So You Can Always Find Me
By Dylan Pierce
Astrid does a backbend across the trail, and she looks like a crescent moon trying to crawl back into the sky. Or maybe a werewolf whose spine is rearranging to mimic its lunar master.
Cora can’t do that. She can’t will her limbs to yield into the shape she wants. She doesn’t know who the master of her own body is, but she’d certainly like a word with them.
“Too many people here today,” Astrid huffs, kicking one long leg out and pulling it back down hard, using the leverage to propel herself to a standing position in one fluid motion. “Don’t they know this is our turf?”
“No one owns the woods,” Cora says with a roll of her eyes, but if anyone could, it’s Astrid. Cora is sitting on the opposite edge of the trail, gravel making little divots in her palms, a dappled pattern she loves to stare at as it disappears.
Most of the trails out here are sandy-smooth, the roughness confined to the edges, but this one is all jagged. It’s why they like it.
They like the stomp of their feet in the gravel.
Cora slipped in a particularly lumpy patch once, her sneakered-foot skidding to the edge of the ravine, and she’d only laughed instead of screaming, like the trail had compelled her there and she wanted to let it know she approved of the gift. She wasn’t too concerned with falling in.
It feels like they’re merging—she and the woods, she and Astrid, Astrid and the woods too—the longer they’re here. The trees catch their conversations and bounce the sound back and forth between the branches. Everything she hears is a code waiting to be cracked. Cora hopes it will tell her how to escape someday, how to truly dip behind the veil so that she can still see everything but none of it can see her.
“I disagree, Birdie,” Astrid says with a cluck of her tongue, and Cora has never understood that nickname. It’s short for a lot of names, none of which are hers, and she’s never felt particularly bird-like.
“Because you could peck someone bloody if you were pissed off enough,” Astrid had once said.
From anyone else, it wouldn’t have sounded like a compliment, but Astrid could warp and bend words until they meant something they never had before, things they hadn’t been designed for. Most people didn’t know how to take her, but Astrid wasn’t bothered by that in the slightest. If anything, she seemed to revel in the ripples of confused fear she sent through the hallways of their high school, rivers of bodies parting like the animals who scatter when they hear footsteps on this trail, too scared to brush up against the edge of whatever it is they think is contagious.
“You’re mine, bitch!” Astrid laughs into the ravine, and the ravine laughs back because it knows she’s right.
*
“Why are you doing this?” Cora gasps as the pocketknife makes a swift curve across her palm, bright red beads of blood popping to the surface like bubbles in the bath.
“Something to remember me by.” Astrid bites her lip and frowns at the gash as if she’s not quite happy with it, like she wishes she’d been more precise, dotted her path with a marker like a surgeon in prep. She turns Cora’s hand this way and that, and Cora doesn’t know what she’s looking for. Is she just watching the blood drip? Trying to make yet another pattern in Cora’s skin?
Cora wants to wash it off, to clean out the cut and care for it, but there is also an urge to let the blood dry on her skin and stay forever, like the faded wine stain on their living room carpet, the one her mother made when she fell asleep on the couch last year.
“But you’re not going anywhere,” Cora says, even though she suspects that isn’t really the point.
“Aren’t I?” Astrid asks with a raised eyebrow. “Here, your turn.”
Astrid hands her the knife, and Cora pauses, watching the blade glint under the light for a moment before she tries to replicate the same mark on Astrid’s upturned palm. Astrid doesn’t make a single sound as the steely tip drags along her skin. When Cora looks up, Astrid’s eyes are trained on her. Cora is betting she didn’t even blink during the whole thing.
“Do we…?” Cora raises her hand, and Astrid wrinkles her nose with a shake of her head.
“Press our hands together like we’re dumb ass seventh graders? No… this is so we match. So you can always find me,” Astrid says, and there’s a wobble in her voice that makes Cora want to ask. The trouble is, she doesn’t know what the right question would be, and anyway, Astrid never offers up the truth of her aches unless she wants to. There is no asking. There is only waiting for her to decide it’s time.
Cora looks down at her hand and thinks it’s strange that you can feel a throb inside yourself and find the place where it burns, look right at it and simply know. Why can’t it be like that for everything?
Being marked by Astrid isn’t a pain like any other pain.
It isn’t like the time Brady pushed Cora into that gravel pit—her old school is springy and soft now, sand and AstroTurf that insulates, but everything was razor-sharp and perilous then—on the playground and shaved her knee like a curl of potato peel, skin hanging limp and long off the bone. Astrid made him pay for that, sinking his grubby face into the very same gravel until he begged her to stop, but she didn’t. Two teachers had to pry her away, and she shrieked and thrashed like a wild animal the whole time.
