Fiction by Porter Yelton

Porter Yelton calls Chicago, Shanghai, and North Carolina home. He is a graduate of New York University and an MFA Candidate at The Ohio State University. He writes about fractured familial relationships, LGBTQ+ communities in the rural American South, and addiction. His fiction can be found in Driftwood and Apricity.

The Moon Also Sets

Anne remembered her first lightning strike like a showgirl’s first feather-shake on stage. The neighbors had brought food, the psychiatrist had made house-calls, the mayor had called her talking about a key to the city. But when she didn’t turn glow-in-the-dark or start predicting marvelous futures for the good Christians in town, they all left her alone. Fame had simply blinked across the sky, not bright enough to leave pink and green floaters in her field of obscurity. 

So the second time it happened, in her own front yard, she didn’t say a word to anyone. They had proven they didn’t know what to do with a rarity like her; they would choose phrasing like “anomaly” or “striking statistic,” but she was rare and she knew it. That day, being who she was, she walked out into the first rumblings of an August hurricane for no reason at all. With her knees dug into the lawn, she pinched a single raindrop from her nose between forefinger and thumb, watching it slip, as so much had, out of her grasp. She’d craved electricity and she’d begged for it and now, after so much waiting, the sky listened. It cracked itself into her. 

As she hit the hard, wet lawn, familiarity found her. She was at home inside of this feeling: a spark coursing through her body like blue fire from a stovetop. 

Without more than a moment’s pause upon the ground, she cleared her throat, stood, dizzy like stars, attempted to wipe the mud off her ruined gown, and sauntered up her front steps, reminding herself of Princess Di, concerned only with what God-awful perm the forces of nature had just given her, my God I must look like Burnt Toast Barbie but I don’t care. 

My lord, she laughed to herself, to see the face on Barbara Ann next Monday. She won’t know what struck her. 

Barbara Ann, poor thing, didn’t know much. Anne’s hair stylist, forty-one but with a rock-hard bubble flip like the Sixties, didn’t have the heart to admit she wished Anne would find a different salon. Anne reminded her of Children of the Corn, and though she was easy to scam for higher prices, the fear she instilled by walking in a room wasn’t worth it to meager little Barbara Ann. A dashing bit of electricity to the temples had suddenly made this clear to Anne. 

Well, she thought as she peered into the foyer mirror at the half-fried, bad-car-crash mop on her head: I have always been rather electric, haven’t I? The wind blew the door shut behind her, and she deigned never to go to the beauty shop again—to hell with Barbara Ann and her plastic bucket brain—and to hell with the nail salon, the perfume counter, the dry cleaners. No, she thought, if I need something to wear, I will simply buy it new. Her veins felt furry like peaches.

Today it seems she has always been called Crazy-Anne, like a classic southern girl’s double name, but that actually came a bit after that second lightning strike, when none of us knew about it and thought her scale had just finally tipped downwards with the last sand-grain of lunacy. At that time, Anne had already shunned most of her friends, dropped out of the Country Club, loudly praised God when her husband finally died, and began to throw appearances and manners to the wind. So all of us had been calling her “eccentric” for years (when what we really meant was something you couldn’t utter between the walls of a church), but it was only afterwards that we felt comfortable whispering the word “Crazy,” capital C. 

The day of the second lightning strike, Anne began opening all the windows in her massive house and sleeping naked on top of a mound of clothes on her bed, no matter the weather blowing in, with fluorescent lights shining her image out onto the street. Her makeup had always been no better than a knockoff Tammy Faye, but now she added bright, whitened powder and drew on big cheek moles like a Bible Belt Cindy Crawford. Anne never had a clue how to be anything but herself, but the self was now reduplicating, and we don’t tend to take well to that around here. 

The first canary song wafted up from the mine when Anne’s mother died that same week. Anne’s daughter was the one, bless her, to make the call, and would you believe that Anne cackled like a witch? “About time,” she found herself saying. “And who could blame her, darling? At a given point, one needs a certain spark to make life worth living, and what spark did she ever have?” 

