The Age Game
a short story
Ana peeked through the gap in the blinds against her better judgment though not much had changed. A gauzy brown haze hung over the street like 70’s curtains stained sepia by cigarette smoke and aged memory. A tiny orb of light filtered through the thickness, the single street lamp across the way, but nothing else cut the murk. Not the adjacent apartment building or cars crawling by on the street, not the sun high up in the sky nor the occasional helicopter combing the city from above. One glowing cyclops orb in what could have been an endless sea of brown and nothing else. Ana let the blinds snap shut.
“Okay,” she said to Sai who hadn’t left her chosen spot on the floor swaddled by a dozen or more pillows, “You’re going first?”
Sai nodded, solemnly.
“Thirteen,” Ana said, sitting down opposite Sai with her back against the wall beneath the window.
“Damn,” Sai replied. “Getting right to the hard stuff, huh?”
Ana shrugged. “Doesn’t seem like a time for tiptoeing.”
“Real.” Sai blew raspberries into the stale air, pink lips flapping like tarpaulin in the wind. “Okay.” She laughed. “This one would be really embarrassing if you hadn’t also been involved. Lol. Remember Jason St. Germain?”
Ana groaned and pulled her knees to her chest. She already knew what Sai was about to say. It was a terrible, wrenching game they’d decided to play but it pulled Ana so far into the physical history of her body, it was as though nothing beyond her skin and its experience ever had existed or ever would exist again. It was a twisted sort of presence. In the body, but scattered across the body’s time.
“Yes, I remember Jason St. Germain.”
Sai laughed again, tugging at her hair to gather herself. “At the semi-formal, when we were in the girls’ bathroom and he walked in and was, like, excuse me, ladies. Then pulled down his pants and waved his little dick around like a caterpillar stuck to a tree branch.”
Ana’s hand contained her gasp. “I forgot about that. How the fuck did I forget about that?” she said through her parted fingers.
“I tried very hard to forget about it,” Sai squealed. “But, I mean, Anaaaa. That was the first real penis I had ever seen and it was…not impressive.”
Somewhere far off or very close, a round of shots rang out like a rapid, hollow knocking, and something like a scream fell apart in the haze. Ana had never heard gunshots in her ten years of living in the city until the week prior and they’d hardly stopped since. She hardly flinched now though her wet laugh wavered.
Sai retreated further into the pillows but refused to relinquish her giggle, dragging it up her throat and gurgling on it until the gunshot’s echoing faded. “Okayyy,” she said into the stillness, “your turn. 14.”
Ana frowned. “Sequential order is boring.”
“Well, you don’t have to choose 15 next. I just wanted something from the same neighborhood.”
“Whatever,” Ana said. “Well, actually, I thought this was the story you were gonna tell. But I guess this was high school so we must have been 14. The day before summer break when Jason St. Germain asked us if we wanted to come over to use his pool and have a threesome with him and we were, like, hmmm maybe but obviously not serious. But also a little bit serious because we really wanted to have a pool we could use whenever we wanted.”
Sai was already laughing again. “Oh my god, didn’t we tell him we were scared of getting pregnant?”
Ana nodded dramatically, wielding her head like a hammer nailing down the memory. “I think you were like, My daddy would kill me if I went and got myself knocked up like we were good country girls from the Dust Bowl. And he said something like, Nah, ladies, I’ve got condoms. And then,” Ana choked on her laughter, then composed herself. “Then he pulled out a box of tampons and tried to tell us they were condoms.”
Sai keeled over. A dull siren whined from somewhere in the fog, barely keeping itself in order then sputtering out.
“That kid was a fucking idiot,” Sai said.
Ana wiped a tear from the corner of her eye. The thought of getting pregnant seemed almost as absurd now as it had then, regardless of her lack of interest in having a baby. A fresh red scrunchy face choking on the last fumes of humanity. The vision tugged angrily at the stringy muscles in her stomach.
“Where do you think he is now?” Ana mused.
Sai shook her head. “Not part of the game, ma’am. Next.”
Solemnly, Ana wrenched away from her pain and continued. “9.”
Sai made a face.
“What?”
“You know I don’t remember anything from before I was 10.”
“Yes, you do.”
She tried sitting herself up but collapsed into the lethargy of the pillows again. “Fine. Uh, that was the year my parents got divorced, i.e. why I choose not to remember anything from then or before…which you know…so I was probably at your house a lot. Maybe, playing The Sims on the desktop in your computer room. Remember computer rooms?”
Ana’s gaze drifted to the brown corner of her vision and then righted itself. “That’s your most vivid memory from being 9? Playing The Sims?”
Sai dragged her hands down her face, tugging the skin into obscene little pockets, the pink lining of her eyelids all wet and veiny like worms being ripped from the earth. “No. No… Um, yeah, okay. It’s hiding out in your room the day that my dad moved out, and your mom made us soup and we watched 13 Going on 30 under the covers and we played it over and over again until we fell asleep. Or, you fell asleep. I don’t think I could.”
All had gone quiet outside, which felt even worse. The end had to be loud or otherwise maybe it was already over? It would be night soon and what then? There were only so many years they could relive before they had to confront the inevitable.
“Thirty, flirty and thriving, huh?” Ana tried to laugh but couldn’t dredge the humor up from her polluted lungs. Making it through just a few more months to get to 30 seemed no more possible than reaching an arm out into the hazy city and holding that singular glowing orb in the palm of her hand.
