by Ella Gray Hickman
The text message read, “Please make the guests log out of the wifi when they leave today.” The message notification dipped into view with a cruel ping at 7:32 am, interrupting the video Allison was watching on her phone. Jim, the property owner and text-sender, hadn’t been in the county in months. The video she was forced to pause captured a violent altercation between two middle aged men over a stripmall parking space and she hadn’t even gotten to see the first few blows land before her mind was hijacked and her thoughts were cast into the realm of bookings and passwords and guest rules. She’d gotten to really enjoy the inarticulate hot air exchanged between two aggravated Best Buy shoppers before her boss texted, and now her nerves were on edge like a blue-balled teenage boy at an NC-17 movie. Jim always got on her nerves like that.
It was early, before Allison had even finished her coffee or taken a shower or shaved the weird hairs that kept growing on her chin. She was still in her pajamas on the futon couch. The convertible couch didn’t make much sense as she wasn’t supposed to have overnight guests in the garage apartment. It must have been cheaper than any of the proper couches Jim had seen when he was furnishing the place. She had just finished reading a Reddit thread about a man who sued Wendy’s after he found a tooth in his chicken nugget like it was the morning paper and was considering whether it was worth adding a bit more sugar to her half-finished, half-cold mug of coffee or if, at this point, she might as well down the bitter dregs and move on.
She typed out a response, an attempt to explain once again that the wifi only works within the confines of the hardly-far corners of the wooden cabin, a narrow radius of connectivity on a vast stretch of hilly land Verizon and AT&T didn’t even pretend to cover. She had attempted to convince Jim of this before, but he remained adamant in his belief that the guests were taking the wifi home with them. Maybe because the scratchy towels and regular sized body wash in the AirBnb weren’t nice enough to pilfer, he assumed that the requisite sticky fingers of low-budget vacationers must be taking something else home with them, purloined souvenirs. By the time she’d made her point sufficiently, her drafted message was longer than anything she’d expect Jim to read in full. She deleted her words and sent a simple “sure” instead.
The guests had to be out by 11:00 am but would inevitably linger until noon, so Allison had a long morning to herself for her own lingering in the guest house until she could start her day. She would take the 3 minute walk from her apartment down the gravel path to the cabin at the corner of the property near the state route. She would strip the beds and collect beer cans in the yard and empty the K cups from the Keurig and start a load of laundry and clean leftovers out of the fridge and save the complimentary 3 and a half muffins and most of a party pack of biscotti that the guests hadn’t touched to to eat for herself later and do the dishes and half-heartedly wipe down the bathroom and check the chemicals in the hot tub and remake the beds with fresh sheets. The guests, in turn, would rate the AirBnb listing out of 5 stars and leave a comment about how nice the clean mountain air had been, how scenic and serene their weekend was.
Clean air was a polite way to say that no one was breathing on them. Allison had only been the rental property manager for 6 months, but Jim said that the listing was way more popular now that everyone was avoiding hotels. The “contactless check-in” and “COVIDsafe clean” badges he’d added to the listing helped. The location, a good drive north of Red River Gorge in Kentucky, was easy enough to get to from a few major Midwestern and vaguely Southern population centers without needing to get on a plane.
If the guests left by noon, Allison could finish cleaning the cabin around 4:00 or 5:00 pm and then head into town to buy things for the rental on Jim’s credit card: Windex and coffee creamer and some breakfast pastries to stock the fridge with for the next guests. She could go to Kroger right now, 7:37 am, and be back before today’s check outs left, but she felt so lethargic this morning. She felt lethargic most mornings.
She used to buy Private Selection Five Cheese & Marmalade Thin Crust frozen pizza and Private Selection Maine Blueberry Belgian Waffle Cone ice cream on Jim’s card, but he recently started to ask her to text him photos of the receipt after her stock-up runs, so now she buys those on her own debit card. She makes sure, though, to over-purchase the Lemon Poppyseed muffins she likes on each employer-funded supplies run so there’ll be plenty left over after the guests leave. She also uses the same loyalty pin number for everything, so she gets all the points for gas.
