Maddie Louise is a writer based in Los Angeles with work published in The Timberline Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, and Loud & Queer Zine. She adores her work as a program manager for a creative writing and publishing nonprofit serving students throughout Los Angeles. In her free time Maddie enjoys going out and about, tinkering with art projects, and staying caffeinated. She can be contacted at maddielouise.com. 

Sun Wings

I’ve packed the perfect picnic: moon-shaped slices of baguette, rosemary-infused goat cheese, plastic-wrapped cucumber hummus sandwiches. It all sits neatly among the round ceramic plates, the quartered cloth napkins, the folded red checkered picnic blanket. Everything is ready. Everything is accounted for. I check it off in my mind— another morning that I’ve kept it together.

“Is it possible?” Idette had asked me on our first date, prodding me in the shoulder with her finger.

“Is what possible?”

“You’re always on time. You never gossip. I’ve never even seen you spill anything. Is it possible for someone to be so put together?”

The air in me had stilled, and the calculations began. What did she know about me? What mines of my past had she dug through? But then she hiccuped and giggled, covering her mouth with her manicured palm, leaving behind the stench of her gin and tonic, and I realized she didn’t know a thing at all. So I laughed, too.

“No one’s perfect,” I had replied with a nonchalant shrug like I had practiced in the mirror.

“What are you staring at?” It’s Idette now, her caramelized voice interrupting my thoughts. We’re getting ready to leave. My eyes are set on the dark hall, how it consumes itself into a void and swallows all of the light. I’m searching its narrow body for something I thought I saw. The wicker of the picnic basket rubs uncomfortably at my hand. How long have I been standing here holding this thing?

I blink and wave my wrist at the void. “Never mind. You know when you think you see something in the shadow, but it’s just the lamp...?” Idette is rifling through her purse for her keys, no longer listening.

As I pull out of the driveway, she places one hand on top of mine. She does this when she doesn't know what else to say. I smile through the windshield, into the bright sun. There is plenty left to say, but nothing that Idette could tell me. She has already said several times how much she appreciates me moving back to my hometown for her career. How once her contract at the capital is up, we can blow this popsicle joint and move anywhere I want.

The plan was never to return to Sacramento. Backtracking the hundreds of miles to where I spent the latter half of my childhood was something I spent years avoiding, but then I met Idette and I was reacquainted with a brightness that made everything seem like things could work out.

“We can manage for a year, can’t we?” she said once we finished moving all of our New York boxes into our small, peeling duplex.

“It’s like I was never here,” I had replied, though my chest ached from the labor of breathing the minute we crossed into California, as if my lungs had recognized what had happened in this air.

Idette knew only of what I told her about my growing up in Sacramento. The way I was plopped here at the start of my seventh grade year, after my dad retreated to his first family and my mom was forced to move us someplace cheaper. Idette knew of the long, mostly quiet school days that followed. The even longer nights, picking through the wake of debris my dad left behind, the lonely search for a sign of life within the rooms of my home.

But it was like giving Idette a book with every other page ripped out.

“What is it really?” I was afraid she would ask one day, sweeping her thick braids of black hair over her shoulder, or adjusting her larger-than-life glasses, her perpetually damp brown eyes searching mine for some kind of answer. Then she’d loosen her tie like the old men in our detective shows and squint at me like she was analyzing a piece of old bread for mold. In a butchered British accent, she’d say, “Ms. Johnson, what exactly are you hiding?”

I met Cam Riggins in Ms. Chandler’s homeroom on the first day of seventh grade. He came in with a limp. The story went that he had fallen off an ATV during his summer trip to the mountains with his dad and busted his leg so bad, the doctors couldn’t do anything but leave it crooked.

He was off the basketball team after that and I could tell that meant a lot here because when he came into homeroom, a guy in an orange jersey stuck his foot out and tripped him. It got a laugh out of everyone when, unable to right himself in time, Cam smacked straight into my desk. As the new kid and the new outcast, we attached.

It was a matter of survival. I don’t think we ever particularly liked each other much, but we still did the bare minimum so as not to be classified as alone. We exchanged a few necessary words in class, ate at the same lunch table, walked a few paces apart through the crowded, ruleless halls. More than anything, proximity is what kept us together. We happened to be neighbors, just two apartments down from each other, and so walking to and from school together became part of the habit. Some days, through no real invitation or effort except for the motivation of not wanting to go home, I would go with him to his apartment after school to play SimCity 4 on his dad’s desktop.

