COLD STORAGE

I beg of you, I have curbed my worser natures and will not make the mistake I made last we met. It pains me even to think on it, how the devil drove me to snap my jaws at you so madly, no better than a starving dog. If you would please find some last kindness in your enduring heart and open your door to me, so I might hear you speak, it would keep aloft that thing in me threatening always to fail, like a hand might cup to preserve a guttering candle. Please, Magda, shelter me in this way, even if time has dulled the ardor you once held for me. It is not so great a thing and I would appreciate it past the means of words — yours, yours always, now, forever

Valeria holds the letter to her nose. Under even delicate pressures, its edges crumble like flakes of antique paint. It smells of archival shelves, of evergreen, and faintly, beneath, a cloying thing, a sweetness too coy to be floral. Even its breathless passage beneath her door jamb had not been the clever enticement it played at—its silence was not charming, only sinister and wearying.

The snow on the windowsill is blue in the night, and the silhouette waiting past the door imposes itself as a blot of India ink. She checks her chain locks, her latches, her deadbolts. They remain stoic. Midwinter’s imposition has halted roadway traffic with ample black ice, so when the lights of a passing car do crane through the shades, the stripes cast are cinematic rarities. The glare, briefly, waters her eye and dims the outlined shadow beyond the window, so for a second, it isn’t there.

When she turns back to the room—the utilitarian dressings in uninspired 70’s browns—the shapes of the furniture, suitcase rack and armchair and lampshade, are diffusely bordered and abruptly alien. An unfamiliar space in poor light. The edges of things, suggested, are passing beasts peering momentarily between stalks of midnight corn, uncanny with indifference. Her heart is too high and too fast, belligerent in her throat. She tries to tamp its influence, because it’s just the kind of thing he’s attuned to.

She retreats to bed, taking difficult steps across the exposed veldt of the tacky pile carpet, and abandons the letter in her open suitcase, where there are others. A child’s logic is simple—if you can’t see me, I am not there—and it’s times like these she embraces it. If certain other mythologies can be true, why not this one?

She pulls the covers tightly around her body and tucks them over her head. He knocks on the door, three sharp beats—tp tp tp.

+++

Mad thing, he can’t come knocking in daylight’s dominion. She packs up from this, another faded and unremarkable Days Inn, and strives to reach another, so much further afield only a car could close the gap. It’s her strongest advantage, and still rarely enough. The money is thinner by the day, but if she gains enough ground, there’ll be time to stop at a payphone—maybe in Knoxville, or Daytona, if she keeps up the pace—and beg another hundred or two off her sainted mother, the last time, I promise, mami, of course I promise, I’ll be home for Christmas, I’m on the way now. In the meantime, there are credit cards to max out, debit cards to overdraw, CDs and shoes and other jetsam from life to hock in backwater pawn shops. In the more immediate meantime, there’s the highway, and the drive, enduringly the redemption of this ordeal. Valeria loves, really loves, two things, and one of them is driving. She keeps the sunroof of the Volvo S8 open, even though it’s freezing, for the rush of the airstream, and to channel music out into the world, rising smoke through a chimney. It makes a better wake for her to tear up as she weaves between semis and minivans, bright-eyed VWs and ponderous Rams. From the assemblage of discs in the passenger seat, today, she’s settled on Deftones, and into the torn column of early December air ascends a scratch of moody guitars. Music to speed to, she thinks.

In the evacuated Days Inn room, back in Virginia, she had left behind a full set of clothes, including a prized pullover sweater she wore almost every day her second semester of college. The ways and means of her dogged pursuer are unknown to her—she’s not sure how accurate to reality (what a thing to say) Buffy or Bram Stoker are—but in lieu of laying capsaicin in her tracks and salting the earth, this is one way she thinks she might confuse a bloodhound.

She was afraid, for a long time. Now, she tells herself, sliding gracefully around an elephantine eighteen-wheeler and into the far left lane, she isn’t. She’s being pragmatic.

