I’ve taken to working mornings at Starry Night and heading back to Adam’s after lunch to run the desk there. If it’s needed, I can even head back to Starry Night after to help out a bit more. We’re well into the busy season, so both the long-stay and the café are happy for whatever help they can get. An accountant running the till is a weird fit, but at least I’m fast at it.
It’s interesting to watch the ebb and flow of traffic through the town.
Starting about six in the morning, folks start trickling into town, but within an hour, it becomes busy, then frenetic. From there, it climbs steadily until about nine-thirty, dips for an hour, then picks up for lunch.
I head out by one thirty or two to dash back to Adam’s and start getting folks checked in and out while Adam does property stuff. Usually, he’s out repairing the drive to the units (and the little one-room cabins in back, one of which I now inhabit). He’s intensely focused on that drive; he’s talked with me about the upkeep and maintenance of a dirt road for an hour or more on multiple occasions. I don’t drive anymore, so I just have to trust him.
Things clear up by five, and sometimes I head back to Starry Night. At that point, it’s mostly a social thing. If I’m not chilling out back of the office with Adam, I’m here at the café. If not either, I’m painting. I’ve gotten about a third of the ceiling tiles done.
The movement of people is fascinating up close, following the ways in which people move and change throughout the day. The before-coffees and the nine-AM-bounces and the post-lunch-siesta. The perking of ears and the bristling of whiskers. The droop of tails and stifled yawns.
When you zoom out, though, it’s grains of sand just below high tide. The tide rolls in, and there’s a chaotic dance of spiraling movement. Each wave brings cars cycling around parking lots, small collisions of bodies, crimped tails, tantrums weighing down parents.
And then tide rolls out, and the town settles back down into its ground state. Grains of sand compact nicely when left to dry, a comfortable stasis until the next high tide.
In the midst of it all, the regulars provide a sense of weight, anchoring high and low tide to provide a sense of continuity. There’s Adam, of course, and Stefan. I suppose I’m slipping into that role too. We are the wave-polished stones.
And then there’s Aurora.
We’ve only talked once or twice in earnest, her voice familiar and quiet, but I watch her every day. She has a table all but reserved in the corner of Starry Night, farthest from the door but right in the elbow of two of those ridiculous single-pane windows. To her left, one window looks out over the parking lot and, across the street, the parking lot of the market. In front of her, three trees that have been planted too close to each other, forming a tiny grove between Starry Night and the back fence.
She wafts in around six thirty and orders a latte, a soda water, and a pot of hot water for her and one of the teabags riding shotgun in her jacket pocket. If her table isn’t free, she’ll sip her latte at the bar until it is, and then set up camp.
She drinks the latte first, then the soda water, then the tea.
Once she’s finished the soda water, she pulls out a pen and either a book or a stack of printouts and a clipboard. I’ve never figured out what she does for work, but she’s always either taking notes or marking up printouts. A teacher, perhaps? An author? Editor?
At noon, she orders another soda water and another pot of hot water for the second teabag. Some days she’ll pull out a sack lunch, some days she’ll order something from me—we serve a few simple sandwiches—in her comfortable contralto.
She eats the lunch first, then drinks the soda water, then the tea.
Once she’s finished the soda water, she settles back into the chair and stares out the windows. Mostly, she just looks at the trees, but sometimes she’ll rest a cheek on her fist and look out toward the market, her long canine ears canted cozily back. Something about the sight always has me watching her in turn. Something familiar, cozy.
Then the coyote gets back to work, and, before long, I duck out to help Adam. On the few occasions I’ve stayed, Aurora will close out the shop with us, saying little but saying it kindly. Her silences, I expect, are a matter of course. They are absolute, and absolutely part of her. A stillness I can only dream of.
I’ve never seen her out of the shop, but I think about her every time I walk or bus back home. I’ll have inevitably forgotten by the time I get inside, though, as she’s context-shifted around a corner of my mind.
I’d imagined I’d done such a good job of cleansing my life of who I used to be when I left, that each time I’m confronted by something I’d accidentally brought along, it’s jarring, or even frightening.
Undergarments had been the first such instance. I hadn’t thought to grab any new panties before leaving town. This was probably fine, I reasoned, because anything missing would have been noticed. Unfortunately, this left me with only one pair—the ones I left in—and I’d had to visit the “essentials” aisle of the supermarket early on to grab a pack of bland panties. They fit so poorly, I’d largely stopped wearing any.
What had me jittery, though, was seeing that old pair every time I did laundry. One last reminder that I’m no longer who I was.
I threw them out soon after.
Each time I come across some remnant, it reminds me of what I’ve done, in a very tangible way, even if not necessarily why. The “why” had already begun to blur on the bus ride, and I’ve never been able to make it gel again.