Anne saw it as: though her mother, Nancy Jean, had lived all her years in hot pink lipstick and cheetah-print blouses and a perm that stretched halfway up to God’s Front Door (apples do fall), her mother never had the personality to match the looks, so it was just as well, Anne reasoned, that the old bat was gone. She’d frankly forgotten for quite a while that her mother was even still alive. There are reasons, she would often assure herself, why daughters leave their mothers. 

Even the people in the trailers out past the highway know that at thirty-three, bruised from temple to tit, Anne had shown up on her mother’s doorstep—weathered and wet with summer rain swirling around her—seeking asylum or at least advice, and instead she’d been met with a shimmering admonishment for not being the kind of wife who knows how to avoid a beating. Her mother hadn’t even let her past the door. Anne’s husband was funding her mother’s lifestyle, and how selfish it would be of her not to make “some necessary, hard-earned changes” so that all of it could continue. 

And then years later her mother had accused her of going crazy because she was smiling at her husband’s funeral, and then Anne’s daughter had taken Nancy Jean’s side, accusing her mother of murder even though she knew the man was drunk as communion every night and had done it to himself, and then neither of them had spoken to Anne for six months except to ask for the money there were surprised had been left only to her, and then they’d post pictures together on the internet, a clear generation missing, as if for the sole purpose of taunting Anne. 

And then, and then, and then: Anne felt her life like a series of sharp, nicked dominoes crashing into each other without the wherewithal or the decency to ask her how she felt about the fall. And now here was her daughter, telling her of the last domino—at least for a while—and expecting a string of tears, a collapse as grand as the injustice that had been dealt to her. But how could Anne do anything except thank poetic justice, in which she believed more than she believed in a single person she knew? 

The issue, of course, was the funeral. Anne had not left town in eleven years, and her daughter—sad and distant, with that husband as flavorless as a stale rice cake—was coming to collect her the following morning for the necessary drive down to the sea. Thank the Dear Sweet Lord, though, the husband (Jesus what was his name? Her daughter had just said it, and now it was gone, poof!) was away on business in Scotland and would not return home in time to join them. Other mothers-in-law would feign shock, claim family-first; Anne balled up her fists and shook them quickly back and forth with glee. 

“But, darling,” she said over the phone, looking at a calendar on the wall. “The funeral is on Saturday. Today is Wednesday. Why do we need to drive down there tomorrow?” 

“Jesus, mother,” her daughter said. “She’s dead. Have you no sympathy? Of course we have to go tomorrow. We’d go today if wasn’t already so late.” 

This will be you one day, Anne wanted to say, begging your own daughter not to force you to come and look at my wrinkled cheeks in a coffin; waste of your time. 

And from where could poor Anne draw sympathy? Her mother had decided to move to Hilton Head of all places, as if she wasn’t writing her own fate by choosing a home like a lukewarm fridge where people go to wrinkle and wilt like spinach. And, since Nancy Jean was dead, as Anne’s daughter had so unduly emphasized, why should she care what time they got there, or what day? She was dead! She didn’t care! Anne restrained herself and did not say this aloud, miracles do occur, perhaps this should have been her own self-sign of insanity but she brushed it off like a piece of lint. 

Anne didn’t sleep at all that night, or the next one, their first in Hilton Head. She was sure she wasn’t bothered by the death, which felt like a welcome westerly breeze, and the drive hadn’t tired her out like she’d expected. She simply felt too energetic, too manic, to imagine laying her head on something as plump and cumbersome as a pillow. She bumbled around the hotel room that first evening, animated by something, and she was about to re-paint her makeup, just for something to do, when she heard a knock at her door. 

“Mother,” her daughter said from behind it. Anne cringed before inserting a smile into her voice; she’d always hated being called that. 

“Yes, dear?” 

“It’s just—could you open up, please?” 

Anne looked down at herself, at the bright red Chanel frock she’d been wearing all day, ridiculous in a place like Hilton Head but the only sort of option she could find in her closets and piles, and she turned to glance in the bathroom mirror. Though it was true, she did look like a dirt-dusted Cruella DeVil who hadn’t slept in weeks, she reminded herself that she’d chosen to view her age as an opulent sort of beauty, carried in her handbag of realities as wealth that need not announce itself as such. There were good things about Anne, you see. She opened the door and smiled as best as she could. 