+++

Daytona emerges around dusk. Dangerous timing, but some fierce impulse in her refused to be satisfied with anything short of her arbitrary finish line—now she finds herself shakily counting out loose change to make up the rest of the room fee at the Motel 6, the clerk impassive to what she’s sure must be a palpable, sweaty, animal terror. There are epochs wedged into the time it takes him to tally her nickels and dimes, but the key is in her clammy hand all the same, and the door opens for her, blessed, wonderful thing, without the cost of superfluous seconds.

He has no breath to feel on the back of her neck, but the hairs on her forearms creep to attention. She knows he’s there, even before she turns around to let sight confirm instinct’s sharper eye.

Accusation masks other, deeper creatures—she points, almost steadily, to the thin stainless steel divider of the threshold.

“I’m paid up. The residence is under my ownership. I expressly do not invite you in.”

On one side of that silver line, her scuff-toed Docs. On the other, his black duckbill loafers, spit-shined beneath their perpetual caking of mud. She looks him in the eye, as she’s done before, and the effect isn’t lessened. There is the expected gleam of the supernatural—in the faint glow of the overhead light behind her, his pupils shine like the reflective eyes of an animal—and very little else. A dark, swallowing iris, set deeply into a sallow, articulated face blanched to tones of blue and purple. He regards her with the stricken misery of a kicked pup.

“Tell me my name,” he says. In the barest movement of his chapped lips, there’s the flash of teeth, violent even when inert.

Valeria closes the door in his face and locks it. In the morning, though she slept through the sound, she discovers deep gashes in her door, torn in overlapping furrows, like hands scrabbling for purchase.

+++

“Mami, I’ll be home for Christmas, I will, the driving has taken longer than I thought.”

“Tch, mija, why? Why so long? Why didn’t you take a plane?”

Her mother’s voice is crumpled by the shoddy speakers. Valeria presses a palm to the much-graffitied wall of the payphone and is unwilling to confess it: that it was not a rational thing, but she believed he could corner her in the lawless stasis of midair, and she would see him, down the collapsing lines of the center aisle, and there would be no place to run.

“Planes are expensive, I’m trying to save money.”

Her mother sighs. In the background, Valeria hears the shape of the house in Phoenix—the morning traffic on the radio; the sibilant murmurs of a pan over the gas stove; her mother shuffling to and fro on the linoleum, phone cradled between her raised shoulder and her ear, now opening the refrigerator, now running the tap, filling a glass. Valeria considers restlessness an inheritance.

There are another few days between Daytona and Phoenix. More, if she maintains the evasive zig-zag she’s been trying, though its effects seem limited, maybe nonexistent. She makes the Christmas promise with a tongue accustomed to offering the moon, unconcerned about delivery, and her mother, both wise to it and unwilling to be so, says it will all be fine.

The thing is, her life hadn’t changed that much after he had found her, or she, unwitting, had found him. Itinerance was her preferred mode of living—the Volvo had borne her across oceanic leagues of asphalt, bouncing between coasts, stopping in places long enough to do short-term dishwashing in Olive Garden kitchens or sweep the aisles of Walmarts. She became an anonymous nomad. Few ever looked too closely at her pockmarked resume. She omitted much of her early career to avoid questions. Some asked, with muted curiosity, about her education, listed as Vanderbilt University, Class of ‘85, Econometrics/Quantitative Economics.

Two decades expired. Ancient History, she would say, with a well-wrought smile and sometimes a laugh. Seemed like a good idea at the time.

Venture capital, as a fantasy, was vivid. She imagined herself a post-modern robber baron, whose future house in the Hills would find itself a two-page spread in Architectural Digest, whose name would only be known to a few, from whose mouths it would emerge dressed in the finery of respect. Economics appealed to her twofold. It was math—ordered, respectable, known—and the market—vicious, sanguinary. Armed with appropriate tools, what counted, in the end, were instinct and willpower, endurance and cleverness. She liked the patterns. She liked, more, the sense of brilliance concomitant with knowing when the patterns would stumble, and how to leverage even a single faltering step.

The years after college had offered her assistantships and junior analyst positions, and then, the terrible discovery: that this corner of the world offered her only so much and no more, and while it wasn’t paltry, her burgeoning success, it did not sate her.

