The Long Fall

They met at a poetry reading in the basement of a church. Alex had graciously floated over to the corner where Loretta stood alone sipping white wine that tasted like cheese. She asked Loretta all the regular questions: where she was from, why she wanted to act. 

“Well,” said Loretta, “I was in a Wawa one day, and this guy asked me if I wanted to be in a movie. I said no, but later realized it was Peter Jackson.”

Alex didn’t know who that was. 

“And then a couple years later Lord of the Rings came out...” 

“Are you serious?” Alex doubled over in laughter, like Loretta was doing a bit. Maybe she was. 

“He said I looked like an elf. I thought it was a porn thing,” said Loretta, shrugging. 

She never thought of herself as an elf. As a little girl, Loretta had the kind of face people say you’ll grow into. Her features looked like they’d been carved into place. Deep set eyes behind a sharp nose. A wide, thin mouth that turned down at the ends just a little.

In another scenario, Loretta would have made an awkward comment about the event to get Alex away from her. Something about how she was bored of hearing poetry about sex work and agony. But Alex’s persistent interest was making Loretta feel like the main character in an HBO show.

After that night, they were inseparable. They had no trouble finding things to laugh or sneer at. They synchronized their sick days. They had fights so intelligent they could have been scripted. So that they both understood each other, Alex would say things like, “You go to bed when you’ve run out of things to do and I go to bed when I’m tired.” She described the world in “you and I” statements. As if she could capture the ethos of their souls in random details. In truth, Loretta stayed up longer than Alex because she was an ugly, loud, and violent sleeper. 

Carol, Loretta’s sister, had always been good about it. She would come into her room and wake her up just enough. A hand on her leg would do the trick. Sometimes the moaning turned to shrieking and Carol turned on Tchaikovsky to calm her. 

Their mother loved Tchaikovsky and she only played it when she was in a good mood. She would cook to it, conducting with a spatula, her orange hair tied back in a messy bun instead of hanging in strings around her face. Carol would sit at the top of the stairs, watching and swaying to the violin, her proud face almost scolding Loretta.  “See, didn’t I tell you everything would be ok?” 

On one of those good days, Loretta’s mom would take her to the beach to sit on a rock and chain-smoke as Loretta played.  In Loretta’s hands, rocks, sticks, and rotting kelp became orbs and scepters and as she looked across the gray sand, frothy ocean, and green reeds swaying in the salty breeze, she saw a wild expanse waiting to be tamed and explored. 

But good days like those always had an end, which meant they hurt more than they soothed. Then, their mom left suddenly and didn’t take any clothes with her. Loretta shed a single tear, ran to the front yard, and screamed to the sky while jabbing at it with a large stick, “I hope you stay gone!” 

She did.

When Alex moved into Loretta’s studio apartment, Loretta slept soundly for the first time without music or Ketamine. After a couple weeks, she started to fake moan. She thrashed around a bit and let out a haunted wail. Alex sat up and leaned over Loretta, who kept her eyes closed but not too tight. Alex cupped a hand around her cheek. She whispered, “Loretta?” Loretta opened her eyes. Alex’s face was so close to hers, she could smell the breath coming out of her nose. 

The next morning Alex was up first and making breakfast as she always did. Loretta sat at the little kitchen table and picked at the peeling white paint. She crushed it into dust and licked her fingers, then chased the metal taste with OJ. Alex hated that table. She had drawn a smiley in Loretta’s eggs with Sriracha. Loretta decided that they were in love. 

“Oh you’re a lesbian. That explains everything,” said her sister on the phone.

Carol had called to tell her that she finally bought their childhood home and was renovating. As Carol talked, Loretta thought about all the joints they tossed behind the radiator in the TV room, the way the rotting carpet caught the front door, making it impossible to slam. It would all be gone. Flooded away to make room for a better world like that story in the bible. Would the mice and ants pair off in twos? Or did they know too much? Doomed to be flushed away with all the other paraphernalia of an embarrassing childhood? It didn’t seem possible to wash away so much with only a coat of paint.

“Wait, wait? What the hell needs explaining?” Loretta asked, a little late. 

For Alex, apparently, a lot. Loretta knew she wanted to have one of those “get wine drunk and wake up the next morning free of our baggage,” kind of conversations, but Loretta’s past bobbed up to the surface of daily life in awkward bits and pieces. When she was getting changed one morning, Alex noticed a hot dog shaped burn on the small of her back.

“Oh that? My mom turned her curling iron into a medieval ball and chain.  I plan on getting a wiener dog body tattooed around it,” Loretta said laughing.

Loretta had a hard time pinning down what turned Alex on about life, and it made her wonder who Alex had loved before her. Loretta met Alex’s ex, Sara, at a wine and cheese kind of party. 

