An Archive of Brightness by Kelsey Socha

Author:Kelsey Socha
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FICTION / LGBTQ+ / General, FICTION / Science Fiction / General
ISBN: 9781941360668
Publisher: Lanternfish Press
Published: 2022-08-30T00:00:00+00:00

Two girls are sitting on a porch swing staring at a field in a place they won’t find themselves in again. Irony exists at this end of the world, but it’s no less heavy-handed than sincerity. No one can see them on this side of the house. No one can see them if they keep pretending to be shadows.

They’re smoking a cigarette, slowly, handing it back and forth. Fingers brushing when they pass it back and forth, lingering. Intentional. It burns in their lungs. It’s filtered, so it burns in a filtered way. It’s gold, which means light, a perfect smoking ad from when smoking ads were still cool.

Two girls kiss and neither of their mouths tastes like ash. One of the girls is wearing a denim vest. The cigarette box is in her vest pocket.

No one can see her, though, remember? She’s a shadow. The other girl, the one who is also a shadow, is playing with her lighter. She bought it after the other girl kept losing hers. Both the cigarettes and the lighter came from the gas station down the road. The man who owns the gas station can see them, but only separately, even when they’re together.

The girl holding the lighter is always forgetting that they’re separate. Sometimes they go to different places, and it feels like they are each other’s phantom limbs. We’re orbiting, she said once to the other girl, who nodded. We are planets.

I lied, earlier, when I said that this end of the world had irony. Only one of the girls can feel irony. It’s a split ticket.

They aren’t planets. They are magnetic fields. The girl in the denim vest is talking. It’s a poem she didn’t write, but she did copy it down by hand. She has her reading voice on, and it is lovely and scratchy and terrible.

The paint on the side of the house is chipping.

All these events take place before they drive to the cathedral. And they happen after. All this time not letting go of hands, mostly forward-focused. The porch swing doesn’t go anywhere except back and forth.

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