Galveston
by Theodora Ziolkowski
Image: “Bad Hair Day” by Sean Ewing
Lars is high as a kite when the first blow comes. I am wondering how long it will take him to realize what happened to the blonde.
We are in his mom’s basement, Lars’s “apartment.” Another slasher flashing across the TV. The loveseat is barely big enough for us both to fit, but Lars sprawls across it anyway. My head cradled by his armpit, our legs a tangled heap.
“Look, Lars,” I press pause. “Look what happened.”
On the screen: The murderer’s gloved hand clutches a knife, and cartoony blood coats the blade.
Lars hunches over the coffee table, clicking his lighter. Viking hair matts his shoulders. He passes me the bowl, a courtesy. I resist with a smile, say that’s his. Lars knows I can’t get high, I’ve tried. There are a lot of things I can’t do.
Tonight I’m thinking about what it would take for me to leave Lars. A thought that only takes me so far. Lars and I have been together since I moved down here at the start of the summer. We met online, like most people. Now I have nowhere else to go, not really. A thought that makes the back of my throat itch but doesn’t stop me from imagining.
Lars wraps up, another cough. I point at the screen and ask if he caught that. “Did you see the first death?” Lars rubs his eyes with the inside of his wrist. Guesses the first to go, guesses wrong.
“You know the blonde is always the first to go,” I say.
Though he has a log-splitter’s name, Lars doesn’t know the first thing about wielding an axe or using his body that way. He has a fast metabolism, stays lean. But I know that it’s only a matter of time before he packs on the pounds, gains a pouch. Few can outrun everything.
Now he draws me in, hot breath in my hair. He says it’s cute, how I find him funny, and I laugh to fill in the space, my eyes trained on the TV. Patter of footfalls, a scrim of green trees. Bird’s-eye view of the summer home in the country.
I can tell that we’ll have sex soon. Red-eyed and dopey, Lars will worry the zipper of my jeans. Explore with his hand or, if he is feeling generous, go down on me. It doesn’t matter that his mom is upstairs, likely contemplating the latest Fiesta dish set on late-night QVC. Peggy’s proximity never stopped Lars from having sex with me.
In the movie, teens play flip cup, a phone rings. Someone’s coming, someone breathes.
All the girls start running.
I flew south as soon as I turned twenty, happy birthday. Inside my backpack: a ratty sweatshirt, seventy-five dollars, my driver’s license. Everything else I left at my dad’s place.
School isn’t even out yet, and already, tourists have begun to fill up the streets. The boardwalk is bright with live music, the slap of waves and the swell of voices. Visitors book rooms for the weekend, rides to ferry them to and from the bay. In the air, you can feel the vibration. The traffic trundling over the freeway, the bars spitting out twenty-somethings. All summer long, the atmosphere pulses with the sense that anything, at any point, can happen. I love the island for this reason.
Monday thru Thursday, I work parttime at Wave Babies, a daycare for kids that belong to privileged families. My shift is split between working the industrial dishwasher and performing the duties of a “floater,” for which I drift from one children’s room to another, filling in the gaps that need filling.
The infant room is my favorite. The babies can’t talk yet, and their bodies are like plump water bottles. I love the talcum powder hush in there, the warm bread dough of baby skin. When I cradle one in the glider, I pretend to be her mother. I hum, rock back and forth. Plant kisses on her cheek and say, “Hush, baby. Everything is okay.”
Everything is not okay.
Lars’s mom is a high-functioning alcoholic, and her best friend is me. During the week, Peggy works the front desk at the dentist’s office. I can see her signing in patients, marching them down the hall in her clogs. More than once, she’s stuffed her purse with complimentary floss and travel-sized toothpaste. She keeps a tub of these in the guest bathroom, though I am the only guest here, and I have yet to use one.
On nights when Lars falls asleep before I do, I wander upstairs to share a night cap with Peggy. With its rustic gingham checks and red-apple curtains, her kitchen is garish and Biblical.