“Did you hear about the woman who got her face ripped off by her pet monkey?” Loretta asked. 

Alex looked at her with her head stuck out, how wives look at their husbands when they fart in public. Alex quickly changed the subject.

“Sara just got a part on a new Netflix show,” said Alex. 

Sara was the humble type, saying it was still being optioned. 

“Loretta is an actress too,” Alex nodded to Sara. 

“I work at a smoothie shop on the Universal lot. I make smoothies for real actresses. Like you!” 

Loretta swallowed the rest of her glass and wiped away the wine that dribbled down the sides of her mouth. 

“God, that was awkward,” said Alex in the bathroom.

Loretta was squatting over the toilet. “You mean the monkey comment? It was on the news, don’t people talk about the news?” 

The conversation ended with a flush, and back at the apartment, Loretta kicked off her shoes and turned on South Park in the bedroom. Alex stood fully dressed and leaning against the door frame with her arms crossed, watching her with a face like she just checked the milk and it was too far gone. 

“Why do you watch this crap? It’s mind numbing.” 

“Exactly,” said Loretta, “that’s the point.” Her lips were covered in orange Cheeto dust.

That night, Loretta fake moaned and waited to be comforted, but Alex didn’t budge. Loretta’s sadness had lost its charm. There was no little light swaddled in sarcasm after all. Or if there was, it had resisted Alex’s attempts to brighten it. No, Loretta wasn’t tortured in the good way. Not in the way you know you are and use it as fuel. She wasn’t a writer or an actress. She was a barmaid that served liquid vegetables at a cafe called Vegatopia and she was lazy with her suffering. The next morning, they ate eggs with Sriracha. 

“How is it 11 AM and I’m already bored? You think I could get high eating paint?” asked Loretta. 

Alex put down her fork and sat up straight. She gathered most of the good kitchen stuff, the New Yorkers that Loretta was going to get to eventually, the thermometer, and left. 

Loretta sat at the kitchen table. Alex was right, it was hideous. The apartment around her looked achingly regular, though it felt absolutely changed by just a few missing objects. When the toast popped, Loretta was surprised. Not by the sound, but by the indifference of a machine to continue as if nothing had happened. It was almost impressive, how little strength it took the world around her to keep going. 

Loretta stood and walked to the window above the sink. The old lady in the building across the street was hanging laundry on the fire escape. The woman squinted in the sun as she hung a pair of blue striped boxers. Loretta had never seen her husband, but she imagined the two together on the couch. How they would act when no one was watching. He was the type to bring home bagels every Saturday morning. He wore thick rimmed glasses that he took off before he kissed her, still passionately after all those years. When they made love, they weren’t self-conscious of their sagging skin and withered bodies because, like they did with everything else in their 50-year-long marriage, they forgave each other for getting old. 

“Here’s grumpy,” her manager, Larry, whispered as Loretta walked through the door. He was much shorter than Loretta and had a bald spot on the crown of his head she liked to stare at when he talked.  She was feeling a little bit better, but her face wore a slight frown despite it. Her customers saw that, and frowned in return, the same way you smile at someone who smiles at you. 

She wanted to scream at Larry “I got dumped last night!” But for the most part, she had been unusually mature about it. Except last night, when she called Alex and screamed “You said you fucking loved me,” over and over into her voicemail until her throat hurt. 

Loretta stood in the corner of the storeroom staring into space. She had come in to grab something, but couldn’t remember what it was.  I’ll always be here for you, Alex had said before she had closed the door, if you’re in the shitter.  She felt her cellphone buzz inside her pocket. 

“It’s mom,” Carol’s voice was shaking, “This time it’s actually happening and I’m not sure how long she has.”

At home, her bed welcomed her like warm sand on a cold beach. 

“Loretta?” Carol was at her bedroom door. Loretta pulled her toes under the blankets as she sat on the edge of the bed. She still wore the same perfume. Loretta had heard Carol telling a friend she wished she could run away, but that Loretta was too “precious.” The next day at school Loretta swiped a perfume bottle with a gold cap from a teacher's desk and Carol had worn the scent ever since. Every time she hugged Carol and breathed in deeply remembered that she had been a burden, albiet a precious one. 

“Alex is worried about you.” 

“What are you doing here?” asked Loretta. 

Carol held up a key. “You gave me a key?  I think in your words ‘in case you went missing and I had to use clues to from your diary to find you.’” 

Loretta chuckled from under the covers and then recovered her stoniness. 

“You have to see her, Lor.” 

“Why? She’s been functionally dead for years.”

Carol shook her head and sighed. She put her hand on Loretta’s quilt covered leg and her eyes wandered to above the headboard, where a knuckle shaped dent in the wall made her grimace. She layed down next to Loretta, still on top of the covers. Her eyes wandered to the window sill, where Loretta displayed her favorite rocks that she had found over the years. 

