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I magine Johnny, waking.

Hair mussed, short, brown spikes pressed in odd directions, pillowcase creases in her cheeks.

Hazy remembrances of sleep scamper away, and Johnny blinks the blur from her vision, finding beside her a dream made flesh.

Alice sits up, as if stirred by the movement.

Reaching, back arched, hands to the sky.

Johnny counts the vertebrae along her spine.

She doesn’t know how many vertebrae a person should have, but she counts twenty.

That should be the right amount, she thinks, unless exceptional people have more vertebrae, in which case maybe most people have about fifteen, and Alice has more than average.

She counts one more time as Alice makes a pleasant cooing sound, arms falling to her side.

But when her counting reaches the base of Alice's neck, Johnny notices.

“Your hair,” she says.

“It’s a mess, I’m sure.” Alice twists with a coy pout, taking Johnny’s cheeks in both hands and planting a tight-lipped morning kiss on her mouth. She draws Johnny up to a sitting position beside her, plucking a fallen eyelash with pinched fingers. “Make a wish.”

Johnny closes her eyes. Makes a wish she dares not even think too loudly. I wish it could be like this forever. She blows, directing the puff of breath away from her lover. Eyelash gone, Johnny runs a curved finger over the blunt edges of Alice’s haircut. “It’s short.”

Alice palms the blunt ends of her bob, squishing them into her jawline. “Do you like it?”

Johnny thinks back to the night before, long platinum strands draped over Alice’s pebbled nipples. Long strands. Some stuck to her lip. She had to brush them away. “I do, it’s just, last night?—”

“You don’t like it?” Alice’s amusement cools to suspicion.

Johnny gets anxious. “It’s not that.”

“I needed a change,” Alice says, casting the blanket off her legs and turning away to dismount the bed. “I think it suits me.”

“But when did you…?” Johnny struggles against lingering fatigue, grasping for any recollection of chopping sounds in the night. She squints through still-bleary eyes to look for snipped hair in the attached bathroom. The grout is dingy, tile still a putrid shade of beige. But no hair lies on the floor.

The faucet gushes.

Toothbrush. Toothpaste. Alice works up a foam across her front teeth. Molars. Top. Bottom. Spit. “I dunno, not long ago.”

“I just?—”

“We’re starting fresh,” Alice says. More water: Gargle, rinse, spit. Alice turns with a hawkish stare. “Don’t be weird. I’m gonna walk Lucy.”

Johnny watches short-haired Alice tug an oversized sweatshirt over her head and shimmy on a pair of cotton shorts. She doesn’t want to argue, so she’s consumed with watching. Watching, watching. So swallowed by it, she pads across the room to watch Alice get Lucy from her crate and?—

Lucy?

In Lucy’s place is not Lucy at all, but a bulldog. A bulldog, bulldog. Must be nearly 100 pounds of black bulldog, roughly the shape of Lucy but increased in size. Not an overpriced, shrunken version you might find peddled at a beachside strip mall, bred into miniature, into snorting gasps from a smashed snout. No.

“Lucy, come,” Alice calls the dog, unphased. Seemingly unaware that French bulldog Lucy is now a thundering, knotty beast.

Johnny’s frozen in the doorway. All her careful, measured articulation from the night before collapses to an infantile vomit of words. “Everything’s different,” she blurts out. “Your hair is short and Lucy…she’s fucking huge!”

There’s a long moment of quiet. Long enough for Johnny to question her sanity, her vision, her sobriety, her memory from the night before. In that long, empty moment, Alice grows only more stern.

“Things change,” Alice says, a wrinkle forming between her eyes. “I thought we talked about that.”

If you could see Johnny, you would see her calculating canine growth but failing, because it’s not her expertise. You’d watch her consider the contents of the bathroom waste bin, but being unable to see inside from her position on the bed, not knowing if there’s shorn blonde hair in there or?—

“We talked about us changing. To be better. Better for each other not…”

Alice huffs with an incredulous shake of the head, the edges of her bob catching on her ears. “You believe in change or you don’t, Johnny.” With that, she clips new-Lucy’s collar to the matching leash and is out the front door in eight heavy steps.

Johnny goes swirling. She’s stuck in a one-two-three and she got out of bed too soon and she didn’t drape the covers over her shoulders and scroll social media like she usually does; so she’s cold and confused, a shiver wracking her shoulders.