Most of the time, our conversation follows the same trajectory. We talk about how Peggy found herself pregnant at fifteen. How raising Lars has been the best thing she’s ever done, and the hardest. On multiple occasions, Peggy expresses gratitude for her “tribe of moms,” moms I’ve never seen. The thing about having Lars so early, Peggy says one evening, is that she feels like she missed out on certain things.
I ask, “Like what?”
She says, “Like living.”
I pour us another glass, invite her to elaborate. Making my expression placid but encouraging. An open book that appears both unremarkable and enticing.
Peggy says she wants to find love, to go on adventures. “I want to find something I enjoy doing.”
“So you want to discover your purpose.”
Peggy shakes her head. “Raising Lars is my purpose.”
When he isn’t playing Grand Theft Auto—crouched on the ottoman, plugged into a headset—you can find Lars hacking into leftover casserole. Though she is always on some diet, Peggy keeps a tub of Crisco in the cupboard, makes bulk batches of Lars’s favorites. Casseroles that congeal in the oven. Colorful desserts comprised of fruit bits suspended in Jell-O. Peggy has a doughy complexion, no hobbies. One day, she eyed my waist and said, “How do you do it?” Then acted like she hadn’t said anything.
Lars has been employed at half a dozen restaurant chains but fails to keep his position. Evidence of his indolence that Peggy attributes to his still developing. After all, he’s only twenty-three. There is still so much for him to discover about himself, and the male brain takes longer to form—Lars could use some grace.
“Someday,” she says wistfully, “he’ll find himself, and that will be wonderful.”
I grew up in a tiny rural town up north that nobody’s heard of. When they learn where I’m from, all anyone can think of are snowcapped mountains and general stores carrying the jeweled amber bottles of maple syrup. Where I’m from, there are those things. But there is also hunting and mud season, flooring it through pine trees on a four-wheeler. Decent weed and the occasional mushroom trip. My dad’s house with its solar panels and wood stove. In the curiosity cabinet in the mahogany-paneled den: My mom’s Snowbabies collection.
Sometimes, I call him. On the payphone at the gas station down the block from Peggy’s.
“Hello?” Most times, he answers on the second ring. The gravel of his voice bringing me back to his farmhouse in the country. TV dinners, shitty internet. Spring water tapped from the stone cold well. And it is as if I am all the way back there, watching snow fall from our window.
“Hello?” my dad will repeat gruffly. Though I can sense in his voice a skepticism that is also hopeful. Like he’s been through this before, answering a call from an unknown number. Only to have it drop just before I find it in me to say hello.
For some time, things go down the same way. I wake early to go to Wave Babies, return with my t-shirt covered in formula and snot. I stay up watching horror movies with Lars and drinking gas station wine with Peggy. Then I fall asleep, only to get up again the next day, when everything repeats.
I meet Ethan on the Fourth of July, a day that breaks the monotony of the work week. This year, Lars is hosting a bunch of his guy friends at Peggy’s. I spend the morning wiping down the patio furniture and scraping out mayonnaise. I run into Ethan after Peggy sends me to the Publix for more mayonnaise.
I see him before he sees me. His cart is filled with sparklers, a store-made platter of crackers and cheese. He looks like he is going somewhere far more interesting than me.
I grab the mayonnaise, purposefully brush against him as I glide to checkout. It is when he notices me that I take him in fully.
Ethan is tall and lean. Skin so pale you can see the bluish green veins spidering his temples. His hair is the color of hash brown casserole, and he has very long hands and clown-sized feet. He reminds me a bit of the vampire in this book I’d loved as a teen. In it, a girl falls in love with a vampire who visits her nightly. The girl in the story is a lanky brunette, like me, and the rendering of the vampire on the cover looks a lot like Macaulay Culkin, but with extended incisors and a vampire’s black cape.
I don’t bother giving Ethan my name. I know that he’ll find me.
Peggy starts eating like me, and by that, I mean, she eats what I eat. It’s strange, to be copied this way. My hand drawing two ladles of peanut butter stew, then Peggy’s hand doing the same.
