Page 1

~DOLLY~

Before Everything

Molted petals litter the streets, a reminder that things are changing. Good. The sky is the same bland gray it’s been all week—like it was last week, and the week before. I put off meeting these fake coworker friends for drinks then, but I wish I hadn’t.

At least the place we’re going has good ranch. The best.

That’s the one thing I’ll miss when I finally escape this shit state where the worst things happened to me. Where I met the worst guy and his gross friends.

Fuck you, James. And fuck you, Gabe.

I can’t wait for two weeks from now when my lease is up and I can finally go home. I miss my mom. And our unfriendly cat.

I head down the hill past my quaint—charming, if I can brag a bit—apartment with the gate that’s creaked ever since my loser ex-boyfriend and I moved in three long years ago. The trees were full then.

Cheating bastard.

The streets may be ugly, and the sky may be too, but the air out here is nice. It’s like the press of a cool pillow to your senses .

I reach the crosswalk and make my way across, waving at an impolite car slowly rolling through the blinking traffic lights. The water reflects yellow and white from the safety lights, the haze of headlights, and the dawn of streetlights. I reach the doors, push them open, and then stop.

What the hell am I doing here?

This place is a wonderland of abandonment, painted in a film of aged light and reeking of that same sticky smell that always makes me wonder whose past it is I’m breathing.

I don’t know why I even crossed the street. I meant to keep going, down to that bar on the corner with the sexy, golden fries and sexy, slurpy ranch.

But my feet have their own plan. They lead me deeper into the archives of a thrift store that’s like a lost and found in a pocket of time. It’s fun to hunt here on the weekends. Last time, I found a really cool vase. Not sure what I’m searching for now...

My fingers trail over knobbed glass and textured pottery, mixing my smudges with all the others that have come before, until I land on one piece that stands out among the rest. It’s practically begging for attention, with that fat little bottom and that slender neck . And walls dark enough to keep whatever secrets might be plugged up inside.

It’s a glass bottle, and it looks like something that may have stored precious oils in biblical times.

I don’t need it. I’m in the middle of downsizing because I’m shamefully moving back in with my mother while I apartment- and job-search back home.

So why did I just grab it around the neck?

It feels good. Solid. Right.

Right?

I slip it into my cute little purse, the one I gifted to myself over this last year of self-betterment while I lived out an unfair sentence in an apartment I inherited—because I was the only one on the goddamned paperwork !

Two weeks left. Two weeks until I finish out this lease and go home to the Midwest.

I think I might be attracted to this bottle.

In a sexual way.

That’s what I think as I take the relic from a sink-bath I prepared for it while the TV behind me rambles off a rerun I’ve seen a million times. Anyone else have a hard time focusing?

From my kitchen counter, the bottle gleams at me, the light from my apartment’s antique high ceilings glinting across the base like a dark grin.

Someone tell me why I thought about this bottle the entire time I was at the bar. Someone tell me why I rushed home in a spring rainstorm just so I could... be alone with it.

I bend to its level and admire the strange, murky color.

This is new for me. Inanimate objects.

I mean, I’ve seen specials about it. I know it’s a thing.

But it’s, like, really a thing.

I reach out a finger and poke the glass, feeling the smallest spark travel from my fingertip, up my veins, and down my spine—like someone just hit me with a cool stream of breath.

What am I even doing?

Why did I just stroke it?

And why am I now lifting the thrift store find to my mouth?

The moment my lips touch it, the warmest sensation floods through me, and the world goes dark.

At the edges of reality, I hear a voice in the shadows—raspy, low, like the warning purr of a lion. “ You’ve kept me waiting, Master. ”

It smells like tobacco.