Forsaken Stars

A magazine writer begins to see his lost love in his apartment, at work and in his car and he can’t figure out if she is a dream, a memory or delusions–and then he begins to see other versions of her. Did she ever really exist? And what is she now? Who or what is the Echo Girl? A science-fiction/horror romance influenced by Asimov, Bradbury, Ellison and Niven, drawing from the writer’s own personal struggles of the last two years, including divorce and depression, the Echo Girl is a slow burn that amps into a brain teasing thriller and ends in an unsettling twist. Includes poems “I am the End” and “This Author’s Corpse Vow” and flash fictions “We Found it in the Forest” and “Cut Off.”

I finished the article, late, and went out for a drive. I wanted to hit some curves, so I drove out to Friant, nearly up to the dam, but that was a stupid idea, because that’s where we had one of our first great make out sessions.

“You’re ridiculous,” she said appearing next to me as if she had always been there. I nearly ran off the road.

“Jesus! Where do you come from?”

“You spent the afternoon researching small businesses and bagel recipes and flirting with that Bagelrama cashier over the phone when you should have been researching the Alternate Worlds Theory,” she said, sounding more like Joey Lauren Adams on a B-Zet track than usual.

“First of all, I was not flirting. Kayree is way too young for me anyway, but, you’ve gotta admit, she makes a phenomenal bagel. Second of all, are you a ghost? Because ghosts are known for being cryptic and indirect. I mean, why should I dig through countless books, when you could just tell me?”

“Because I’m not a scientist! Not a physics type, that is. I’m a criminology major. I’m a little bit of a browncoat, but definitely more a Hogwarts girl. I can’t help you here. I need your help.”

“Are you in trouble?” I asked, my stomach contracting.

“I don’t want you to worry about me. But maybe. I think I’ve become unstuck.”

I glanced over at her and she was biting her lip as if she has just drank the last of the milk.

“What? What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“It’s hard to put into words. Sometimes I’m here with you…and then I’m somewhere else. Sometimes you’re there too. Sometimes you aren’t.”

I pulled the car over, harder than I planned. It jerked to a stop. I took hold of her by her shoulders. She was warm to the touch. I looked in her eyes, drank her in. It hurt to look at her she was so beautiful, so sad, yet there was a trace of a smirk on her lips.

“Do you still love me?” I asked. The words caught in my throat, but I managed to choke them out.

“Of course. I’ll always love you,” she said.

She had said those words a year ago too, just before she left. Or did she leave at all?

Maybe I’m the one that’s unstuck, I thought.

I tried to focus. I tried to remember the last time I had taken my meds that help me do just that. Couldn’t remember. Ha. “Do you want to stay? With me, I mean?”

Her face contorted as if I had just driven a spear through her belly. As if I was insane for asking that particular question.

And then she was gone.

The shock of her sudden disappearance catapulted me out of the car. I scrambled around like an idiot looking for her on the other side, down an embankment, under the car. I slammed my fist against the top of the roof of the car and tears came.

When I wiped them away, I realized I was holding one of her hair ribbons in my hand.

“It’s like Nightmare on Elm Street,” I explained to my buddy Hayo, a fellow spec fic writer, under the guise of explaining the plot of my latest novel, over chilé colorado burritos. It was a brisk afternoon on the plaza adjacent to the Tacos Del Fuego Food Truck.

“So it’s akin to Nancy holding on to Freddy Krueger’s hat. Because of your hero’s connection to his love, he is able to hold onto one of her hair ribbons, so it gives him the idea of trying to pull her completely back into his reality from wherever she goes to whenever she isn’t with him.”

“Right!” I said, feeling like a great weight was about to shift off my shoulders.

“The difference is that Nancy knows which dimension Freddy is from–the dream dimension. She has some modicum of control over whether or not she enters that dimension by taking sleeping pills or drinking obscene amounts of coffee. Your hero only has an inkling his lady is from an alternate reality and no idea how or why she is slipping into his.”

Each of Hayo’s words were fists striking at my solar plexus, forcing every drop of air out of my body, leaving me bewildered.

I simply needed more information.