“Yes, and what is it?” 

“I’m right below you, Mother. It’s the middle of the night, and I can hear you pacing around like some sort of anxious dog. Really, it’s—well, it’s loud. I wanted to see if you were okay. If you— wanted to talk?” 

Ridiculous, Anne wanted to say, we’ve never done such ludicrous things in this family. 

Instead: “No, dear, I’m just feeling energized, that’s all. I haven’t been this awake in years. But you! Go and get some sleep. I saw some darling pink earplugs in my dresser over there; I’m sure they’ve provided them for you, too, they’ll fix you right up. Bye now!” 

But as Anne tried to swing the door shut, her daughter stuck her foot in its wake. 

“Mother, your hair.” 

“What?” 

“Your hair. I haven’t wanted to mention it, but, really—well—what on earth has happened to your hair? It’s been perfect every day of your life, and suddenly—I’m sorry to say this—but you look like a skunk.” 

Anne couldn’t help herself; she laughed in such a shriek that it shocked even her own daughter, who chastised herself for still being so surprised at things she should have learned to live with. 

“A way with words, darling, you’ve always had it!” Then Anne looked beyond her daughter, at a flickering bulb down the hallway. Her voice hollowed. “Lately it’s just all become rather electric, hasn’t it?” 

She shut the door with a quick flick of her bangled wrist. This time, her daughter didn’t stop her. Anne pressed her ear to the door. A moment of silence passed between them, as one so often did. Her daughter sighed, and then she quickly headed back down the stairs. Anne could picture it: her daughter already reaching for the pink earplugs, heeding her mother’s advice out of sheer befuddlement. 

Smiling to herself, Anne thought about the hurricane in the yard, the gale force winds, and the burst of light from the sky: her sun-spotted secret. She would never personally tell her daughter about the second strike of lightning; it was far too early to lock her up in one of those depressing retirement communities where she’d be watched like a hawk and fed like a fattened Thanksgiving bird. 

The flicker of that bulb had sent a stronger pulse of restlessness through her; she needed to get out. And yet the shops would not be open at this hour. Food did not excite her; she’d stopped feeling attracted by flavors on the tongue years ago. She’d already cleaned out the minibar and foolishly forgotten to imagine that nowhere on an island was going to sell liquor in the middle of the night, so she chose to go, of all things, on a walk. 

She had no idea how one was meant to dress for a walk, so she simply followed her instincts, slipping out of the frock and into a gold-sequined blazer, adding two hefty shoulder pads; she puckered her lips in her reflection on the golden sconce by the door as she flung it open and descended the stairs to strut out onto Lighthouse Lane before her daughter below could interpret the floor-creaks for what they were. 

She slinked down the sidewalk, giggling under her breath like a young girl. The sidewalk turned into a boardwalk and the surpassing of a shaded palm tree revealed the way the moon shone on the stubby little red-and-white lighthouse, tall, gallant, domineering in this light. It had looked like an old man’s chode in the daylight—she’d thought, with a gag, of her late husband—but not now. Now it twined itself skyward. 

Light: she felt it pulsing from that tower, emanating from her body. She felt the light and her sequins enraptured by each other. She looked up at that dashing silky saucer in the sky and uncovered a mystery she imagined would sustain her into any further future: she no longer needed sleep. She only needed the light, the moon, the shine of things glinting all around her, and each day she’d become more electric. 

