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The afternoon sun lit up fine strands of Elena’s almond-blonde hair, and accentuated her high cheekbones with a warm luster. Sunlight glinted off her eyes, pale and unblinking like winter moons. She usually looked away as if evading the intimacy, but now her gaze was burrowing into my pupils. I glimpsed a heart full of broken glass. Elena could make anyone wonder if they’d been sleepwalking through life before she appeared.

A breeze from the estuary—laden with a briny tang and the pungent odor of rotting seaweed—rustled the leaves of the plane tree overhead, and fluttered Elena’s hair. She tucked errant strands behind her ear, then shook her head softly.

“You quit because of me?” The hint of a reluctant smirk tugged at her lips, a glimmer of mischief in her weary gaze. “What was the point? Just to spite that phony cunt?”

“Isabel was out of line. She had no business attacking you like that.”

Elena’s fingers tightened around her notebook. She let out a slow exhale, releasing tension.

“That’s… Look, I don’t need anyone following my lead like I’m some twisted pied piper of misery. I’m used to that kind of treatment. I’ve had a lifetime of people thinking I’m fucked-up. My parents. Teachers. Classmates. Coworkers. Therapists. Like you, I was already on my way to quitting that writing course. It’s done, I don’t care anymore. Isabel can be queen of the idiots. Let’s get back to you, Jon, who claims to be fascinated by my work. Do you get off on watching someone else’s darkness spill out? Because let me tell you something… it isn’t performance art. I write for myself.”

A passing cyclist, a girl in her twenties, shot us a curious glance as she whirred by on a pink beach cruiser, her brunette, ponytailed hair streaming.

“I’m drawn to darkness myself, as you are. Well, I shouldn’t say ‘drawn.’ It’s not like darkness floats around and you gravitate toward it, right? No, in truth you’re sitting at the bottom of a well, engulfed in darkness. From time to time you dare to look up at the distant circle of light. But you know that no matter how high you jump, that light will never touch you. So you stop trying to reach the light and instead you describe your surroundings, to paint a portrait of the darkness you’ve lived with for so long. Someone else in a dark well of their own might read what you wrote and feel less alone.”

As Elena’s pale fingers twisted the metal coils along the spine of her notebook, she chewed on her lower lip. She met my eyes directly, her stare haunted.

“Are you always so melodramatic?” she asked in a hollow voice. “Is that the amateur writer in you?”

A sigh escaped her. She leaned forward and rested her elbows on her thighs, her chin cradled in her palm. Those pale blues tracked the lazy arc of a gliding gull, wings outstretched against the cloudy sky. When Elena spoke, her voice carried an eerie calm, a sense of resignation.

“You were in class, weren’t you, when Isabel placed on the whiteboard the vibrant, drawn close-up of a girl’s face, whose big, round eyes stared at the butterfly resting on the tip of her nose? She tasked us to write an impromptu piece inspired by that image. While the other students, including you, hunched over their notebooks, scribbling away, I sat there frozen for half of the allotted time, because I could only picture a girl chained to a wall in a dark cellar, eating that butterfly to survive. I tried to think of something else, I really did. But my mind is a radio receiver tuned to a single frequency. I felt that a thin sheet of glass separated me from the normal people in that room, and against the glass pressed a wriggling mass of blackness I couldn’t let them see. But in the end, I wrote it down. The girl eating the butterfly. When I read it to the class, I felt the weight of their stares like I had sprouted tentacles. Remember Isabel’s face?”

“I was looking at you.”

Elena rubbed the back of her neck.

“She looked like she’d swallowed a bug. Her expression said it all: I had committed a sacrilege. I had taken a beautiful thing, pure and innocent, and defiled it. Isabel didn’t understand how anyone could look at that picture and not feel inspired to write something wholesome. But that’s how my brain works. If I had to write a story about Isabel finding love in a coffee shop, it would end up with her head in a blender.” Elena slumped back against the bench, slid the pen into the notebook, then closed the pages around it. She plucked at the frayed edge of her hoodie’s sleeve. “Hey, listen to this one. I must have been twelve. My parents had dragged me to some family gathering. There was this supposed cousin, right? Maybe fifteen. Sunday dress, knee-high socks. I think her father owned a business. Anyway, she approached me, the girl who had spent the entire afternoon hunched over her notebook, avoiding everyone, bored out of her skull. This cousin, she had a bright, bubbly smile as she grabbed my notebook and read a sentence aloud: ‘The only interesting thing about you ran down your mother’s thighs after she fucked your dog.'”

“Jesus. What the fuck was the context?”

Her pupils dilated slightly, the pale blue ringed with something feral, before she looked away.

“Long forgotten. In any case, her smile died. Instant fulmination. She dropped the notebook and walked away. Never spoke to me again. Can’t blame her. But think about that, Jon. What the hell did I know of cum at twelve that would make the sentence meaningful? I hadn’t even had my period yet.” She pulled down her hood, then raked her blonde hair back with splayed fingers. “And you know what? I read some of the stuff I wrote when I was nine fucking years old. It would have made A Clockwork Orange blush. Who taught me that shit? Who put it into me? No internet back then. I can tell you it didn’t come from my parents. The point is, as a little girl, my mind was already a sewer. Born with a brain full of maggots. And now I write stories that make people want to hurt me. Isabel was right: I am a freak. Even my own mother can barely look me in the eyes.”

“I can handle that.”

“Can you, now?” Elena asked, her voice strained, brittle. “I don’t think anyone can, in the end. Maybe not even me. Maybe especially not me.” She looked up with the gaze of someone crushed under a collapsed wall, who knows no help will come, yet still won’t die. “A dark thing’s living in me, Jon. It’s always been there.”

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Author’s note: today’s song is William Griffin’s “The Devil Inside My Throat,” from the album Odes to My Triceratops, Vol. 2 (hey, remember when I produced like seventy songs?).