She did better, worked longer hours, shook hands with people whom she had not dreamed of shaking hands with, and even through the contact of palm to palm she could feel the thinness of it all, its nonsubstantive meringue, dissolving into near-nothing on the tongue. She had a nice car, and property in Manhattan before the crash, and at family holidays her mother would boast so glowingly that maybe she could’ve reconciled it all. But there was the old vice, gnawing on her stomach, scattering against her hard palate like thrown knucklebones—she wanted something, still.

+++

In the third week of December, she’s near asleep in Searcy, Arkansas, when he slips another note under her door.

Forgive me for my stubbornness, but there is something you can give me which I can acquire nowhere else. You must speak to me so that I may again be as I was, as I am certain will happen, if only you explain to me why you have been gone so long, and how it is I find myself here, coursing in your trodden path. I am sure it will all make sense, and I will be myself again, and I promise that I will not lose my wits as I did before, which yet fills me with relentless shame. Please speak to me. I am a gentleman and will not enter by force. I will wait for you to ask it –– yours, still yours, over again

+++

She severed ties and fled abroad, taking a sabbatical from which she knew, privately, she would not emerge. History compelled her, and then did not—art compelled her, and then it, too, returned to the flatness of canvas. Movement seemed, even temporarily, to clarify her, enough that the days became bearable and without starvation. She went to bed early to miss the falling of the darkness, when thoughts of the broad expanse of the remainder of her life piqued some terrible fear in her, the likes of which she could not quell.

Black sheep, she is—gossip of the family table, absent major holidays, unreachable by phone. She was chasing some glory without a name, discovered neither in checkbooks nor in the ruins of Rome—the only thing different, now, is that she’s running for a more definite purpose.

He had fooled her, once, with his immense, wet eyes, his bowed and pleading head. A strange, Byronic wraith, garbed in stolen coats, muddied and worn through, nothing like the subtle glamor of his TV archetype. He had fooled her with his desperation, his earnestness, and most of all the way he talked with the faintest lisp, as though he had never grown accustomed to navigating the teeth.

She was lucky she was quick, when his eyes lost their focus and his lunging body revealed its predatory coils. She knows better than to trust luck twice. Now she will escape him, by determination. In Phoenix, at home, bulwarked in her mother’s crucifixes and the unyielding sun, he could not keep pushing his despair under her door like she owed him something.

+++

“Magda,” he called her first, with a barren voice—this tall scrape of a thing, by the pylon of the parking garage. Fluorescence did him no favors. “Magda, sweeting, Magda, it’s me.”

“I think you have the wrong person,” said Valeria. He looked sick.

+++

Magdalena, Magda, Magdekin, it is so strange and so awefull that I should yet find you, having walked this broad earth in a terrible daze for so long I cannot be sure. Has the world grown so clamorous for you also? Is there not new smoke in the air which was once so clear? I lingered for a great while around our sweet Stratford home, but I think it was longer than I suspected, for in time there were new people in our house, and you no longer stood in the light of the bedroom window evenings, brushing that blissful dark hair of yours. And then I was afraid, and then too was in a great dim spell, almost morbid, when I did not know where I took myself, only that I was with a dreadful hunger, as though the flesh was waning from my very bones. Once, I was in the dark hold of a ship, for a period of time whose breadth I cannot state for certain, and since I have not found my way back to our Stratford, our tall ash trees and the broad green lawn where Henry used to run around after grass-hoppers and where I was so fond of strolling, in the velvet moonlight, as I had been, last I saw you, combing the night-fall of your hair –– yours, irrevocably, unflinchingly yours

+++

It is rare, now, that he gets to say much at all to her, save for the few points she’s not fast enough, or he’s a little too quick, finds her in parking lots when she emerges from some roadside diner having erroneously judged the sunset. Then he will chase her, and she’ll see it plain—the split chasm that runs down the middle of him, separating the man from the devil, and all that emptiness in between, slavering. She puts cloves of garlic in the glovebox. She buys a bracelet with a silver mirror where a watch face should be, choosing to believe it will be a ward. Nothing changes but her own feeling of having tried—having fought.