It’s not always negative, this process, but it’s never positive. Other than a few useful items—the jewelry, for instance , kept for something pawnable in an emergency—I throw everything I find away almost as soon as I find it, stopping only to destroy it for the catharsis. It’s all too much risk to keep around.
Thus me, crouched on my haunches behind Starry Night, hyperventilating as I try to destroy my old driver’s license.
How this had escaped me before was something of a mystery. An actual legal document bearing my actual legal name, tucked within my old wallet in the back of my suitcase, was not something I should have missed.
This caromed straight into fear. Into terror. Into that agonizing sickness that settles into one’s gut and closes off one’s throat. I’d stopped crying as much, recently, and started smiling more, but I’m on the verge of panicked tears now.
I can’t say what made me tuck the wallet into a pocket at the start of the day. It was an interesting artifact, perhaps, nothing big or important, that I decided to keep on some whim. The credit cards that had once filled it lay scattered by my abandoned car back home, after all, so I figured it must be safe.
The license won’t tear. That was my first instinct, but my pads had slip off the slick plastic too easily, and my claw tips only scrabble ineffectually at its surface.
I can bend it, at least, and I crease it this way and that in an attempt to fatigue the plastic enough that maybe I can snap it. ID cards are, apparently, designed to last, and despite repeated folds, I can’t get enough of a grip to tear the card, much less snap it, though the ink along the crease fades and warps into whiteness. I don’t have the leverage necessary to crease along my name, however.
This isn’t working.
I stuff my wallet back into my pocket and dash over to the dumpster, flipping up the lid. I had intended to tear up the license and toss it in with the coffee grounds and banana peels, but the thought of it slipping out of the dumpster or falling out of the trash truck feels inescapable. With all the people going through the café during the day, though, there has to be…
I tear through two of the shop’s thin garbage bags before I find what I’m looking for: a cheap plastic lighter, yellow and scuffed.
The rasp of the wheel against the flint sends my whole paw to buzzing, the snap of the spark too loud for my frazzled nerves.
I flick at the lighter a few more times. It’s almost certainly dead, thrown away for a reason, so I just have to hope there’s enough fluid in there.
The flame finally catches, only barely peeking above the rim of the lighter.
It’ll have to do.
Holding my breath and struggling to still my shaking paws, I carefully bring my driver’s license above the tiny flame, letting the diffuse glow settle beneath the photo of my face, the weasel there looking startled, backlit by flame. The plastic browns, sags, then starts to char and bubble. By the time the smoke, reeking of burning plastic, starts to make me cough, the image of my face and much the identifying details have melted away, the ink burnt off by the low flame of the lighter.
Motion in the shadows cast against the dumpster catches my eye and I whirl around, Aurora startling back a half-step at my sudden movement. We stare, uncomprehending, at each other for a moment.
“I—” I croak. “Hey.”
“Hey, uh…you okay back here?”
I look around, down to my mangled license and the shitty yellow lighter in my paw, back to the coyote, struggling to come up with an explanation. A half-truth is the best I can manage. “Needed to, uh…expired credit card and all. Melting it, I mean.”
The quotidian mundanity of such an activity seems to click things into place for the coyote. She perks up and smiles, “I’d never thought of melting them before, I always just cut them into little pieces.”
The lighter is finally starting to cool down in my paw after it’s extended use, which is good, given how much I keep fiddling with it. “Couldn’t find my scissors once I got out here, figured this would work.”
She nods, squints toward my paws, then back up to me. “You from Idaho?”
I gape, crumpling the license as best I can within my hand.
“Just looked like my old card, I mean.”
I do my best to keep my ears from flattening and tail bristling, only to catch myself panting. So much for acting cool. “I…yeah,” I gasp. “Moved a while back.”
“Hey, no stress. I won’t pry,” Aurora laughs, holding up her paws disarmingly.
I manage a smile, hoping it’s convincingly embarrassed. “Sorry,” I say, stuffing the lighter and warped card back into the garbage bag, before hauling the whole thing back into the dumpster. “I guess it’s just a weird thing to get caught doing.”
Head tilted, Aurora grins at me a moment longer, then shrugs. “I guess, yeah. See you inside?”
I nod, struggling to calm my breathing as I watch her round the corner to the front of the shop with a flick of her tail.
When I make it back inside to prep her usual latte, Aurora smiles at me. I beam back to her.
Something about the encounter by the dumpster has left me feeling giddy. Perhaps it was the thrill of nearly being caught, or maybe the relief of being rid of the thing. It’s one fewer identifying thing about me that I need to worry about, after all; and beyond that, it got Aurora laughing.
Why that makes me so happy in turn is beyond me.