The first couple weeks on the job, Allison drove a lot. On her odd days off, when no one was staying in the cabin nor checking out nor coming to check in the next day, she would use the freedom to her advantage and drive the hour or so it took to get down to Natural Bridge State Park. There was a massive sandstone rock formation there that looked just like a highway overpass perched 65 feet up in the sky. She took the touristy skylift up once and spent the whole day leisurely hiking down the mountain trail.
When she first took the job, before she moved to Kentucky, she told a few acquaintances from college, with some degree of pride, that she was excited to be living so near to the bridge. That is how she found out, when once-close friends who'd grown distant since graduation incorrectly guessed the state Allison was preparing to move to on awkward catch-up video calls, that there were also Natural Bridge State Parks in Virginia and Massachusetts and Wisconsin with very similar geological curiosities. For some reason, Allison had assumed that the rock formation in Red River Gorge was unique; discovering that this was not, in fact, the case didn’t make the bridge any less beautiful or impressive, but it dampened her feelings a little bit toward the whole endeavor.
On her fourth or fifth excursion of this sort, she realized on the trail that she had ventured outside of her cell carrier’s coverage area and grew wracked with anxiety that Jim was calling her to no avail about some emergency. Like, maybe a raccoon had climbed into the kitchen window and Jim was watching it destroy the couch on his nanny cam, incessantly redialing her cell–and as soon as she returned to civilization, she would find herself out of a job.
She knew it was stupid, everything that day had been fine; in fact, when she finally logged back into the guest house wifi, her feelings were hurt by the fact that the only notifications flooding her screen were generic junk texts and emails. No one had tried to contact her at all in the whole day.
Even though the fear was clearly irrational, Allison ventured out less now. Even on days with nothing to do, she’d rarely leave the property.
As it stood, she wasn’t even driving enough to use up all the Kroger gas points she was raking in. She had briefly, a week or so ago, considered whether she could sell these points for cash, maybe through Craigslist or Instagram or something like that. But she wasn’t so much as Facebook friends with anyone in the area, not a single person. She was from out West, near Spokane, where they didn't have Krogers or Kroger Fuel Centers or participating Shell locations. So the sort-of-sad high school acquaintance who she’d expect to DM her about discount Fuel Points wouldn’t be interested. Her Fuel Points were no good there.
Befriending someone here was beside the question. Walking up to a local in the cereal aisle–and you could tell who were the locals–to initiate an under-the-table arbitrage was a bridge too far for Allison. She wondered if the gorped-up Deadhead hiker tourist kids could tell she wasn’t a local and whether the locals assumed she was a tourist at first glance. She wondered if she was still an interloper in this backwoods corner of the world. Anyway, it seemed like a lot of work for a pennies-on-the-dime black market racket, so she let the idea die.
During all this, the cleaning and the driving and the shopping, she kept an earbud in. In the morning, she listened to an audiobook about a woman getting divorced, but it had lost her attention by around 2:30pm when she was refilling the Britta pitcher.
She switched over to a true crime podcast, a glib little guilty pleasure hosted by two failed comedians in LA. The easy syncopation of their conversations appealed to Allison, though she was slightly uncomfortable with the podcast’s abrupt swings as the hosts veered between lighthearted topics and more gruesome true crime themes. She stayed away from episodes about regular murders for that reason, especially the ones with rape or where the guy only killed women and kids. She always found their quippyness much too flippant on those topics.
Luckily, they had plenty of episodes about Bigfoot hunters and alien abductions and ghost sightings. The paranormal stuff, and even a good deal of the cult stuff, seemed safe in their mere semi-morbidity. At least as long as it wasn’t a cult where they did weird stuff to kids.
By late afternoon, she realized that she’d underestimated the time it would take her to clean up after this group of guests. They’d left behind little penis-shaped plastic drinking straws and a small pile of vomit in the garage; she should have gone to the Kroger in the morning. By the time she arrived, later into the still-early evening than she had hoped, the parking lot was packed with cars, the crowd mostly Friday evening pit stops on their ways home from work.
She sat in the parking lot, luxuriating in the feeling of baking in the hot car interior under the late day sun. It felt like a sauna, the sort of place you’d go to sweat out the toxins and rejuvenate your spirit. But the heat of the leather seat seemed to be sapping Allison of her will to go into the supermarket.