Cam spent most of our time together surly, most of all on the days he got slammed into lockers or found a drawing of himself as an amputee. He never really told me to leave him alone, but he always rolled his eyes when I followed him into his apartment after school. It was the day he slammed the computer keyboard down, almost crushing my knuckles, insisting that it was his game and his computer, that I took the hint to let him be.

I wandered off into his living room and that’s when I saw Mrs. Riggins for the first time. She was a short, slender woman with a curtain of wavy, brown hair down to her hips, dressed in a lime green tank top, bootleg blue jeans, and tan wedge heels on her feet. She had a softness about her, taking up the same amount of space as a flicker of light. Every other time I had been over, I hadn’t heard a sound from her and I never saw her move from room to room.

“Hi,” I said to her. “I’m Daphne.”

Mrs. Riggins smiled at me, delicate. She looked frozen for a moment, just looking at me, as if trying to remember if she was alive or not.

“Done playing? You can turn on the TV if you want,” she finally said, releasing her pose. I did. I flipped through the channels until I got to Wife Swap.

“Ooh. This show is trash, but I can’t help but watch it,” she said.

“I’ve never seen it.”

“Careful. It’s addicting.” Her eyes widened. They were round and hazel, always tucked under an expression of slight concern. We watched in silence as a woman with a sparkly headband tried to convince a burly man with a blue Slushie in hand that he should try tofu. Right as he was opening his bearded mouth to respond, it cut to commercial.

“This is a strange show, Mrs. Riggins.”

“Strange things are the best things. Call me Lina.”

“Is that Disneyland?” I asked, pointing to the framed photo of her on the TV stand where a large fountain danced behind her.

“Universal Studios.”

I looked twice. “You’re wearing the same thing.”

She paused to look down at her clothes, then laughed. “You’re right. I love this outfit, I guess.”

A preview for the next Wife Swap episode came on. A sporty family versus a video gaming family. A lot of screaming, then some tears.

“I could never do this show. I could never leave my family,” Mrs. Riggins said, tapping at her chin. She didn’t seem to be talking to me when she added, “But then sometimes I wonder, could I?”

It didn’t take long for my quiet friendship with Cam to go silent. I let him have all my turns on SimCity 4, and instead of following him into his dad’s office after school, I went straight to his living room and turned the TV on to Wife Swap.

Lina always appeared to watch with me. She never probed about Cam, just exchanged a tired look with me when the door to the office slammed shut. She knew what I knew: it was better this way. Let him be and the two of us could enjoy the peace.

For weeks, it stayed that way. Just the two of us, cradled in the arms of the afternoon.

She let me talk about anything. The first time I brought up my PE crush, Alexa, it was an accident. The words spilled out of my mouth too quickly for me to put them back in, searing my cheeks a deep red. But Lina didn’t seem to notice. She soaked it in like a sponge, easily, happily. Not blinking twice that it was a girl I was telling her about, who I wanted to ask to the Winter Dance, who I daydreamed about kissing under the bleachers during passing period. She only stood there like a woman in angel’s dress, saying, “Is that so? Tell me more.”

Every day, Lina left me with an open door in my chest. A door that swung gently on its hinges, a light breeze wafting in and out of me, looking for what else it could sweep in. In the hours leading up to seeing her, I found myself scouring my brain for more things to tell her. Turns out there were hundreds of little thoughts stockpiled in the secret crevices of my mind just pulsing to get out.

“Did I tell you about Alexa’s new haircut?”

“Tell me again,” she’d say.

“Did I tell you about her science fair project?”

“Tell me again.”

“Did I tell you that Trevor Lassen asked her to the dance?”

“Tell me again.”

The only time I ever left her presence was when I was forced to. It usually happened right as the credits to the last rerun of Wife Swap crawled on screen. The sun outside would be melting through the window. Cam’s faint murmurs over the SimCity 4 would be wafting in from the other room. Down in the parking lot below, a white Toyota would be pulling in and Mr. Riggins would be climbing out of the driver’s seat.

“Go on,” Lina would say.