She let out yelp-like hollers, a one-woman rendezvous, and she swung her left shoulder forward, then her right, and her feet moved with them. Anne was dancing. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d danced. Now she was talking to the moon and her husband was dead and her mother was dead and her only child was quite insufferable, could barely tolerate her, and no one understood the first thing about her, but Anne didn’t care! She didn’t care! She danced. 

~~~~~~~~~~

Upon returning home from the humid, dirt-drenched slog of a funeral, Anne discovered that her harborside adventure had not been an anomaly: she now loved nothing more than a walk with a purpose. Sometimes she would dance through a park with her Audrey Hepburn sunglasses on; sometimes she’d frolic between treadmills at the YMCA and say hello to people she did not (and had no desire to) know. You can see how the nickname began to grow. Her favorite place to walk, though, was the only place she still knew how to stand still and present herself with emotional balance: the store at the back side of the local mall, Ooh La La, our own local Neiman Marcus for the middle-aged. She began walking there each day, first thing in the morning, rain or shine. 

Each evening when she walked out onto her bedroom balcony to take in the moon, she’d look at the clothes in her upstairs rooms, piles and piles of them, mountains of dresses with their price tags still affixed, heels piled miles-high and jewelry tangled in clumps. Then she would think, with a sudden terror: It’s not enough. It’s not nearly enough. 

One time the feeling hit her so violently that she bolted out into the street just before midnight, in mismatched heels of different heights, hobbling up the street to the mall only to find that the glass-and-steel doors of Ooh La La would not budge an inch. She was reminded, for a revolting moment, of her marriage: the way it had purported life swinging open for her, only to later reveal itself as a gold-rimmed cage, glinting dazzlingly with its lock bolted shut. She waited there all night, on the curb, ripping sequins off of her blazer and arranging them into shapes on the ground: lightning bolts, bunny rabbits, Bette Davis’s face. 

When morning came, she finally shouted to the alarmed workers inside—and from which pearly gates had they entered?—that if they’d just let her in a bit early, she promised to spend no less than four thousand dollars. So they budged for Anne, screaming and crying, mascara down around her mouth like lip-liner, forty-five minutes before opening. When she bumbled on home, donning her new wares, she thought what little could be purchased for such money these days. 

She thought of old Nancy Jean, laying atop a quiet fortune all these years like a house upon rubied feet, and her own now-full accounts. Anne began spending her sudden wealth like it was a profession. She was top of her class. But, quickly running out of space for the dresses, the cardigans, the blouses, the furs, she started stuffing them into the oven and under couch-cushions and in the downstairs powder room. She unplugged the refrigerator in the garage and stuffed more in there, throwing moldy old jugs of grapefruit-in-syrup into the open air. As they hit the ground and exploded, she hooted and hollered and danced. Goodbye, loneliness. Goodbye, disrespect. 

During each daily pilgrimage to Ooh La La, she would purchase exactly one full outfit, saunter shamelessly into a bathroom stall, change into her new purchase, stuff the old outfit into a trash can, and shepherd herself into a booth at our town’s best white tablecloth restaurant. She’d sip two or three martinis and relish the olives that came with them before she marched home in her new purchase, skin tingling, and threw the clothes onto a pile in her closet, or in the bathroom, or the garage, anywhere they fit—never to be worn again—and then she’d wait for the sun to set. 

Word had spread, of course, through town. Everyone on the stretch between Anne’s house and the mall, about three quarters of a mile, had grown tingly with expectation. People followed her, snapped pictures with their phones; they whispered nasty things about her, though they were sickly impressed. Anne’s daughter tried to call her and stop the madness, but then upon realizing that this would only implicate her in their mother’s affairs, she quickly pulled back, plugging up phone lines. Anne hardly noticed. She was walking, she was dancing, she’d gotten so much done during the night while everyone else had had to sleep, with the moon to accompany her, so how could she be bothered by those who simply did not understand? 

Pictures of Anne graced the local newspapers again; her old Country Club friends couldn’t hardly play their bridge game for all the discussion about whacky, wild Anne’s whereabouts and goings-on. This was why the leader of the bridge group, Francine Lou Mulligan, went to find Anne one afternoon just as the first martini arrived at her table. 