Jim texted her, “Remember to check the hot tub chemicals before the guests check in tomorrow.” The phone screen scorched her fingers. She didn’t have it in her to tell him she'd just finished measuring pH, alkalinity, and sanitizer levels. Nor did she have the energy to explain to Jim that the next guests weren’t checking in until Tuesday. She’d be alone all weekend with plenty of time to return to the store for supplies if she didn’t pick them up today; today, she’d just run in and buy her own dinner, she resolved. Maybe grab some wine or canned cocktails. Maybe she could get away with using the hot tub tonight. If Jim wasn’t even looking at the host dashboard calendar, he probably wasn’t watching the security camera he hid on the back deck. He had been very worried, when Allison first spotted the camera, that she’d think he was a creep trying to get footage of unsuspecting guests in their bathing suits or perhaps even less.
“You don’t understand,” he’d argued as if she’d lobbed the imagined accusation at him, “that hot tub cost me four thousand dollars. One mistake could screw up the entire system. Replacing the pump or ozonators alone could run me another two grand. If a guest is eating in there or something before it breaks down, I need to know.”
There was something sticky on the handle of the shopping basket she grabbed on her way into the store. It bothered her more than she felt it should, bile rising in her esophagus. Or maybe it was just heartburn. She redirected her path on the formica tile toward the pharmacy section for some Tums as one podcast episode ended and another began.
“Today’s story comes to us from a listener who wrote in about a cult in their hometown,” one of the hosts began and the other, the one with the dweebier voice, agreed that he loves it when “fans bring something spooky to the table.”
“I don’t know how spooky this one will be, I think we might be looking at more of a goofy-slash-crazy tale.”
“Oh, that’s just as good,” the dweebish one amended judiciously. “So what, no deaths?”
“I didn’t say that!” the audibly fatter host boomed back with laughter, “Let’s just say no legally provable murder, but there have been some questionable deaths around the compound where these guys all live.”
“Alright, lay it on me!”
Near the Tums, Allison paused to consider a row of gummy vitamins, each with its own health promises. She tossed a bottle of matte rust Apple Cider Vinegar gummies (promising weight loss) and a bottle of grape-shaped “Calm & Sleep” blends into her basket. Once, in college, she had read a dubious infographic on Pinterest about how Apple Cider Vinegar was good for digestion and gut health but she couldn’t find any at the store so she took a shot of Balsamic Vinegar every morning for a full semester. She experienced no positive or negative health changes.
“Okay, so this whole group, and we’re talking like 250 people here, follow this bald weirdo who calls himself Tuuhikya, which is a Hopi word for ‘healer.’”
“Let me guess, New Mexico white guy?”
“On the money! He’s like one of those new age religious guru-types who does a lot of Instagram.”
“Geez, I can just see the turquoise belt and braided leather vest now.”
“Eh, he’s more sparkly yoga pants and Amazon mandala tapestry.”
The image was clear in Allison’s mind, this archetype of a pseudo-next-gen new ager. Sinewy and greasy. Sandals. Her high school boyfriend had cheated on her with a girl like that, which had pissed her off almost as much as the cheating itself. And not like a hook-up cheating either: they had a whole talking stage thing, the girl was tagging him in Instagram posts. That’s how she found out. Allison stalked her page and was repulsed by the cheap, unironed tapestry hanging behind the girl’s twin bed, pressed against the wall long-ways. Suddenly, the sinister connotation of her boyfriend’s recent interest in kombucha and cacti came into clearer view.
“Like he’s youngish. But for sure smells like patchouli. Basically he claims that he is a past life psychic who can, get this, see into your future lives as well.”
“I don’t want this guy seeing any of my lives!”
Allison wondered whether she’d be okay with someone seeing, truly seeing, the way she was living her life. The idea filled her with so much shame it propelled her into the produce section. She’d cook a proper meal tonight.
“I know, gives me the shivers. He says he can see far back enough in a person’s life to witness when they lived on a different planet two thousand years ago.”
“Okay, I’ve heard of the ancient alien hypothesis, but wouldn’t that have happened like millions of years ago? We have archeological evidence of human life on earth way older than two thousand years ago.”
“Yeah, this is where he gets all conspiratorial, he has this whole alternative timeline of life on Earth to the so-called scientific community’s. He says that he can see the next planet we’re going to live on too. Since Earth is, you know, dying and running out of resources and making everyone sick with pollution.”