This is not a new feeling, in fact, it’s too familiar, this deep-seated dizziness. She needs something firm, something to grasp, something rooted to the earth and not to mercurial Alice.

Johnny steps into the living room. She looks to the couch, for the leopard print blanket, but it’s gone. Maybe Lucy ate it, some chemical in the fibers responsible for the unnatural growth, she wonders. But in the same beat of wondering, she knows that doesn’t make sense, the blanket being inedible and lacking nutritional value, and feeling quite sure that if blankets held some power of exponential growth, scientists would have discovered that by now and somehow exploited the trick for profit. Were that the case, blankets would cost thousands if not tens of thousands, controlled by pharmaceutical companies and distributed frugally, and only through a bureaucratic system of managed payers who would ensure deductibles were met and medical necessity was in place and the like. Johnny had slept with a blanket just the night before, so she felt sure none of the former was the case.

Does Johnny believe in change?

She’s still cold, so she returns to the bedroom, crawling back under the covers and drawing them over her goosed shoulders, up to her neck. Alice’s phone charger snakes across the empty nightstand. She’s taken her phone. Must’ve snatched it quickly, a fluid motion Johnny missed.

Johnny misses things sometimes. Especially around Alice.

She decides there are bigger things in flux than length of hair and size of dog. She doesn’t want to feel so tossed about, so seasick, so churned by a force much greater than herself, but Johnny can’t admit that. Instead she tells herself she cannot miss the point this time, the big deal: the second chance. Another opportunity to make it work with the woman she loves.

That word. Love . It falls short in her mind. She wants to think of a bigger word. A longer word, perhaps. One meatier, with weight. She thinks back to the rectangular, German sounds Alice made the day before, the details too faded to mimic. German has nice, hefty words. Johnny thinks they must have one that could be sufficient to hold her feelings for Alice. She makes a mental note to learn some German. Surely a weighty German word for love would hold her down, ground her to the earth.

Johnny always thinks this on , and on Alice’s hair is always too short and Lucy is always too big. And Johnny has already blocked my number. And from where she lies on the bed, the wall is hiding the view of the billboard where I’m standing. Standing and unfurling a vinyl sign. She won’t see me , not now and not later, but she will see the sign.

I’m getting ahead of things.

So what if Lucy stretched and Alice’s hair shrunk? Johnny figures if she can change and Alice can change, the relationship between the two will change. She is not a fool, has not been tricked, and, most importantly, is not a fool who has been tricked again . If the relationship changes, the end result changes, id est, Johnny loves Alice and Alice loves Johnny and Alice doesn’t leave. She scrambles out of bed, determined to make herself look like someone Alice would want to change for, someone Alice would want to love. Johnny crosses the room to the bathroom and squeezes a strip of wintergreen toothpaste onto Alice’s toothbrush.

Faucet runs.

In a scenario where Alice and Johnny and the relationship and its likely end are all changing, other things can shift too.

Brush foams.

It follows that they would, considering their environment is shifting around them.

Spit.

Johnny decides the only important things are those bonds between herself and Alice and shaping them into a proper story with a proper ending. One in which Alice doesn’t leave.

Rinse.

Johnny’s hair has always been short. That much is the same. Brown tresses kiss her brow bone when pushed forward, shaved sides that tickle Alice’s palm when she runs her hand across the prickled hair. That’s good. That’s what Alice likes, maybe even loves.

Her eyes are also brown. Less good. Unremarkable. Forgettable, even. If she leans in and inspects them closely, they’ve got little gold flecks, which is nice, but nothing like Alice’s powder blue. Peering into Alice’s eyes is like looking through a window on a frosted winter day. Or a porthole to a churning ocean swell.

Johnny thinks hers are like looking at a leather couch with brass studs.

There are no clothes in Johnny’s bag. Just the other things. Things she doesn’t think she’ll need now, but she does need her black cutoff and the new jeans with the holes in the knees. The shirt fits her just right, accentuating her modest biceps and drawing attention away from her chest. The jeans are new, which means Alice hasn’t seen them before, which means maybe she’ll like how they slouch at the waist and let a little hip bone peek out, and maybe she’ll think some other woman suggested them—better even, bought them for her. Maybe she’ll get jealous and possessive and all but drown Johnny in attention.