His clothes change. They are other people’s clothes, too short in the sleeve or too broad in the leg. When they get too shoddy, he swaps them out for others, which come bloodstained, like the ones before. There were several encounters in a row where he wore a torn band of polyester silk tied precisely around his neck, the perfected habit of a lifetime of mornings. Then one time it appeared blackened and stained, and the next time, it was gone.

In Phoenix, she’ll be okay. In Phoenix, the sun bakes the earth into a cracked pan that scorches the soles of bare feet, and nothing like him could make it. He’s made for mildew and cloisters. He might chase her there, but he’ll die there, too.

She rolls down the Volvo’s windows, all four of them, so the whole car is crisp and frigid. With the music loud enough, the dashboard rumbles under her hand like a pulse. In these intervals, with nothing ahead but more road, she feels— not satiated, but as close as she gets. She floors it, and the winter sun slices off the silver of the hood.

+++

You have changed with the times far better than I, Magda mine. I knew you by your face, which I could not mistake anywhere, though these days light does make my eyes less faithful stewards than they once were. How peculiar you looked, and yet it was you. I know I am not the man I was –– I am lost, within myself, and too, I am sorely emaciated, and I know how you did love my round cheek, though I still protest it made me look a ridiculous boy. But though I feed, in periods of waking delirium, it does not sate me. I think now satiation is an old thing, left somewhere. I do not know what I eat. You must tell me how you have fared, inspire in me with your doubtless rich fable the breath and pulse I have misplaced somewhere, perhaps caught in the mouth of that foul beast which darkened my evening’s well-trod path, when I was made sick. O Magda, I know it. I cannot know it, but I know –– yours, all the same

+++

In Muskogee, a place the color of a callus even under a ruff of snow, she can’t sleep. She reads, for a while, a tatty paperback of B.J. David short stories someone left in the drawer of the nightstand, sandwiched against the Gideon bible.

“No,” Dr. Pryzgidski said urgently, “listen. Don’t be blinded, or worse, learn to walk in the dark. Love is just like any other pathology.”

“Well,” said Clifford, “you would say that, wouldn’t you.”

As the hours wax on, the text begins to slalom down the page and lose its sense of self, so she surrenders the pastime and turns off the lamp.

The bed in her rented room is lumpy, springs turning like screws into the flesh between her ribs. The night is clouded—the only source of light is the lamp outside her door, whose luminance is wispy and colder than the air. She pulls the comforter up under her chin.

There was another letter under the door tonight, written on the back of a napkin in a pen that was nearly out of ink. Magda, I am sorry. Magda, please. Magda, Magda, Magda, repeated, ad infinitum, even after the pen gave out—torn into the thin paper, the mangled shapes of the letters continued.

A sound aches into the dark of the room—a long, thin scrape against the door.

She keeps imagining, as she did when she was much smaller, a face appearing over the foot of her bed. A dark face with bright eyes, trying to convince her it was human. A nightmare, of course, from which she would always wake, run crying to her mother. Her mother would stroke her hair and sing a song whose words Valeria doesn’t remember now—only the tune, revolving softly in memory.

Another long scrape, accompanied by a faint thump and a rasping call: “Magda.”

Valeria doesn’t respond.

“Magda. Magda.”

“I don’t know you,” says Valeria, with all the voice she can muster.

There’s a long silence. Long enough that a foolish part of her hopes that he has gone.

Then the scraping resumes, and with it, a rote whining, as if the only word remembered: “Magda.”

+++

Magda, Magda, I will not harm you, I swear it on my life, if life this is. If I sought to devour you maybe it was only a surplus of my devotion, realized poorly, a need to make you a part of my-self so that I did not lose you again. Sweeting I do not know how to explain but in that moment I needed you so totally I thought I could bind us flesh to flesh and blood to blood. I was in error of course and I am sorely sorry Magda. Maybe this is a gift from G-d. that I might see you once more, know of you and the fate of you and the fate of our Henry –– is he well? I do not see him with you. Did I miss him growing? Did he learn the trick of the bow I gave him Christmas last? He might make a fine hunter, his hand is so steady for one so young –– and all shall be well. Magda you must remind me of my-self for I have lost so much. I am terribly cold –– yours

