"Take your shoes off, Taylor,” she said to him. It was still quite cool out that night; the mid-April chill pierced his bones. He knew that he could blow his hot breath into the air and see the heat lingering in front of him. He knew he could point this out to her, saying something about how cold it was, and that she would drop the subject, perhaps smiling slightly and shaking her head. Despite this knowledge, Taylor reached down and slid the slender chocolate straps off the backs of his heels, slipping his lanky feet out of the sandals, humoring the girl, Annabel. She grinned up at Taylor and swung her willowy arms at her sides in quiet victory.

The two of them walked to the bandstand in silence, sparing little smiles when they glanced at each other. The others babbled loudly around them, making dirty jokes and guzzling beers. Taylor didn’t drink, and from what he could tell, neither did she. Her hair was the color of sunshine and cropped up to her ears, wrapped up in a floral bandana that reminded him of Santa Cruz in the summertime, where the world is so full of color and life that it hurt to look. The ground was frozen beneath him; his feet throbbed from the cold. Annabel gently brushed back the top of her sweater, revealing the end of a navy blue tattoo that peaked out from underneath her thin, faded t-shirt.

They reached the area in front of the stand, and Taylor spread a plaid, woolen blanket over the crushed grass. Annabel sat heavily on it, wrapping her arms around her knees like a frightened child. Taylor took his lighter out of his back pocket, pulled up the flame, and cupped his hand around it, trying to transfer it’s heat onto his skin. After a few moments he handed it to the girl. She softly traced her finger over the Star Valley painted on one side.

“What’s Star Valley?” she whispered.
Taylor leaned back. “It’s this little town in the middle of Arizona. My dad bought it in this little hardware store where the owner liked to customize little things like that.” Annabel smiled at him and lit the flame as he had. Taylor watched her intently. He hadn’t told her that it was in that pit-stop town where he had first smoked a cigarette, an amused gleam lighting up his father’s hard blue eyes. It was the same lighter whose flame had been flicked on Taylor’s knuckles whenever he smarted off to his dad. Taylor stole it from his father’s desk drawer the evening before he left for college. He had spent the night spinning the smooth metal between his fingertips, pulling up the flame and blowing it out with a solid puff of his breath, amazed at his influence.

She handed the lighter back to him and grinned slightly. “Do you only take that out when you’re cold?” She said it teasingly, a sorrowful glimmer in her foggy eyes. Taylor sighed heavily. “These days I do.” He caught her interested look before he gazed up at the black sky. “I quit last year. The girl I was seeing...well, she wasn’t too excited about the idea.”

Annabel nodded slowly. “You’re a good boyfriend. Sorry it didn’t last.”

“Nah, it’s okay. I guess I didn’t like it that much anyways,” he said, a casual smile playing at his lips. Annabel grinned back, shaking her head. “You’re a nice kid, Taylor. How’d a guy like you end up here tonight?”
Taylor squinted his eyes slightly, as he usually did when he was trying to piece together the right words. “Just to live for a while.” Taylor spoke softly as he stared at the small, sad girl sitting next to him. Annabel’s colorless eyes grew wide.
“We could sit here all night and into the morning swapping our life stories. I could decide if yours is as desolate as you appear, and you could determine if I’m truly a nice kid. Let me tell you, I think you’d be surprised.” Taylor grew quiet, looking down at his brown, scarred hands. Annabel smiled brokenly, turning the chunky rings that swam around her pale little fingers. “Shoot.”


The band slowly began to seep in from the back of the bandstand. A thin woman accompanied by four tall men, all of them with long hair and a lazy look in their eyes. They were all donned in dark tones: blacks and navies, with the exception of the lady’s shock of vivid red hair. She strode to the center of the stage, her small eyes searching the audience of college students parked on blankets. The band suddenly struck up behind her and she began to sing in a deep, lovely voice.
Taylor looked at Annabel. She was the sea. Her voice broke like a rolling wave against one’s back. The emotions wandering in her body were raw as wind, flowing like the salty tide. Her eyes were closed gently, stress and tautness absent from her face. Taylor mimicked her, allowing the easy darkness to overtake him. He began to sway with the light pattern of the guitar, drifting.


Taylor glanced down the shore at his mother. She stood slight at the edge of the endless abyss of water, her bright floral dress flying loosely in the wind as her long blonde hair floated behind her. “Lovely,” he imagined his father saying, rubbing his lips together. Taylor thought the same thing as he watched her sit on the sand, looking up at the seagulls that spun circles in the sky, her plump lips stretched into a smile as she gazed at the cawing birds.

He ran down the beach, pumping his little legs to carry him further and further down the stretch until his mother was only a little speck in a sea of blue. They were on vacation at Lake Michigan that summer, and that day his father had chosen his older brother Dean to go with him to some car museum. Taylor had turned green with envy, but Model A’s and Mustangs were far from his mind as he waded into the water and searched the cushiony bottom of the lake for treasures. Taylor beamed when he pulled up a silky white stone. He skipped along the shoreline all the way back to his mom. He shyly held his small hand out to her in offering, his palm open wide to the sun. She tenderly plucked the stone from him, pulled him down next to her and pressed her lips to his hair. “Thank you, Taylor,” she’d murmured. He closed his eyes, smiling as he sank into the slender arms of his mother.