Sai ignored her anyway. “18.”
Ana considered this with levity. The year her father died, also her first year living away from home for the first time in her life, also the year she came out, filled with too much regret to make it a joyous occasion. Still, amongst all the chaos only one memory surfaced.
“Our first college party. I don’t even…it’s such a little memory but it takes up so much space.” The silence outside was settling like a fine mist. It could have been that the two of them in Ana’s bedroom were the only people left in the entire city. “I had such a terrible night, I was too drunk to remember most of it. But I can still feel you holding my hand in the backseat of the car going home. My head against the cool window. The streetlights drifting by like neat little lines of fireflies. And you, squeezing my hand. Soft and sure, like you were checking an avocado for ripeness. The rest of the year was just…a fucking spinning vortex of non-stop tragedy, but that moment was so, I don’t know, concrete. It held me down.”
Sai pulled a pillow to her chest and squeezed. “Are all of our memories really just of each other?”
“The most vivid ones at least.” Ana half-grinned wishing she had a pillow to get wrapped around but all she could do was press her chin into her knees and remember all the places she could bend.
“5,” Ana said.
“Again, I’m an empty vessel for childhood memories…And you’re only saying that because you know the memory is about meeting you.”
“That’s correct,” she confessed.
Sai’s eyes flickered to the blinds as though their constant observation could keep the outside from ever getting in. She hunkered down once more. “You’d be so mad if it wasn’t–”
“I would not be mad.”
“You would be and you’d pretend not to be. But lucky for you, your dumb fucking face is the only constant in my life. Okay! Five goddamn years old. I remember my parents fighting like children, already, and we’d just moved into this house but it already felt…I don’t know, fucked by how much they hated each other. Like a change of scenery would ever have fixed their mess. My dad threw some shit in the kitchen so I just walked out the front door and neither of them noticed. I don’t even remember being scared, just wanting to be somewhere else. Feelings were so much easier to act on as kids. You just did shit because you wanted to.
“All I did was walk down the street, literally just a straight line but I was lost. Nothing made sense without a car window in between me and the world. And I was about to cry, and start calling out for my parents, but this…fucking girl, this idiot, decided to throw an entire volley ball at my head from her front yard. Weirdly, it stopped me from crying even though it sent me to the pavement. I looked up and there she was, standing over me with her ugly ass pigtails, offering me a hand.”
Ana smirked. She loved that story. Even though she remembered it differently, she never corrected Sai. It didn’t really matter the string of events that intertwined their lives for the past two decades and change, only that those events happened and kept them locked together until now, a terrible, endless moment that might collapse their timelines entirely. But at least they’d go out together.
“My little lesbian ass always did know how to throw a ball,” she mused.
Sai opened her mouth to reply and her voice was cut to pieces by a world-splitting noise. A new siren wailed like a banshee clawing open the industrial earth, a terrible Klaxon thing that echoed strangely operatic in the dense fog. Baroque. Ana reached instinctually for Sai’s hand and held it with a ferocity that spanned two dozen years of palm-to-palm contact. The siren swirled and moaned and consumed all other noise, not even Ana’s heart shouting in her chest penetrated the useless warning. Then it sputtered out and all the racket of cars starting and people spilling down the building’s staircase rose like a shitty interlude.
Ana and Sai did not move, sweat mixing in the space between their palms like bodies of water meeting.
There came a dull thud from the ceiling and then the sound of something shattering. A shadow swallowed the minimal light briefly as it slipped past the window and then hit the ground with a thwack. A broken sound crawled up the fire escape, like an animal squealing inside of a bloody trap. It sounded nothing like a human moan.
“31,” Ana said. She locked eyes with Sai and held her gaze with a new intensity.
“Ana.” Sai swallowed and it could have been tears or poison air she was choking down, but she choked on it regardless. “I don’t want to go.”
“31,” Ana repeated.
“It’s not even my turn–”
“31,” Ana said with finality. “It’s just one year, Sai. One year of survival is nothing.”
Sai inhaled through narrow nostrils. “Fuck. Okay. 31. Um. So, there’s a place in the mountains in South America, but its name doesn’t exist yet. We got there by boat. Women and children. The sunrises are insane, better than the sunsets and it’s the kind of village where everyone’s up early because we make our own public infrastructure and there’s shit to do. Real communist wet dream. But there’s you and me and we stopped at the cliff on the edge of town to watch the clouds get painted by all the weird morning light even though we’ve seen the sunrise every morning for months. We just had to stop. There’s that ratty little dog that followed us around everywhere, the one we named Banana because of his weird little jaundice eyes. He’s there, too. And we sat on a big, mossy rock and listened to the world wake up. The sky turned blue and all the warm colors bled away to make room for the day. You turned to me and said, ‘hey, remember Jason St. Germain?’ And we laughed. And we were okay.”
Ana squeezed all over. “South America, huh?”
Sai shrugged, self-consciously. “That’s just the memory that came to me. You remember that day?”
Gunshots raked the pavement on a nearby street, or maybe it was their street, or maybe it was the whole city. Nothing made sense in that putrid, human smog. Impossible to imagine a way out. The odds of two girls surviving thinner than topsoil.
“I remember,” Ana said. She pulled herself to her feet, then helped Sai from her pit of inaction. She eyed their bags parked by the front door. Thought about lugging all that shit to South America. She’d do it for Sai.
“I remember all our days,” Ana said.
That was a beautiful read
Didn't see the twist coming! Love this one