io9 is proud to present fiction from Lightspeed Magazine. Once a month, we feature a story from Lightspeed’s current issue. This month’s selection is “Drosera regina” by A.L. Goldfuss. Enjoy!

Drosera regina

by A.L. Goldfuss

The men knew before she did. Before this boy, before sophomore year, before even her twelfth birthday, they had jostled her on the sidewalk and hooted from cars, searching for something just past her skin. But now, with her panties stripped off and the boy’s eyes on her, Jackie felt a strange prickling. A warning pacing behind her ribs. A mouth about to drip.

The boy’s family had a single-wide, newer than her mother’s, and the carpet in his bedroom was soiled with crumbs. The thin pile bit into Jackie’s shoulders and spine as she thought how, inches below her, was fresh air and cool earth.

“Feels good, right?” the boy said, sliding a part of him along a part of her. It did feel good, at least in one place. Another place hurt, and that seemed to be where the boy was interested most.

On the other side of the door, his father watched television in the living room.

“Here I go,” the boy said, and Jackie bit her lip as he pressed into the place that didn’t feel good at all. He thrust once, twice, pimply face blocking out the inset ceiling light, then yelped in her ear and pulled out, leaving behind a hole.

“What did you do?” he said, clutching his crotch. Between his fingers the skin growled red and steamed with blisters. “What did you do to me?” Beyond the door, the television swelled louder.

Jackie sat up and her cami stuck to her chest with something thicker than sweat.

“It hurt me, too,” she said, thinking it was an experience they could share. Perhaps this was part of it.

“You’re diseased! Look what you did to me! Get out!”

She dragged on her shorts, denim sticking to her fingers, and plucked her sneakers from the kitchen on her way to the door. She might have said goodnight to the boy’s father—he didn’t respond—but all she remembered when she got home was the betrayal in the boy’s eyes, as though Nature itself had wronged him.

• • •

For two years, Jackie asked the wrong questions. She spent lunches hiding in the bathroom and ninth period on the bus to the county library, where she combed the card catalog for “STDs,” “acid,” “burns,” and “boys.” The answers she got all started off promising, but ended before her troubles truly began, as though she had wandered off the map of human reckoning.

The boys, meanwhile, got worse. They huddled outside the girls’ locker room and followed her onto the court. They inched their desks closer to hers in math class and punched each other by her locker. What friends she had—other girls—stopped inviting her to sleepovers and study nights. Jackie was knobby-kneed and freckled; none of it made sense.

One night she woke from an embarrassing dream to find her chest and arms slick with sticky sap and her mother arguing with a gruff voice at the trailer door. Jackie opened her bedroom door a crack, nightshirt clinging to her skin like wet leaves.

“Get out before I make you.” Her mother stood in her pink housecoat with a shotgun in her arms.

“There’s something in there,” the man said. “I want it.”

“I said get.” Her mother pressed the barrel into his chest, pushing him back out the door with effort and locking it behind him with a shaky sigh. They kept the shotgun by the door after that.

It was the librarian who saved her.

Jackie was hunched over cellophaned reference books again, one hand hovering over a notebook scrawled with dead ends. The librarian, shaped like a cookie jar, wandered by and took pity.

“Is it for a report? Perhaps I can help.”

Jackie chewed her pen and tried to formulate an explanation.

“A fluid that attracts?” She swallowed. “And then hurts.”

The librarian tipped her head at the cryptic description, then lit up like Christmas and went digging in the stacks, pulling out an encyclopedia of plants. There, a two-page spread detailed a verdant garden of unusual curves, streaked with red, and dotted with dew.

Dionaea, the flytrap. Nepenthes, the pitcher. Drosera, the sundew.

Plants that attracted and then hurt.

Jackie’s mother worked evening shifts at the Bluebird Diner off the highway, so Jackie was in charge of grocery shopping after school. This time, she took the envelope of cash to the other side of town, to the neighborhood where the grocery store also had a garden center. For the price of a TV dinner, she rescued a Cape sundew from the discount table, its three shriveled stalks dragging in the dirt.