“Well, it’s nice someone has that all figured out!” The host laughed and Allison found herself taking umbrage with his dismissive tone. She was looking now at tomatoes, at least they all looked like tomatoes. They felt enough like tomatoes. But as she held them, one by one, up to her nose, masked half-heartedly in a jersey-knit tied over the bottom half of her face, she found that not a single one smelled like a ripened tomato ought to.
“I know, I’d sure love to know what the plan is!” the other host joked, “they’re so convinced that the Earth is past saving, they think all food, even organic veggies and stuff, is poisoned from environmental toxins, that the group has been accused of intentionally causing environmental disasters.”
“Why would they do that?”
“This Tuuhikya guy calls himself an eco-accelerationist, he thinks destroying the earth in undeniable ways is the only way to get humanity to chart a course to the next planet we’re destined to live on.”
“And he knows this because he can see into the future?”
“Bingo!”
She gave up on the tomatoes and began trudging over to the frozen meals.
“The group hasn’t been prosecuted for it, but a lot of people think they were behind the transformer explosion that caused that wildfire in Cibola National Forest last year. And that thing killed like 7 people, which is pretty intense for some woo-woo yogis.”
“Oh god!”
“While he hasn’t explicitly claimed responsibility for the fire, Tuuhikya did make a public Facebook post thanking the–and these are his words–‘Fire Star Angels’ for taking humanity a step closer to our next evolutionary leap. He has this whole thing about how once we all pick up and move to the next planet, humans will evolve a new organ where the pancreas is, like a second liver, that will filter all the ‘radiasma’ out of our systems. That’s this type of pollution-y body toxin he made up. Basically just bad humors. The whole idea is kind of like how I started wearing a pocket chain when I moved schools in the seventh grade to try and reinvent myself. Can’t say my thing worked too well.”
“Well, that’s all pretty damning. And weird!”
“If we evolved, I’d hope we’d at least get something cool, like a second penis.”
The idea of something called “radiasma” coursing through her body made Allison feel dizzy; the unease in her gullet morphed into a stomach-pit and pounding headache. She meandered her way over to the bakery section and grabbed a sweaty maple cream donut and an apple fritter. That would spike her blood sugar enough to drive home without this fuzzy grogginess. All she’d had today was coffee anyway. The strands of hair around her face that had become wet with sweat in the hot car were cooling her brow in the supermarket AC and that made her feel better too.
On her way from the self-checkout to the exit, Allison nodded politely at the teenage bagger positioned by the sliding doors as an ad hoc security guard. She meant to mumble something friendly at the automatic-doorman as she passed by, but found her airway clogged. She only managed to clear her throat with an awkward choking sound– essentially, a drive-by coughing on a pimple-faced teen-essential worker with his paper mask pulled below his nose. It occurred to her that she couldn’t remember the last time she had spoken out loud. A few weeks back, she was forced to call a local exterminator with no email address to schedule some minor fumigation after some guests reported pantry ant sightings. In case she wasn’t home when they came by (which ended up being the case), she gave the exterminators the garage code for the lockbox with the front door key for contactless check-in. But that was nearly a month ago. Certainly she had spoken aloud since, she just couldn’t remember when or why.
When she first moved into the garage apartment, Allison spoke to herself incessantly. It was her first time living alone, without the help or hindrance of family or friends; the privacy was, for a while, something to luxuriate in. She narrated her life out loud as she ambled through the rhythms of her days: acting like a TV chef as she cooked dinner, like a beauty influencer as she applied her nightly serums and creams, like a guest on a late night talk show with a particularly engaging anecdote as she spoke to herself over mundane daily tasks.
She wasn’t sure when, but at some point in the past months, probably gradually, she’d stopped speaking to herself aloud. The inner dialogue had gone back into her head.
Back in the driver’s seat, her phone automatically synched with the bluetooth-cassette-cigarette-lighter-socket situation rigged to the car radio. The crackly old car door speakers picked up where she'd left off in the cult podcast. Her throat felt swollen and tender the more she fixated on its lack of use.