It isn’t like the time Cora carved little geometric designs in her arm just to see if she could shape her skin, if the rough, hardened beads of scar would slough off and leave a pattern for all time. When Cora’s mother saw the aftermath, she looked at her like she was a sickly, deformed thing. Like she couldn’t imagine this creature had grown inside her and come out so wrong. She looks at Cora that way a lot, and Cora can’t find a way to sufficiently explain her curiosities, that they aren’t diseased lines of thought poisoning everything around her. They’re just a fire-ant sizzle under her skin. They need to be scratched out.
No, being marked by Astrid isn’t like any of those things. It’s something lush and possessive, a mark that zings straight through the center of her, and Cora knows she’d let Astrid cut her a thousand more times if she asked.
She only has to ask.
*
They’re walking through the cemetery, fingers trailing over the craggy stone tops of the tombstones. The woods are at the far edge of the cemetery, and when they were younger, they used to say they were wading through the Land of the Dead. They would slip their arms out of their hoodies, draping them over their heads like billowing cloaks, fingers wiggling in the air as they warned each other of fabricated phantoms, racing across the sodden grass to escape the witchy fingers of a specter looking for its next victim.
Now, it’s just an unremarkable patch of land dotted with morbid monuments to lives unknown. They march through it only as a necessary passage to something else, but sometimes Cora wishes it was still shrouded in foggy mystery. She misses that childlike thrill running up her spine, the ease of fireworks lighting off inside her from the pleasure of the smallest things.
“Penile scum at three o-clock,” Astrid mutters, waving to a group of three boys gathered a few yards away. “Why does everyone always have to be where I am?”
Cora laughs and thinks what a blessed magic power that would be: banishing everyone from your sight whenever you wanted to be alone. Fuck flying and invisibility. The right to never be bothered has much more power than that.
“Hey, Astrid,” Brady says as they approach, their boots squelching in the soft ground. It’s been raining almost every day for a week. Cora longs to be somewhere warm and pillowed, but every room of her home is a stained, drab brown, like the walls have given up on themselves. Might as well be here.
Brady’s eyes rake up and down her body, and Cora instinctively tightens her arms around her chest, pulling the sleeves of her sweater down until they reach the tips of her fingers. She hates the way he looks at them. There’s an ownership in his eyes, a deep, probing look like he’s trying to crack her open and crawl inside, thumb through everything that doesn’t belong to him. He holds out a flask, and Cora frowns when Astrid takes it, drinks, and hands it back.
Jacob, his scrawny best friend, shaggy hair falling below his eyes, picks up a small pumpkin and lobs it at the sign a few feet away. The sign warns of misconduct in the cemetery: be out before nightfall, no smoking, don’t feed the birds. The squash hits it with a sickening smack followed by the echo of vibrating metal, the pumpkin splitting down two of its pleated seams. They have a whole collection of them at their feet: small pie pumpkins, the kind bored mothers paint and put in their windows every Halloween. Cora always thought they looked like warped hoop skirts, high society ladies drowning in fabric. The stem is a skinny neck sticking out from a pile of crinoline.
Owen, Brady’s poor long-suffering brother, is sitting in the grass, eyes foggy with longing to be elsewhere. He always looks like that, and Cora feels sorry for him. His eyes tilt up, and he offers her a muted, sad smile, one he clearly doesn’t want the others to see. Cora thinks about asking him to come with, but she knows Astrid wouldn’t have it.
“What do you do in those woods, anyway?” Brady’s lips curve up in an ugly smile Cora wants to scratch off his face. Maybe she should take Astrid’s blade to it. Widen his smile into a permanent grimace. “And why the fuck aren’t you doing it with me?”
“Because I think you’re disgusting, and the only thing I think about when I see you is all the different ways to separate your head from your body,” Astrid says, snatching the flask back and taking another sip. Brady’s nostrils flare like he’s smelled something rotten. He’s not smiling anymore, but Cora is. Astrid nods toward the woods and loops her arm in Cora’s. “Once more unto the breach, Birdie.”
“Give me my fucking flask back!” Brady calls after them, but Astrid just hoists her middle finger in the air. She doesn’t even turn around.
There’s another smack of shattered pumpkin followed by the tinny boing of metal. Cora flinches, and Astrid slips her arm around Cora’s waist. Gives it a reassuring squeeze.