Jackie put the sundew on her dresser in a Country Crock container filled with water from the rain barrel outside. Within a month, the stalks recovered and unfurled new leaves, each tipped with pinpricks of nectar. Whenever a leaf caught a gnat, it curled around its victim like a body in pleasure, and Jackie tallied each shivering meal. The little sundew became a graveyard of winged bodies and sent up taller and taller stalks, making her proud in a small, secret way.

• • •

After high school, Jackie worked alongside her mother at the diner. Ostensibly it was to save for college, but they both agreed it was nice to replace the transmission on the pickup and spring for takeout once a week.

At first Jackie waited tables, but that ended when a customer smashed the pie case lunging at her over the counter. She moved to the back, scraping dried yolks and meatloaf gravy off dishes on days when the woman fry cook was in. When Jackie ovulated, she filled the yellow dish gloves with dew that hung off her elbows in long, sticky strings. The owner, a pragmatic woman who had seen her share of oddities in the world, shook her head and bought more glove packs in bulk. Jackie tried to make up for it through sheer effort, and no one breathed a word to her mother.

Dish duty was only part of it; Jackie also took out the trash at night. The dumpsters huddled near the back of the cracked parking lot, and she had to carry the bags out one at a time, arching her back to the side for balance.

To her right, a trucker descended from his cab, bouncing off the last step onto the ancient asphalt.

“Hey, baby. You wanna feel good?”

“No, thanks.” But she couldn’t run. The trash bag was glued to her hands.

He yanked it away, unperturbed by the sticky mess shining under the lot’s lone halogen bulb. It was the two of them alone in the dark.

“There’s something about you,” he said, and Jackie pushed his face away, worried about her mother waiting at home. He screamed under her hand, so she covered his mouth, cementing it shut, and he clawed at her arms as his skin blistered. The dew drenched her, ruining her uniform and squelching in her shoes as she dragged him behind the diner, to the field they used for holiday parking. She stumbled and sobbed, moaned a prayer to the night, but the rest came regardless, had been inevitable from the start.

There in the tall grass, between gopher burrows and beneath the stars, Jackie ate him bit by bit.

She didn’t use her mouth. She didn’t need to: The dew coated her and she feasted with her whole body, sipping through her pores. He tasted of chewing tobacco, burnt coffee, a shot at the state championship, a bum arm, an ex-wife, and a sleeve of stale Rolos. The more she ate the more aroused she became, and heat knotted in her groin like red wires. The orgasm clenched her arms into him, lifting him up, but he was much lighter now.

Digestion took hours, and she emerged from her haze right as dawn blushed over the hills. The man was an armful of leather and bones and looked like old sticks when scattered around the field. She had just enough time to finish with the trash and lock up the diner before the owner arrived to open.

The man’s cab was still in the lot.

Jackie knew how to drive it.

The door swung heavy under her weight as she climbed up and onto seats smooth and plush. The keys were in the console—she knew that, too—and she fished them out with one hand while the other adjusted the mirrors. The cab wasn’t attached to any trailer, and the highway called from pavement frosted with mist.

She drove for hours, the semi cab a fortress around her, and she punched the clutch with the confidence of someone taller, stronger, and smug. At first she didn’t have a plan, then she did. The tank was full with thousands of potential miles, and the cab had a bed twice as nice as her own. Add that to the cash under the mattress and a few nighttime meal stops and she could make North Carolina no problem.

Days later she arrived at sunset and parked the cab down a forest service road. There were no signs confirming her destination, and her palms itched for a map. But she was rewarded once she stalked between the tall trees and her flashlight found the ruby-mouthed florets in the dark.

Dionaea muscipula, the Venus flytrap, grew in sandy bogs in the American southeast.

She sat among the toothy traps, the largest no longer than the pad of her thumb, and studied their process. They didn’t drip with dew, but once a fly or wasp triggered the hairs in their clamshell mouths, they snapped shut and got to work. And the plants were so small, easily missed unless you knew where to look.

