TWO STORIES by CONNOR HARDING
Secret/Handshake
So you’re about to leave. Leave with the capital “L,” mind you, where there is no ornamental bric-a-brac, no revolving door, no peeking over your shoulder, no turnstiles at the airport, no coming home for Christmas, no handkerchief, no waving, no stopping. You are going, going, gone, and all 45 pounds of the shit you own is Lincoln-logged into the backseat of a KIA Soul.
I packed all your boxes for you—your nets, linens, galoshes, plates, notebooks, lenses and funnels and field guides and that thing you keep calling a pooter, and I carried them down three flights of stairs and across the shitty parking lot your apartment shares with the Kroger and I made Tetris of them in your trunk because I am the only person in the world who loves you enough to know that this is the best decision you will ever make for yourself. And now we’re here, pre-dawning with the crickets (I’m sure you hear them too), figuring out how goodbye can exist between two people who have never not known each other.
Then you do it. You stick out your hand out like a dew-burdened leaf, a slithering gap between your thumb and forefinger still scabbing from box-cuts.
I don’t even remember how our secret handshake goes anymore, but pieces of you exist to me as sinew. I reach out because I know you’ve retained every step—obsessive, singular you. The one that pinned preserved butterflies to corkboards and made lectures of them at sleepovers. Who described their migration patterns, wings like scales, proboscis and host plants and eyes made of lenses that see light that does not exist to us. You are semisolid, a membrane of amber thought, and I have followed you my entire life knowing that all I will find are footprints.
This moment is no different.
I let my palm spackle into yours and then we’re off, thumbs brushing, rising like a thing of feathers, before snapping down again and locking at the pinkies. In this way we have always connected at odd angles, from eating our lunches by the anthills on the playground to hiking through shoulder-tight thicket. You and your strangeness, your gentleness, the thinness of your fingers, ones perfect for understanding delicate things, always pulling strands from the world that I had never looked for.
We twist our hands and rib our knuckles like saw teeth, and I find myself already thinking of you as the person-who-is-gone. Like being with you now is retroactive, and you’re already 2000 miles away observing caterpillars in tubes, measuring the light refracting from transparent wings to the nanometer.
I imagine you will spend most of your time alone out there, and I imagine this will be thrilling to you, but a part of me wonders if any room exists for me in the between-spaces of your life. Or if maybe you will find yourself encased—to wriggle and morph and shed until becoming something new, with eyes that can see the world in a light where I am little more than a flutter of wind, a tendon of cocoon, a tack on a board. I ache knowing that I will never understand you more than I do right now, and that any secrets we’ve ever had will slick thin as oil on skin as we touch.
I am anxious of the person I will become on my own.
We unravel and re-coil and I archive bits of you in every tickling hair and pressing nail until we finally come apart with a vacuous snap. I feel like I could grab fog by the fistful and find you there. The crickets continue their chatter in the brush.
We stare at each other a long time, knowing.
The Good Guy with a Gun
The Good Guy with a Gun steps into Walmart Lone Ranger style, his feet smoothbore on acid-stained concrete like he’s looking for something that’s looking for him too. His Wranglers dangle under the persuasion of a holster that he takes just about everywhere. It’s made of a sleek, noiseless nylon, but he imagines it as a thudding extension of flesh—a thumb-tap against his hip, waiting for the inevitable. The Good Guy with a Gun thinks about the inevitable frequently, how it exists in particulates. How you live every day of your life breathing in the unavoidable by parts-per-million, and it builds all up in your insides until you finally realize that it’s there. That it’s coming for you. That it has always come for you. He walks over to the Garden Center with a hawk’s caution, watching his own footsteps in the security playback screens like he’s looking into the future instead of the past.
The Good Guy with a Gun browses the chrysanthemums, alone but observed. An archive of eyes has fallen onto him over the course of his life—nervous teenagers tugging sleeves and parents railroading children to distant aisles. Like he is a self-portrait of venom, a crux in the being of others, a killer-to-be. The Good Guy with a Gun has never dreamt of taking the law into his own hands the way a criminal would, only the way a free and self-respecting citizen would. When he thinks of killing people, it’s in the service of other people. Good, innocent people, by extension making him the same. Freedom has always been a daisy chain of outcomes in that way, not toppling like dominos, but existing together, in the same line, all at once. So when the little old man in the vest peers at him from behind wire shelves and he is circumnavigated by passerby like a landmine, he feels de-petaled.
Nobody ever told him that safety meant a life in the periphery of others.
The Good Guy with a Gun meets up with The Bad Guy with a Gun at the bistro before sunset. It is their third date in a month, but if a spark exists between them it is a thing of black powder and heat. They order cheap wine and eat butterless bread and lock eyes as if blinking were tantamount to infidelity, transfixed beyond appetizer or ambience. It’s been like this ever since they’d met—The Good Guy with a Gun bewitched by his gristle and low eyes, the way he could do something terrible at any given moment. How he wished he would. How if he didn’t, then they’d exist as flesh on a rind, separated by little more than films of skin and the vacuum between.
So, how was your day? The Good Guy with a Gun asks.
The Bad Guy with a Gun loads the wine cork after a heavy pour.
My day was actually pretty terrible, The Good Guy with a Gun says.
The Bad Guy with a Gun splatters shallot vinaigrette onto his steak.
The cashier wouldn’t look me in the eye. Nobody will look at me, The Good Guy with a Gun says.
The Bad Guy with a Gun puts holes into his potato with a fork.
Sometimes I feel like you aren’t looking at me either. Like you’ve never thought about me the way I’ve thought about you. The Good Guy with a Gun says.
The Bad Guy with a Gun uses the chrysanthemum petals to wipe spare lubricant from his pistol barrel. He folds his napkin into a tidy square and stands up, his jacket slack on his shoulders.
Call me later? The Good Guy with a Gun asks.
Most bistro patrons have transferred to faraway tables or fled into the streets. The dining room is a peppered hollow of wasp holes. The Good Guy with a Gun drops his fork and knife onto a serving plate, causing a waiter to dive behind the hostess podium. He eats the scraps of his date’s dinner with his hands, all grease and flesh, and weeps into the breadbasket. He pays the bill, and tips poorly. At home at night, The Good Guy with a Gun dreams of bullet casings like lobelia, the world a garden of delicate things wrapped in violence. A place of knotted, choking roots, all clawing into the long dark. Each thin. Restless. Searching for water.
He wakes up the next morning, still waiting for something to happen.
Connor Harding (he/him) is a fiction writer and current MFA candidate at George Mason University. His works have been published in HAD, Crow & Cross Keys, Flash Frog, Unstamatic, Every Day Fiction, and Rogue Phoenix Press. He is originally from Youngstown Ohio, and primarily writes stories set in the Midwest.