“You wanna know the weirdest shit?”
She did.
“When I was under with her, I had this thought.”
“Like what?”
“I’ll sleep beneath the golden hill.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You’re stupid. How would you? How would anyone? I thought I did, with the gator and then right after. But now…now…,” he drifted. Returned: “I dream of the water and of her…but it’s gone. We looped around again, and the dark and the silver from the moon above, and she took something from me, but she gave me something too. I almost had it. I almost touched it. It was right there. Then…,” he snapped his fingers and shook his head. “I almost had it. Why did I get to taste it, but I couldn’t have it?”
“What did she give to you?” Each time she blinked, she caught alligators in the corners of her eyes.
“Something real. Something I can’t forget. Because a lot’s gonna fade, and that night will only get farther away. But what about you? Are you going to forget? Or remember? That’s all there is. That’s the only line that exists between anything. The only separation—and all it comes down to is remembering and forgetting.”
“I don’t know,” Meadow whispered. “Is this all real?”
“Yeah, like forreal. Really, really.” Christopher scrolled through his phone. “Completely totally real, Meadow.” And then he was illuminated in blue, and the way he smirked at her made her wonder if he had been fucking with her the entire time. If it meant nothing at all. As if that night, and Christopher—connected in the dark, turning over and over, and breaking the black surface like a sky, with alligator eyes constellated into stars, to swallow at summer air—as if all of that meant nothing.
“Close the door,” he told her.
The glow of the TV in the living room and from beneath her parents’ door cast the house in a strange lunar hue. She went into the bathroom and looked at her reflection while she brushed her teeth. Soon it would be another day, she thought. Soon this moment would fog over and get lost. She tried to make sense of this.
Once she was in her room, she thought about how much she wanted a bowl of cereal.
What was that about the taste Christopher told her of? A single taste of something perfect and unreal and forbidden. She thought through all her favorite cereals, and in her state, the flavors were heightened. The milk was ice-cold and sweet—this was good. Her mouth watered. Her mind went further: offered her up banana French toast, peach nectar, and key lime pie. Passionfruit, pomegranate, overripe and leaking cherries, guava, pineapple hard candy.
Just barely, she caught a thread of jasmine on the air from an inch of parted window. She sat on her knees and shoved the rest of the pane up with her palms. Night poured in. Meadow sat and watched moths and their shadows drift in with the jasmine, sliding across her ceiling. They flitted between and around shadows of her hands. Stretched out, she stared until they were no longer her shadows. Her hands floated in another space, reaching, touching only shadow. Turning her wrist cut sharp shadows above her, toothy shadows—gator shadows, she thought. She merged them, made mouths and twins and dark outlined beasts of fingers and palms.
She slid into her little bed, tucked in the corner. As she drifted, she thought of gators. Alligators made up the ground under her feet and lurked beneath the swelling sea of jasmine and had jaws big enough to split the sun like a melon. Sour tangerines and hibiscus blossoming and bearing bloody juice and velvet petals, like the taste of summer. Meadow neared sleep’s ledge and as she began the tumble over, she jolted awake wondering if the wall before dreams was like the line that her brother almost touched, the only one that counted. She wanted to remember to ask in the morning.