at the two sisters, bewildered. 

The older woman felt that something was not quite right. The girl breathing heavily on the ground didn’t seem particularly afraid, only anxious. It felt too easy, too neat. There was something close to terror in the girl’s voice but not the rock bottom desperation she remembered from the other girl's final moments. 

Maybe they were just different, girlhood was a wide pool. But as the two thanked her and scurried away, exiting the bright beam of light, she wondered if there wasn’t something else going on. But by the time she thought about calling them back, the dusk had swallowed them whole, bones and all.