Matilda
A boy just moved in across the street- his name is Oliver but he looks just like Ben Willoughby who has been missing for two years now. His family packed up and relocated seven months ago. I remember the day I saw them fit their entire family home life- or what was left of it in the absence of one of the four family members who once shared that life- into the back of a moving van, I remember it so well because the same day I stepped on a bee and saw hundreds of dead bees littering the lawn. I've had a dreamcatcher above my bed since before I met Ben even. Ever since Oliver moved in there with his stepmother and father and their cinnamon-coloured dog whose name I don't know because I've never cared to ask, ever since then, I've stared at the feathers and beads dangling from the dreamcatcher before I close my eyes to sleep, fixed my eyes on their slow rotation until I felt dragged by the tides into dreamless slumber. Last night I made the mistake of looking at it before I lay down. I saw right through it's middle and out of my bedroom window. I saw Ben Willoughby, standing on the lawn. He was dripping wet and his eyes were glowing amber and he was watching me. He was accusing me. His eyes said, I know. Oliver is in my class at school and even sits close to me just like Ben did, because my name is Wittenstein and his is White, but I can't look at him. He might know something too.
Bernadette
I died falling headfirst over the banisters of my stairwell at home. My life, the way they tell you it will, flickered in the forefront of my vision as the floor grew closer. I watched my boyfriend's shoulders slowly rise and fall with his snores in sleep, I watched and felt him kiss me, the sensation warm on my lips, I watched him shave from my perspective standing in the shower, and falling I felt the hot water falling with me too. I saw my mother applauding from the eighth row of the audience as I collected by Doctorate degree. I saw my cousin holding her newborn baby in her arms in a room crammed with flowers so thickly I could smell them, I had a tickle in my nostrils. I saw my father bandaging my foot after I'd injured it while rollerblading and the floor was so close my eyes already shut. When I opened them I was sittting on the bench, poured all over with sun, in the park where daffodils swarmed, spreading like yellow oceans. A sea of light-petals to swim in. And my father was taking pictures of them with his black and white film. I didn't understand that at all. My ankle was smarting and my father was bald on the top of his head as he dropped to squat and meet my eyes, said, 'Ready to go again' and he pulled me up by the hand. I began to rollerblade again and this time I didn't fall.
Dalton
I always watch people, feeling slightly out of place. There is something so fascinating about people and their wooden hinges, metal teeth, and leaking eyes. They lay with lovers in cold beds and they catch their children, cradling him or her in their arms. They push shopping carts and purse their lips. When it is cold, they tuck their arms into sleeves. They are much like me, and that is why I feel out of place, for I am watching a ticking reel of browned and borrowed film. It is passing my eyes and plugging the cracked basins somewhere inside or underneath but that I can't locate, I just know it's part of me. My strip of film is scratched and I don't belong and nobody wants to see what I have accumulated on my reels. Damage just doesn't work for people, even if they pretend to be okay with the idea of it. It took me a while to reconcile with the actuality that the episodes of my life are just as worth watching as theirs, my scrolls of film just as valuable. Not even in spite of the scratches. Because of them. Not many others see it that way, but it's okay now I do.
Lorelei
Benjamin is weary from being missing, from nobody looking. He's brooding and cracking his knuckles in the house and in the woods on the walk to the lake and behind the shed where the bikes are locked. His eyes might be dark, reminiscent of a cult, which worries me so I daydream of bringing him soup and berries and The Jungle Book. We sit together on the roof not eating or reading but looking off to the past first days of spring when it was better. He pushed the hair out of my eyes, said the valley was vague and gaping like a nightmare. I had hoped he wouldn't say things like that. Every night afterwards I took to tucking a pill under my tongue and pretending I didn't know what he meant, but I knew. I had thought it first. Body bent in half and voice blank. One day is harder than most to leave behind, I know the date, it doesn't need marking on my calendar but comes by every year, as he comes by everyday without being here at all. He comes with red eyes and won't look away. Darkness overtakes the room. Inside of myself a flower blooms in illusory blood with wet heavy petals one by one falling into what I understood in the language of the empty, but have no translation.