Sometimes as a little girl, Loretta would look out the window with the polished rocks lined on her sill and imagine her own funeral. She would cry as she imagined her mourning sister, her mother’s unfeeling face. Her dad would come to the wake; he would look down at her perfect porcelain face and regret never knowing her. 

Once her mother had come in the room while she was doing this. She sat on the arm chair by the window and turned Loretta towards her. She held her cigarette in her lips, crunching up her eye as she wiped Loretta’s tears with her shirt sleeve. 

“I was imagining being dead.” 

“What?” her mother laughed. “That is the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard. You’re not dead, ok?” 

“Ok.” Loretta wasn’t convinced.

“You’re not dead, Loretta. Ok? You’re 11.”

 Loretta stuck out her lower lip and crossed her arms. Her mother groaned and stood up to leave.

“Don’t be so difficult,” she said, “I was trying to comfort you.” 

When she left the room, Loretta looked back out the window down at the tree with the knotty hole in its center. The one she imagined fairies lived in. They had probably carved the whole trunk out and built a tiny little winding staircase up it, because even though they had wings, they were waiting for Loretta to shrink down small enough to be part of their world. Which she did very slowly over the years. 

The next morning, Carol pulled up in her VW. She honked her horn three times before Loretta poked her head out of the window, her newly cut bangs sticking straight out like one of those retractable porch awnings. 

Loretta stood still in the middle of her room. Depression mess, Alex used to call it. She threw a bunch of random crap in a canvas tote: a denim skirt, a bathing suit, and some purple and green striped leggings. Before racing out the door, she grabbed a frog beanie baby, a large straw hat, and a flask. She shuffled outside holding the hat down on her head and hopped in. 

It was a beautiful drive. The blur of the world behind glass quieted her mind. They passed fields of tall grass where tall telephone poles sloped down off into the distance. She wondered what little critters lived in that lush field speckled with yellow flowers. If a family of lady bugs would crawl up one of the telephone wires to watch the sun descend behind the green grassy horizon, now honey colored in the fading light. They would sit there with their little bug arms around each other basking in the orange glow of the setting sun, happily unaware of all the worlds those poles connected and the good and bad news they carried. When they said “I love you” they would know it was forever. 

Loretta reached into her canvas tote and pulled out her flask.

“How's motorcycle guy? Still seeing him?” Loretta asked. 

“Doing a little more than seeing him.” Carol winked and they snickered. “I’m asking him to move in.”

“Coochie coochie coo,” said Loretta. 

“But that’s not why I'm redoing the house. I’m doing it for myself too. And for you, Loretta. I don’t want that house to be some cloud of horrible memories.”

Loretta chortled and thought of her old house, once a little sagging yellow bungalow. It was probably painted a cool gray now. She thought about Carol packing her school lunch in the kitchen. Carol making dinner. Carol bringing home a sad little tree she found in the trash the first Christmas they spent without a mother.

“You know I have a whole other life in my mind that I live out when I imagine?” Loretta asked Carol as she unwrapped a used camcorder. She was 12. 

“Oh, yea?”

“It’s like a movie,” little Loretta said, tapping her temple. 

“Careful living up there,” Carol had said, “it’s a long fall back down to reality.” 

Loretta offered Carol the flask and she took it, which was a surprise. She choked a little and that made Loretta feel like she was better at something. Carol asked about the break up. 

“I think she was tired of the hot Cheeto finger prints on her silken nighties,” said Loretta. 

Carol wasn’t buying it. 

“I know it’s hard but try not to take it personally. Not everyone is in or out, black and white, love or hate, like you.”

Loretta poured a packet of sugar into her mouth. "Have you been reading Bukowski?” 

“Who?”

She was tingling all over. Each breath felt deep like a gulp of cold water. 

“Are you going to be ok, seeing mom?” asked Carol. 

It was almost an offensive question. Loretta knew that when she saw her mother, she would feel nothing. 

The new décor at the house looked exactly like Carol, a little bland with pops of color. There was a red vase in the living room filled with hydrangea from the garden. Loretta made her way into the dining room, nothing to note, and then the kitchen. Carol had put in yellow tiles behind the sink and there was a hook next to the pantry with some farmer-like aprons. 

“It’s really nice, Carol,” said Loretta, “You did a really good job.” 

Carol got a pitcher out of the fridge and a couple glasses, and Loretta pulled a chair out of the kitchen table. It was painted newly white but it still made the same squeak against the old wood floors. 

“Mom’s going to die soon,” said Carol. 

“Yea.” 

“I think we should keep that at the front of our minds. We should try to go through this gracefully.”