She ate her Kroger donuts before she started the car. Her fingers grew sticky as she licked the globs of icing rubbed off onto the wax paper. Or they were still sticky from the basket. She should have washed her hands before eating, at least sprayed them with sanitizer, but she never remembered to bring it with her. What was the point of wearing a mask inside if she immediately licked her fingers as soon as she left? “No one gets sick in summer anyway,” she thought. But she felt sick. She was overly warm again and the heat made the sugar in her veins feel vivid purple the whole winding drive home.
The box of frozen mozzarella sticks she’d bought only had instructions for the oven and stove top; she thought that was presumptuous and a little mean as she loaded a paper plate full of frozen sticks into the microwave.
Instead of pulling up a get ready vlog or car crash clip compilation on YouTube like usual to watch while she ate, Allison sat at the peninsula in her kitchenette and aimlessly perused Instagram Reels. There was no room to sit in the kitchenette, so she sat on the living room side of the counter top on one of the high top bar stools. The countertop didn’t extend far out enough to fit her knees under, so she had to eat side-saddle, leaning heavily on the elbow of the arm that she held her phone with.
A Reel from a young woman with artificially piercing blue eyes, either from contacts or a filter, caught her attention.“They don’t want you to know this, but we do not need the sun,” the girl began emphatically, with a haughty sneer, “and in fact, the sun is actively harmful to humans.”
The girl’s backdrop altered abruptly from her earthy apartment to a PubMed screenshot of a study by some dieticians. “Scientifically, as we know science, there is Vitamin C and D, which are the major recommended reasons why big pharma scientists urge humans to spend time in the sun. But these vitamins are readily available in foods like oranges and certain species of mushrooms, so that can’t be the real reason why scientists want us in the sun.”
The speaker’s backdrop changed again to a slowly moving video of the planets in orbit. The video backdrop seemed to pulse with turquoise haze.
“Anyone who has gotten a severe sunburn or sun sickness before knows intuitively that the sun is actually harmful to your health. The sun casts UV and gamma rays toward Earth that are so powerful they can interrupt electric and radio signals. Just think about what those kinds of violent energies could do when they hit our bodies and our crops.” The girl’s eyebrows shot up at the implication.
“So what can you do to start purging these radiasmic toxins from your blood?” She paused for effect before bugging her eyes and delicately pressing her fingers into her temples, as if the answer was so self-evident: “Drink moonwater, people! The moon is like a cosmic liver, it takes in all the radiation from the Sun and only sends pure, untainted light to the Earth.”
Allison found herself intrigued by the girl’s idiosyncratic fashion sense and by the way she spoke out the left side of her mouth. She couldn't find anyone being outright mean or even entertainingly dismissive in the comment beneath, so she clicked over to the girl’s page. Astra Seed was definitely not her given name. She lived outside of Albuquerque with an elderly cat named Luna. Her ideas were obviously insane, but seemed a bit more cohesive and singular in direction than those of the sorts of crazy people Allison usually enjoyed laughing at online.
It took her 45 minutes of scrolling through the girl’s impressively consistent video output to find any mention of Tuuhikya and another 50 minutes for Allison to figure out what moonwater was. The reveal that it’s just water you leave outside under the moon in a glass or wooden container was a slight let down. The girl advised that the water could be charmed for a variety of end uses by chanting one’s intentions into the glass.
In one video, the girl explained that humans are so sensitive to sunlight because they are originally from a solar system with a weaker star. In an archived live Q&A, she discussed the many past and future lives she was aware of having led or would lead and how she could sometimes tap into their personalities without meaning to. She appeared with post-cry red eyes and nose in an emotional entry, expressing fear that humanity would never venture out to a more distant planet in our solar system before the sun entered its next cycle of vast swelling. Humanity, the girl lamented, was too tied to material and terrestrial vices to imagine life off-planet. Another video, entitled “When ur in ur feminine moon energy>>>,” was wordless, just the girl silently dancing for the camera around the base of a large tree in the silver midnight glow.