“Oh, darling,” said Francine, tottering up in a hurry. “Darling, darling, Anne, oh you must be going through it. I know what it’s like, believe me! My own mother went to be with our Dear Lord just two Christmases ago. It’s a pain you just can’t put into words.” 

Anne hadn’t the faintest clue why Francine should be broaching such a topic; she’d moved entirely on from her own mother and the baggage that had always accompanied that tiresome, confusing woman. 

“My dear,” Francine said, a smile appearing at the bottom of her painted, operatic face. “Tell me, though, I bet the funeral was just lovely, wasn’t it? Your mother always had such—well such fabulous, such eclectic taste. I’d be willing to bet she’d prepared some pizzazz even for her departure.” 

Anne felt the strongest impulse to laugh. She allowed herself to follow it, but only for a moment, before she wiped the corners of her mouth with her napkin, dainty like a Debutante. 

“She did not. She did not prepare one thing, if you must know. Except for a lot of money, for which I am most grateful. She had heaps and heaps of it, really, and now it’s mine.” 

Anne took a big swig of her martini, then said ahhh, not as one does after a bite of something tasty, but rather for a doctor wielding a tongue depressor. Francine’s grip on her purse tightened; her brows inched up her massive forehead like snails on a bleached driveway. 

“The funeral, yes, was very unkind of her,” Anne said. “She made us pick out everything and invite everyone and she made my daughter cry. The whole thing was tacky and cheap, just like she was. So I suppose it was rather fitting, wouldn’t you say?” 

Then Anne laughed a three-syllable cackle and popped an olive into her mouth, swallowing it without chewing. 

Francine looked like she’d seen a Country Club eviction notice, and—unsure how to perform kindness in the face of such improper behavior—quickly stuttered an excuse to take her leave. Anne felt herself dancing there in the booth, popping the remaining olives into her mouth and singing Bonnie Raitt’s “Something to Talk About” aloud, though only a soft, lo-fi music was playing. 

She signaled to the wide-eyed waiter across the room that she wanted another, and at once she saw the bartender already reaching for his silver shaker. And Francine thought this was her territory, Anne thought with a grin. They know me here, not you. 

What she’d wanted to say—if silly Francine were worth the time—was that funerals couldn’t be anything but tacky and cheap, encouraging a heap of smile-laden lies. Her mother had not been, as the preacher had said, “the best listener” or “the most attentive and put-together wife,” “always so charitable and generous.” Even Francine had hated Anne’s mother; she knew this, everyone did, it just wasn’t the right thing to say. But was it ever? Nearly everyone Anne had known had been fabulously mediocre, existing without causing a solitary ripple in the fabric of the world. 

Why, then, had she felt obligated to dab the edges of her eyes with a lacy handkerchief at the funeral of Mildred Patterson, the meanest, most spiteful hag in the church congregation? Why comfort the widow of Robert Reynolds, who had never kept his pants above his knees if a high school boy was within a ten-mile radius? She’d decided to stop all that when her husband died, just as everyone else cried, willfully forgetting the way he had borne so much of his daughter’s unhappiness as a child, for their daughter had indeed been a very unhappy child, Anne knew it, and she’d tried everything she could to make up for the crushing weight of her husband’s incompetence, his boorishness, which he’d hidden from everyone but Anne, and no one, not even her daughter, so much as noticed, driving her—was this the first and final cause?—crazy. 

Yes, funerals were always dishonest affairs, Anne thought, and that’s why I’m done with them; that’s why I won’t have one. Stand me up in Ooh La La and hang clothes on me like a mannequin instead. She thought this, then cocked her chin at herself as she popped the final martini’s final olive into her mouth, not knowing if she was serious or not. 

But something darker was beginning to rise and vibrate around her. It was a particular sort of dread she couldn’t recall feeling until that first night of dancing in Hilton Head: an utter dismay at the thought of the sun setting. At first during her sleeplessness, Anne’s mantra had been: the moon also sets, meaning: the day and the mall and the clothes and the martinis, they are coming. And yet even this had become a threat: the light in the sky, the kind you like, will go away. Every single day it will go away. This kind of light is too harsh, that kind too friendly, neither of them honest. So although for a while the singularity of the moon’s sheen had been enough to keep her warm, to keep her guessing with the way it sparkled off of whatever nonsense she was wearing at the moment, as all pleasures do, this, too, had begun to pass. 