“I can’t spend the night?”

“Not tonight.”

“Please?”

“We’ll pick this back up tomorrow, I promise. Your mom is probably waiting for you.”

I always left with a trudge in my step, and sometimes forgetting to say goodbye to Cam on my way out. Though I wished it were true, my mom wasn’t waiting for me. Only as much as a corner waited for a cobweb. Eventually I would come, but it was only a matter of time before she cleared me away again.

That year and for many years after, my mom only saw my dad when she saw me. The remnant of the man who was with his new family while we were stuck in this old, lonely apartment. Whenever my mom and I talked, it usually ended with her pointing out some feature of mine and blaming its weird tilt, or bumpy angle, or greasy nature on my father. Then she’d wave me away, tears springing to her eyes, saying it was all too much.

Some days, I did dare to dream. High from the afternoon with Lina, I’d patter down the hall, a small kernel of hope that my mom would want to know just a fraction of what Lina knew. That this new, open door in me would make her want to come through and look inside. But she was always where she had been the night before and the night before that. Naked and shivering against the cold ceramic of the tub, an empty bottle of wine or two on the bath mat, small sobs gurgling up from the depths of her drunken doze.

On these days, I laid my head to rest and turned my dreams to prayers, asking God to pick my mom and Lina for the next episode of Wife Swap. And that if he did, to make it a miracle episode: the first one where they never swapped back.

A smiling bear on a hefty wooden sign welcomes us into the park.

“Go ahead,” I tell Idette as I gather the picnic basket from the car. She flounces away to snag a shady spot. Around her, kids pummel the playground. Mothers and their toddlers stroll along the pavement, stop at the patches of grass, exchange words over the sandpit. On the far end, there’s a dog park where owners stand statuesque watching their purebreds strike back and forth, talking to each other from only the sides of their mouths.

The last time I was here, this entire manicured display was just an old abandoned field with a chain link fence around it. I wander around the corner to where my old apartment complex used to be. Nothing about it is familiar except for the placement. The peeling clod of apartments where Cam and I grew up, wafer-thin walls between us, has been completely torn down. In its place is a three-storied mini mansion. Years before my mother’s death, as she was being forced to leave the apartment for this new development, it only existed in my mind the way she described it to me: yet another curse from my father.

Through the big bay windows, I see a handsome couple inside and a small towheaded girl hovering at their legs. Standing on the other side of the wrought-iron gate, it feels like my years here were all just an illusion. I scan the front yard, checking for omens. Something like a rogue weed poking up from a sidewalk crack, waving its frail little arm to say, How much longer can you really keep it together?

Lina helped me look pretty for the Winter Dance even though I wasn’t going with Alexa, but with a sweaty boy from science class. With every spritz of perfume and with every accessory I tried on, she’d step back and admire it on me, saying, “Just wait until Alexa sees that!”

I could have repeated that ritual for hours until I was drowning in jewelry and drenched in perfume, bathed in what Alexa might one day think of me and what I knew Lina thought of me then. But eventually I had to go. Sweaty Boy and I never made it to the actual dance. He took me to the creek behind the school where a bunch of kids passed around water bottles of vodka skimmed from their parents’ liquor cabinets. Couples were scattered across the shore bank. Someone played music from a boombox. The water bottles emptied at a fast pace.

Cam was there, too, but he acted like he didn’t know me. He seemed to be in fine spirits, nonetheless, wading into the shallow part of the creek, playfully splashing everyone in reach. It was around the seventh or eighth pass of the water bottles when someone from his old basketball team threw a rock at Cam. Then, another and another until it knocked Cam off his balance and he fell, soaking himself all the way up to his neck. When he rose from the water, his eyes blackened in a way I had never seen before. A dark space exists in my memory of what happened between the team’s laughter and the chaos that broke out. All I remember was shoving my way through the other kids to the sound of someone screaming, “You’re killing him!”

But when I got there, skidding to a stop at the edge of the creek, halted first by confusion and then by horror, I saw that it was Cam who had a kid by the neck, holding him underwater with all of his strength, the poor kid’s arms flailing, losing steam. I searched and searched, trying to find Cam somewhere behind the monster’s face, but only when one of the water bottles of vodka struck him in the head did he let go.