Cora needs pressure to feel okay sometimes, and Astrid often lies on top of her when everything is too much to bear. She likes the weight of Astrid’s body on top of hers, just lying there, squeezing until she can’t breathe. Sometimes she wishes she couldn’t.
They trade off. It’s something they learned to do when Astrid would flee from her house, tiring of that boyfriend of her mother’s, the curse who keeps boomeranging back. Astrid calls him Mr. Nothing because she doesn’t think he deserves a name.
“I’ll kill him someday. Push him right off the ravine,” Astrid had said, cheeks flushed with rage, tears clumping around her lashes, and Cora believed her. She had pressed Astrid into the mattress—“harder, Birdie, if I’m not numb, you’re not doing your fucking job”—her nose smashed against Astrid’s neck. Cora wanted to stay there, face buried against her neck until Astrid was all she could smell even when she pulled away. Until her scent lingered there, flushing everything else out. It seemed possible. Astrid has a way of pushing everything out of a room until she’s all it contains.
They make their way down to their favorite trail, and Cora shivers as she watches the ground. It’s wet enough that she knows to be vigilant for snakes. Astrid just calmly scoops them up on a stick, their malleable bodies coiling around the twig as she returns them to the woods, but Cora isn’t brave enough to do anything other than run.
“This is where it all begins, Birdie,” Astrid says, pointing to one of the oldest, largest trees on the path. She makes a lot of sudden proclamations that Cora doesn’t really understand, but they still skitter along the skin of her arms like adrenaline with no place to go. It’s the same inexplicable excitement she feels from the pound of bleachers under hundreds of feet, the vibration so strong, it shakes your teeth. Cora loves to open her mouth and let it rattle. “Are you seeing it? Are you really seeing it?!”
Astrid leans against the tree, her cheek resting on the bark. With Astrid, Cora does see. She slows down and looks.
Alone, everything is a blur whizzing by, a paintbrush obscuring the whole picture into an incomprehensible blend of color. She’s too in her head to properly see anything outside of it. But she walks up to Astrid, folds her chest over Astrid’s back, and sees everything.
“Do you hear it?” Astrid whispers. She raps her knuckles against the tree three times.
“Hear what?” Cora whispers back, not knowing the reason for the hush but afraid to burst the sanctity of it.
Astrid lets out a sharp, irritated breath and pushes away from the tree, gathering Cora’s arms like a doll and placing her against the tree in the same spot where Astrid was just standing. The wood scrapes against the shell of Cora’s ear, but all she hears are birds and the occasional twig snapping underfoot in the distance. No sounds beneath the tunnel of her ear.
“I don’t get it, Astrid. I—”
“Here. It helps.” Astrid holds out the flask, and Cora reluctantly takes it, wincing at the burn in her throat. It feels like the alcohol is excavating a path, eroding parts of her away to leave raw redness behind. She wonders if it will eat all the way through, an acid spill dissolving flesh into waxy, melted strings. She sighs and closes her eyes, pressing her ear to the trunk again. Nothing. “I don’t hear anything.”
“How are you ever going to see it when it’s time, Birdie? I’m giving you everything you need, but you’re not really listening,” Astrid hisses in Cora’s ear, but her voice isn’t cruel. It’s desperate, a plea whose firmness is rooted in fear. The final girl whispering instructions for escape, hoping to link arms with her friend and bring them both to sunlit freedom. Astrid covers Cora’s body with her own, and Cora can feel the telltale quivers in Astrid’s stomach as she cries, little tremors that radiate from her into Cora and then into the tree. She can almost hear it now. The tree is resonating with everything they’re funneling into it, isn’t it? It has memory. It stores things. She tries to twist in Astrid’s grasp, to tell her she thinks maybe she knows now, but Astrid just pushes her into the tree even harder. It isn’t violent. It’s an embrace too serious to be soft, that’s all. Harm isn’t always about pain, and pain isn’t always about harm. “I’m so worried, Birdie. Every day I wake up, and I know it’s almost here. Like how you know you’re about to trip the second before you do, but you can’t do anything about it. You know you’re going to fall, but maybe you can choose how you fall, right? Can’t you?!”
“Yes… of course you can.” Cora doesn’t know if that’s true, but she hears the high-pitched strain in Astrid’s words and she’d do anything to soothe it away.