Lars graduates from Grand Theft Auto to a game that involves cultivating a kingdom of livestock and wheat. The objective is the opposite of the sort that usually keeps Lars entertained. Now he isn’t expected to kill anything.
A week after we meet at Publix, he DMs me.
Wanna hang?
I wait an hour and a half before responding, Who are you? Though, of course, I know perfectly well who he is.
It turns out that Ethan drives a serial killer van. Matte black, tinted windows. There is something wonderful about moving forward, destination unknown.
He lives on the other side of the bay, so to get there, we meet at a designated place. Soon as I buckle in, we’re off. Twenty minutes later, we cruise through a gloom of trees. Ethan’s cabin twinkles among branches like an optical illusion, surrounded by green. The interior is all wood, smells of balsam. It is like the destination in a fairy story, or the set piece for one of the slashers that Lars and I watch most evenings.
That first night at Ethan’s, time falls away.
What I like about Ethan is that he doesn’t require much energy. He asks if I want to lie down, and I agree without thinking.
He just stares at me, hair draping my shoulders. His bear rug warm on my back, the fur smelling of lint and black cherries. I keep my clothes on, remain still as a statue, the arctic A/C puffing above me. Eventually, Ethan says “okay, that’s fine.” I don’t need him to tell me that it’s time to get up, collect my things.
About my mother, this is what I remember: Her penchant for oversized turtlenecks in muted neutral colors. The hot-pink espadrilles she’d wear in the summers. The clap of her laugh, like billiards rolling across a green felt table.
But perhaps I only recall these things because of the family photo albums, the home videos recorded on my dad’s chunky camcorder.
Her name is Allegra, which means “happy and lively.” Only Allegra was neither of those things, which explains why she left in the first place.
The day after Ethan’s, Peggy and I go shopping. A neighbor is throwing a block party, and Peggy wants to look pretty.
I help her choose an assortment of billowy floral numbers. Peggy is partial to the kind of busy patterns that resemble Victorian wallpaper.
When she summons me to the fitting room, her face is blotchy, she’s obviously been crying. She pinches the fleshy roll above her waistband. Laments the time she was my age.
I swat her hand away, tell her she’s looking better. Which isn’t a lie, either. Since eating like me, her skin has been glowing.
At Wave Babies, the preschool room’s pet gerbil dies. The toddlers all get pink eye. It’s almost August, and the heat isn’t breaking any time soon. Even the waves outside Wave Babies seem to flatten. When a mother drops her newborn off for the first time, I see her point to me and ask the head teacher, “Is she old enough to be taking care of my child?”
The third time I finish posing for Ethan, he appears with a tea tray—an actual tray with a silver kettle and a pair of gilded Turkish glasses.
He motions for me to sit. In the hearth, the fire spits sparks, and though the temperature is warm outside, his place is drafty. I wear the blanket he offers like it is a cape, and I a queen.
That night, we talk about books, first crushes, our favorite horror movies. The rhythm of our exchange straight from a romcom, with its playful nudges, though Ethan takes the lead on asking the questions. The tea is very hot and very herbal, a garden set ablaze. If anything is going to happen, I tell myself, it would have already happened.
Ethan drives me back with his blanket still draping my shoulders. Out the window, the night is a smear of stars. Somewhere, the sound of the sea.
Allegra was fond of gambling. She liked the slot machines, with their colorful glowing lights and twinkling cash register noises—ka-ching! My dad hated the casino, so she would show up there on her lonesome. Once, she brought me with her, and I can still remember the waitresses in short skirts ferrying drink trays. The salty grease of fast food mixed with the chemical smack of carpet cleaner, the frosted floral notes of Elizabeth Arden perfume—Allegra’s favorite.
By the time September rolls around, Lars scores a job at Whiskers.