The pine bark scratched through her now-stiff uniform, but the katydids croaked a pleasing refrain, and the mosquitos, ironically, left her alone. In the heat and the dark, with the flytraps and the bog, she had time to think.

She could use a beer. One of the convenience store specials that used to accompany her to the boy’s football games, until he went off to college and got too big for that town and her house. She scratched a ghost beard on her chin and froze at the motion. In the distance, a pickup with dirty disc brakes squealed down the road, a sound she would not have recognized yesterday. The world pressed in on her, now filtered through two sets of eyes, and the extra dimensions tickled her stomach. She clamped her eyes shut and swallowed until the ground under her felt solid again.

Later, Jackie drove the cab over state lines, wiped it clean, and hopped a bus back home.

• • •

Within a week of being home, it was obvious Jackie had changed. She was fidgety and impatient, snapping at her mother over the yellowing plastic of their bathroom fixtures and the worn edges of her bedsheets. Her mother pushed back at first, then simply listened, folding into old dreams on the sofa.

Early one morning, Jackie left with a knapsack and her latest paycheck stuffed into her bra. She imagined her mother being relieved.

Those were the good, lonely years. Men opened their cars and wallets at rest stops, coffee shops, and bars. She sweet-talked, motel hopped, moved up, and broke down. She learned how to dress for her body type—tucked shirts into trousers to cheat her waist and wore A-line skirts to hide her knees—and smothered her freckles with expensive foundation.

She learned it didn’t happen with every man. Never with the men who listened to their sisters or chose to be in the room when their wives gave birth. Never the men who volunteered at Little League games, bought tampons without flinching, or tried new foods with interest. Those men never touched Jackie, never wanted her at all.

It was their shadowy brothers who found her. The loud men, the rough ones, the broken stairs everyone stepped over on their way out the door. Every bar had one, and every woman was glad when he ignored her for the gangly nobody who had just walked in. Sometimes they announced themselves from across the street, but other times Jackie didn’t know what her night would be until a strange hand traced her hip.

Once they found her, the rest was the same. Jackie fed and woke up different. By the time she turned twenty-six she could descale a boat motor, give a stick-and-poke, write BASIC, read Japanese, cook a gumbo so thick and spicy it coated the throat like soft fire, tune a hearing aid, bind a chest, take a punch, run a sawmill, do an ollie, play bass clarinet, blue a revolver, plane a table, shape a baguette, and hustle a game of pool. Sometimes Jackie woke from feeding to a field of stars overhead, and she wondered if her mother got the cash she sent.

She tried to get clean, following every sign the universe gave her right to the neon-soaked steps of a lesbian club. There, between the scuffed dance floor and oiled bar she found all sorts of women, many eager to try her on. Jackie let them lead her down tiled hallways and into studio apartments, squeezing her eyes tight to work the spell of rewiring her brain, succumbing to the painted nails and acid-washed denim. But the hands were always too small, the lips too soft, the words too kind. She willed herself to change, to let them build her a home, but each time stumbled into the dawn with the same self-repulsion and realization. Jackie was made for the worst men. She was a rabbit in lust with hawks.

• • •

The men had been driving back from a bachelor’s party in Atlantic City, taking a detour through the Pine Barrens to extend the trip. There they had found Jackie, crouching near the water, fingers combing the underbrush. She saw herself through their eyes now, how they had skimmed past her fresh perm and went right to her ass. Despite it all, she was heartbroken.

Jackie gripped the two men close, their legs entangling in the wet grass as the Jersey summer boiled the air over the cedar marsh. Above was a perfect patch of blue, but Jackie didn’t see the sky or the herons or the pine needles sprinkling onto the men’s wet shoulders. She roiled and rolled, orgasms rocking her thoughts, what vision she had split three ways.

She had never had two at once, and the jeans around her ankles and firestorm in her brain told the tale. She screamed with pleasure, moaned with agony, and panted into their foul mouths, her arms plastered to their chests. The men wrestled inside her. Called her all the usual names. Digestion was always difficult, each new addition pecking and clawing until his feathers congealed into the miasma veiling her senses. Every man gone, every man dead, but still a small facet through which the world reflected at a new angle. Already she was expanding twofold, more skills and opinions and cruelty and sorrow. Already that girl in the trailer park was shoved further down a hallway of cracked mirrors. Jackie was shattered, only aware of her legs when walking or her hands when slicing a steak.

