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fiction

I’m parked across the street from a grand, white-pillared mansion in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Red rose bushes match its glossy red door. My notebook is open in my lap.
What do I think is going to happen? Candy’s going to walk out that door and explain everything?

But Candy doesn’t exist anymore. She existed for one moment, and now she’s as insubstantial as a goddamn rainbow.

So what am I doing here?
At first, I was writing some kind of literary police report. I imagined myself telling a dull-eyed officer I’d been the victim of a “fabrication of false identity.”

Alleged Identity: Candy Moore
Age: 20–35
Sex: identifying female.

Victim: Matthew Taylor Age: 32 Profession: Copyeditor and Non-writing Writer

I first met Candy on April 12, 2024, while jogging along the Providence River near the Crook Point Bridge. I observed her on the ground, bleeding profusely. She had allegedly fallen from her rollerblades.
It almost sounds like a police report already.

When the flat-voiced officer asks what the alleged perpetrator gained through this false identity, I can only imagine answering:
My heart, officer. Just my heart.

What are you thinking now?

Pick yourself up. Since you’re a writer, make it into material. Write it and forget it. But if I could write, I’d be writing.

I found Candy sitting on the pavement, rollerblades splayed in front of her. Blood streaming down her face. Her head was thrown back, pinching her nose. She looked like a battered ragdoll with her legs flung out in front of her.
I was jogging in place like an asshole, staring.
“Oh good,” she said. “A witness.” I coughed out something like a laugh, then tried to cover it with some kind of question about all the blood.

“I get bloody noses all the time.”
When she tried to stand, she winced, and I asked if she had hurt her ankle.
“Dramatically,” she said.

I’ve looked at this scene through a loupe—examined it, slowed it down, replayed it frame by frame, trying to catch what I missed.
Not only this scene. Every scene from those four months, stretched so thin, my imagination is filling in the missing frames.

Was I a mark? Was it a setup? I joked with Candy that the universe made her fall off those skates—that it pulled us together.

I asked if she needed help taking her rollerblades off. She nodded, flashing that smile. There was something deeply familiar about her face.

Her huge, pale blue eyes, with eyelids so translucent, it looked like she never blinked.
Veins showed through her skin. Her baby doll lips were perfect, heart shaped.

Her sharp, beautiful Adam’s apple rose and fell beneath the skin like a blade. Like there was another body underneath, almost slicing out.

Fuck, she was beautiful.

She put her arm around my shoulder. I wrapped my hand around her waist.
It made me feel strong—solid. Like she gave me gravity.

She let me drive her to her motel. She trusted me.
I got her ice from the machine. She leaned on me as we passed an open door—a couple screamed at each other in their underwear. We exchanged hushed giggles, creeping past like kids.
I shouldered her jammed door, and as we tumbled in, a breathless, intoxicated giddiness came over me.

We drank boxed wine out of paper cups and wiped our Cheeto hands on the bedspread, laughing. She told me she was hiding from her stalker ex, waiting for him to graduate so she could finish her RISD painting degree.
As she talked about painting light in her work, her hands moved through the air like she was painting it. Then she sat up suddenly, eyes lit from within.
“It’s about painting the moment the light changes, right before it disappears.”
That’s it, that’s the moment I fell for her.

When I left, it was three in the morning. The moon hung impossibly large above the empty speedway, too bright, too perfect, like a stage prop.

I imagine the officer asking what I knew about her. Just the facts.
I’ve made a list, and besides her physical description, it’s probably all fiction.

I’ve spent so many sleepless nights staring out through the blinds she tore down “to let the light in”—trying to figure out what can’t be faked.
What part of a person can’t be made up?

The detective agency gave me a document—it’s folded into my notebook.
It didn’t answer anything. If anything, it raised more questions.
But it got me to this address.

It looks exactly like the house she described.

Lying in the dark, we watched headlight patterns slash across the ceiling.
She traced their movements with her fingers and told me about the house she grew up in. A white-plaster, pillared McMansion in Muscle Shoals, with its impeccable symmetric rose bushes. She said she used to lie on the ground in the foyer just to make someone step over her.
To see if anyone would notice.