 If all of her sentences started with “I think” how could she possibly disagree? Carol reached over and put her hand on Loretta’s arm. Her eyes were animated pools of glittery tears. She knew she was being sentimental. Loretta’s adrenaline spiked and she chewed on the inside of her cheek.

“Do you want to brush your hair before going to the hospital?” Carol asked. 

Her hair? Loretta reached up to the crown of her hair. It was matted and felt like a sponge. 

“I would rather shave my head.” 

Loretta leaned over to hug Carol, sloshing her drink into her lap. She was going to find her own way to the hospital.

“But it’s at least an hour walk!” said Carol. 

Crossing the bridge over the highway, Loretta stopped to look through the chain link fence at the blur of ugly colored cars. In the middle of the fence there was a hole in the links that someone had jumped out of. Loretta looked for the blood splatter on the highway below but didn’t see anything which was disappointing. Someone had used zip ties to close it up, although zip ties could be cut far easier than wire. Alex would have said how horrible it was to keep the hole unmended. That death didn’t need another sign post “in these times.” Alex didn’t know shit about times. 

Her phone buzzed twice before she silenced it, it was Carol. Loretta tried to make out the text, but it was blurry. 

Loretta stopped in front of the old timey theater. She walked past the ticket counter into the first theater and sank into a red velvet seat. It smelled the same as it did in her childhood, thank god. Thirty minutes in, Loretta went out to get popcorn but instead wandered back onto the sidewalk. 

The sun was setting. She pulled out her purple and green leggings from her tote and wrapped them around her neck. She took out the beanie baby frog and gave it a kiss, then tucked it into the fold of her makeshift scarf. She walked past a shanty town that lined the highway. Someone had hung a drawing outside a tent. Loretta got on her knees to admire the handiwork. It was great. A bunch of primary colored shapes connected by a jagged red line. 

Her phone buzzed again. 

“Where could you possibly be? There’s a change of plans, we’re moving mom to the house. I didn’t want to say no. That’s going to have to be alright. She doesn’t want to die in a hospital.” 

“She’s going to be at the house?” 

Loretta felt her full body cringe, the way she did when her mother's footsteps pounded up the stairs. When her feet cast black shadows on the square of light under the door and the knob turned slowly or, on later nights, slammed open with a kick. She couldn’t remember how it sounded, but she remembered how her mother’s lips curled and puckered as she yelled.

“Her old room is too messy; it’s being done up right now. She’s going to be in your old bedroom, Loretta. . .  Loretta?”

Loretta could hear the bustle of the hospital in the background of the call. Carol would wheel her decrepit body into that new house and she would think those hydrangeas were for her. She lowered the phone. Her knees were bloody. She must have been crouching on some glass and not noticed. 

Everything was beautifully still. Loretta stood in front of a playground. The sun was almost gone and so were most of the kids. A blue blanket covered the bright colors of the jungle gym and the curves in the slides and tunnels acquired a deeper shadow. Loretta sat on a damp bench that turned the seat of her pants gray, holding her stuffed frog in her hand.

She watched two little girls kneel over a hole they had dug in the dirt. There was a light emanating from within it. Their eyes widened and their faces glowed as they peered down at the treasure they had found. They had followed a secret map to get there. They had fought goblins and pirates and other unspeakable evil to come out the other side, heroes. Forever changed by their journey. 

One of the little girls picked up a worm from the hole and wiggled it in the other’s face. They squealed in delight and whispered to the worm. One of the little girls chased the other around the hole and then around a nearby tree, a thick White Oak. They were squealing and laughing. Then they stopped and crouched at the base of the tree, looking intently down at something. At the base of the Oak, the roots split to form the entrance of an underground passage. They pressed their hands around the entrance, no doubt searching for the secret button that would unlock the doorway. Loretta walked towards the tree and got down on all fours to investigate. She knew trees like this, there was one right outside her bedroom window growing up. She turned to address the little girls but they screamed and scampered away. The bark smelled sweet from the rain. She ran her fingers over it, searching. It would look like nothing, but you would know when you found it. And there it was, a gnarled knob in the bark. She twisted it and the ground underneath the tree gave way. She stuck her head in and stared down the long dark passageway, the dirt smelled otherworldly. She flattened her arms by her side and slid down the hole. It was a long fall back down to reality.

Lee Phillips is a New York-based writer, filmmaker, and actress. Her poetry chapbook, Space We Can Only Cross with a Rocket, was published by Irrelevant Press in 2022. Her writing has appeared in Dream Boy Book Club, Refinery29, office Mag, Document Journal, and is forthcoming in the Car Crash Collective Anthology. Her short film, Observations of the World Around Us, premiered at Nitehawk Cinema in collaboration with Nobudge. She is also looking for a home for her novella, "Ink is an Invasive Species."