The guys scrambled to help their nearly unconscious teammate to shore, and then everyone split. I tripped up the shore behind my date. Over my shoulder, I caught a glimpse of Cam standing in the water alone, breathing hard, staring into the black of the night, distracted by some demon wading in the water beside him.

I find Idette by the picnic tables. Groups of people are spread out across the grass, tossing beanbags into cornhole boards and chucking Frisbees in between trees. They all tilt just a little as they play, their tipsy brains luring them back to a time where fun was in their bones and not just their planners. I lay out the picnic. When Idette plops down on the blanket across from me, she closes her eyes and tips her face up to the sun. The day around her passes like honey dripping down the side of a jar.

The corner of the blanket flips over in the wind. No matter how many times I press it back down, the wind wins and the blanket never settles. That’s how I feel when I think about the idea of Idette for too long. No matter how many times I try to push down the feeling that I don’t deserve her, it comes back fiercer with every return.

Nevertheless, I lean back and try to enjoy the sun like Idette. I remind myself that nothing has unraveled. The park is just a park. The picnic is just a picnic. Idette is just Idette.

I can keep it all together, I tell myself.

Just then, the sidewalk beside us catches my attention. There is a woman there. Short and slender, wearing a lime green tank top, bootleg blue jeans, and tan wedges.

There is sunshine behind her, rays of it, like a pair of angel wings.

She sees me, and when she does, the door in my chest flings open. It’s almost painful how strongly the wind blows in. It makes me bolt upright, makes me forget exactly where I am. When I look closer, I can see how well she’s aged. In fact, she looks exactly the same as she did the last time I saw her. Only Lina could go twenty years and rock the same outfit and maintain her same smooth skin. I almost laugh out loud, carried away by the shock of it all.

I imagine Lina gliding over and wrapping me in a hug. I imagine introducing her to Idette and offering her a cucumber sandwich. I imagine us all sitting on the picnic blanket, me retelling stories of our afternoons watching Wife Swap, then confessing all my trembling years thereafter, and the both of them laughing, Idette with one hand on top of mine, saying, How silly! How could that be? For as long as I’ve known you, you’ve always kept it so together.

Lina will agree with her delicate, concerned eyes, and I will finally sigh happy, knowing that my muddled, mixed-up mind has just been another story I’ve been telling myself.

Maybe, after all this time, I’ve been afraid for nothing.

“What are you so smiley about?” Idette’s eyes are open now, a curiosity at her lips. Excitedly, I jab my finger in the air and point to the sidewalk. “That woman over there, in the green tank top. I knew her as a kid.”

It comes out fast, eager, tumbling like a ball of weeds. Only when it lands at my feet with a heavy thud, do I realize my mistake.

I didn’t see Cam again until the last day of his suspension. He was waiting for me outside of my apartment door after school. I wanted to go to his place and see Lina. After all, it had been almost a week without seeing her too. Every time I tried to come over, it was Mr. Riggins who answered the door and told me Cam wasn’t allowed any visitors.

But Cam didn’t want to go to his apartment that day. Instead, he led me out of the complex and to the overgrown field behind the building. A chain link fence guarded the entire thing. With some effort, he climbed it and hopped over. I followed. I didn’t realize he had been drinking until we had been walking for a few minutes and he pulled out a half-empty water bottle smelling like vinegar. There was no reason for me to keep going with him, except that I missed Lina. I thought that after this field trip, he’d invite me over and I could go back to my afternoons with her.

We walked far, until I could smell the scent of the creek, before Cam finally said something.

“I’m moving.”

“Huh?”

He stopped and sat down in a clearing, rubbing his bum leg where undoubtedly a dull ache was starting to pulse. “We’re moving. To Illinois to stay with my grandparents.”

When I didn’t say anything right away, he glared at me and added, “I thought you’d want to know since you’re over all the time.”

“Well, how come?”

“‘Cause of what happened at the creek.”

It hit me all at once: Was Lina leaving too?

“My dad says he needs more help,” Cam continued, even though I didn’t ask. “He says I’m a safety hazard.” His words slurred and as he leaned back on his elbows, I could see a rare sadness tugging at his lips.