Blackness furred her vision, and she forced her eyes toward the dainty treasure past her soles. The reason she had come to the Pine Barrens.

Jackie had zig-zagged across the country, bouncing off men like a pinball, but always, always found the plants. The flytraps saw her several times, but also the white trumpet Sarracenia in Florida and the dainty bladderworts. She had even made it to the west coast for the Darlingtonia with their curious forked tongues. There was a park in Oregon dedicated to these cobra lilies, and in the densest patches they looked like a green shag carpet.

But her favorites were the sundews. They edged every bog at every latitude in the country, often hidden by taller grass and grander vegetation. Finding them was like finding a fairy ring, a secret among the moss, glistening in the afternoon light. Drosera rotundifolia in California, cute rosettes with oval leaves. Drosera linearis, playing hide-and-seek along the marl bogs of the Great Lakes.

And here, Drosera filiformis, its scarlet tendrils waving in the humid Jersey breeze.

Jackie concentrated on the delicate plant, its tender leaves clogged with gnats, flies, and a solitary moth. But those slender stalks didn’t bow under the weight. They stood tall and proud, supping on the battlefield. As Jackie admired them, her own weight lightened.

Jackie pushed the men’s desiccated piles into the marsh, along with her ruined clothes. She strode back to her car naked, the only devil wandering the woods. Some baby wipes and an emergency stash of clothes got her back on track.

On the highway she caught a faded billboard promising a classic diner breakfast at some nameless greasy spoon. Yearning spiked through her, and she considered the source. Impossible to tell who wanted what. She listened to the radio for a while, savoring someone else’s memory of Canadian bacon, then took the on-ramp. Two hours later, she stood outside an old single-wide with rust gathering around the windows.

She rapped on the door and stood sweating in the dark, until the door opened into a slice of yellow light.

“I can’t stay,” Jackie said as her mother flew down the stairs. “I’m sorry.”

“I know,” her mother said, holding her tight.

• • •

A detective found her in Wyoming, at a motel shoved between a used car lot and a lunch buffet. He wore a department store suit and a cowboy hat but was otherwise clean-cut and earnest when she opened the door.

“Debra Rawlins?”

“Yes?”

He nodded and pulled back his blazer to flash his badge and .38. “I’m with the homicide unit out of Laramie, and I’d like to ask you a few questions about the disappearance of—” And he named her last meal.

“Homicide? My goodness.” Jackie smiled like a makeup display and opened the motel door. “Please excuse the mess.”

He passed by her tidy bed and suitcase to sit at the little table in the corner. He seemed almost embarrassed to be there.

“We have a report from the bartender at the Ranger Club that you were seen there with this man on Thursday night. It’s, well, it’s a rough establishment, ma’am. Doesn’t seem like your type of place.”

He was young, perhaps younger than her, and worried at the edge of his notebook as he talked. She could take him, whelp that he was, a good four inches shorter than—No. No. Jackie swallowed her indigestion and kept her face pleasant.

“I was there, yes. I was hungry and the chalkboard sign said they had burgers.”

“There’s a burger shop just down the street.”

“I wanted company.”

“At the biker club?”

“I didn’t know that when I walked in. I travel a lot.”

“I see.” He had probably been an Eagle Scout. Could probably build her a fire in a rainy gorge after a plane crash. Would probably tuck their kids in at night. “It seems you do travel a lot, ma’am. You stayed at three other hotels in the state this month. Two of those dates line up with missing persons cases.” He set his hat down on the table, not meeting her eyes.

“How horrible.”

“I put out some calls to Idaho, too. Crossing state lines would make it federal.” He cleared his throat. “Ma’am.”

Jackie slid into the chair across from him, the cracked plastic cushion wheezing in the still air. He didn’t look up, sit back, or check his gun. She liked that.