+++

Chance is a fickle player. She survives Texas in a straight shot of some 10 urgent hours—proximity to home makes her anxious, tantalized by the nearness of what she’s decided is the answer—and then the Volvo’s engine collides with some internal fatality on the I-10 West two miles outside of Red Rock, a bare watermark of a town between Tucson and Phoenix. The sky is dimming relentlessly, and her cellphone is a ghost of the past, one of the first things sold when the road began, as an act of foolhardy self-liberation and to pay for hotels from Vermont to New York. The best hope is hitchhiking—questionable—or walking, both of which leave her exposed in variously uneasy ways.

She decides to lock herself in the Volvo, on the dusty shoulder, and wait it out. Come sunrise, she can walk back to Red Rock and call her mother, a tow company, someone. She kills the headlights, and the radio, too, though the noise would be a comfort against the disquieting silence, broken only by the occasional passing of a long-haul truck, its blunt nose plowing through the air.

She pulls on an extra sweater, another pair of socks, wraps her puffer coat tighter around her shoulders. The night is already biting.

+++

Tk tk tk tk tk.

Valeria wakes, not with a jolt, but with a slow and painful tug. The yellow nails of a corpse are tapping against her window, just by her frigid ear. Her breath is soft parcels of mist. Past the glass is that horrible face, so thinly-skinned it could be translucent. His mouth is soaked with gore like a wolf’s lifted just now from a freshly-felled deer, but his eyes are liquid.

“Magda,” he whispers. She sees his mouth moving, and the name supplies itself where it belongs. “Magda.”

Through the passenger window, east, where the road runs parallel to an enormity of scrub, there is the faintest hint of pale blue, breaking across the black horizon of night. Hope. Arizona’s sun, come to save its daughter. He has taken too long to catch up—her Texas flight has bested even his superhuman pace—and it will be his undoing, she decides. There’s no shade here, not for miles in any direction. Only the indeterminate mercy of light.

“Hello,” says Valeria. Ambiguous. It will keep him talking. She can smell his mouth, or imagines she can smell it, a damp and stagnant cavern thickly laden with rotten meat.

“Magda,” says the vampire. “Magda, how far we are from home.”

His voice is hoarse with disuse. When he smiles, his lips split around the new accommodations of long and doubled canines, but he doesn’t bleed. In the side mirror, he has no face, no body. The scraps of his dirty button-down sometimes reflect, and sometimes, in certain turnings, don’t.

“Oh, you look well, Magdekin,” he says, “you look very well. I do not know how I look. I seem to have lost the trick of mirrors. You can tell me—you may be candid, I am sure I am frightful.”

He presses both hands to the lower edge of the glass. They leave dirt, and blacker stuff, in an outline of his palm lines. When she was a teenager, Valeria had a book on reading fortunes in palms, and she would discern from the hands of school friends wild, improbable fates—stardom, security, a marriage to Johnny Depp. She wanted there to be something greater, if only destiny, for her to grapple with. She’s forgotten how to read the lines, now. His, against the window, are illegible and tremulous.

“Magda,” says the vampire, “you know how absent of mind I always was, and it seems this flaw has not left me, as other, better things have.” He laughs weakly. “Would you remind me, sweeting, what it was you called me?”

Valeria stares. Beneath the hope, and the misery, and the pathos, are two things which terrify her most genuinely—an animal’s crouching patience, and an impermeable vacancy. Something in him is displaced. There is a man in there. Worse—the fragmented outline of one, trying dumbly to reassemble itself.

In the corner of her eye, dawn is nearing. The pleasant blush of pink is already staining the edge of the rearview mirror, reflected in the silver paint. She can’t outrun him, but with this advantage, she’s tempted to try.

“Magda,” he says. His fingers drumroll on the glass, and his smile stretches to the point of structural failure. “Magda, talk to me again. Your voice is like old music.”

“I will not invite you in,” says Valeria. “I know the rules.”

He nods hastily. His hair is tawny, bizarrely plentiful over that skull of a head.

“I would not seek to be unmannerly,” he croaks. “I will not come in. Come out and talk to me, Magda. Please.”

