Speck by speck, he captured what he could, and in those moments, with all his focus and energy flowing through the tip of his paintbrush, he couldn’t let his anger boil over. Being angry all the time was tiring. Still, he preferred being furious about losing his sight to mourning the loss of his dreams. Tears choked you. Rage kept you breathing. Anger needed air to fan its flames.
Q ran his fingertips over his final painting. It was meant to capture the woman’s left eye, but he had run out of time to finish it. All he could do was trust his manager’s word that even if the piece wasn’t done, it was good enough. His show was opening this evening and he needed to deliver its missing piece. It would be a shame not to include the painting since it fit the collection’s theme perfectly.
Unfinished
A Silent Auction of the Final Works of Q Chen Philips Jr.
All proceeds to be donated to blindness research.
Q took the painting from the easel and wrapped it in brown paper. He did not have time to have it framed, but it was just as well. Frames were doorways into a painter’s truth and this piece only led to a dream’s end. His patrons would simply assume that this was yet another piece where he broke the rules, just like the swarms of scorched moths he vigorously denied spray-painting on the city’s walls.
“Where do I board the Elsewhere Express?”
Frequently Asked Questions
The Elsewhere Express
Passenger Handbook
Raya
It had been ten years to the day since Raya had sat by Jace’s hospital bed, holding his bandaged hand. (She no longer went by the name Hiraya, but it was still the name printed on her first-year medical school ID.) She had squeezed her brother’s fingers harder than she should have, convinced that if she held on to him tightly enough, he would stay. Their parents stood at the foot of his bed, unable to speak or cry. They had braced themselves for the cruel twists of his disease but failed to foresee that what would actually leave their teenage son brain-dead would be a drunk driver in a red pickup, a few blocks away from their home. This, however, was only half of the truth of what had happened that night.
The other half hung above Raya’s head, hovering in the hospital room’s arctic air, a secret only she could know.
Raya kept her eyes on Jace’s bandaged face, aware of how every breath the blinking machines forced inside him extracted every drop of meaning from her bones. She ground her guilt between her teeth, counting down the last moments she could call herself “Hiraya.” She did not care to be reminded of what she had become: Shewas now a wasted wish. A pile of useless spare parts. She had had one purpose. And now he was gone.
She clung to Jace’s hand more tightly than she had held on to anything before. Mary Beth had been right about the strength of her grip.
Tonight, as she rushed to catch her train home, Raya used that grip to clutch the straps of the overstuffed bag swinging from her shoulder. The blue tote was made from ocean trash and shimmered like the sea. Raya was not too proud to admit that she envied the bag: The plastic bottles it used to be had been given a second chance to be new.
At twenty-five, Raya swore her bones creaked as loudly as the steps to her sixth-floor walk-up apartment. She didn’t have to be a doctor to know that her diet of candy bars, sour gummies, and energy drinks did not do her any favors. But if living off simple sugars and caffeine was what it took to stay awake for the next four years of medical school, diabetes, osteoporosis, and renal failure would just have to sit in the waiting room and flip through old magazines until she could see them.
A man ran into her bag and scampered away. Raya apologized when she had meant to swear. Saying sorry and smiling were default responses that came with living on autopilot. They had their uses but sometimes left her mouth coated in ash. Raya grimaced and took a quick inventory of her belongings. A dented laptop, a dog-eared textbook, a binder containing her anatomy notes, and a purple notebook peeked through an assortment of ultra-processed snacks that had no business being called food.
As far as she could tell, nothing was missing. Her upcycled bag still strained to carry a downcycled dream. Raya conceded that she was never going to be half the doctor her brother would have been, but holding on to half of a dream was better than letting go of a dead one.
Raya transferred the tote to her other shoulder even if it didn’t make a difference—invisible loads were at least twice as heavy as any that you could see. She slipped the bag off and then returned it to its bruised home. Her skin welcomed it back with a silent sigh. Oldpain trained the body to miss it. Over time, flesh forgot the difference between what it had learned to tolerate and what gave it relief.
Wind blew through the subway tunnel, whipping Raya’s newly dyed lavender hair. She slipped a hair tie off her wrist and secured her hair in a messy ponytail. The electric-blue elastic had matched her previous hair color but clashed with the pale purple. She made a mental note to replace it. Though she never colored her hair the same shade twice, she could not bring herself to throw any of her old hair ties out. The rainbow of retired elastics in her drawer grew each year, always a few days before Jace’s death anniversary. Raya insisted that it was a coincidence just as staunchly as she denied that changing her appearance was the only way she could stand looking in the mirror. But today, despite her new hair, she took pains to avoid her reflection. The lavender only reminded her of Claire, a cadaver who shared her hair color.
Claire was not the corpse’s real name. Following protocol, the bodies donated to Raya’s gross anatomy class were anonymous. Naming her group’s cadaver had not been Raya’s idea, but she didn’t care enough to object. Dissecting a dead body for the first time was just another item on her to-do list, no different from doing the laundry or organizing her notes. Numbness was the sole perk of living in the hollow of someone else’s life and Raya took full advantage of it. It came in handy in class when it steadied her fingers as she unzipped the black body bag containing Claire.
Hollow eyes. Ashen skin. Purple hair. The elderly woman’s cadaver was as cold and lifeless as the rest of the laboratory’s equipment. Raya groaned in her head when her groupmates decided that thanking the corpse before dissecting it was the right thing to do. No one else seemed to notice that the body on the stainless steel table couldn’t hear them. Nothing lived inside it anymore. Perhaps, Raya thought as she stared down at the dead body, only husks saw other husks for the empty shells that they were.
Thank you, Claire.The name’s single syllable rolled off Raya’s tongue without ceremony. Raya regarded the cadaver, shifting her weight on her feet. Its face remained just as sunken, stiff, and gray as it was before its christening. Giving it a name had changed nothing.
Then everything was churning inside Raya all at once.
A breath hissed between Raya’s teeth as sharp as the truth that lodged behind her tonsils like a fish bone. She coughed twice but couldn’t spit it out, and so she forced herself to swallow the reality whole: Names weren’t spells cast on those given them, they bewitched those who said them out loud. While Raya’s eyes still saw a dead body, her mind could not stop seeing the woman who had lived.
Wrinkles recorded the smiles that had reached Claire’s eyes, along with all the frowns that didn’t. The deep creases around her mouth logged a lifetime of laughter while the finer ones documented the words she spoke. But if Claire had felt any sorrow when she passed, death had taken great care to erase every trace of it.
Raya pursed her lips, struggling to describe what remained on the woman’s face. She couldn’t remember the last time she had seen anything like it in the mirror, not even when she dyed her hair the prettiest of pinks.
Contentment. Composure. Peace.Raya pasted each word over Claire like a label, only to then peel them off. She needed a word with more weight. Dying had stripped Claire of many things, but not the gravity that came with knowing that even in death, she was a gift with meaning and mass, and that not an inch of her was a waste of space.
Raya clasped her hands behind her back, resisting the urge to brush a stray strand of purple hair from Claire’s temple. Their choice of hair dye, Raya thought, was the only thing they had in common. Serenity made its home in a lived life’s marks, and without a place to nestle on Raya’s face, it rolled off her cheeks and chin like tears.