I told her about feeling my father’s ghost in the house. I’d never known him but imagined him so precisely I could almost see him.
I told her I was homeschooled until third grade. The transition was brutal. The other kids saw my long hair and dreamy eyes and called me a girl.
I learned fast. I put on something solid. Something that would pass.

I try to picture her stepping out of the mansion. For a second, I can, almost. She’s superimposed against the red door. Seeing ghosts again…

What’s the plan, Matthew?

I imagine myself grabbing that brass fist knocker.
What was I going to say? I lost someone who said they lived here. Do you know anyone?

God, it sounds ridiculous.
My hands are shaking from truck stop coffee. My clothes are wrinkled. I look like hell—a crazy person. When’s the last time I slept?

She came over the day after the motel and basically never left. She showed up with one giant leopard-print suitcase.

She called my apartment “drab” and filled it with posters from punk bands she’d never heard of, frilly brass lamps, stolen street signs. Her stuff was at her ex’s place. She said he was looking for her.

She had a scar above her throat, a thin, raised mark like a dash.

“Did he do that?” I asked.
She nodded.
On my list of facts, I wrote: thin scar on neck.

When we were out together, she’d sometimes grip my wrist. “Don’t turn around,” she’d whisper, and my whole body would go stiff.
She saw him once, at a café. We dropped our forks and dashed out. We ran three blocks, both breathless and laughing. I felt wild. Free.
But the next day I went back to pay the bill, stammering out an excuse. It haunted me— Why didn’t I stand up to him, protect her? Man up?

When she was downtown working, or hanging out with her friend Paully, I edited at home, the apartment feeling empty.
I’d watch the clock and edit manuscripts. I went through the motions of writing my novel, but I was really watching the blinking cursor, waiting for the sound of crinkling plastic that signaled her return.

She always brought home exotic food, little gifts—a poster of chrysalis stages, a fake bird of paradise, clothes for me after she threw out my cardigans.

She would narrate her day, give me details about the muffled voices of her bosses that she was convinced were mafia. She described how their cigar smoke stained the windows yellow.

She said she felt safe there with them.
She never said that about me.

I watched her as she talked, sometimes trying to guess her age.
She never answered directly. “How old do you think I am?”
Sometimes she looked like a child. Other times, much older. The deep purple circles under her eyes hollowed out her face.

Her favorite game was: What are you thinking right now?
If I said “nothing,” she’d shake her head. “No—look closer. A thought, an image in the background. Look!”

Then a minute later: What are you thinking now?

At first, I made things up. Stupid shit.
“I don’t know, fish with wings.”

But eventually I started catching my own thoughts—flashes of memory, scraps of dreams, stray bits of background noise.

She told me: watch your mind like TV.
I started seeing it—a street from my childhood, a dream without gravity, weird random thoughts.

It was like she reached into my head and tilted a mirror slightly and I could suddenly see what was there.

We went to a costume party once. I told her it was hard enough being myself—I would feel even more ridiculous.
It was one of the only times we almost fought. She got frustrated, called me beige, said we should use ourselves as canvases.

Eventually, I gave in. She made herself an axolotl crown with her huge, unblinking eyes and painted-on smile, I burst out laughing—doubled over, tears running down my face—until she got annoyed. I was laughing too hard to take her discourse on axolotls seriously. She was saying how if you take them out of water, they metamorphize into salamanders.

Later, as she was drawing biker tattoos on my arms, she said, almost bitterly, “We’ve got to get you out of the water.”

Once I dug through her purse for a cigarette and found a man’s driver’s license. “Who’s this?” I asked innocently.

She was across the room, but she flew at me and snatched it away. Her face changed completely. Fury.

I’d only seen the ID for a split second. Not long enough to read the name. But long enough to see short brown hair.
I’ve tried to reconstruct it since then, obsessed over that blurry half-second—tried to bring the name into focus. Was it her?

Later that night, I told her how I used to dress up in a red velvet dress from our costume box—wore a wig and loved seeing myself in the mirror as someone else.
I asked her—gently—who she used to be. Did she have a different name when she was a child?

She went completely rigid.
And then she left. She was gone a full day.

When she came back, we went back to normal. We never acknowledged it, and I never even got to apologize.

The wind at the beach was sharp and cold, making tears stream down my face. The water was black, but the crests of the waves were blinding white in the sunlight, and I had to squint. The whole scene blurred.