Valeria puts her hand on the door handle. There is no subtle lure in his tone—maybe that, itself, is the lure. Maybe his guile is the absence of guile.

Then she tightens her hold, so the white of her knuckles peers through the skin.

“We haven’t met,” she says. She has said those words a hundred times, and each time they seem to strike, then glance off, leaving only the uncomprehending repetition of the name that doesn’t belong to her, the vows she doesn’t understand. “My name isn’t Magda.”

The vampire’s face, in intervals, goes slack. In the very first ray of daylight, his eyes refract twin circles of yellow.

“Have I forgotten that, too?” he asks. “What is it?”

Then the bursting sun crests the horizon. The vampire recoils, gasping, though Valeria knows he doesn’t breathe. The habits of the body die hard.

The squalling begins—a high, keening wail, torn from a place unknown to any living throat. He staggers backwards, clutching at his face.

Valeria throws open the door and starts to run. When she turns over his shoulder, he is stumbling like a blind man, panels of his exposed flesh curling away like dry paper. The second time she looks back, further down the road, he’s gone.

+++

Christmas dinner, her brother asks her where she’s working. He’s a contractor, building the sort of houses in the Hills she once came near to affording. But what does it matter? She has no answer for him, so she lies, easily—says she’s looking into firms in New York, polishing up her resume. Her uncle nods approvingly. Her mother pats her arm.

“This is good,” she says warmly. “You can put your wandering behind you.”

“What were you doing, anyway?” asks her brother. He’s trying to keep his young son from weaseling away from the dinner table by bribing him with a little toy car. His son drives it in wobbly circles around his plate, making vroom noises. The curved tines of the fork become a ramp, off of which he executes a daredevil leap.

Valeria shrugs, suddenly uncomfortable.

“Just looking around.”

+++

For the next week and a half, she sleeps in her old bedroom. Her Volvo spends two-thirds of that time in the shop, siphoning off an arm and a leg for the repair of a shot alternator and two broken belts, but Valeria pawns off her last pair of designer shoes and borrows the difference from her brother, who seemed only too ready to indulge her change of fortunes. They were never particularly competitive as children, she thought—now, when he calmly counts out the cash and hands it over, smiling, she realizes maybe she just hadn’t noticed.

Her mother’s house is impenetrably warded. A crucifix in every room; votive candles of Mary tucked on the mantle; a letter on the fridge from her abuela in Yakima Valley reporting the small miracle of a new saint, curing cataracts, stuck under a magnet with the cards of St. Sergius and St. Bacchus purchased from his belongings. The frontispiece from one of his Hardy Boys books, with his name chicken-scratched below the title. If she lined the door jambs in silver, Valeria thinks, she couldn’t be safer. More enclosed.

Fetching the orange juice from the fridge one morning, she reads the back of the card of St. Sergius: King of Kings and Lord of lords, who alone possess immortality and inhabit unapproachable light, shed light on the eyes of their minds, because they walk in the darkness of their unknowing. At night, she leaves the shades open, but keeps the window locked.

Now the Volvo sits parked on the curb. She can see it out through the kitchen window when she helps her mother wash dishes, or chop onion and garlic for pozole, a hearty armament against Phoenix’s nightly surrender to cold. In the streetlamp, its silver shines like minnow scales, and seeing it still strikes her as somehow perverse, as though she’s caged it—trapped it in a single still frame, from which it cannot escape.

“Mija, pass me that spoon—taste this, here, come here.”

Her mother holds out a spoon of broth. It’s hot, in degrees, and hot, in spice, on Valeria’s tongue, and so doubled, the very idea of cold seems like a silly one. This can be enough, she tells herself, nodding and smiling.

“Perfect. Really.”

She turns back to the task of the onion. It’s almost meditative, the way it crumbles into neatly severed arcs and cubes. Her eyes water—when they’re drawn, by inevitable gravity, back to the car, it’s a shimmery pearl of mercury, on the black plate of the dimming street. With the solstice behind her on the calendar, the days should be clinging to light a little longer, but they still seem too ready to pass, each unmarked by any moment of consequence. The only nighttime sounds that pass her door now are her mother’s steps, infrequently crossing from the bedroom to the bathroom and back again. Insomnia persists—that creeping dread captures her even if she goes to bed before dusk, finds her with her eyes open to the vacancy of a popcorn ceiling well past moonrise. Life unrolls its length, and in it, she can find no certain feature.