“Is there anything else, detective?”

“Debra Rawlins isn’t your real name. I can bring you in just on that.” He did look up at this, strong jawline tense.

“So, why don’t you?”

He hesitated, and she could see this face ten years older, explaining baseball to a seven-year-old with the gravity of a priest.

“The boys at the station think I’m crazy, but you are a killer, aren’t you? I’ve never met a lady killer before. One time a woman shot her husband, but he had been beating her for weeks and she hadn’t meant to. But you’re different, right?” He looked almost sad. “I want to know why.”

She leaned back into the sharp chair frame, half a lie on her lips. But it felt good, almost poetic, to unburden herself onto this clean-shaven detective. Jackie had stood on both coasts numerous times, slept under the stars, climbed mountains, run through the rain, but always alone. Her feet ached from running.

“I don’t go looking for them. They find me.” This was happening. She was confessing. “They find me in bars, on escalators, in church. Loud men. Mean men. Sometimes, rich men.”

“You’re a prostitute?”

“I’m sure my mother thinks so.” Her lips twisted into a smile. “I send her money every month, and she never outright asks, but I feel it all the same. And it doesn’t really matter, in the end. As long as she gets the money.”

“So, you sleep with them and then kill them?”

“Not exactly.”

“Do they hurt you? Is it self-defense?”

“The first time was, I suppose. I’m not sure about the rest. At some point, it has to be my fault.”

“Look, I—I don’t agree with your lifestyle. But I have a cousin in a similar way. I get how it happens. And these men, they can be real assholes. If you can give a detailed statement about it being self-defense, I’m sure the city can find you a good lawyer.”

He was a puppy in a two-piece suit, looking at her like she was a damsel in a tower. She had always wanted a man to look at her this way. Treat her like something precious. And here he was, a young detective who probably came here on his lunch hour to follow another dusty lead. How many days had he spent tracking her down? Was she everything he’d wanted?

“Okay. I’ll come with you.” Wyoming was one big stretch of sky, and it would be nice to be a passenger for once and drink it all in. “Can I gather some things? I don’t imagine I’ll be back for a while.”

He thought it over and nodded. She leaned over the small table and patted his hand. It was firm and dry.

For the first time, he looked nervous.

“Thank you.” She meant it.

Her suitcase was open and partially scattered, but her purse was mostly ready. Makeup compact, pocketknife, keys from her last ride. She had left the latest man (sleek bones) behind a pet store, because it felt fitting. Perhaps she could convince the fresh detective to go there now. Perhaps he would believe her. Perhaps her mother would as well.

The chair scooted behind her.

“Almost done,” Jackie said, zipping up her bag. She was thirsty from talking. Maybe some water, before the road.

He was right there when she turned around, his footsteps muted by the stained carpet. The blinds were drawn on the window, and what light that peeked through made his young face stark with shadows. A thin scar twisted through his eyebrow. Someone had slashed that boyish face.

“Excuse me, ma’am.” His voice was rough, a struggle, and her heart dropped. “But you smell amazing.”

• • •

Jackie left the detective at the bend of a river, where gleaming fish stroked the rivulets and finches played in the young trees. It was nice (nicer than he had been to her, in the end) and she stayed to watch the morning sun dapple her sneakers before leaving town.

She hit the big Midwest cities. Chicago to learn, Vegas to forget. She became a stripper, strutting into the spotlights to looks of disappointment and slipping behind the curtains as the audience stormed the stage. She worked the streets, men on her heels down every alleyway, biting bags of garbage to muffle her ecstasy as they melded into her flesh. The dew came easier now that Jackie sanded with the grain. She could quell it for a time with the promise of a good meal always on the horizon. After Wyoming, no cop bothered her again, as though she reflected them back to themselves. She disappeared men no one wanted returned.

She grew a callus against the good ones, her cicatrized eyes bouncing off their slight frowns as they shuffled away from her on the metro. They could smell their brothers on her and assumed it was her fault, something Jackie had welcomed, so how good could they really be, anyway. As though she wanted their pedestrian white fences, jewelry on Christmas, forehead kisses as she birthed their sons.