Johnny has a plan.

She grabs her phone, battery indicator red at 4%. The time is 8:16. She’ll be late for work. Johnny taps out a quick message to her supervising professor, explaining that she’s ill and won’t be in. She could run home, grab the cutoff and the jeans and a charger and come back. But if she leaves, she’ll need a reason to come back. Her options are: leave and make herself more like someone Alice would love, but risk the possibility that Alice would not invite her back for another chance, or stay and remain brown-on-brown-Johnny.

Johnny slumps down on Alice’s bedside.

The swinging of a door. The creak of neglected hinges. The chitter of paws on tile. Alice finds Johnny, her cheeks flushed pink from the walk, ribs expanding and contracting.

“You’re stuck in that head again, aren’t you?” She draws her thumb from Johnny’s temple to chin, and Johnny’s sucked into those glacial eyes, icy and deep enough to sink the unsinkable. “Come with me.”

Johnny accepts Alice’s hand, follows her out of the bedroom and past the crawling crack in the living room drywall. Lucy ducks into her crate and curls up with a plush toy. Alice motions at the sofa, and when Johnny sits, curls into her lap.

“Wonder if…” Alice starts, tucking an arm behind Johnny’s back. Wonder if is an old game. A silly one Johnny made up when they were new, still mixed up in that sublime glow of endless possibility. “Wonder if you won the lottery.”

It’s a strong start. Alice is dreaming up their future. “I’d take you to Scotland.”

“You’d buy me a castle?” Alice smirks and traces a swirl through prickles of Johnny’s hair.

Johnny recites Alice’s dream, somewhere far enough from here to feel like another time altogether. “I’d buy you a castle by the sea so you could watch waves break from your window.”

“You’d dig me a moat?”

“I’d dig you a moat and fill it with crocodiles.”

“I don’t think Scotland has crocs.”

“I’d ship them in.”

“To keep people out?”

To keep you in , Johnny thinks. She plants a kiss where Alice’s neck meets her shoulder. “Only the ones we don’t like.” Johnny raises the stakes. “Wonder if we had a daughter.” Oh . Saying it aloud clutches at Johnny’s heart. A daughter would bind them together. For so many years. For forever. Alice might recoil from the notion, and Johnny wishes at once she could pluck the words from the air before Alice hears them.

“I’d braid her hair,” her platinum-blonde-bobbed lover says. “I’d teach her archery.”

Tears prick at the corners of Johnny’s eyes. She wants to say, That’s all I want, a life and a daughter with you . But that’s too much, so she says, “Why archery?”

Alice mimes pulling a bow from a quiver, lining up a shot with one eye closed. “It’s badass,” she says, drawing back the imagined bowstring. “With flair.” Alice lets the invisible arrow fly. The wall opposite cracks, a hole the size of an arrowhead punched in the drywall.

Johnny’s eyes are fixed on the new pock in the wallpaper. Having accepted that perhaps people change, and with them, everything else, she considers a new theory. “Wonder if we could wonder our way to real.”

That one sits a minute, while air pools around them and grows stagnant. The AC kicks on. What if her love was big enough? To break reason. Physics. Logic. Johnny grows hopeful at the thought, then frustrated at the hope of the thought. She remembers she’s angry with Alice. Remembers long nights and empty mornings. “Wonder if you hadn’t left,” Johnny says.

Alice’s lips draw tight. “I’m not leaving now.” She pushes off Johnny’s lap, sitting cross-legged in the spot next to her. “Wonder if you grabbed me some water.” A mischievous grin and Johnny gets up, crossing the living room to the kitchen.

“Ice?”

“Yes, please.”

Johnny fishes a handful of cubes from the icebox, then realizes she doesn’t know where Alice keeps her glasses. She checks cabinet to cabinet, frigid water dripping through her fingers and rolling to her elbow. With each failed attempt to find the glasses, the ice continues to melt, her palm aching. All that love she feels for Alice, and she doesn't even know where she keeps her glasses.

It’s the last cabinet she tries, and by then, the tips of her fingers are numb.

When glass and water and ice have been properly sorted, she returns to the living room.

“What is this?” Alice asks.

