Chapter 3
Jess
The thing about the days getting longer as the new year wore on was that it fucked with Jess’s head. Every Friday she hit up one of her favorite coffee shops in Northwest, got some work done, and jetted around five to do some grocery shopping and head home to Southwest. (An hour-long trek, but a girl was willing to make the commute if it meant she got more work done.) During Christmastime, this usually meant emerging from the dark, cool coffee shop to find pitch-black darkness hanging over the earth like an angry veil. Now, in the warming air of February, it was still daylight when she walked out of the café.
She stood at the intersection beside Trader Joe’s, where a busker played guitar for tips and tourists traipsed about with their wallets hanging out of the back of their pants. The suspiciously long light made Jess get out of her phone and check the bus schedule. If she got in and out of Trader Joe’s in her usual record time, she could pick up the #77 bus down to Fifth and Pine, where either the #44 or the #12 could dump her ass at home. If she were lucky. Sometimes the bus came five minutes early, and she would be stranded unless she braved walking a few blocks in either direction to catch the #15 or the streetcar.I’ll have a bag full of groceries…
Life was hard.
Honestly, Jess obsessed over these details because it was better than letting her brain wander to where itreallywanted to go.
Shannon Parker. Sunday night. The most gorgeous, ephemeral storm to ever come blowing back into Jess’s life.
She was convinced it was a dream. Then again, most of her memories of Shannon felt like dreams now. That’s what happened when a woman matured between her college years and full-blown adulthood.“Ah, yes… Shannon. I remember her. Boy, I really had it bad for her, huh? Typical straight girl stuff.”Jess wasn’t completely convinced that it was Shannon she saw at the teashop almost a week ago. That was preposterous. A manifestation of her brain doing… things. Yes, things! That was it. Jess’s family had a terrible history of mental regressions and other health issues. It was only natural that the moment she hit thirty, Jess began hallucinating.
She looked up, catching sight of the first star of the evening. The night would be clear. The Super Blue Blood Moon (or was it the Super Blood Blue Moon?) a week ago had almost been missed, although an astrology buff like Jess made sure to set her alarm so she could behold the most awesome sight since the solar eclipse.
Astral bodies up to no good tended to bring about… change. Some mythologies suggested they brought spirits with them as well. Charles Dickens would say that the image of Shannon was a ghost of Jess’s past. Or maybe she was a specter of unfortunate things to come.
It wasn’t her.Jess removed her shopping bag from her backpack the moment she stepped into the supermarket.Just another woman who looked like her.Shannon had a strikingly soft face. It didn’t matter if she changed her hair color. Her style was the same. Her presence was undeniable.
Yup. Jess was losing her mind.
She slammed her backpack into the bottom of the grocery cart and steered it toward the produce department. Bananas. Apples. Potatoes. Her brain went through a mental list, hoping it would stop painting pictures of Shannon.
Even though her damned brainlovedpainting pictures of Shannon Parker, also known as Aphrodite and occasionally doing business as Lilith, the feminist demon who escaped the Garden of Eden with a pair of bat wings.I love Lilith. Red hair, shutting down the patriarchy…That bushy hair Shannon sported in the teashop was like gazing into a kaleidoscope from the ancient past. Except she always had that effect on Jess, didn’t she?
That’s why it had been so hard to let her go. Three years of Jess telling herself that there were other women out there who could steal her soul like Lilith – uh, Shannon – had. A year of throwing herself at a man, in the hopes that pursuing a bisexual life would help purge her mind of that one woman she loved with all her heart. Escaping the country, because this one held too many memories.
None of that would have affected me so much if you hadn’t…
If Shannon hadn’t reciprocated Jess’s unrequited love that one. Fucking. Time.
Good for her, opening Pandora’s Box in Jess’s heart. Not like she needed every quadrant working at top functionality anymore. That was for well-adjusted individuals, not lesbians still crying over that One Straight Girl from college.
Jess took a deep breath in one of the aisles. Her basket was half full of items she grabbed while on auto-pilot.
She turned the aisle to check out the frozen stuff. Fried rice. Burritos. Turkey burgers. That was it. That was her mission.
Bumping into an actual angel wasnot part of the mission.
Jess stopped dead in her tracks the moment she saw Shannon from behind. No. Nope. That wasn’t her. That was a lookalike. Another doppelgänger. Some woman who had killed poor Shannon and stolen her skin. Not. Shannon.
The worst part? Knowing that their encounter Sunday night had been real. That this woman, bending into a freezer to grab bagged shrimp was back in town and ready to break hearts once more.
Jess attempted to turn around before she was sucked into that vortex of shit and shame. Yet the aisle was crowded at half-past five, and an elderly man in a trench coat and fedora had blocked Jess’s way so he could decide between regular and gluten-free waffles.
Unfortunately, that meant Jess had no choice but to keep going forward. With any luck, Shannon would remain enamored with fish and not bother to look over her shoulder. Instead, Jess glanced at her, catching a glimpse of Shannon’s hot pink bra strap slipping down her arm.
***
Memory #3
It was a dull evening in the dorm. I sat with my roommate Sara, watching TV on the large screen down in the basement. The lights were off to create a theater-like atmosphere. Occasionally, other residents walked behind us, on their way to the laundry room. They always looked over to see what we were watching. The sad thing? I remember. It wasDodgeball,of all mid-2000’s movies.
I was also doing my laundry. It must have been a weekend night, because all the machines were full, and people didn’t do their best to come get their crap. You know how it is. All you want to do is your damned laundry, but you’re up against a dorm full of assholes who don’t remember they left their pile of laundry in a machine for half the day.
I excused myself from the movie to swap my laundry from the washing machine to the dryer. Naturally, there were no dryers available. I picked one with a load that had long cooled off, signaling that the negligent owner of this wardrobe had really been out to lunch – and probably wouldn’t give a shit if I did what anyone else does in this situation.