A thing I like to do is stroll in. Hoodie up, sunglasses on—incognito as possible. On days I wait for him to notice me, I pet the kittens and bunnies. I explore the marine-life and reptiles, taking stock of the sage-faced iguanas. I float the aisles up and down, my disguise a game. If Lars picks me out, I’ll kiss him on the mouth, right there in the shop. If not, I’ll swing by Orange Julius for pretzel bites and a sundae, which I’ll eat until my stomach hurts, or I get brain freeze. Whichever comes first.
It rains later that week. A cold front moves in. Peggy signs up for a bi-weekly art class and only stays up drinking on some nights. On Saturday, Lars puts down his game controller, suggests we go on a date. We ride bikes to the boardwalk, play games like plastic boat race and balloon darts, share a sticky wand of cotton candy. When it gets dark, we line up for the Pirate’s Plunge.
The flume bobs along before the current picks up, gathers speed. Water splashes our laps as we dip through one series of rapids, then another. As we snail our way to the peak of the creaky ride’s dark mountain, I almost miss the time before Ethan, or the time before Lars—I’m not sure. In my best moments, I feel on the brink of something, and the thing is, that has always been my favorite part: Gripping onto the rails, nosing the drop. Like the glint before you lean in for a kiss, knowing full well what’s coming next.
The next time I meet Ethan, our encounter wraps up the same way. We gather around the fireplace. Turkish glasses in hand, blanket cascading from my shoulders. From my view on the floor: the bear rug’s hangdog grin.
That night, I ask him why he asks me to pose like that, and Ethan says, “You remind me of someone.”
“Who?” I ask and am met with silence. “Who?” I say again. Seeing my wide-eyed face reflected, a great-horned owl blinking from our Turkish glasses.
I soon bring home more of his items. In my corner of the basement—the basement apartment I share with Lars—is my backpack, and in my backpack is the glass paperweight from Ethan’s desk and the almond bar of soap I filched from his tub, which has real ground-up almonds. On my back is his t-shirt—a detail that Lars will never notice—and in my mind are thoughts of all the girls I am or could be.
When Lars is asleep, I crawl to my backpack and look at Ethan’s things.
Allegra won big, once, at the casino.
I wasn’t with her. Wasn’t there to see her cash in her chips, be escorted by security. I was home, outside, on my back. Fanning my limbs out and in, out and in. Making angels in the snow.
“What’s this?” I indicate the paper sack with a nod.
Ethan and I are sitting side by side in his van after another night of my posing for him. He slides the sack across the console. Macaulay Culkin cheeks reddening, he looks bashful. He asks me not to open it, “wait until you’re home.” He says he wants me to wear it some time, “but only if you’re comfortable.”
I wait until the right moment. I wait until I am back at Peggy’s and have made sure that Lars is asleep. Then I wrap myself in Ethan’s blanket, open the sack, and reach.
It’s October when Peggy brings back the works she’s created. Her class is focusing on perspective, on accurately capturing the angles of light and shadow, conveying the illusion of distance on a two-dimensional surface. Some of her drawings are rendered in graphite and pencil; others, in the sunset red and orange hues of oil pastels. Meanwhile, Lars takes on more hours at Whiskers, adopts a clownfish. He fills a tank with neon gravel, a plastic treasure trove. I have never seen him care so much for a living thing before.
The night before I plan to leave him, Peggy completes her art class and I quit my job. We go to a seafood place to celebrate her. The restaurant is dank, like the belly of a ship, and smells like buttered lobster and toilet bowl cleaner. For most of the year, it’s a tourist trap, but whatever. They have the best margaritas on the island.
We order oysters on the half shell for starters, though neither Peggy nor Lars like oysters, it’s just to be fancy, and Lars asks for multiple rounds of complimentary cheddar biscuits, his pupils dilated and his hands grabby. Peggy is the happiest I’ve seen her, air-cheering with her frozen margarita. She looks good, I think. Maybe the best ever.
The surprise of the Pirate’s Plunge is that a camera snaps your photo as the flume makes the final drop. You can purchase an overpriced print of it afterward. That, or a keychain, a mug, a Christmas ornament emblazoned with the photo.
