When she was little, she would go to the Walmart with her father to buy anything they couldn’t get at a local shop. Mainly, they went to Walmart a lot to get school supplies of various colors and prints, Lisa Frank a repeat offender in the war against plain red and blue spiral notebooks. She struggled though, with wanting things and asking for them. She suffered from early onset guilt about taking up space and existing at all. These qualms, fed by her fathers overindulgence and her mothers eventual scolding of it, led her to be unable to stand anywhere near the checkout area while the items rang up. She wanted things, she wanted her father to buy them, but she did not want to know how much they cost. If she heard the cashier, monotone and miserable, utter the sum of all the individual items, she would begin to feel a deep pooling tar inside of her, making her sick with the shame of the price. So, when her father joined the long line of patrons waiting to check out at the register, she would wander, not too far as to get stranger dangered, but just enough to not hear the exchange between the cashier and her father.
It was on one of these long wanderings when she first discovered the Walmart missing people wall and became enamored by the mystery of it all. She had little knowledge of crime and corruption but she knew a great deal about misplaced responsibility and how to hold it. Looking at these images, grainy and grimy, she began to replay the faces of everybody she had encountered in the day she’d just lived, and the day before that, and as far back as she could. Had she seen one of these people? Had one of them walked right in front of her and she hadn’t even noticed? Did they need help or rescuing? Could she have helped one of these people, if she had recognized them earlier? Her eyes narrowed as she scanned facial features, trying to commit to memory every line and crease on every portrait on the wall. She didn’t get the chance, as her father had suddenly appeared behind her. “Don’t look at those,” he said. “They’ll only make you upset.”
So she didn’t look at them. Not really, anymore. For all future Walmart visits, she would allow herself to gaze briefly over the faces, scanning for any that had maybe been found or resolved, but she would not allow herself to spend over a minute standing in front of the wall, looking up at them, like she had that first time. Eventually, she got busy, she got medicated for her relentless guilt and other oddities, and she stopped looking at the board altogether. She didn’t even think about it.
Now, at the age of twenty two, she fancied herself much different from the peculiar little girl with woeful curiosities she once had been. She had managed to get herself very far in the regard of her parents and friends in the Pre-Med track. Doctors never worried about finances. If she was a doctor, she could afford all the Lisa Frank she wanted.
College was different from high school, in ways she had grown to appreciate. She was fond of her friends, she enjoyed what she studied, and she took easily to the independent tasks of caring for herself in diet, health, and academics.
“I should call my mother,” her classmates often said, bundled in scarfs and hats to brave the cold trek home after a night lab.
“Yes, me too,” she would say in return, reiterating a script for an audition of normalcy.
When she did arrive home, she would often shower before bed, taking careful time to avoid looking in the mirror, sure to see exhaustion layered in purples and blues under the makeup she caked on in the morning.
She would call her mother, as she always said she would, but it was never truly to give an update on her life and much more of an opportunity for her mother to complain about hers.
Lastly, she would set a little glass of water on her bedside table next to the clear orange bottle she kept there.
Her medicine had become something she didn’t even think about anymore. She took it every night, just as she had done since she was little. Sometimes, she felt weird about taking medicine. She often wondered if people could tell she took something or if people thought she should or if they would be surprised to find out. Oftentimes, she would be walking across campus, and she would imagine that those around her could hear her rattling as she went, a walking bottle of pills. But still, she took them, because she had not deteriorated in a very long time and she really did not have time for deterioration now. After she took her medication, it did not take very long for her to fall asleep, and then it was time to do it all again.
He was somebody that she had always been acutely aware of in classes and group studies. Handsome, but in a crooked way that still allowed him to be approachable. She did not usually study with anyone one on one, preferring groups or solo sessions to two people staring at each other, but on this night she finished her work early enough she got to leave before others.
“Hey,” he said, catching up to her in the dark.
“Oh, hello,” she said, hoping to sound tired or nonchalant, fearful that he could sense in her voice distinct chalantness.
“It seems like you’ve really got the hang of it” he said, out of breath in a way that she felt evened the score on awkwardness a little.
“Oh, ha. Yeah. I’ve been spending a lot of time studying.”
“Lucky you. I feel like I haven’t had much time to study lately.”
“Why’s that?”
“I guess I haven’t wanted to, really.”