The sun and the moon and the sequins were not enough anymore. She needed lightning. She needed a storm. She needed more. 

She couldn’t keep spending her entire nighttime like this: stirring gin into her coffee, then standing on her bedroom balcony in her fur coats and Louboutins, her body naked underneath, then re-entering as she began to shiver and taking out every photo album she owned and lighting every single picture that included her dead husband and her dead mother on fire. Let the dead be dead, she’d think to herself, surprisingly neutral and apathetic for a woman with fried hair charred like the underside of a salmon who was wearing last spring’s Valentino inside-out as she snuffed fire from a match at both ends. Even this could get old; even the lifelong photographs of a hoarder can be burned down to useless ash after enough nights spent in the lamp-glow of match-light. 

So when an autumn night’s temperature dropped uncharacteristically near freezing, Anne still opened all the windows in her house and prayed for the storm she’d heard the weatherman say might be brewing. Cold wind whipped through the mounds of clothes, blowing them about like thick, burdened confetti. Soon enough, from her balcony, Anne could see clouds covering the thin bands of light coming from the crescent moon; from them sprouted big, zig-zagged lines of electricity. She felt at once famished and energized. 

“Thank God for you,” she whispered out towards the storm. “Come closer, and I can get a taste of you, a third little swig.” 

Eventually, the clouds drew closer, Anne never having felt so in touch with herself. Thunder boomed louder, and she heard the distinctive pop of a transformer blowing several streets away. She thought she could even see a plume of smoke rising through the trees, and where there was smoke, where there was thunder, there was Anne, dashing out the door barefoot, running down the sidewalk, begging the storm to stay put for one moment, just until she could dress herself up all nice for it, slipping, cackling, holding the bustled bunches of her dress in her fists like a runaway bride, running. She felt like an Olympian, knowing, just knowing that what she had to do was sidle herself up to the prettiest, most elaborate, sickeningly expensive silver gown that Ooh La La had to offer. 

She told herself, one syllable per stomp, you-can-get-home-by-the-end-of-the-storm, you-can- get-home-and-join-the-storm-and-be-it, live-it, light-it-up-like-foil—she paused now, panting, in front of those beautiful shop doors—covered in diamonds. 

They were cleaning the shop then, past closing, but they hadn’t locked the door, and when they saw who was waltzing through it, despite her bare feet they did not stop her. Anne couldn’t have known that her bank account had dwindled down to nothing; she couldn’t know that the sin of a St. John frock she purchased that evening would be the last charge undeclined. For now, the charge rang up just fine. The cashier having learned Anne did not want a bag, she simply handed the clothes over the counter with a frightened smile. Anne took off all her clothes, even the undergarments, and changed into her new outfit right there in the middle of the store. She looked up at a security camera and winked. 

“No time for a dressing room!” she shouted with a smile as she bundled her previous outfit into a ball and threw it at the poor, horrified, delighted, scandalized cashier. 

Unknowingly penniless, Anne then sprinted back down the road, where thunder and rain and wind and lightning were all flickering as if she’d called upon up herself. And she had, she realized. She felt like a lightning-catcher of sorts, stirring up the wind like a wildfire, tasting the salt of odd-weathered hail on her tongue, slipping and nearly falling on the pavement, feeling electric the whole way and knowing, knowing, knowing that this was her time. It was finally Anne’s time. 

But—No! Not today of all days: foolish, silly, stupid old Barbara Ann the hairstylist was being escorted out of her car by a newspaper photographer who was camped out by Anne’s lawn, waiting for her return after being informed by the neighbors of her odd departure. Though it seemed everyone in town had forgotten Anne was a person at all, Barbara Ann had been worried. (Which meant: Barbara Ann had missed the crazy, exorbitant funds that Anne had poured into her hair.) Where had Anne been these past several months? The relief she initially felt at Anne’s absence had been hijacked by a dryness in her own dwindling accounts. Besides, Barbara Ann could not fathom continuing to be associated with the wet, wild, mopped-out mess atop Anne’s hair in the papers. She must, she thought, go check on the old hag and beg her to come back. 

