The man gave me a measured look over the rims of his glasses and I wondered if he could see my fingers moving after all, the tendons in my forearms faintly twitching. I found liberation in letting my fingertips dance, unbridled by the fear of anyone ever reading the words they spelled. It’s a habit I picked up somewhere along the way of wanting to be a writer, this compulsion of secretly transcribing conversations. I typed the word on my lap, beneath the table where they couldn’t see. The vulpine lady’s smile deepened, a pair of parentheses framing her lurid red lips. The man spoke on behalf of all three of them as though they were a modern-day Greek chorus. They stared at me, their clinical smiles simultaneously out of place and yet perfectly in consensus. I smoothed my skirt as I sat back down, brushing off a sliver of chewed fingernail. My chair screeched as I stood to shake each of their hands. When the door opened, I watched them filter in like smoke. I wondered if the room was ever used as an office, or reserved solely for interviews, because what would anyone do in there besides slowly go crazy? The lake effect punched through the cement walls, slithered through the seal of the lone window. They were a trio that operated as one: a man whose mustache resembled a wire brush my dad would use to scrape coagulated oil off his workbench, and two women one was fox-faced and squashy, the other wore her black hair pulled into a tight bun and teal, bullet-shaped earrings.īarely an hour ago, I sat at a large pine table in a nondescript room, wearing the only blazer I own.

I’m still wearing the clothes from my interview earlier this morning. The trees with their wet, charred-looking trunks the smell of fish scales and soil the coal-blackened bridge that looks like the exoskeleton from some prehistoric beetle, stretching from bank to bank.Ĭoldness pricks the soles of my feet. It feels wrong and yet a little bit like coming home. It’s the first time I’ve been here in almost ten months. In my gossamer-thin nylons, I edge toward the middle. Standing back up, I slip off my pumps and set them aside. The skin on my palms tears, the metal like dry ice. My hands slam on the corroded iron tracks.

My heel catches in a knot in a railroad tie. I could scream bloody murder, and it’s not that no one would hear me-someone probably would-but they would write me off, convince themselves that I’m just a rabbit being eaten by a hawk or something. This is Black Harbor, a purgatory where people mind their own. Someone will see the woman standing on Forge Bridge and they’ll call the police or try to save me themselves. The evergreens cut sharp silhouettes, arrowheads piercing a pearl sky.

Hello transcriber