One Day You Will Lie Here But Then Everything Will
The night Clarita called, I was grease-cheeked and livid, fiddling with a lightbulb in the bathroom that despite my efforts wouldn’t fix. We’d mostly lost touch over the years, but maintained that intrinsic closeness that you share with old friends. She appeared in my dreams often. I wondered about her grandmother’s health. On my birthday last year, she sent a card to my parents’ address, apparently confused about where I’d ended up. I picture you in a castle somewhere, forever my heroine, she wrote, on the back of a blown-out Polaroid: two girls asleep in a spiral stairwell, one head on a shoulder, the other pressed against a stone wall. She wore a ragged green raincoat, plaid cuffs frayed, that matched our kilt uniform and degraded it, too. I had runs in my stockings. Her knee socks fell down. Our jaws unclenched, mouths ajar, as if hymns drifted out from our bodies as we slept. All around us, dirt and dust. Cobwebs bled diaphanous light.
We attended a Catholic school run by nuns who flitted through the halls and extolled pain. Only a few taught; their general role was more obscure. They were spiritual advisors, bookkeepers, disciplinarians, but most of all they were decorative, like wax figures brought to life. In class, you’d sometimes glimpse the edge of one’s habit by the door. Or perhaps you’d hear a sniffle and sigh, her eavesdropping unconcealed. They locked themselves in bathroom stalls, surveilling students through the cracks. In the principal's office, where I often was sent, a nun stood behind me like a shadow sent from God to witness and eternalize my crimes. Most of the convent’s infrastructure had disintegrated with age, or else been bulldozed and replaced with a glass science wing. But they still had the bell tower, a lone pillar built from stone, tipped slightly east by prevailing trade winds. Thrice a day, the bell rang, and regardless of whether class was mid-session or if an injured student bled, everyone dropped to their knees and prayed.
From the tower, a nun gazed out. She stretched her arms across the sill like a bird about to take flight.
The bell was still ringing when Sister Pauline hit the ground. We stayed on our knees as the nuns ran out, hands stiff by their sides. I would have thought their veils might lift, but gravity held strong. They circled Sister Pauline and laid beads upon her breast, then the ambulance took her away. The rest of the day ached and blurred. For the first time in my life, I prayed. Lines for the payphones wove through the halls, through which an overall panic took hold. One nun tried to console us with spiritual platitudes, but Sister Pauline’s blood had soaked the white coif at her neck so she looked like she might drop dead too. The next day, Mother Superior rang the bell at the same time as Sister Pauline leapt. Then she locked the door, for the very last time, and collected all the keys.
I couldn’t place where Clarita and I slept in the photo she sent to me. Since high school, I’ve visited ruins like this, but here we were fifteen, maybe sixteen, and had never left town. It occurred to me how much I had lost through my failure to keep up with Clarita. What else did she remember? What else did I forget? How strange it is to have your life revealed to you in fragments, unknown. I taped the photo on my refrigerator, otherwise unadorned, and immediately wrote back to her with my current number and address. But it was Christmas by the time I retrieved the mail from my parents and her letter was postmarked July. She never wrote me back, so I assumed she’d moved again.
The night Clarita called, I stood still for a moment, luxuriating in how the telephone’s wail disrupted the quiet room. Blue shadows drenched my basement apartment. Above the bathtub, a small window projected onto the landlady’s unkempt flowerbeds. I kept the ledge clear so I could sit there and smoke, flicking embers from my joint into the wild bergamot. If Hugo was around he’d be in the other room, uninterested in substances that blurred one’s state of mind. He’d wash dishes, read the newspaper, flip the pages so loud they’d rip—anything audible that conveyed his superiority to me. He hated that I smoked but liked when I was high, because of how I softened, how my body searched for him. I’d slip down from the ledge into the empty tub, undress and hang my clothes on the metal radiator—then I’d stand there, cold, for however long it took until Hugo got bored enough to come find me. Black mold lingered in the grout, caked the edges thick with scum. On the inside of the tub, a ring of mineral residue was illuminated by the moon.
One night I waited so long I thought he’d fallen asleep. But then I heard him clear his throat, set a glass down on wood. He shuffled across the floor and turned the radio on. For a moment, there was beauty: a broken deathbed voice. Far away, an orchestra of strings. I imagined Hugo in the other room, shoulder flush against the wall. His eyes closed, his head hung low. Gently, he swayed. I imagined tears in his eyes when he turned the radio off. I wanted to give him a hug. Poor Hugo, I thought to myself. He’s afraid of his own heart. If only he’d come find me, he should never feel alone.
Still, he didn’t come. I heard the front door open with a cruel, dark force, then slam shut as if ravaged by wind. But there wasn’t any wind that night, not even a breeze. Hours passed, my nipples went numb. It had grown too dark to see the mold. In my head, the song still played and it held me as the sun rose.
The night Clarita called, I hoped it would be him, but prepared for another telemarketing call. I stumbled through the dark, flicked the kitchen light on, then picked up the phone. Her voice hadn’t changed, easy and serene, as though no time had passed since the last spoken word. I stood in front of the refrigerator before our teenage selves, perpetually fixed on those sun-bleached stairs. Clarita’s words seemed to come from another dimension entirely, like the musings of a sleeptalker, a call from out of time. She said she’d fallen into the abyss of love, and it was thrilling, and it was strange. They met at the local hardware store. Neither remembered why they had gone. Inside his head, a carousel of thoughts. He was the first man to whom she’d felt compelled to tell the truth. “Have you ever tried that?” Outside, it started to rain.
She explained how new beliefs took hold of her, demanded light of day. Like how time is different than what she’d formerly thought: it’s a gravitational field, not a bidirectional line. You exist in shared time with some people—call it love. There is no going forward, no going back. “He explains it better than me,” she said. “I think he could explain it to you.” I cleared the dregs of isolation from my voice and asked where she lived. Only a two-hour drive from the city, she said. Near a skiing town. I offered to bring groceries but she wouldn’t hear of it. All she wanted was to see my face, to share with me what she knew.
It rained heavily through the night and liquid seeped through the walls. I woke before dawn to deep, thrashing groans as the landlady’s son played Fight Night at full volume above. My dreams metabolized these sounds, turned flesh impact into drums. Or was that nuns? Falling at breakneck speed. My eyes were shut, I couldn’t see. But somebody could see me. Clarita and I were in the stairwell again, and gravity here was strong. We ragdolled across the steps, our heads knocked backwards to expose neck and chin. I couldn’t lift a finger, paralyzed. I couldn’t open my mouth to scream. Far away, laughter. Someone poured wine. A shred of blue underwear winked beneath my skirt. The camera flashed, not white but red. Between the shots, my hair grew long.
Eve Cavanagh lives in Montreal. She is forthcoming for publication in PRISM International as winner of the 2025 Jacob Zilber Prize for Short Fiction. Find her on Instagram: @boo2goose.