She’s not totally inept when it comes to social cues, in fact she’s spent a lot of time learning them, and she knows she’s supposed to laugh at this moment. The problem is, by the time she realizes she should be laughing, an awkward silence has already fogged around them.
“Maybe you could help me?” he offered, reaching a hand out to help climb onto his level of chill college conversation.
“Oh,” she supplied again, this time sure she was reading the conversation a little better.
Then his shirt is off and he’s in her room and he’s kissing her with his eyes closed while she looks around her space trying to see what he sees. She kept her area neat, but there was an empty coffee cup on her desk that some might decide was lazy. She made a note to rinse it out before bed, and then their intimacy was over and she hadn’t really felt like she’d participated all that much but he told her she was “so good” and then immediately started getting dressed.
“Did you really need help studying? It’s not too late, we could still go over our notes.”
He breathed out through his nose.
“Not tonight. I’m beat.” he said definitively. As an add on at the end, “Maybe you could text yours to me?”
She stared back at him, attempting to exude disapproval from her pores, but aware that her staring probably came off as more like a shell shocked owl of sorts.
“What’s that bottle? The one right there.” He pointed to the orange cylinder next to the previous night’s empty water glass. Two for two on dirty dishes, she thought.
“I take medicine,” she said. “For, like, anxiety. I was really anxious as a kid.”
“Like crazy pills?”
“What? No. Lots of people take this medicine or ones like it. It’s not abnormal.”
“Good,” he leaned forward, planting a kiss she did not reciprocate. “I don’t like crazy girls. Send me those notes!” he said and then he was off into the night, walking home in the dark without the fear of assault or murder in the way only men can, she thought annoyed.
She sent him the notes. He did not text back.
“Hey, I said I would grab skittles for the blood sugar lab this afternoon, but I haven’t had time to get to the store. Is there any way you can pick them up for me? I’d seriously owe you.”
She stared at the text, hoping the owing did not come in the form of mediocre intimacy. She saw him in classes, but this was the first text he’d sent since their time spent together and she was increasingly paranoid about what he told his friends about her. Did he tell them she was good, but crazy? Or was the intimacy good because she was crazy? Were crazy girls good for intimacy but not for dating? He must not have thought she was too crazy, if he was asking her for a favor, she thought in the candy section of the store. Or, more likely, everybody else already said no.
She scanned the bag of skittles at the self checkout and scanned her tampons trying to remind herself that it was feminist not to be ashamed of doing so. She’d been trying to be proud about all things shopping for pads and tampons, carrying them out in the open like a weird friend from her Art History class said to do.
On the way out she found herself in a position she hadn’t been in in years. Standing in front of the Walmart missing people wall, she scanned the faces like a game of Guess Who? looking for anyone that might be familiar. Maybe one of her classmates was a missing person this whole time, and maybe they didn’t know. What a story that would be. Her eyes landed on one blonde woman with an uneven jaw and beady brown eyes. The woman looked like she was bored of her life, drooping eyelids and crooked frown. Maybe she ran away. That was the best case scenario, she thought to herself. The woman seemed like someone she would waitress with, at the diner during the summer. One of those people who worked there year round, while the eager young brats went back to school in the fall.
Her pocket buzzed.
“Thank you so much. Seriously. Like, seriously.” he had typed.
She didn’t set out to stop taking her medicine, it was more of a decision she didn’t even realize she was making. It’s not very difficult to stop doing things, she was realizing. In fact, it was nice to not do something for once, one less drop in her vast sea of doing things.
She was having some trouble sleeping now, but she didn’t think that was all that odd. She had been taking this medicine for so very long it was bound to have some effects when she eventually quit. This could be managed with extra coffee in the mornings.
One morning, she had fallen asleep late into the night and woke up past the time she had intended. She didn’t have time to tinker with her coffee machine, she thought to herself, so she threw on her sweats and resigned to stopping at the coffee shop on the way to class. She just needed to get out the door.
“Just drip coffee, please. With milk.”
The server looked familiar in some way she was unable to grasp, spurts of brown hair peeking out from under her uniform cap.