She talked about soulmates. She called them “twin flames.”
I watched the side of her face; she was the only thing in focus. She held up her hands and drew shapes in the air—two twisting flames, like a strand of DNA.

“I want to be whole,” she said.
She didn’t look at me when she said it. Just kept staring out at the water.

I knew, even then, she wasn’t talking about me.

One day, I came home, and she was gone.

No note. No warning. No sign she’d been planning to leave.
The night before, she’d curled up in my lap while I read, blocking the page, just to mess with me.

I kissed her each time, and she kissed me back like she had nowhere else to be.

I’ve replayed that night so many times, trying to find a clue. But it was a normal night.

We ate sushi, cross-legged at the coffee table. She told me about her lunch with Paully. She laughed at something I said.

Then she was gone.

After a few sleepless nights of calling her incessantly until the phone was no longer in service, I started looking for her. First, I went to her office, only to find the building gutted, a demolition notice taped to the glass.

Next, I went to Paully’s work. Except there was no Paully. No one by that name had ever worked there. I remembered the times she canceled on us at the last minute, the vague excuses. But there were phone calls. Hadn’t I heard a voice on the other end?

I pressed my memory hard, squinting like I could pull out more detail if I focused. But it just blurred, like a word repeated until it lost all meaning.

I started worrying about our sex life. Candy always said she didn’t like receiving, that giving was enough for her. And I believed her.

I’d sit at the window, chain-smoking, replaying it all in my head. Every time she made me come, every time she pulled away shamed me. Humiliated me.

Then I became sick with it. Fed myself images I couldn’t stand.

What are you thinking now?

Her body arched against someone else’s, someone giving her what she wants.

Why didn’t she let me touch her?
Why had I been okay with it?

I forced myself to sit my pen to paper. Told myself: write anything: how she looked, something you did. But it was like a narrow tunnel after a flood—choked, clogged. Before Candy, I couldn’t write because everything was too dry. Now it was all rushing in at once—nothing could pass.

I went to her art school, scanning faces on the green, searching for her in the crowd.

Endless, frantic internet searches. Searching every tagged photo of RISD students I could find. Looking at group shots from parties, openings—scanning for her face in the background.

I dug through her supposed hometown, pored over ten years of yearbooks, looking for her eyes in every single picture.

Until I started seeing her face in everyone’s face.

Until I caught my own reflection in the mirror and, for a split second, I saw her there too.

That’s when I hired a digital private investigator with lots of good reviews. It was outrageously expensive, but I had to get some answers.

The detective agency dug up a lot more mystery than anything else. They found fragments, a series of names she’d used, including my own.

I basically paid to hack myself. They dug through my computer, my internet history, old emails, deleted downloads.

What are you thinking now?

Me swimming through murky waters in a stupid axolotl bonnet.

They found a rental application in my name. An unfinished email exchange about a deposit.

They found a blog of her paintings. Fractured light, shadowy amphibious creatures—like the sketches she made.

That, she couldn’t fake.

There were emails, credit card debts under different names. And then there was that address that kept coming up.

Muscle Shoals, Alabama.
I found it on Google Maps, and my stomach dropped.

The plaster pillars.

So here I am.

What are you thinking now?

I’m not going to knock on that door. Any answer will just lead to more questions.

The real question is the one I’ve been circling all along: why couldn’t she love me?
It comes down to that.

I’m not writing a police report.
If I do go to the police, it’ll only be to make sure my name, my accounts, my life hasn’t become hers.
Whoever she is.

My Candy is gone.
And even if—by some wild chance—she could explain herself, I still don’t think I’d understand.

I sit down at a booth in a dive I find and order a black coffee and a full breakfast.
I pull out the notebook, paging through all the notes that were supposed to be about facts—and do not contain a single one, outside of the detective’s document.

I open a new page.
I think of her asking: What are you thinking now?
My small hands pressed against a mesh window screen, watching my mother mow the lawn.

What now?
The jagged ridge of a dorsal fin catching rainbow light.

What now?
Are we just one person? Some rooted, grounded thing?

What now?
Who would I be if I let myself become whoever I wanted to be?

I exhale.
I don’t have the slightest idea who that would be.

I click the pen.
And for the first time in years, I begin to really write.