My brush-strokes are confident, each one is a smooth arc describing edges and boundaries, or perhaps reinforcing color.
The tile had been given to me burgundy, and I’d chosen to leave it that way, painting within that dark red surface rather than covering it up. I painted in black, and I painted only shadows, not details, as though the scene were blown out towards white and the contrast turned to a hundred percent.
It had started as an abstract gesture of a face, angular and canine, but had slowly headed toward something more concrete. Not realistic, but perhaps something from a comic. Hard-edged lines, but true to form with no liberties taken.
Aurora at her table as seen from the espresso machine, cheek on fist, staring out of frame. The shape of her muzzle, the tilt of her ears, both familiar and new.
My brush-strokes are confident. Black and red, no need for another color.
“Season’s winding down.”
“Mmm.”
Adam laughs and shakes his head, plopping down, then melting further into the deck chair.
“S’good to see you painting, you know.”
“Mmm.” I perk up as my mind parses meaning out of those sounds, and then flatten my ears. “Sorry. I got kinda into it. What’d you say before?”
“Said season’s winding down.”
“Yeah, seems like,” I offer as I carefully shift the painting off the table to lay it flat on the ground next to me, replacing the bucket of ice in its spot. My poor-weasel’s easel of the table between us returns to its former state as drinking space. I pour us both a drink.
The otter has moved on from rum and is now trying his paw at whiskey. We’ve been cycling through batches over the last few weeks. The taste is far sweeter than I would’ve expected, but Adam says he doesn’t have the cuts quite right yet.
In my mouth, ice machine ice and homemade whiskey jockey for space with words. “Wha’s li’ in off ‘easong?”
“Eh?”
I crunch down on the ice and brave the brain freeze to say more clearly, “What’s it like in the off season?”
“Same but slower,” Adam says, chuckling down to his glass. “Way slower, some days. You got here before season started, but weren’t really here in the middle of off-season. I’ll probably beg your help deep-cleaning some of the units.”
“Sure thing, boss.” I laugh as that gets me an ice-cube to the face. “Fine. Sure thing, master.”
Adam makes as though he’ll throw the whole bucket of ice at me, before we both settle back into our chairs with jars of whiskey and ice, grinning. In the silence, I paint my claws idly with the black acrylic left on the brush from my work on the ceiling tile. The condensation off the glass thins the paint and it starts to seep into my fur. My paws are covered with the stuff anyway.
The silence goes from comfortable to expectant, and when I look up, Adam’s adopted a vaguely confused look with whiskers smoothed back, which he’s directed toward his all-important drive. Just as I’m about to brush it off, he asks, “How’d you leave?”
Anxiety brushes up against me, breaking through the veneer of calmness. It takes me a bit to respond, and I try to fill that space by nervously stirring the ice into my white whiskey. “If I just say ‘very carefully’, will that be enough?”
The otter’s expression softens and he shrugs against the back of his chair. “I s’pose. Doesn’t mean I don’t still want to know.”
“I just…I don’t know. I spent a lot of time thinking about all the different parts there were of my life and thinking about what I’d be without them.” I brush my paws over my cheeks, heedless of the paint. My fur has almost grown back completely, and the freeze-brand has indeed come in white. Still, it’s become a habit. “And then I just set a date and went around to all those parts one by one, turning them off or throwing them away.”
“No going back, then?”
“Not if I want to stay out of jail.” I don’t think this is true, but it sounds good.
“So you turned off or trashed all these parts of who you were,” Adam mumbles, pouring himself another inch of whiskey. “What’s left?”
I don’t answer.
I don’t have an answer.
When I think about it, there’s just nothing there. It’s like trying to see the inside of my eyelids. Just nothing there. I tore down what I was without any thought of what would be left. Even my license, that last proof of me-that-was, had long since burned. There was nothing after that. It was more a form of suicide than I’d wanted to admit.
Finally, I shrug. “Just me, I guess.”
Adam laughs at this and stretches his legs out, splaying webbed toes. “Fair enough. You do a good job around here, though. It feels like you belong now. I don’t know what you were like before, but you were scared out of your whiskers when you got here. Now you’re just you.”
“A punky weasel living off the grid in a hippie town?”
“That too, yeah. Took you a while to grow into the punky bit, but you’re getting there.”
My turn to laugh. “Just missing the get-up, I guess. Second-hand shirts and jeans miss the mark a little.”
“Mmhm. And you ought to get a piercing.” Adam slides out of the chair and stands, using his thick tail to give the leg of the table a thwack. “And it’s good to see you painting.”
To be continued…
“Disappearance” first appeared in Restless Town, an anthology of contemporary furry short stories set in the fictional town of Sawtooth, ID. You can find the book — and read several of the stories — here.