I tried to picture his apartment empty. A new family moving in. A new mom to replace Lina. She’d probably wear boring floral blouses from the mall and only watch HGTV with the volume off and the captions on. We wouldn’t talk about Alexa or watch Wife Swap. She’d never listen to what I say, or respond with exactly what I needed to hear.

The thought of it made my skin prickle with rage.

“What about your mom?”

Cam looked at me funny. “What about her?”

He laid all the way down into the dirt and sprawled out like a starfish. The vodka was starting to hit him. “I swear, Daphne,” he said. “You’re obsessed with her.”

“Am not.” But what he said made me blush.

“Yes, you are. I hear you talking to her every time you come over. It’s so weird. Even when you put on that stupid Wife Swap show, I can hear you talking to her about Alexa.” My face burned. I swear I could have stomped on him right then and there.

“You act like you’re best friends or something.”

He didn’t know what he was talking about. How could he? He had been too busy hogging the computer to see what had flourished between Lina and me.

“Shut up.”

“Is it the picture? The one on the TV stand?”

“Stop it.”

“It is, isn’t it? The one where she’s in front of the fountain at Universal Studios. You’re talking to that one, aren’t you?”

I pressed my hands over my ears. He was just jealous because I was practically the daughter Lina never had.

“You know you have your own mom, right?”

“I said stop!”

All I wanted to do was shake him and scream at him to get his act together. Do something, anything, to keep the move from happening. He couldn’t take Lina from me. But then a sharp wind rushed through the grasses, silencing the both of us.

“My dad says we have to leave because he can’t handle me alone,” Cam finally said.

“So does that mean Lina’s staying?”

Cam sat back up and snarled at me. “Stop it. It’s not funny anymore.”

“I’m not joking.”

“You never even met my mom, Daphne.”

A ringing shot through my ears.

“She died way before you moved here. All she is is a picture to you.”

What was he saying? Lina was real. She had to be. The wind screamed between us. “Don’t you get it?” Cam said, his voice caught in his throat. “She’s not here.”

Like a chisel tapping away on its last cracks, I could feel myself crumbling from the inside out, my mind scrambling to hold it all together. When I reached up to touch my face, it was wet. Before I could say anything, my body moved without me telling it to. Soon, I was on my feet and running as fast as I could back through the weeds toward the complex. Cam called after me, but his voice just became one of the wind’s many tunes. I ran until my lungs burned, until I was in the apartment halls, until I was at Cam's front door.

I pounded until Mr. Riggins opened it. “Daphne? Are you okay?”

“Is Lina here?” I blurted.

“Lina? What’s going on?”

“It’s girl stuff. I just really need to talk to her.”

Mr. Riggins squinted at me, concerned. “Daphne, are you well?”

“She’s there, right? Lina’s inside?” I stretched on my tiptoes to see past him. Just over his shoulder, my eyes landed on the photo on the TV stand. The one of Lina in her lime green tank, her bootleg blue jeans, and her tan wedge heels, in front of the Universal Studios fountain with a delicate, untouched smile. Frozen in time.

“Why don’t you go home and get some rest?” Mr. Riggins said. “Maybe have your mom take your temperature.”

As I stumbled back from the door, in the blank white of the empty hallway, I saw it for the first time: the guilt hanging from Lina’s smile. The admission I had never noticed before, that she had in fact, never truly been there for me.

Idette looks at me confused. “I don’t see anyone in a green tank.”

“Never mind,” I repeat hurriedly, waving my hand.

I try to shrug off my mistake, like I’ve practiced in the mirror, like I did on our first date, like I’ve done every time my mind gets muddled and Idette’s face is a bunched up piece of paper, trying hard to understand me. I hold my breath, certain that this is the time she’ll hear the crack in my voice and press me, the weeds in the ground whispering to her the truth.

She’s never had it all together. She’s an illusion.

I steal one last glance at the sidewalk, before it all unravels, where Lina has turned and is walking away. She’s no longer a full body, just a perpetual fleck of what I imagine her to be against the horizon, rays of sunshine bleeding out behind her.

Beside me, Idette is still for only a moment longer before she releases her pose and squints at me. “You haven’t started drinking without me, have you?”

Relief floods through me. Surprised, I laugh. Again, I shrug my practiced shrug. In my periphery, Lina returns to the sky with her sun wings and I reply, “No one’s perfect.”