*
It’s been four days of no Astrid, and Cora absently wonders if it’s the rain. It’s been coming down in thick curtains for so long that the ravine is probably filling up like a lake, washing everything away and carving new chunks from the soil. It’ll be brown and unsightly when all the water rises up into the air, smeared, muddy debris littering the ground. Cora’s mostly been sitting by her bedroom window, watching the light reflect in, filtering through the prism of the rain. Everything it touches looks like a shimmering river. Everything that is still is also on the move.
Maybe Astrid will return when the rain recedes. Maybe they’re too powerful to exist at the same time.
She waits for an insistent tap on the glass, a smirking Astrid crouched on the outcropping of the roof, her legs spring-loaded and ready to pounce.
Astrid doesn’t come.
When the sun appears the next day, spotlights bouncing off streaky piles of leaves, everything too bright and bold for Cora’s eyes, she runs to Astrid’s house. She doesn’t stop the whole way there, just slashes through the burning ache in her lungs, her legs pumping until she can’t even feel them anymore.
“Doll, I haven’t seen her, and you know she doesn’t give a damn if I know where she is,” Astrid’s mother slurs as she stands in the doorway, makeup smudged around her eyes, her breath acrid and whiskey-stale.
“Thanks,” Cora says with a small smile, retreating on shaky, defeated legs, heading toward the cemetery. When Cora sees Brady, her hands clench into fists. Owen and Jacob are standing a bit behind him, idiot disciples praying to the supreme idiot ruler. “Don’t you ever do anything else?”
“Fuck you, Cora. Where’s your lover? She finally leaving you for me?” Brady grins, and Cora walks up to him and lays her hand across his cheek so hard, his entire face turns to the right.
“Have any of you seen her?” Cora tries again, appealing to Owen’s perpetually rueful eyes.
Brady rubs his cheek, his mouth agape, and Jacob and Owen take a few steps back.
“Jesus fucking Christ, what’s your problem—” Brady jerks away and holds up his hands when Cora advances on him again. “Okay, okay! I saw her a couple days ago, heading into the woods like always. What’s the fucking deal?”
Cora doesn’t answer. She just sprints toward the woods, but she slides on the slick carpet of grass underneath her, falling backward, her palms and the back of her jeans covered in mud. She hears a chorus of heckling laughter from the boys, but she doesn’t have time for that. Cora gets up and starts toward the trail, but it doesn’t look the same.
It’s like a reproduction of a painting. The idea of it is there, traces of the origin of the thing, but it’s just not the same, the kind of minute shift only the painter would recognize. No one is on the trail, and the emptiness makes Cora’s pulse race. It isn’t natural, and she finally realizes it’s more than emptiness. It’s complete and total stillness. Nothing is moving, not a leaf in the breeze, not a rock falling over the edge of the ravine, not a bird expanding its wings and flapping from one tree to the next.
Cora stops a few feet away from the tree where Astrid held her, and she listens.
There’s nothing.
Nothing. Nothing. No animals scurrying in the underbrush, no wind whistling through the trees.
It isn’t the kind of silence where a flick of her finger against the trunk will release a deafening echo. It’s the kind where she knows she could scream herself hoarse and nothing would come out. Everything has been forcibly sucked out. There is nothing in these woods. Nothing living. Nothing dead. Nothing that has been or ever will be.
Cora’s eyes are itchy and sandpaper-rough. It’s the ache that comes after crying, except she hasn’t been. She walks up to the tree and presses her ear against it, hugging her arms around the trunk. She doesn’t know what she’s doing, doesn’t know what answers she hopes to find on this soggy trail. Sunlight is striping the gravel in thin patches, a blazing path meant to show something, but what, she can’t begin to guess.
Cora knocks on the bark, and it isn’t until she rubs at her eyes that she finally realizes she is crying. It’s soundless because no noise is permitted in these woods right now. There is a vast hollowness all around her; it feels like hurtling through space with no hope of finding anything to grab onto, no anchor to stop her from floating away into the void. She clutches the tree harder, the solidity beneath her hands the only thing that feels real, tears carving streams in the dirt path of her cheeks, the soiled places where she placed her fingers, her hands still thick with mud from her fall, but nothing happens.
Where are you where are you you told me to find you I’m trying to find you
Cora shouts inside her head, letting the words fill her until she can see them snaking around her mind, expanding to take up every inch of space. Saying them aloud seems futile, but eventually she does that too, her lips moving with the fervor of a religious zealot reciting a prayer until it becomes a part of their blood and breath. There’s still no evidence of the words, no noise to let her know they’re real, but her lips are moving, moving, and her tears are filling in the grooves in the bark like rivers carving their route through the earth, shaping the landscape of nature into something new. Something that is theirs now. Staking a claim.