The band’s acoustic song grew weary and thin before it stopped. Annabel’s eyes were open now, wide and brilliant. The slender vocalist spoke soft, thankful words to the audience, her head bent so her face was invisible at Taylor’s angle. The crowd behind him laughed noisily, slurred words fused with loud slurps from glass bottles. The singer snapped her bony fingers and the band picked up again, taking on a more serious and intense theme. The barrage of bass beats made Taylor’s head throb as they blended with the white Stratocaster’s shrieks. An inferno of fury raged in his mind.

His father was sitting at the kitchen table with his hand over his eyes, crying like a frail old man. Their chubby yellow lab lifted its baggy eyes to him and nudged his knee, whimpering slightly. The broken man didn’t even swat him across the nose like he usually would. Taylor slowly walked over to him and touched his hair. “Dad?”

His father shoved a crumpled piece of paper at Taylor. He quickly scanned the note, allowing the reality of the event to seep into his mind. Slowly, he dropped the note and retrieved the dog bowl, filling it with the off-brand dog kibble kept under the sink. He then slowly walked around the house, noting the missing knick-knacks and pictures his mother must have taken. The house was as quiet as death. When he walked back into the kitchen, his dad was gone.

Taylor cautiously edged into the master bedroom, now his father’s room. The photograph of his parents on their wedding day was gone, leaving only a tacky golden frame, surrounded by shards of shattered glass. He peered into the bathroom and his eyes went wide at the sight of fire in the ancient bathtub. Taylor leaned forward, horrorstruck, to see the black and white snapshot engulfed in a riot of flames. His father gazed absentminded out the window as Taylor watched his mother’s bride-happy, beautiful face turn to ash. It would be nearly two months before his brother Dean would follow his mother’s example of leaving, taking his drug addictions and constant revelry with him. After he left his father wasted away, never speaking about that Sunday morning when a firestorm erupted from his lighter and his youngest son collapsed.

Annabel looked up at the boy, Taylor. His hazel eyes were squinted into slivers, probing through the stars to find the pale moon. She noticed her posture and sat up, straightening her spine. She pressed her shoulders back and craned her neck forward, like a bird. Annabel noticed Taylor staring in curiosity, and she smiled secretively at him. The band slowed and she dazed, her own memories now uncurling.

She was being smothered by blankets, shuddering violently. The heavy down of her parent’s comforter restrained her body as fresh waves erupted from her core. Annabel pressed her eyes closed, trying to pretend that the shrieks of TV Land thoroughly blocked out the soft voices seeping through the walls. As she listened in anguish to her mother’s cool, broken voice questioning Annabel’s older sister, she imagined her father’s black eyes hardening into an unsympathetic glower. Annabel quickly became nauseous as she eavesdropped on them, drowning in a sea of raw emotions and feelings. She pinched her arm to verify her reality and watched the white crescent moon lose its ghostly beam as it faded into the thick tension.

Claustrophobic in her solitude, Annabel shrugged on her coat and tiptoed into the kitchen, her dog following closely behind her. Words like ‘addiction’ and ‘influences’ floated like lost feathers from the living room, flooding Annabel’s mind. She softly opened the back door and escaped breathless into the construction paper night. Annabel stared at her sister through the window; her robin’s egg eyes were sandwiched between thick smears of mascara. She spun slowly from her house and sauntered leisurely up the street, her world turned black and white. The dog casually sniffed the ground as Annabel watched white snow fluff tumble gracefully to the ground, mingling with the icy sludge that lit up the roads. Returning home, she cautiously pressed the door open, easing herself into the house. Annabel peered into the living room and realized it had been deserted, the rooms now filled with a heavy layer of silence.

The band finished their show, resulting in a quiet sea of applause from the audience. The college kids slowly trickled from the park toting their warm, moth-eaten blankets. Taylor and Annabel folded theirs together. They walked in silence with their friends, stealing glances at one another. Taylor caught a glimpse of her tattoo once again and smiled. He hazily remembered the peculiar words from a story his mother had told him a long time ago.

Before they parted ways, both Taylor and Annabel wrote their numbers on each other’s wrists. The stained ballpoint pen danced over Annabel’s translucent skin, lingering like the prickly navy whispers breathed by a gun, etching lacy words into her shoulder. Both of them knew they were lying when they said they’d call. Wandering Chicago’s lit streets, Taylor realized that, in a few years, he would scarcely be able to identify the face of the pixie-like girl he sat with that night. He stared at the pale moonlight on his shoulders, and noted the almost peaceful feeling of silence running through his body. Taylor closed his eyes tightly, capturing it.