In the one of Lars and me, our faces are windswept, our cheeks pulled back. Lars makes a rock-on sign with his hand, while my eyes are closed but my mouth is wide open.
I leave the photo in Peggy’s basement for Lars to discover once I leave him.
Things go on with Ethan. On Halloween, I wear the fuzzy black cat ears and tail from the paper sack he gave me. We finally have sex, and after, I wake to find him holding my cat ears and staring at me. Some afternoons, I fall asleep on the bear rug, and on the inside of my eyelids is a constant stream of the possible girls Ethan imagines me to be. During the day, when Ethan closes himself in his study to do whatever it is he does to make money, I walk barefoot across the chilled floors of his place, snack on apples and walnuts and on the chalky rinds of imported cheese. From time to time, I consult the globe in his library. I give it a whirl, close my eyes, and locate where on the globe my finger lands once I stop its rotation. Then I picture a life for myself in that place, even if my finger points straight into the ocean. Almost always, I think about my dad, eating a TV dinner on a TV tray, or Allegra and her slot machines, wherever she is. Then I will myself to stop thinking, rinsing my mind until it is blank.
In the beginning, I consider Lars and Peggy often, I wonder what they are up to. If Peggy is still losing weight, if she is still painting. Is Lars still cleaning cages and replacing pet water at Whiskers? Does he still look after video game acres, his clownfish, watch slashers?
But then enough time passes that Lars and Peggy become a distant memory. I get used to being with Ethan, my needs cared for. Drinking tea from his Turkish glasses every afternoon, around four, and then dining on salmon he gets shipped from Alaska to his stately cherrywood table. I grow accustomed to having nowhere to go and nowhere to be. No longer a stranger to the balsam pong of his cabin, the fruit bowl of humid apples. I drink less than I have in the past year, and my surroundings become sharper, my desires less urgent. We go to the ocean sometimes, at sunset, but only once the weather turns cooler. I ask Ethan who I remind him of, over and again, until his silence loses meaning and I decide that the girl I’m sure I’ve replaced may as well be me.
Then one day, in that awful gray spell that settles shortly after the new year, Ethan makes the same drive we used to take. His van is smaller than I remember. The windows dirtier. Owls hoot as we peel away. When we get into town, he pulls into the gas station. The same Valero with the payphone, which I once used to dial my dad. Waiting to hear his voice on the other end, the phone a slippery black eel in my hand.
Ethan gets out, starts the pump. He raps on my window, asks if I want anything, and for the first time in months, I am outside his walls, alone with myself. I touch the veined brown leather of his steering wheel. I comb the glove compartment, the seat pockets, collecting whatever I can find. The coins and receipts and straw wrappers filling my fingers. There is a moment when I can see Ethan inside the gas station, moving through the aisles, and there is another when I’m heading to the payphone, half dreaming that I’m back up north. The ground is covered in snow—so white it makes my eyes sting, like it’s supposed to—then the gas station door opens, and who should step out is not Ethan, but a woman.
I move the coins in my fist, or I drop them—I don’t remember. But Peggy is close enough that I can make out her eyes, she is looking right at me. And for the first time in my life, I see myself how the world sees me.
Theodora Ziolkowski is the author of the novella, On the Rocks (TRP: The University Press of SHSH), winner of a Next Generation Indie Book Award, and Ghostlit (TRP), a collection of poems. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in The Writer's Chronicle, Short Fiction (England), Prairie Schooner, The Normal School, Oxford Poetry (UK), and elsewhere. She lives in Kearney, Nebraska, where she teaches creative writing as an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. She also serves on the faculty of the University of Nebraska, Omaha, MFA Program. Read more at theodoraziolkowski.com
Sean Ewing is a visual artist inspired by the natural world and the delicate interplay of light and shadow. He endeavors to capture the quiet beauty of ephemeral moments, evoking a sense of serenity and introspection. His work often reflects the serene landscapes of dawn and sunset, creating a space for viewers to pause and explore their own reflections. Sean’s art invites contemplation and offers a peaceful retreat from the chaos of daily life.