Her forehead is crinkled into a scowl, and her eyes are fixed on Johnny’s dying phone.

A gut drop. Johnny grips the glass so tight she thinks it might shatter.

All the warmth and hope and future dreaming from just moments before distills into chilly dispassion.

“Brenda Ramburg?” Alice coughs out a humorless laugh.

“You’ve been stalking me.”

She knows .

Johnny thinks about hours and days.

Weeks and months spent in infinite scroll.

She knows about the masked follows and likes and requests for digital friendship.

The searching. “It’s not what it looks like.” A clumsy cliche, and Johnny sets the glass down on the coffee table to hide the tremble in her wrist.

“That’s not even a real name. You could’ve at least chosen a real name for your fake accounts.” The trail of water from Johnny’s wrist to her elbow sends a chill through her body.

“I just…”

Alice is still scrolling, taking in data, knowing and learning more.

“I just wanted to?—”

“You’re obsessed. ” The word is a hiss.

“It’s not healthy.” Alice shakes her head.

“It’s not normal.”

“I just wanted to see if you changed!” The echo of a rage restrained bounces off the walls and floor, which at once feel too naked, too bare.

“This is too much,” Alice says, tossing Johnny’s phone on the couch cushion beside her.

“Don’t do this.”

“This is why I went to Germany.”

Johnny rounds the coffee table.

“I had to get away.”

She gets to her knees in front of Alice.

“We’re not good for each other.”

“I’ll delete them,” Johnny says, taking Alice’s hands in hers.

“It was terrible, it was crazy of me, but I just missed you!” She pulls Alice’s fists toward her chest, tugging her body closer.

Within Johnny’s chest, an organ pumps blood, fast and hard and desperate.

She would hand it over to Alice, slimy and thumping.

She thinks she already has.

“Don’t you know what it’s like to miss someone? I love you.”

Alice draws back, worry and sadness in the lines of her face.

“Please, let me show you how much.”

“What if we can’t change, Johnny? What if this is just who we are together? Jealous. Broken. Dangerous.”

Alice’s hands go limp in Johnny’s, but Johnny squeezes.

She would never let go, never release this grip.

She would offer up her twitching heart to receive Alice’s in return.

“What if we can’t be together,” Alice asks, “no matter how hard we try? What if we’re not supposed to be?”

“You don’t believe that,” Johnny says, sealing off the place inside her that dares to consider it might be true.

“I’ll change. We will change. Think how good it could be, if we just get it right.”

“It’s a pattern,” says Alice.

“You and me, hurting each other.”

Johnny weaves herself tighter into Alice’s thighs.

She tangles their bodies together as if her arms and Alice’s legs are all the pieces of them she wants to save.

“Don’t give up on me,” she says.

I have never given up on you.

Fingertips comb Johnny’s hair.

She shuts her eyes, embracing the tingle of nails against her scalp.

“ Johnny ,” Alice says like a sigh.

Can’t we just try? Johnny thinks, warm tears beading her lashes and rolling through fine blonde hairs on Alice’s thigh.

She smears them away.

“Can’t we just try?”

Alice nods, tracing the lobe of Johnny’s ear.

The afternoon is a stiff display of Johnny changing.

She deletes Brenda’s accounts, showing her phone so Alice can see.

Apologies pile up in stacks until Alice insists they not talk about it anymore, and turns on a rerun of some show with a laugh track that plays when jokes aren’t funny and fills the frigid silence between them with a chorus of pre-recorded joy.

* * *

When night falls, Johnny asks, “Can I stay?” and Alice offers up an old t-shirt and loose fitting sweatpants and an acquiescent nod of the head.

They hold one another in the quiet.

Alice ignores the buzzing from her phone on the nightstand.

Johnny grips tighter to Alice, pressing one ear against the pillow and muffling the other against the side of her lover’s head.

She tries not to hear, but the buzz-buzz-buzz invades her private, in-between place of sleep and awake.

It must be that woman from the Speakeasy.

Or a woman from Germany.

Maybe both.

Johnny thinks of the contents of her bag, then pushes that away and pulls Alice closer.

This is her big chance, and everything is changing now.

Johnny has to change too, has to trust that they can change together.

She tells herself to dream of love.

She dreams instead of the wild, of predators and prey, the metallic scent of blood.