“Oh, Anne!” Barbara Ann shouted as she saw her client approaching, and because she didn’t hardly know right from left, she didn’t take in the way Anne had her teeth bared, the way she was running towards the hairstylist like a hungry lion. “Thank goodness you’re okay! My, your outfit. Well, I’d heard about it but I swore it couldn’t be true. Anne, we’ve got to get you—Anne? Anne! Stop running so fast, Lord have Mercy you’ll kill us both. Anne!” 

She sprinted into the yard, furious with Barbara Ann for stealing her moment, for planting her feet at the exact place on the lawn where Anne felt certain the lightning would strike, just where it had found her before. She barreled straight into Barbara Ann, who yelped, whose skull collided with the side of Anne’s shoulders, who fell onto the ground screaming and yelling, then quickly pulled her mess of a self upwards, holding her head in her hands, frantically yelling to the journalist—who was too busy snapping photos to care—to help her back into her car because her friend had truly gone crazy, had finally lost it this time, and Jesus why was no one helping her? 

Anne had moved on. A small gray bunny hopped across her yard and stopped just a meter away from her. It looked into her eyes, reminding her of her mother. Those eyes were wide open, despite the rain crashing down on top of them. Then—as if she’d made a direct phone call to the Lord Himself—lightning struck the patch of grass between the two of them, Anne and the bunny. The only photograph of them staring at each other was ruined by the synchronicity of the sky-flash and the one from the camera, so that, while the journalist would assume he had imagined the bunny—it couldn’t be—Anne would know that she had not. 

She smiled at the bunny while the journalist stumbled backwards and covered his eyes, hindered as his vision was from the light, while Barbara Ann scooted away in her car and the journalist ran down the street on foot, head turned away from this madwoman all coated in silken, shiny shards of silver fabric. Anne simply smiling, Anne laughing, Anne dancing. 

This time the sky had spoken to her differently, but it had spoken all the same. The sky was her friend. Looking up at it, she thanked it. Anne made a plan that, tomorrow and the next day, however many days it took, she’d haul every single piece of sparkly and furry clothing out to a patch of land beyond the town and she’d light a match; she’d watch her old identity go up in flames and she’d adore every second of it. 

Then with that long-delayed matter of business complete, she’d call a realtor and sell her house and she’d move somewhere else—maybe Florida, maybe Oregon, she’d heard good things about Finland, and there was always the back room of Ooh La La down the street after they closed all the doors and shut off the lights and went home. 

She winked at the bunny in the yard and she flipped up the tail of her frock like a villain’s cape in a movie; then she turned and walked back towards her house and she decided, fully and finally, that she hated everyone. Not passionately, not angrily, but simply. So perhaps hate wasn’t quite the word, but—she thought—what was an absence of love except for a particular brand of hate? Love was such an exhausting emotion; it took too much. Her mother, the moon, her daughter, her sleeplessness, even her god-awful husband—she talked poorly of them all, chastised and chided them all when they became inconvenient for her, challenging her good graces, but this, she knew at once, had only been to protect herself, for she had loved them all and never gotten so much as a smile in return from any one of them. 

No, love did not work for Anne, love was no longer, love was over. And what a relief it was. 

That was when she, too, knew she had become Crazy-Anne. But despite the amped-up reputation that would begin to encircle her ever more ferociously now, she refused ever to be unhappy again. She liked Crazy. Crazy looked good on her, chic like a trend. The metamorphosis was complete; no one would utter her name again without its prefix, and she imagined that when they did, she would smile, knowing that the ones labeled Crazy are—have always been—the only ones who get it. 

For the first time in weeks, Anne felt tired. That night she slept soundly, resting her head not only upon the piles and piles of clothes bound for flames on the outskirts, but also upon the understanding of her own understanding. She did not dream, and when she awoke, all the charred-out hair on the top of her head had fallen off onto the floor, where it sat atop a Gucci cardigan rimmed with black lace. She laughed and laughed, tears of knowing streaming down her face as she rushed—exuberant—to find a mirror in which to view her final form.