Nothing happens.
Until it does.
Cora hears it now. It’s a low hum at first, the buzzing of a single fly trapped in the house, flitting from corner to corner unseen, but then it crescendos into a swarm. It is coming from everywhere and nowhere at once, but Cora thinks that’s a trick. She wouldn’t dare lift her ear from the tree. Eventually, each note in the cacophony separates. They’re not buzzing insects. They’re voices, old and young and soft and loud. A collection of voices threading together to make one blanket of sound.
Cora knocks on the bark—one, two, three, just like Astrid did—and there’s a click and a pop. Cora steps back, and the trunk splits down the middle, a thunderous crack that echoes in the woods for a long time, back and forth and up and down. A heavy rain of sound spreads across the air. The bark parts at the seam, lifting up and outward, spreading wide as dragonfly wings, a dark chasm opening until it’s large enough for two people to enter side by side. Cora looks around and sees no one. The woods are only for her at this moment. She isn’t sharing with anyone nor does she want to. The only one she wants here is gone.
Everything inside Cora tenses and twists the way it did when Astrid dragged that blade down her palm, her whole body flooded with the sharp stab of fear that comes with the unknown, but then she thinks about all the times she wasn’t scared of the ravine. So many times, she’s pictured herself taking a running leap to the end, swan-diving into a mélange of twigs and carving hollows with her thumbs in the dirt like a happy worm. She used to imagine that the ravine would catch her in its rugged arms and spit her back out again, high and spritzing like the most graceful fountain stream.
“Birdie.”
Cora’s heart stops because she knows it’s Astrid. It has to be. No one else calls her that.
Cora holds her breath and jumps into the blackness awaiting her, squeezing her eyes shut against the inevitable impact.
But she doesn’t hit the bottom.
She is light as air, soft and wispy as cotton candy, little bits of sugar you can roll between your fingers until it dissolves on your skin. She can’t see anything but that never-ending abyss, but as soon as she starts to panic, to pinwheel her arms and shout for someone, anyone, she hears it again.
“Birdie… I knew you’d find me.”
Cora melts at the sound, everything that was tight and compacted unwinding as she remembers she’s fluid and free. She’s no more than a ripple of silk gliding on the wind.
Lips meet hers, and they’re lips she knows by heart. She’s never felt them on her own before, but she’s memorized every groove, every soft curve of Astrid’s mouth and pictured the way they would mold to hers if she ever found the bravery to ask.
Strong arms wrap around Cora, the harsh pressure that would be too much from anyone else but is always the ballast Cora needs in the storm. Those arms pull her through the darkness. Cora is whooshing past thin atmosphere and infinite sky, gasping for breath as everything grows colder, and then…
She tumbles out the other side, Astrid’s lips still connected to hers, the tether that pulls her through. Except this time Astrid’s body is underneath hers, clear and real as anything has ever been. Cora stands up and swivels her head in every direction, taking it all in with wide eyes, trying to see, see, see. To miss nothing anymore.
They’re in the woods, but they’re not.
It’s like a reproduction of a painting. The idea of it is there, traces of the origin of the thing, but it’s just not the same, the kind of minute shift only the painter would recognize. No one is on the trail, but this emptiness doesn’t fill Cora with dread. There is no absence of life here, merely absence of distraction.
Cora laughs and thinks what a blessed magic power this is: banishing everyone from your sight so you can be alone together. There has never been more meaning and worth in anything than this. Cora turns to Astrid with a smile, and Astrid smiles back. It’s not the defensive warning it usually is. It’s not the brash, posturing smirk Astrid uses to keep the bothersome hoards at bay either. It’s a pure, joyous curve of her lovely mouth that lets Cora breathe easy in a way she hasn’t in her entire life.
Astrid holds out her hand, palm up, and Cora sees the scar there. The scar she made. Cora raises her hand to brandish her own matching mark, and Astrid smiles even wider.
“So you can always find me.”
Astrid’s plans never make sense until the precise moment she wants them to, but Cora likes it that way.
Cora takes Astrid’s outstretched hand, and they walk down their favorite trail, past the ravine and into somewhere new, somewhere Cora knows they won’t be bothered.
Dylan Pierce (they/them) is a queer Pittsburgh-based writer working on their first novel and trying to preserve their local film community in their off hours. Their work has appeared in Anti-Heroin Chic and Gayly Dreadful.