Paper-Thin Wings

There’s a diner and its light draws Ai to it like a moth to a flame.

She’s tired. Her feet ache. Her stomach is pinched and empty and tight.

All Ai wants is a place to sit. Something small to eat. Maybe some water.

So she follows that light. She tightens her ponytail and she shifts her feet in her running shoes and she heads for the diner, leaving the black stretch of beach behind her.

A neon sign declaring the business open flickers and buzzes out front. Bugs bounce off of the hot glass, zipping around dazed and confused and then coming back to do it again.

Ai watches them for a moment, standing on the concrete sidewalk, inhaling sea-salt air. Her lungs feel sticky.

They never learn, she thinks. A moth hits the neon sign and then falls, its paper-thin wings barely keeping it upright before it drops again and then lies still at Ai’s feet.

She watches a moment longer. Then she goes inside.

Inside smells like bleach. Inside smells like sugar and oil. Inside is an odd combination of sterile and messy — the linoleum floor has been mopped, but someone has dropped a donut right in front of the door and the cherry-red jelly is leaking, oozing, spilling out from between broken, frosted dough to stain the tiles.

Ai looks around. It’s empty besides a couple in the back, sitting on the same side of the booth with their heads bowed over their plates.

Her stomach rumbles. So she keeps going and takes a seat at the front bar. A little silver bell rests near her fingertips.

It only takes a second to reach out and tap it.

It only takes a second for a waitress to appear from the back.

She looks as sugar-sweet as anything in here. It’s an odd thought to have, Ai admits. But it’s true.

The waitress is wearing a spotless, white apron over a yellow dress and her dark hair is pulled up immaculately. But its her lips that look sugar-sweet. Glossed over and shining.

“What can I get you?”

Ai startles from her staring. She grabs a menu and flushes behind it and then orders a cup of coffee and a chocolate éclair without thinking. The waitress leaves with a twirl of her dress.

She doesn’t really need the pastry. But who cares at this point? Ai is on vacation for God’s sake. She needs the break. Who cares about calories?

She leans back in her stool before remembering it has no back and then sways, balancing herself again on the slippery plastic. Her heart leaps into her throat at the brief sensation of falling.

God, of all people to have an issue with foresight. Sighing, Ai readjusts herself, fitting her sandy tennis shoes under the metal bar at the foot of the stool to secure her weight in case she decides to do that again.

What a dump, is her next thought. She glances around curiously all the same.

The place is clean enough. The paint is peeling though. And the lights buzz obnoxiously from the ceiling. An ancient-looking jukebox hums quietly in a corner, the faint music drowned out by the flickering fluorescents.

And that jelly donut still lies, broken and forlorn on the floor behind her.

The coffee though, when the waitress reappears with it in hand, smells amazing. The chocolate éclair doesn’t look half-bad either — of course, anything would probably look appetizing after spending the entire afternoon jogging down the beach.

“Can I get you anything else?”

Ai looks up, right into honey-gold eyes. She blinks. “Um, I don’t – I mean -,” she stutters. Her eyes are drawn inevitably to pink gloss, dropping against her will, and Ai flushes ferociously.

Jesus, pull yourself together.

“No,” she chokes out, gripping her coffee mug tightly and smiling past her humiliation. “Thank you.”

The waitress — Teagan, it says on her little, plastic name-tag — smiles and then she’s off again. Ai hadn’t imagined the amusement on her face either.

She groans under her breath. You’re a real fucking, hot mess.

“Shut up,” Ai mutters to herself. She takes a sip of coffee. It’s good, hot and strong. It pushes a bit of the exhaustion from her run out of her head.

A strand of hair from her bangs slips from her bobby pin and she pushes it back behind her ear. Sweat still dries cold and sticky along her spine, under her sports bra. Ai sips more of her coffee, pokes at the éclair with a finger.

After this she thinks she’ll grab a cab back to her room. She had been planning on walking back the way she’d come — the ocean at night has always drawn her, so dark but undeniably there, breathing up against the land — but this coffee makes Ai think of a hot shower.

Hot water to wash away the sand sprinkled up along her calves and in the bends of her knees. Hot water running through her hair and down over her aching shoulders. The sooner the better.

Then she’ll crawl back between the soap-smelling sheets of the hotel in her underwear and drift off, warm from the water and pleasantly limp from the exercise. She has the rest of the weekend after all.

Take a break, her boss had told her, tapping her pen on the edge of her lip and barely glancing up from her tablet. God knows you need it.

So Ai had gone. She had booked plane tickets, a hotel room, that night. She’d been gone the next day.

She had flown out here, to the beach. To the sea.

The sea is constant, despite its tumult and its ebbs and flows. The sea is always there, breathing wetly up onto the land, following the pull of the moon.

The sea didn’t change the way Ai’s life did, forever swapping between lines and threads — forever jumping between different people and their fragile, fragile wings.

She sips at her coffee. She doesn’t let herself think of the cards tucked down in her shorts pocket. It had just been an extra precaution, shoving them into her suitcase, nothing more. A last minute decision.

The chocolate éclair is worth all of the calories. It’s gone in an embarrassingly short amount of time, lost to Ai’s grumbling stomach. She finishes her coffee quickly too, watching the couple in the back laugh and whisper to themselves.

If only her life wasn’t so filled with work, she muses. With running around, flying to different cities and different continents, spending late nights on assignments.

Then maybe she’d have time for more than just the half-dead plants she keeps in her apartment in the city.

Ai dismisses the thought. There’s really no use agonizing over it. This is her calling.

Outside the diner, the moon rises full and bloated into a dark sky. The sea crashes and breaks down on the shore. Ai’s cards burn in her pocket.

A sudden, irrelevant, quiet thought flaps its way into her head. It comes unexpectedly. It comes unbidden, without permission.