She blinks rapidly to clear her vision. The stars are out tonight. Her mother hums an old tune Valeria can’t place. So familiar it almost hurts.

+++

In January’s second week, sleepless, she’s watching the humped back of her suitcase at the foot of her bed as if it might move. Her mother has stored most of her sewing things in what were once Valeria’s dresser drawers, and so Valeria has made no distinct effort to unpack. Instead, nightly, she zips the suitcase shut and props it upright, the handle positioned to be readily grasped.

Everything is still teal, like Valeria had wanted at fourteen. The window is locked—she checks, every night, muscle memory—but she leaves the shades open to permit the moon’s catlike paw to roam her woven carpet. Their house is a compact rancher, Western style. The unkempt fringe of her mother’s mulched beds of desert grass, bordering the back wall, is just visible over the sill.

She chafes against this past life.

The walls and the ceiling box in an enormous pressure. To breathe, she has to push the air in with a piston, shove it out with both shoulders. The second thing Valeria really loves is the kind of simple peace you can get only in places where no one knows you—not lingering, but stopping briefly, for pie too tempting to remain under a glass dome, or the allure of an unknown store whose ill-lit corridors promise some Twilight Zone artifact. There, embroiled in motion, stasis is not stagnation, but a respite, and in this way she can gorge on the parts of life that are life, that say, yes, maybe there is something you want so totally it will fill you, and maybe you can find it, right past this exit.

She’s put in a call to an old coworker or two. There’s room for her, in her evacuated niche.

“Everyone has a nervous breakdown now and then,” said a former partner on the phone, chuckling easily. Valeria had paced the living room, straightening pictures that hung askew, carefully assuring herself there was no condescension in that tone. “Honestly, they’re kind of in vogue now.”

She turns under the sheets, settling her cheek into the pillow. The far wall is murky with visual static. In the morning, she’ll book a ticket into LaGuardia. It might make sense to sell the car, too, for the money—God knows New York rent isn’t pocket change. And there’ll be less need for driving. Maybe she can get a direct flight, no tiresome layover in Denver or Milwaukee.

Tomorrow. She closes her eyes, to enforce sleep. Sleep dodges nimbly.

Tkkkkkk.

Impossibility, sharp as a whetted blade, strikes a foolhardy chord in her chest.

Something is scratching against the screen on her window—each catch on the woven mesh is a rapid pulse, blending into a whir like a rattlesnake tail. Her eyes are open, now, to the shadow black over her bedroom floor, obscuring the moonlight in a heavy stain. Under this imposition of darkness, the walls are not teal, but a rich, velveteen blue.

In a high rise, she could find a bedroom whose window did not touch a fire escape, and then how would he transmit his morse code? And life would be clearly outlined, as the grid of the streets below, orderly even in the dark. Mathematical.

“Magda,” moans his voice, thickened with soot.

Symbiosis, she thinks, remembering suddenly the word. From Greek, sumbios, companion—bios, “life”, and sum, “with”.

Valeria throws off the covers. She’s been sleeping with the frontispiece and her car keys under her pillow. The enormous lunacy, frivolity, of everything condenses into a single acute and actionable point: she can beat him to the car.

***

H.F. Al-Kowsi is an honors graduate of the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars program and is currently in application for her MFA in fiction. Among other projects, including a magical-realist baseball novella and a very slow translation of the Aeneid, she's also the conceptualizer, author, and future director of AMERICAN VAMP, a full-length rock opera set to be produced by the Baltimore Rock Opera Society in spring of 2026. "COLD STORAGE", while itself a standalone short story, also comprises an interlude in her first full-length novel OUR LADY OF AUGUST, for which she is currently seeking representation. When she's not doing those things she's probably still trying to fix the tape deck in her '84 Ford Ranger.