If she didn’t have time to make coffee, she really didn’t have time to try and place this girl, so she paid and hurried along. The day was busy enough that she was not plagued by stray thoughts as she went through her motions. It wasn’t until she was in bed that night staring at the red letters on the digital alarm that she was able to remember this girl. Two semesters ago, Sociology class. They did presentations and peer reviews that she thought were to be anonymous. She wrote that this girl needed to work on her public speaking, noting that she was fidgety and shifty while speaking. On the last day of classes, she was shocked to find their peer evaluations being passed back to the recipient, but she reasoned with herself she would probably never see this girl again, so it did not matter if she was rude on her evaluation.
Yet, here that girl was this morning, responsible for the beverage she had put into her body. At first she thought, maybe this girl spit in her drink and, maybe she even deserved it. Then a second, more catastrophic thought shoved its way into the picture, an unwelcome guest in the rooms of her mind. Behind the counter, there was a long, sleek bottle of blue cleaner. She had always had issues with cleaners, taking special care to ensure she never kept any around food or beverages and making sure she never accidentally inhaled any. This girl though, this mousy barista, she had no control over this other girl’s actions and she did not watch as the girl made her drink, opting instead to scroll through her email. If this girl had put cleaner in her drink, she really, truly, would not have noticed. And if she died now, would they be able to track it back to that girl? Maybe she was a psychopath, shifty during her presentation because she was seriously messed up in the head. Maybe she was the type of crazy that her classmate vocalized distaste of that night in her room.
She dragged herself out of bed and to her tiny white bathroom, where she stuck her fingers down her throat. Years ago, she had made herself throw up before. Never to lose weight, which made her feel like it was okay. She only ever did it when she thought she may have been poisoned accidentally or on purpose, which she hadn’t thought about for years but was thinking about now. Some people were bothered by the smell and look of vomit, but she truly never was. Cleansing herself, she thought. If this coffee girl had poisoned her, it was all gone now, lost into the swirling abyss that was a college apartment toilet.
Back in her bed, she did feel better, although she still could not sleep.
The next day was cadaver lab, which always sounded worse than it was. She wondered if she had been desensitized in some way, all those episodes of Forensic Files her parents watched while she played with toys on the floor of the living room.
“The cause of death was blunt force trauma,” they would say on the television while her Barbies went to prom.
In front of her, her professor held a bisected head in his blue latex gloves and she blinked at it, not particularly impressed or bothered. Mainly she wanted this to be over, so she could be back in her bed.
“We’ll meet again tomorrow,” her professor said to a class of students who were in no way listening and she went back to her room to shower and get back in bed.
Tomorrow came, and she had somehow managed to go another night without sleep. In the morning she decided she was in no place to dissect bodies and sent an email explaining that she did not feel well.
“You’ll have to schedule time to come in another day.” the email back said. Sure, she thought. Whatever.
That night she got some sleep although not as much as she would like, and she scheduled time in the afternoon to spend in the cadaver lab.
Once there and alone with her professor, she mainly let him talk, watching as he peeled back the skin from a calf muscle and thinking about other things. When her professor excused himself for a moment, she allowed herself a minute to stare into space.
The air conditioning blew in, freezing, and making the blue sheets covering the bodies move like rippling pools. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a patch of blue falling off the side of the table. She was not supposed to mess with or touch anything in the immediate area while she was alone, but she resolved to give the corpse the grace of covering it back up. Closer up, she grabbed the blue sheet off the floor to cover the deceased and she thought about how people often kissed the foreheads of corpses at funerals. She wondered if anyone had ever kissed this woman and she allowed herself to peer at the woman’s face, although she immediately wished she hadn’t.
The woman had blonde hair, matted down now, and a face that looked ready to offer syrup for waffles. Although she feared getting in trouble, she could hardly stop herself as she reached forward to open this woman’s eye. It was small, brown, and beady.
It had to have all happened in five minutes, the covering up again of the woman, removal of gloves and scrubs, and the dash across campus. She shot an email explaining to her professor that she had begun to feel ill again and wondered if she needed to eat something, covering her crazy with a thick winter coat and beginning the journey to the dining hall.
Even in the dining hall, however, she was unable to put anything in her mouth, staring at her thin, flimsy slice of pizza and thinking how it looked not dissimilar to the skin flap her professor was removing from someone’s calf earlier that day.