For the time being, I would try to not think about her, so I turned the conversation to Hayo’s latest endeavors–putting on muscle mass, trying to date two women at the same time, and world-building his historical time travel masterwork, Pocketwatch & Prophet.

After a long and intellectually mind-bending lunch, I went to the library determined to find something that would shed light on our predicament, but the chilé colorado burrito did me in, and I ended up drifting off in one of the large leather chairs deep between two towering bookcases.

I woke up to her unbuttoning my shirt and kissing my chest. Her hair swept along my skin as she moved down to my belly. She had added a red streak to her hair since I had last seen her, and when she looked up to make contact with my sleepy eyes, her eyes almost glowed out from pools of dark, gothic eye shadow. She reached up to stroke my chest with on hand while she pulled at my belt buckle with the other, and I noticed a tribal style tattoo of a bearded dragon along her forearm.

“When did you get that?” I asked at possibly the worst time imaginable.

Her lips popped off of me and she let out an incredulous laugh. “Really? You want to talk about my ink now?”

“Sorry, you feel amazing, of course, it’s just–” I looked around, “are we still in the fucking library?”

“Yeah, I thought you could use a break,” she said, massaging me, “you’ve been working really hard.”

I felt a wave of ecstasy pulse through my pelvis and radiate outwardly. “Uhn,” I moaned.

“You like that?” she said.

“We should probably stop,” I said, adding, “I mean, relocate.”

“This won’t take long,” she said. “You’re almost there. I can feel it.”

I was completely consumed, but also felt the nagging sense that we would be caught any second.

“Oh, God, hey,” I said, reaching down to caress her face, to maybe get her to stop, to look at me so that I could show her in my expression how much I enjoyed what she was doing, and that we should continue back at the apartment.

Before I completely lost all reason, she looked up and broke into her open mouthed smile, revealing long, sharp incisors and canines.

“What?” I thought as she dove down on me again, this time sinking her teeth deep in my flesh, sending blood shooting across my belly, chest and face.

I woke up in the library, gasping for air, clutching my crotch, pulling at an extremely uncomfortable fold in my jeans that had been pinching my testicles.

A pretty blonde with large black rimmed glasses peered into my spot between the book shelves.

“Are you okay?”

“Y-yeah. I just read the end of For Whom the Bell Tolls,” I said with a Harrison Ford shrug.

She nodded slowly and turned away.

I have to stop watching so much porn, I thought. I checked out a few physics books and sci-fi novels and went home.

“I was a what?” She asked.

“A vampire,” I said to her, brushing my teeth the next morning while she did her make up.

“No, no, I believe you said I was a cock-slurping vampire.”

“No, no. No. What I said was you were gothic, you had a tattoo and you were more, uh, sexually adventurous.”

“What kind of shoes was I wearing?”

“Huh?”

“Flats? Sneakers? Boots? What was on my feet?” she asked.

“I didn’t get a good look, but boots, I think. High heel boots.”

“I was a vampire hooker. You had a dream that I was your personal blood-sucking whore.”

“I did not!”

“You just explained it, in rather graphic detail. And you had that Seinfeld shit-eating grin the whole time.”

“It was a fun dream! At least I think it was a dream,” I said as I rinsed my mouth and wiped my face with a towel. “At least, it was fun until you used teeth.”

“Here, let me see,” she said, following me out of the bathroom and then catching me off balance, pushing me onto the bed as I walked by it.

“What?”

She pulled the towel from around my waist and climbed onto the bed and began examining me.

“This feels strange yet familiar,” I quipped.

She moved it up and down, side to side, and got comfortably yet uncomfortably close.

“They are faint, almost unnoticeable, but it does appear that you have several impressions around your penis, my friend.”

“Tell me you’re joking.”

“I wish I was, believe me. The crazy thing is, they look familiar. This feels familiar. These impressions look like…” she trailed off then ran off into the kitchen. I heard her bite into an apple. She came running back and compared the curves and ridges in the apple with the faint impressions on my skin. “Well, I can’t say for sure, but there are distinct similarities in the spaces between and the general curve of the bites.”

“What could explain–?”

She threw one of the library books at my face and disappeared.