Jackie dove into an ocean of exit ramps, motel coffee, mall photos in bruised wallets, cheap gin, expensive shoes, limousines, logging trucks, silk scarves, border crossings, fast cash, and rough stubble until she washed up again at the foot of familiar splintered steps, mumbling a curse in Spanish as her eyes focused on the frayed hem of her mother’s robe.

“Oh, honey,” her mother said. “What a mess.”

For three weeks they said nothing about it. Her mother attended her usual shifts at the diner while Jackie haunted the length of the sagging trailer, inventing new ways of pacing its abbreviated spaces. She slept among the stacked boxes in her old room, sweating out her recent meals, digesting hard memories, and shoving the men behind every saran-wrapped corner of her mind until she had quiet.

But quiet was steel wool against her raw nerves. She rummaged through her mother’s belongings to fill up her head with sound. Flyers for a church rummage sale. L.L. Bean catalogs. An old wedding invite from someone Jackie had known in high school. She crumpled it into a tight ball and tossed it in the trash.

What Jackie sought were love letters, dirty photographs, a red underline in a supple address book. Proof her mother had touched a man, had been around men, since Jackie’s father had died. Evidence that she was more than a pink diner apron and tin walls. But Jackie found nothing, not even a Christmas card from a suspicious name. Her mother was a nun, holy, and she lived here unscathed.

So Jackie walked to the gas station for a twelve pack of beer, to soften her mother and blunt herself.

When her mother came home, she appraised the situation with a raised eyebrow but acquiesced easier than Jackie had expected. They sat across from each other at the cramped Formica dining table, her mother smelling of grease and Jackie hoping she smelled like nothing at all. Drinking with her mother as two adults was odd, as though they had skipped several crucial stages. Jackie was awkward, eighteen and thirty-two at once, two people superimposed over each other. And she’d had little need to cultivate the skill of small talk. But her mother seemed content, commenting on the beer as she sipped it, and Jackie studied her mother’s shoulders and crow’s feet until she thought she detected something give.

“Still doing the dinner shift at the Bluebird? You get home so late.”

“But I keep my mornings. I can have my coffee—I get these nice beans now, you should try—and read the paper like a queen. And Rosa lets me sit in the back office when my feet are sore. She asks about you, you know.”

“But you don’t have to, right? Aren’t you getting the money I send?”

“Yes, I get the money.”

“Well?” Jackie pointed out the window with the bottleneck at unseen riches in the dark. “It’s enough to buy a house, right? Why don’t you buy a house?”

“And what would I do with a house? A house is too big for just me. Unless you’re going to stay with me. Will you stay with me, Jackie? In a house?”

Jackie traced the threads on the bottle’s throat. “I will. Soon.”

“When? What is it you’re looking for out there? What do you want?”

A man to look and see all of her, every freckle, every scoundrel’s memory hanging off her like a ghost, the way she mashed saltines into her clam chowder until it was a salty paste, her one crooked tooth, the way she cried before bed, all of it, all of it, and want it all. Want it all more than he wanted to cram himself into her tender places, hairy knuckles in her mouth, his dessert more important than her name. Want it all more than he wanted himself. “I want to know what happened to dad.”

Her mother clacked her beer on the table, and the eighteen-year-old inside Jackie winced. “What sort of question is that?”

“Just, what happened to him?”

“He died. People die.”

“Yes.” Years ago, Jackie had swiped an issue of Cosmo that claimed women were attracted to men who smelled like their fathers. Did the men who found her already smell of decay? Was there something buried in this trailer, in her mother, that would save her? “But how?”

“Enough of this.” Her mother stood and rinsed her bottle in the sink. “I need sleep. And you need to stop thinking such morbid thoughts.” She kissed Jackie’s forehead, anointing her with the remnants of tinted chapstick, and prodded Jackie’s shoulder toward the second bedroom. “Don’t stay up late.”