She reminded herself she did not really truly have time to deteriorate and that she needed to hold it together, even if she was not sleeping. She remembered a story she had heard somewhere of a woman who was stabbed and left to die in the woods. The woman, determined not to die, had held her intestines in with her arms as she slowly made her way to a nearby road where she was rescued. She imagined this was her now, holding herself together, as she dragged herself to and from classes all that week running on little to no sleep and coffee made in her apartment to avoid any poison paranoia.
It had been a week since her bout of recognition in the cadaver lab and it was time to go back to the scene of the crime for class again. Although the woman lay covered, in the back of the room, she remembered which one was her and she could feel the woman staring at her, somehow looking through both the veil of death and the blue veil of cadaver preservation.
She imagined the woman turning her head under the sheet to face her, sending her psychic messages from beyond the grave. By the time class was out, she realized she had really not grasped any of the material given today.
“Hey!” she said, catching up to the classmate she had grown to dislike. “I was having a few issues paying attention today. Is there any way you can send me your notes?”
He laughed. “Oh, you do not want my notes. Trust me.”
Back in her room she stared at the collection of dirty mugs on her desk she did not realize she had begun, before she got up to make another.
Her little fridge door sat empty and it dawned on her that she had used up the last of her creamer. She would have to get more, she thought, resolving to treat herself to the good cookie dough creamer although it was more expensive, because after all, she’d been having a difficult time lately. In her car, she realized that it was cleaner than it had been in a while, no coffee shop to go cups cluttering the floor. She’d been making all her coffee at home lately.
In the store, she didn’t even pretend she was going to walk past the wall. She knew she was going to look at it. Staring at it now, holding a bag full of sweet cream, chips, and candy, she searched for the woman who had begun to haunt her. Brown hair. Red hair. Brown hair.
Her heart rate increased. Where was she? She was not on the wall, but there did not seem to be any empty spaces either to suggest she had been taken down. Maybe she was taken down, and they replaced her.
She did not even wait to get home before searching, sitting in the parking lot on her phone, searching for any missing women who may have been found these last few weeks. No grown women were found, but a little girl was found far from where she was last seen. Would they have taken her woman off the wall even if she had not been found? Could they have taken her down just because the case had gone cold, because too much time had passed?
She needed to calm down. She needed to get home. There were no answers to be found or problems to be solved in the Walmart parking lot by her.
As the next week went by, sleep became an unfamiliar sensation, replaced instead by midnight coffee and the missing person database. Could they tell if someone looked at this website a lot? Was there someone who knew she’d been spending hours on it? Would she get a knock on the door to her apartment any time now for suspicious internet activity?
When the cadaver lab came around again the following week, she wrote in sick again. In some ways, it was true. She had not been feeling very well at all. She scheduled one on one time again in the lab tomorrow working with a shaky plan that even she could not fully rationalize.
When the next day came along she sat outside the lab eagerly and early, scissors burning a hole in her pocket. Once let in, her professor droned on, so she let her mind wander, which she worked really hard to avoid most of the time, but had been engaging in more and more lately.
The police force had systems for these things, ways to test DNA and match things to each other. They would think she was crazy at first, but then she would be a hero of sorts. Or at least validated, a feeling which she craved desperately.
At the same time as last time, her professor excused himself from the room, needing to unlock a lab down the hall for another student and when he was out of the room she pounced from her seat and ambled across the room. She did not have time to waste and so she made quick work of removing the blue sheet and tipping the woman’s mouth open. She swabbed her Q-tip in her mouth and placed it in her Ziploc bag, dropping the bag into the pockets of her scrubs and taking her scissors out. Reaching out slowly, she held a lock of the woman’s hair. It was slick from the stuff they use to preserve corpses nowadays and she cut a lock quickly, telling herself not to think too much and instead to just go through the motions, something she had been telling herself a lot lately. She held the hair between her fingers, all the pieces sticking together in a thick lock like rope and the door creaked behind her. “What are you doing? Oh my God, what are you doing?” She turned around and the boy who had been inside of her not that long ago now stood staring at her, like he was right about her all along, like she was the type of crazy that he had sought to avoid in the first place.
Maria Connour is a recent graduate from Ohio Northern University, where she studied English Literature and Art. Since graduating, she did work for the Findlay, Ohio newspaper The Courier, and began work for the Cincinnati Public Library System. Her work has appeared in The Awakenings Review, The Afterpast Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Girls Right the World. Connect with Maria on Instagram @mconnour.
Mountain Jay Books 