Page 4 of Last Flame
Gerald has no follow-up questions.
The article is still empty. The cursor is still blinking. The deadline is still Friday, which is not yet, but soon, and it’s going to be my fault when I’m scrambling.
We didn’t stop wanting connection. We just rerouted it.
That’s still the only sentence. It’s been the only sentence for two days. It’s starting to feel less like a first line and more like a thing I say to myself in the dark.
I am eating cold pizza and staring at a sentence when my phone lights up.
DELIVERED.Your package has arrived.
Oh,right.
I forgot I’m becoming a better person. I ordered it three weeks ago at one in the morning, the way all my best decisions arrive — a whole regimen, serums and a cream and something called anessence, which I’m pretty sure is just water that costs money, but the woman in the video had skin like a lit candle and I wanted that. I wanted to be a lit candle. I clicked the button. Past me, looking out for present me. We don’t always get along but she comes through.
“This is the glow-up,” I announce to no one, peeling myself out of the chair. “Friday I’ll have a finished articleanda face. New me.”
The box is in the lobby, on the mail table, sitting there being mine. I carry it back up two flights like a trophy. It’s heavier than skincare should be, but maybe that’s the essence. The essence hasweight.I’m already getting my money’s worth.
I’m three steps into my apartment, already picturing the candle situation, when I notice the paper.
It’s tucked under the flap of the box. Folded once. Cream-colored, nicer than the box itself, the kind of paper that came from somewhere with intentions.
A little card, probably.Thanks for your order. Here’s a coupon. Here’s how to layer your serums.I’ve gotten a hundred of these. They always have a girl on them being radiant at me.
I unfold it.
Your light reaches farther than you know.
That’s it. Handwriting. No logo, no coupon code, no smiling radiant girl, noxoxo the team.Just the one line, in ink, pressed hard enough that I can feel the words on the back of the paper when I run my thumb across it.
I read it again.
Okay. So this is a marketing thing. This is a brand that paid someone to write affirmations by hand because it tests well with women my age, and it does, that’s the infuriating part, it absolutely tests well, my chest did a thing just now and the thing wasengineered.They want me to feel seen. They want me to post it.Look how thoughtful my serum company is.No. Not falling for it. I see the strategy. I respect the strategy. I will not be participating in the strategy.
Except it doesn’t say the brand name anywhere. A brand would say the brand name. That’s the whole reason a brand spends money — so you know it was them. This says nothing. This is an affirmation with no sponsor, which is just a sentence a stranger decided I needed.
Influencer thing, then. A gifting campaign, the kind where they don’t tell you it’s a campaign so your delight looks authentic. Or it’s for the unit two-twelve, the woman with the dog, and it got tucked inthe wrong box downstairs. Or somebody’s running a very slow, very expensive prank on the entire building.
Or it’s nothing. It’s nothing and I’m a woman standing in her doorway interrogating a piece of cardstock instead of writing the article that pays for the cardstock.
I should throw it away.
I open the door to check the hall instead.
Erik is across the hall, fitting his key into his own lock, and my first feeling — before anything sensible, beforehello,before any of it — is genuine annoyance that my neighbor exists and is here and is going to make me be a person in a hallway.
I’m not annoyed at him. Just the situation. At the fact that I’m in socks and a sweatshirt that says WORLDWIDE PASTA and I have ink on my thumb and a slice of cold pizza in the other hand and now there’s a witness.
“Hey.” He says it easy, like we do this. We don’t really do this. Three years and we’ve done the nod, theafter youat the mailboxes, thecan you sign for mine if I’m out.This is more words than usual already.
And then I do the thing. I don’t decide to do it. I’m just suddenly holding the note out across the hall like he’s got answers.
“Did you get one of these?”
He comes over. He reads it. He’s close enough now that I can smell him, and he smells like — okay, he smells like a forest, somehow, like pine and cold air and the inside of a hike, which makes no sense, because we are in Chicago, on the third floor of an apartment building. I’m going to pretend I didn’t notice that.
“No,” he says. Hands it back. “Where’d it come from?”