Jackie listened from her bedroom as her mother trudged around the trailer, putting trash away, brushing her teeth, and pulling her own door closed with a tink of the overhead light. In the darkness, Jackie reviewed the conversation, considering the stresses and flaws. She skimmed through all the conversations inside her, conducted by other mouths, each one commanding and direct. That approach hadn’t worked, but she could try again. She had aerated the soil, brought the dark loam to light, and next she would plant the seeds.

But by the next night, Jackie was back on the road.

• • •

Nepenthes albomarginata has a ring of white trichomes around each pitcher’s mouth that attracts termites. They crowd to eat the white band and push each other in.

Sarracenia psittacina has beaked traps lined with aciform hairs waiting to skewer any prey escaping from the pit of digestive acid below.

Drosera regina has knobby stalks, wilted flowers, and wandering roots. A rare specimen, it seems incapable of attracting pollinators.

• • •

Jackie was forty-one when her mother died. The call came from a neighbor who had poked around the trailer after the EMTs left and discovered a Post-it on the fridge with a number but no name.

“It was a stroke, I think,” the neighbor said on the phone. “Aren’t you the daughter who was always sleeping around?”

“I’ll be there tomorrow,” Jackie replied and hung up.

The funeral was small, but the reception was packed with people she had never met. Bubbles of conversation drifted over her, each a paint stroke in the portrait of a woman Jackie had thought she knew. Her mother had called bingo on Tuesdays, run the church bake sale, and organized the trailer park against a real estate company looking to put in condos. The pastor was there, as well as a local Girl Scout troop, and the Ladies Auxiliary. Each anecdote Jackie caught was a testament to a full, happy life. Alone, but not lonely. So foreign to her own life, lonely yet never alone.

A graying woman shuffled to Jackie’s corner, and Jackie braced for a slap as though she was a trespasser on her own mother’s death. But the woman looked up from under thick eyebrows and offered a serene smile.

“I don’t suppose you remember me?” she said, but Jackie did. Jackie always remembered the women. And she could never forget Ms. Rosa, who had snuck her citrus-scented lotion after Jackie had tried to scald the dew off her arms in the diner prep sinks. Jackie clutched her bag to her side, warding away the memory, and Ms. Rosa bowed her head. “I am so sorry, dear. Your mother was a friend to me, you know. And she spoke of you often. She missed you so much.”

Jackie nodded, eyes darting around the room over the old woman’s head. “Thank you.”

“Do you have somewhere to stay in town?”

“I’m staying with a friend.”

“Is it a nice place?”

“Yes, very nice.”

“Oh good, honey. Because you need a rest.” Ms. Rosa’s voice lowered, and Jackie refocused on her wrinkled face, so many fine lines gathered together like spider’s silk. “I know about the money you sent your poor mother. And I remember you at the diner with all those ruined gloves. I imagine you’re exhausted in many ways.”

Before Jackie could react, the old woman hugged her around the waist, her thin arms warm and strong. Jackie froze and her body shuddered in conflict at an embrace meant to comfort, not restrain. The last person to hug her had been her mother, now an index of messages on an answering machine. Her mother, the one solid anchor in this spit of a town. The crowd’s murmuring rose to a buzzing din in Jackie’s ears as the welts of over twenty years on the road rose up inside her.

The old woman patted Jackie’s trembling back. “There’s a man who comes to the diner on Sundays, and I don’t like how he looks at the girls in their church dresses. I think he and you should meet.”

Jackie clamped shut like a bear trap, her relief unplugged. A numbness spread through her as Ms. Rosa withdrew with that same serene smile and melted back into the crowd.

Jackie tore away, whispers snagging in her hair, and slipped out a side door onto a street shining with a fresh coat of rain and the fire of a good sunset. Cars lined the street for several blocks, waiting for their drivers to take them someplace familiar and warm, and Jackie bent each side mirror as she walked back to the hotel.

• • •

Jackie bought a house at the end of a long driveway outside of town and towed her mother’s trailer there herself. For two weeks she slept on her old bed in her mother’s worn housecoat, rereading faded birthday cards, napping in the closet, and eating very little. When she stumbled into the house for a shower, she noticed the grout was peeling and the water pressure was weak. On returning from the hardware store, the mailbox greeted her with a tilt, and a line of moss taunted her from the roof. Inside, a nail bit her sock.