Allison found herself sitting in her dark apartment with her ass asleep on the uncomfortable bar stool; she realized she’d been stationary for hours, engrossed in, at first, this Astra’s profile, and then the profile of a young man who called himself Rudraksha and who appeared in Astra’s informational dance video set to a hip-hop song by an artist called Blinky J. The lyrics alternated between “yes” and “no” and Astra and Rudraksha pointed to the corners of the phone screen where text popped up, yeses and no’s. Yes! They nodded in agreement and pointed to text proclaiming that salt actually doesn’t impact blood pressure. No! They shook their heads identically and pointed to text which read “Human bodies contain plant cells which need the sun for photosynthesis.” Rudraksha, who went by Rud informally, also lived around Albuquerque, and though he never mentioned Tuuhikya on his page, he seemed to also parrot many of his talking points.
Allison turned the lights on around in her apartment in a daze, slowly adjusting to a deeper field of vision, before she realized she should probably just go to bed anyway at this hour. She watched some more of Rudraksha’s videos and turned the lights back out, using the blue video glow as a flashlight through her darkened hallway. He was much less engaging as an orator, but his videos featured some intriguing illustrations of what pre- and post-earth human biology looked like. Allison propped the phone up in her bathroom as she brushed her teeth and leaned into the close-up mirror on the vanity counter to pick at pimples on her chin and hairline. She barely glanced at her phone to swipe past an ad with her right pointer finger, smearing a bit of puss and blood from a newly popped zit onto the glass of the screen.
“Do you have acne in these places?” asked Rudraksha, pontificating in front of another crude anatomical illustration in color pencil. “Then your liver might be trying to tell you something.”
Allison pulled the phone closer to get a better view, plopping down onto the toilet lid, fully engrossed once again.
“You, my friend–” Rud called everyone his friend–“need to cleanse your system of radiasma.”
Before heading into bed, she veered off back to the kitchenette. All of her water tumblers were thin matte plastic in a sickly mint green from the Target College Essentials Collection of homewares. The cups were old, the seamed edge, where the two sides of its mold must have met during the manufacturing process, was getting thin and fuzzy at the rims. She rooted around in her minifridge for something glass instead and found a nearly-empty jar of bread-and-butter pickles. She finished off the last couple discs and rinsed the jar with a halfhearted swipe of a sponge, still damp from earlier.
She nudged the sink faucet from dish-washing-hot to cold to fill the jar with water before returning to her bedroom. Her bedroom window faced away from the cabin and over the hillside below. The moon, nearing fullness in its waxing faze, cast a soft glow over the vast stretch of forest visible from the window perch. In a moment of impulsivity, she yanked open the window a few inches; a pleasant hum of cricket song seeped into the room. She hadn’t realized how stuffy the apartment had gotten. A breeze carried the cool wetness of dense fauna over her dresser and across the bedspread, chilled just enough to feel like a real reprieve from the day’s suffocating heat.
Propping her forehead against the cool windowpane, she tilted the jar toward her mouth and began to chant, at first with a quiet rasp, then with increasing volume and clarity, “Make me better. Make me better. Make me better. Make me better.” Then she slipped into her favorite pajama pants for the first time in months instead of falling asleep in only a big t-shirt. They sat securely at her waist and held her lower stomach in in a way that felt comforting. She climbed into bed, stewed with hesitation, and then Googled “Tuuhikya past life regression” on her phone. She selected a video, turned the volume low, and slipped the phone under her pillow. She pressed her ear against her pillow hard enough to hear the dulcet voice of the man, droning on only barely louder than the whale song he spoke over.
His voice guided her through a series of flexing and relaxing different parts of her body: toes, then feet, then legs, then fingers, then arms, then shoulders. She fell asleep quickly and without noticing. She dreamt with a different set of eyes of a life on a different planet. Her arms were longer and leaner than her own, her elongated legs carried her at a clip across a fertile orchard bursting with ripe fruit. The atmosphere buzzed, every surface glimmered with oil slick sheen. She was overcome by the thought and nagging feeling that she couldn’t see the fruits exactly as they were, that their true hue was a brand new color just barely outside her range of perception and understanding.
In the morning, Allison found that she could not drink her moonwater because, overnight, a fat slug had fallen into the wide mouth jar and died.
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Ella Gray Hickman grew up in a haunted house in Ohio and lives in Brooklyn. She has written non-fiction for Cleveland Review of Books, Mayday Mag, and the Eidolon Journal as well as fiction for Angel Food Magazine and Expat Press. She edits the STAR⟡MAIL newsletter for Haloscope Magazine.
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