by Audrey Snow Matzke
She would languish for the nice old rake, Killian, and for Fiona who had stolen him casually. And for all of the locals and everyone back on the mainland. Ruby had come down with the Jaguar Island Fever, worst case in history as she was patient zero, and quarantined there, in the attic of the Vrbo Killian had paid for and begged her and Fiona to share without incident—maybe churn some writing out—the virus would get stuck up inside her and die.
Or else Ruby would die from it. She insisted she’d be saving the world in any case, putting a stop to the spread of what could have been its next pandemic, and Fiona barely cared. The rations she’d gather for her, the waters and David bars and cut apples bagged with cinnamon she’d hurl through the window, landing each time with a withering thud.
A third potential death, on the phone with Fiona in the same house, that Ruby wouldn’t put past society:
“I don’t like going on the roof anymore.”
“Why’s that?” Fiona asked.
“It’s like someone’s going to assassinate me.”
“From the government?”
“The fever is a biological weapon, and my intention is to stop it. We think our intentions aren’t known to people, and every time they are! Look, right now I am declaring them over the phone. And always there’s a third person or entity listening in.”
“You and Killian have the same fantasy. It’s beautiful.”
“Oh sure. We look over in bed at him and know exactly what he’s dreaming about. They want to kill him for his criticism, he’s too good, he’s on fire and he must be stopped. But it’s not that I think I’m too good to be alive, just I’m blessed with too much foresight that I didn’t even earn.”
“And you’re settling for that?”
Fiona needed Ruby to forget the hypochondria, and if she didn’t she would leave her no excuses. So she invited her, as she had done every night of their stay, to go hunting for character and quotes and shocking reversals at the Jaguar Island Wharf Pub. Things to write about. The material Killian had banished them there for three weeks to collect, promising publication, twenty-five cents to a word for each of them if they pulled it together. He would give the girls anything shy of exclusive love, if they allowed him, and what was Ruby doing? Taking and then abdicating, she would not produce anything.
Fiona wouldn’t center her entire piece around Ruby’s paranoid delusion, and of course when it did come up she would refer to her only by a first initial, pirate-letter R (how romantic! How rogue…) for reputational reasons. And she would fill the work also with historical kitsch: Portuguese traders, whalebone corsets, oil lamps that allowed you to read in the dark and grow smarter. And she would love many locals as well. She was born with the capacity for uncountable swaths of girls, along with three to five men in the same dirty window.
Back at the city club, with its shelf full of books no one read, Ruby would catch wind of Fiona’s advantage: her massive heart and its straight transmissions, the span of her voice when she talked at the vulnerable. Ruby had it inside her to love just one man, the first and possible last one ever in her life, and for some reason, Fiona wasn’t doing the charitable thing and leaving him to her.
Ruby went to brush her teeth. Her reflection was of interest, that redness in her eyes growing redder. If she’d gone out she would have been of interest to everyone, she could scare them all awake and at such great human cost. She cranked the cold tap and watched some ants come barreling out.
The Jaguar Island Wharf Pub was more of a bar, lit up that Discord shade of purple. If Fiona’s imaginative powers weren’t spent on the invention of lives for people she, objectively, knew nothing about, she would have been able to add more meat to her theory that the color told of slow decay.
Fiona heard a “what’s wrong” and turned around.
“I didn’t even look sad!” she cried.
“You’re trying to tell me you can see yourself?” said the man in the booth. He needed a haircut, the evil light had blessed him with a woolly kind of handsomeness.
“You’re out here all alone and you’re condemning me? You look about the age where you have a wife and a litter of Alphas back at home.”
“Just one Beta, actually,” he said. “A 2024 baby. They’re saying that’s a whole new generation, what with the AI developments and stuff.”
“Okay. What’s wrong, now that you’re asking, is that I’m single and I have no backup behind me at all. This isn’t a fair fight.”
“This is a one-sided fight,” the man said.
“You have your private joys that are sealed up in marriage and family, and if I ever encroached upon one of them even by accident your wife would be justified in literally murdering me.”
“Would you like some water?” the man asked, but Fiona had run off to the bathroom.
The tonic came out clear and unprocessed. Gin had its way of sending liquids straight through her, as if she were a ghost without kidneys or anything pink inside. When she came back the man had fallen asleep. The booth looked comfortable; it had given him passage to the marriage bed of the mind, at least, but Fiona knew better than to sit in it with him. She wasn’t prepared to die.
How does Killian do it? Fiona wondered, staring at the fog before the docks, the shimmering veil. Forty-six years drugged and unattached and nobody’s killed him, no one to her knowledge had tried, even though sometimes his book reviews could get pretty scathing. And she stared at the shimmering veil some more and was suddenly struck by the truth of his infinite love.
And hers by extension. The mechanics were not so different. The two of them would fill mysteriously up and explode, and then refill with hot love like pure magma from the Earth’s center, in front of anyone who threatened them. But it was noble in the manner they did it, unquestionably a service. One day the aftermath might harden into a better island than the one she was on.
Fiona, having left her set of keys at the bar, abusing the doorbell to deliver the good news: Killian’s love is everywhere, even in the places you can’t see it. And yours could be also, you’ll be fine; just start spreading it now.
One of those minutes Ruby figured her assassin would get bored, and kick the door down.
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Audrey Snow Matzke was born in 2002 in Chicago.
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