Forget I Told You This by Hilary Zaid

Author:Hilary Zaid [Zaid, Hilary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC005070 FICTION / Erotica / LGBTQ+ / General, FIC028000 FICTION / Science Fiction / General, FIC044000 FICTION / Women
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

I wasn’t thinking about Connie, though, but about the data trail Arman said I left everywhere I went, when I wheeled Connie’s old bike out of our basement, pumped some air into the tires and started off toward MacArthur Boulevard, where I boarded an eastbound bus and paid with a handful of change to ride all the way to High Street, where I hitched up my skirt, threw my leg over the seat and pointed the bike down High with my hands on the brake.

I hadn’t been on a bike in over a decade. It’s just like riding a bicycle, I reminded myself.

My legs wobbled with nerves and the cars whizzing onto and off the ramps, but by the time I emerged from the shadows, I began to enjoy the feeling of floating. I could see why Connie had liked this. I liked the tic tic tic of the gears, a sound that reminded me both of Arman’s request and of time passing, of the moments that had passed since this bicycle had driven me and Connie to the outermost edge of our happiness, moments that had passed and would keep passing until the pain was a small, bright spot very far away. Arman was not wrong that those two things were joined: how much easier to let go of Connie if my phone would stop remembering her every year on her birthday; but it wasn’t worth blowing up the world for, either. Arman wanted a believer. And that wasn’t me.

The bicycle rolled faster and faster, past crumbling bungalows and stucco apartments with names like The Royal-Hi, the sky open and blue, flat and palm-feathered. Hanging out the third-floor window of a three-story apartment building, a woman threw water down to the sidewalk from a red paper cup. She was holding a blue bowl in one hand, and the cup in the other, and she dipped the cup over and over into the bowl, scooping up water and pouring it out onto the clipped green hedge below, scattering it like holy water. She might have been crazy. She might have been bored. But it looked to me as the bright droplets arced into the sunlight and splattered that she was performing a ritual, exorcising something, maybe; maybe making her own luck. I wondered what my life might have been like if I had inherited something like that, if I could have believed.

Connie grew up in the Church, a fact that was somehow entwined with her winding up in the front row of Professor Donoghue’s class the spring we met; I think she was hoping to meet a girl entranced with the same candle smoke and incense that had flavored her childhood. Instead, she found me. Church wasn’t something she talked about at first because being with a woman meant she had to leave it. But when we went back to Tucson to gather her high school yearbooks and her mother’s ashes from the white stucco house with a

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