Why did I come in here?

For coffee, Ai tells herself firmly. For a place to sit. You’re tired.

The moths buzz and hit and bounce off of the neon sign outside. Ai can hear them through the windows.

They flap and burn and fall and then return, moths drawn to a light.

Ai had come in here like a moth drawn to a flame.

Oh God, she thinks. Not now. I’m on vacation, God damn it.

But it’s too late. She can feel it.

And it all comes at once.

The moths buzz in her ears. The sea is a roar in her blood. The neon light outside flares and flares and burns, too bright, and it hurts Ai’s eyes but she turns and looks anyway.

And there, there it is. Why she’s really here.

As the jukebox continues to moan low and quiet — as the moths outside continue to fall lifeless to the ground — Ai sees the red. She hears a different sound. Ragged breathing, mixing wetly with the buzz of the lights above her head.

The red spreads. It seeps out from the brokenness and it coats the tiled floor, so clean and bleached before. Sticky and dark and thick it keeps going. And going and going and going until it’s under Ai’s stool, a sticky, cherry-red puddle.

There she is. The waitress, Teagan.

She’s the one making that noise. That wet, whistling inhale and exhale as she tries to breathe through the holes punched into her lungs.

They must be in her lungs, Ai thinks, watching Teagan crawl over the floor, slipping and sliding in her own mess.

The knife lies on the ground behind her but Ai can see where it’s slashed her yellow dress and the holes are right there, in her back, right where her fluttering, flapping lungs lie under skin and bone and muscle.

The donut is still there too. Broken, bleeding, red and red and red.

But why? The voice in Ai’s head is as cool and flat as it always is when this happens. She doesn’t have much time left so Ai tears her eyes away from Teagan’s struggling form and turns around, looking.

The couple in the back is gone now. All of the booths are empty.

Ai’s own coffee mug and plate are gone, cleared away. So she’s left then, before this. She’s called that cab and she’s gone back to her room and she’s probably asleep in her bed.

Come on. Find the why.

She’s looking, looking — Teagan’s breathing is shallower, wheezing in and out of her pierced, deflating lungs — and the smell of iron is so strong. It coats Ai’s throat, makes it hard to think.

Even after all of this time and she still isn’t used to this. Not all of it.

There.

The cash register. It’s drawer is unhinged. Ai peers over the counter and dropped change — pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters — lay all over the floor, glinting in the harsh lights. The cash register is broken.

Like the girl behind her.

Turning back around, Ai looks down from her stool. Teagan is barely moving now. Her lips are stained red, covering that sugary lipgloss. The side of her face is too. Those beautiful honey-gold eyes don’t look at Ai but sideways, like she can see through plaster and concrete out to the sea outside.

The blood is everywhere. In Teagan’s dark hair. All over her dress. Coating her hands.

Ai wants to look away but she can’t.

They never learn, she thinks but she doesn’t know who “they” is.

The seconds tick by. The urge to stick her fingers in her ears, to squeeze her eyes shut, is long gone — drowned away by habit and repetition.

It’ll be over soon.

Moths continue to fall outside. Paper-thin wings that stop flapping. Paper-thin lungs that stop breathing.

And eventually, Teagan’s do the same. Her breathing stops. Her fingers stop twitching.

The jukebox is alone in its low wail, the fluorescent lights continue to buzz overhead.

Ai shuts her eyes now. She counts to three.

One. Two. Now.

With a pop in her ears, like she’s just descended from a great height, Ai’s eyes flutter open. She looks down.

A clean, bleached floor. A donut, split open and melting over linoleum tiles. Nothing more.

She turns around. The couple is back. One of the guys rests his head on the other’s shoulder, says something too low for Ai to hear but her eyes drift to her empty cup, the plate with the éclair crumbs left behind.

The cash register is intact.

Teagan appears from the back. Ai watches her.

Her cards burn in her pocket. Guess she’ll have to use them after all.

Biting her lip, Ai swirls the dregs of caffeine in the bottom of her cracked mug.

God, she had just wanted a vacation. She should’ve known that coffee and chocolate éclairs couldn’t explain her sudden urge to walk off the beaten path and head up here. Stupid diner and stupid neon lights, drawing her in.

The pastry hadn’t even been that good.

Well, at least now she has an excuse to talk to her. Yeah, what a shitty excuse. Hey, I know how you’re going to die. You wanna grab dinner later?

Ignoring her thoughts, Ai slips her cold fingers down into her pocket and grabs the cards that feel like a second skin from it. She lays them out on the countertop with a flourish. She can feel Teagan’s eyes on her.

Draw her in, she thinks.

She spreads them out. Tarot cards. Useless and necessary at the same time.

It’s the only way Teagan will believe her. It’s the only way anyone ever believes her.

And sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they don’t believe. Sometimes Ai fails.

They never learn.

She feels Teagan growing closer. She sees that flash of yellow in her peripheral vision. She traces her cards and she waits, steadying her fingers. Clearing her head.

From the countertop, a skull and a white horse grin up at her grimly. Black armor. White mane.

Ai had chosen the card. She doesn’t fool herself. There is no such thing as fate in this world. Only chance meetings, like this one. Luck maybe.

“Do you read fortunes?”

Like clockwork, Teagan’s voice drifts to Ai’s ears. Ai inhales once more, exhales. The sea screams outside the window, a banshee’s warning.

Time to do your thing, her brain murmurs. Time to save her.

Ai looks up. She grins.

And with the beat of moth wings in her ears, the balance of life held so delicately in her hands, and the heat of neon lights illuminating red on a tile floor, she asks one question.

“Would you like to know your future?”

#shortstory #lgbtq #murder #premonitions #scifi #sciencefiction #diners