Jackie sanded and scraped, varnished and painted, scowled and sang. The downstairs bathroom gained a new sink and the kitchen a refurbished range. Special-order curtains draped the bay windows and copper bottom pots hung by the fridge. The work felt good, the house reshaping under her hands, her muscles sore and mind full. Until she lined up a nail to hang a shelf and a grunt echoed through her body, a memory of how she had learned to square and cut and hang.

Jackie flung the hammer across the room and the shelf to the floor. She ripped the curtains with kitchen shears, slammed her dresser down the stairs, and attacked the drywall with a crowbar until a tendon in her wrist screamed. She howled and kicked and punched, sobs erupting from a forgotten cave system, tectonic plates grinding beneath her feet. The house groaned as she slid to the floor, both victims licking their wounds in the dark, and the crickets regrouped outside.

Curled up beside a smashed lamp, breath haggard and eyes burning, her raging blood pooled into a familiar heat in her stomach, and Jackie cupped her breasts with a rising understanding. Urged on by the violence and the detritus of a pretty life, she slid her hands into abandoned territory, and began to draw the map of herself, for herself.

This time the repairs went slow, and Jackie tested her palms against splintered boards as she considered each lintel, each eave. Paint swatches hung in every shade as she tried to remember her favorite color. She ate at the table, on the floor, on the outside steps, judging the sensations of each setting, weighing bread on her tongue. She tasted slow-simmered stew, played records during lunch, and let her hands wander over fresh linens and washed stone. Sometimes a memory smashed her onto the rocks and sent her to bed, heartbroken and frail. But after a dozen storms, the waves came slower, and she could wander the beach at low tide to examine what lived beneath.

The South-facing windows filled with friends. Rows of sundews in all shapes and sizes, some shy pings from Mexico, and even a flytrap or two. On hot days Jackie rotated the pots, her cheeks brushing the drooling Nepenthes pitchers, exotic bellies waiting for a good meal. She dug a bog in the garden and stuffed it with Sarracenia and the occasional cobra lily, then drank up the sun alongside them and considered the dense woods.

She learned skills the old-fashioned way: from books, articles, diagrams, and mistakes. Restless hours siphoned into spinning wool, folding origami, twisting macramé, canning tomatoes, curing cheese, and holding downward dog. She also learned herself, with fingers and faucets, pillows and toys. She kept herself busy, body and soul, so she never daydreamed about butter-soaked waffles, late summer dresses, and a man in a corner booth she should meet. She never wondered how he would greet her, how he would touch her, the things she would learn, the ecstasy she would feel, the flowers she would grow over his grave. She had a system in place. She had a routine.

One day, like all other days, Jackie woke to quiet. All day she had quiet, broken only by her own footsteps, the rasp of knife on bread, the scattering of water from the tap. The house dozed around her, from the floral rugs to the crocheted blankets to the watercolor sketch in the corner. The plants stretched up to the midday sun, twinkling with dew.

No one came up her driveway, lost and curious, smelling of the world. No one knocked on her door in a cheap suit. No one rang her line with a deep, demanding need. The only voice she heard was her own; she had reclaimed herself inch by inch. Alone in her garden. Alone in her bed. Safe and hungry and slick.

About the Author

A.L. Goldfuss’s work has been shortlisted for Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy and has appeared in Lightspeed, Nightmare, Fantasy, and other venues. For more work and newsletter updates, visit algoldfuss.com.

Please visit LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE to read more great science fiction and fantasy. This story first appeared in the October 2025 issue, which also features short fiction by Martin Cahill, Osahon Ize-Iyamu, Micah Dean Hicks, Stephen Graham Jones, Sean McMullen, Megan Chee, An Owomoyela, and more. You can wait for this month’s contents to be serialized online, or you can buy the whole issue right now in convenient ebook format for just $4.99, or subscribe to the ebook edition here.

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